Dissident leaders must have children
In our anti-family society, it's a necessary worthiness test
A few days ago I posted a note which proved controversial:
The cadre of childless thinkers who provide increasingly convoluted hot takes on solving the fertility & intelligence crisis without having kids themselves is emblematic of the failure of the online right. Literally just a basic human, real world step and they can’t take it.
I’m sure they’ll argue that it’s impossible to find a good partner etc. etc. Sorry: if you can’t do that basic life step, you have no business influencing or leading others
I chose my words carefully, and I stand by the statement. Nevertheless, some have ignored the words I actually wrote, and have taken the opportunity to denounce me as ignorant, unfeeling, and superior. Now people are writing whole articles to this effect, I should respond.
Here are some things I did not say:
Childless people are not entitled to an opinion;
Childless people are incapable of great insights;
Childless people do not have the right to complain;
Finding a mate is easy;
Having children is easy.
None of these are true.
Instead, my criticism applies - as stated - to the following group: ‘childless thinkers who provide increasingly convoluted hot takes on solving the fertility & intelligence crisis’.
By ‘thinker’ I meant prominent intellectuals and the anon equivalents (large and influential accounts).
By ‘increasingly convoluted hot takes’ I meant participation in the social media game of departing further and further from reality and from realistic, practical solutions. Instead, these individuals work to ensure that they’re proclaiming or denouncing unique theories and ‘solutions’ that are good for engagement farming, like:
Fathering a host of children outside wedlock;
Seeking out ‘dumb’ girls;
‘Based and right-wing’ porn studios to raise the moral of young men;
Giving up on real women and enjoying AI girlfriends;
Real dissidents shouldn’t have children to ensure they’re free to ‘act’;
Founding artificial religions that mandate children…
And so on, endlessly.
Here are some things that would not qualify as a ‘convoluted hot take’ and therefore would not be within the scope of my criticism:
This economy is bad for family formation;
This housing crisis is bad for family formation;
Many women are more interested in careers than family formation;
The normalization and availability of casual sex undermines marriage;
It is a hard time to get married and start a family.
By ‘failure of the online right’ I referred to the fact that too many people who have risen to ‘leadership’ positions in the sphere are some variety of fantasist, narcissist, or blackpiller. Too many weirdos; too many people who insist on espousing grand philosophies that bear no relationship to the way that they actually live their life in the real world. Unserious people who have spent a decade in the online spotlight and have nothing to show for it in the real world, at either a macro or micro scale, except the expansion of their personal brand.
All of this takes me to my concluding point, which is that I consider the act of starting a family to be an achievement that I regard as necessary in anyone who I will turn to as a leader. Kings should have heirs.
If a man can’t do the human basics (like start a family) in the face of the background systemic dysfunction of our society then I don’t have faith that he can achieve legitimately ambitious projects - like changing that society - in the face of active opposition.
I fully appreciate how hard it is to find a good wife (or husband). I know the financial and social impediments to having children. My decision to start a family in my twenties took me from having personal disposable income to having to aggressively budget to afford nappies. The first two kids wiped out my savings and we’re just getting out of the hole now. I get it.
But a leader of men should be able to overcome this. Getting married and having children doesn’t definitively rule out a man from being a weirdo, narcissist, fantasist, or blackpiller - but it’s a solid start. Sorry: I don’t trust someone with 300k tweets and 0 kids to be a leader. A leader should be able to find a good woman and start a family. It’s hard but not impossible.
Note that this standard is intended to be applied to leaders: the Nayib Bukeles of our world. Kings should have heirs. Different standards apply to priests and jesters: there will always be prophets like Jonathan Bowden who are brilliant but genuinely unsuited for marriage and fatherhood. These people should be heard, but never followed. Bowden would agree.
A real leader helps those under them, including strong support for family formation. Therefore I don’t believe - as implied in
’s article A Moratorium on 'Wife Guys' - in any variation of the idea that the way to solve the fertility crisis is for all young men to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’. The crisis is real, and real leadership will be required to solve it.I appreciate that Fortissax did his best to address me respectfully despite attacking my message. I will attempt to return the favor, but I must be direct: his article demonstrated a lack of understanding of leadership. A leader does not blackpill; a leader does not make excuses. A leader does not put words in the mouths of allies in order to make an attack on their positions easier. And his essay fundamentally misrepresented my views and then moved straight into blackpill carpet-bombing, which was pretty clearly what he wanted to do all along.
I will follow this piece up with two in the near future:
How I understand the fertility crisis. I don’t think it’s primarily economic in nature, but relates to status signaling and mimetic pressure. I believe I can show this conclusively with data and will publish on this soon.
How I intend to help my community with this issue to the extent I can.
Thank you for reading.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
The most memorable homily I've witnessed was concerning "blessings that only fathers receive."
God gives us what we need. "The bird of the air neither reap nor sow nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. The lily of the field neither toils nor spins, yet not even King Solomon in all his splendor was adorned as they are. Are you not worth much more than they, ye of little faith? Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and these things will be added unto you."
Fathers receive blessings that others do not, because God knows that their children must be fed. I don't have kids, but I've been broke as a joke for long periods of time -- and yet, somehow, my dogs always had chicken and venison to eat.
My point is that lack of money isn't the impediment to caring for others that it's so often made out to be. The fear is much worse than the reality and, indeed, one of the primary reasons for having faith rather than fear is that, in retrospect, we can see that things always work out. Even though we can't imagine how things will work out ahead of time, in retrospect we can see that they worked out fine, often better than we could have imagined. Such is the grace and providence of God.
Like anything, it comes down to having faith over fear and seeking *first* His kingdom and his righteousness.
So my grandfather ran a ranch with a dozen hands with families and another half dozen hands that lived in the bunkhouse. He said you could get twice as much work out of a married hand with a good family as you could out of a single hand. He said it required leadership to get those families. my grandfather believed that women need a certain level of economic security in order to be sane. And that unless a woman was dumb as a box of rocks, she was going to look at a young farmhand and accurately predict that he was not going to be capable of guaranteeing her stable economic support. This made the woman crazy and the woman crazy the unreliable. So my grandfather considered his job to communicate to the woman that if her husband was loyal and hard-working, she and her kids will be taking care of there would be feasts on Thanksgiving and Easter and a tree with presents. This was his provision of the house. So when my grandfather hired a new hand, he would put them in the oldest house and inevitably in the first week or two something would break. my grandfather would leave the hand the husband in the field working and he would take the other men and they would go fix whatever needed to be fixed. This includes a particularly memorable event where the roof which had been supposed to been done before that Family moved in leaked and Grandfather literally took every single bodied man down to the teenagers so that he could fix the roof that day, but not the husband. He stayed in the field doing the fairly simple job that had been assigned.
My grandfather, saw all the things that are happening as a failure of leaders to understand how to create loyal followers and motivate them to stick around. apparently up until the 1960s most companies in America paid a fairly substantial bonus to a man getting married and another fairly substantial bonus when he had his first child. In several companies that my grandfather respected even after the companies no longer paid the bonuses the managers would continue to pay those bonuses up until the mid 80s because they thought that it created a much better workforce.
Wow, I agree that there’s a social element I think that most of the economic issues are where is the economic support coming from? It’s not coming from the elder generation which traditionally provided these key injections of cash and other types of support