Why is Korea Not Breeding? Part I

A Recipe for Self-Extinction

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Find part II of this article here.

This is going to be the big Imperium Press critique of feminism. Almost 100 articles in, and we haven’t got to that yet? Disgraceful.

In any case, we will tie this critique to our explanation of global fertility collapse, and our broader project of cultivating folkishness, which is the solution to that collapse. In this first article we will focus on what makes the Korean national character susceptible to liberalism.

Declining birth rates have been observed for a long time, but in late 2022 we pointed out something critical about this long-term trend—fertility is falling much faster outside the West than inside. More critically, it is falling fastest where liberalism is growing fastest. The West has hit upon a strategy of exporting an ideology that we now have antibodies to (Imperium Press is one such antibody), and watching the carnage unfold. This is of course an emergent and not a conscious strategy, but no less effective.

We in the West have long suffered under liberalism. We have learned to live with it. The weakest have succumbed to it. Those people—really, those families or broad types—who depend on a healthy culture to maintain fertility are being culled. The only ones left in the West who are having large families are those who are genetically predisposed to it.

This is not so in the third world. Most people outside the West depend upon a social and economic environment that fosters high birth rates. Their high fertility is a cultural adaptation, not genetic. But these people are now running up against something they’ve never seen. Like the Amerindians discovering alcohol or smallpox for the first time, they have no natural defenses to this something. At best, they have cultural defenses. And now their cultural defenses are getting bulldozed.

So the non-West is currently in the process of copping it. And leading the charge down this suicidal path is South Korea, with a TFR of 0.72 as of 2023.¹ The TFR of Seoul in particular is 0.55, so now about one in every two women there has a child. But why? Why is this happening to the South Koreans and not some other people?

The answer is both simple and highly complicated. The simple answer is that Korea has liberalism, and it has it real bad. The complicating factor here—and what sets the Korean people apart in this respect—is the Korean psychological profile. This profile is by no means limited to Koreans, and so others should be afraid. And they are.

In the first article we will unpack what liberalism is and why it’s so dangerous to fertility, and will sketch out the Korean national character. In the second article we will explain why liberalism is so dangerous to Koreans, offer some solutions, make some predictions, and come away with some lessons.

Liberalism, Feminism, and Patriarchy:

Liberalism is an ideology, but it’s also a symptom. You can see proto-liberalism in late-antique Rome, for example, as Romanitas was falling apart and people were departing from traditional folkways and religious austerity. Earlier, you saw it in Periclean Athens, where the rise of democracy heralded the same departure. In both of these societies, suddenly the individual came into view and started demanding personal freedom. The ideology of freedom is the result, as much as the cause, of social decline.

The effect of liberalism on fertility is well known. In Rome, with the decline of the ancient ancestor cult, children became less of a necessity and more of a burden. Roman patricians began using forms of contraception, some of them quite grotesque, and engaging in infanticide of perfectly healthy infants. They forced their wives to have abortions, often leaving them sterile or dead. Legislation was brought forward, most famously by Augustus and Trajan, to reverse the moral decline, but was unsuccessful. The Romans had reached a point in their civilizational life-cycle where it was “me time” and having too many children was getting in the way of that.² This moral decline, along with endless military service, had disastrous effects on population dynamics.

The story of the West in the 20th century is not much different in outline. With the rise of industrialization and the welfare state, children became a luxury and not a necessity. And with the rise of widespread contraception and a culture of freedom, along with the decline of traditional folkways, the ethos of most Western societies turned to one of personal gratification, self-absorption, and a xenophilic search for authenticity. Eat, Pray, Love as a civilizational imperative.

But ancient liberalism differs from modern liberalism in one way, at least in degree, and that is feminism. When a society is about to keel over, it empowers its women with personal autonomy. This was the case in the ancient world too; in the Islamic “golden age”—right before the Islamic world was conquered by the ruthlessly folkish and patriarchal Mongols—you saw the proliferation of the female scholar, the ancient analogue of Donna Zuckerberg.

But whereas female empowerment certainly grew as ancient civilizations wound down, women were never as empowered as they are in the modern West. At some point quantity becomes its own quality, and female empowerment has grown to where it gave rise to a qualitatively new phenomenon: feminism. South Korea has all the symptoms of acute liberalism, but it is suffering worst of all from feminism.

Before the de facto occupation of South Korea by the United States in 1945, it was a patriarchal society. While Korea has been shaped by Buddhism, Christianity, and its own native shamanic religion, the strongest influence has been that of Confucianism, a highly formalized and patriarchal way of life. As in all patriarchal societies, in Confucianism the place of the woman is in the home, with the man engaging in public life. Marriage conferred the social status of adulthood, before which one was essentially a child. Marriage was regarded as a union between not only man and wife but between families, with the goal of ensuring the continuity of the male lineage. Divorce was rare, remarriage of a divorced woman even rarer, and remarriage of widows forbidden. Virtually all households were two- or three-generational households, patrilineally composed. Sons inherited exclusively, with most of the patrimony going to the eldest. The broader kin group of the tangnae consisted of all descendants of a fourth-generation patrilineal ancestor, who celebrated the death-day and commemorative rites of the traditional Korean ancestor cult.

Liberalism acted as a kind of solvent to break down these traditional social structures, but only so fast—the legacy of Confucianism remains, and this legacy is the key to understanding why Korea is suffering so badly under liberalism.