Well that's certainly a large part of it. It's also certainly true that a lot of the wealthy are actually really stupid, don't think things through, and are easily fooled.

But I'm not so certain it's just incompetence, though I'm sure that does play a big part. It's just hard not to think maybe a little bit of it isn't planned. When you learn about how project 2025 theorizes that the US population ideally should be 100 million it makes all the cutting health care and cutting food Aid and getting rid of vaccines take on a more Sinister light. And that was planned by the Heritage Foundation who write policy for not only the United States but large portions of the rest of the world too.

And then you start learning about these AI rationalists. Those whack jobs who think that we're going to create an AI God who will solve all the world's problems. And anything standing in the way of the creation of the AI God is inherently evil and any sacrifice to get to that point is worthwhile. There's a shocking number of techboro billionaires who are of that mindset. Who truly believe that we can get rid of Labor and replace it with robots and AI and they want to do it now. And don't look now but Peter Thiel is in France right now giving a speech about anybody who wants to regulate AI must be the Antichrist. Could a bunch of tech bro billionaires convince a lot of lazy capitalists that letting a lot of rest of us die is a good idea? Doesn't seem far-fetched to me.

This is the second example ITT of what I was talking about, lol. Again, you're free to have your value judgment on parenthood, just like me. What's undeniable, at least to me, is that the failing birthrates in "developed countries" have this, amongst other perhaps less relevant but still existing characteristics, at its core.

1% ? Both my mom and my MIL are obsessed with me and my wife, respectively. Same with my brother, her brother. Like, that's not true, that's not what I've seen. My friends with kids are obsessed with them, some to the point of losing their minds on a regular basis in worry, lol. Idk man, I think you're letting your bad, very geographically localized (like you said, "developed countries") experience blind you to a wider, very different reality. And yes, for many, maybe the world's majority, that's how it goes. It doesn't mean they won't have their own psychological pathologies and forgo virtue at times, we're talking about people here, but trust me that for them, having children is their dream come true, the main one, and they would literally rather die than lose them or anything too tragic come to them.

Yeah, if we're talking Korea, Japan, France, Germany, etc, things are different, but that's due to a mixture of trauma and an ideology that rejects responsibility and doesn't value parenthood as much as it values the way less stressful "fun" (which in this case, is sweet labour, but whatever), and you're talking from that perspective so of course we disagree on the value of parenthood, but you cannot disagree (or haven't yet, at least) that those very beliefs are what's at the core of the failing birthrates... which is all I was trying to talk about here, tbh, I wasn't expecting this long of an exchange regarding virtue, parenthood and Western values. 😅 It was nice but I just came from a long shift, lol.