Elegiac hillbilly J.D. Vance is in the news for his comments on childless Americans.

It's an unpopular position. "Controversial." I think most people have an aversion to being treated as breeding stock for the empire.

It's unpopular with certain conservatives as well, even. Conservative women, specifically.

So the vibes are bad for the Republicans. The vibes are good for the Democrats. That's how it feels for me on 7/25/24.

I had been planning on writing about the conservative obsession with birth rates for a while, but I was having trouble teasing out the subtext from the actual text. It felt subtle to me, prior. Now here's J.D. Vance, Trump's choice for vice president, saying it outright. Child-bearing grants bonus citizenship in his vision of utopia.

where we're at right now

I recommend reading this transcript of Ezra Klein's interview with demographer Jennifer Sciubba. Or listen to it. Whatever.

Per Ezra:

So, for a long time, the population concern we’ve been used to hearing is that we are racing towards too many people too quickly. This was a Malthusian fear in the 18th century that more people would mean more starvation. This was and is the fear of many environmentalists today, that more people means more weight on the planet’s resources, more environmental damage.

But now there’s this other concern that has come to join it, that we are racing towards de-population — too few people too quickly. As countries get richer the world over, fertility rates plummet, plummet quickly. In countries like America, we’re now below replacement rate, the rate at which a population holds steady. You see that in China. You see that in India. In some countries like Japan and South Korea, they’re so far below replacement rate that their population is going to rapidly shrink generation by generation.

They get into a lot of different subjects in this talk. Why birth rates go up, why birth rates go down. What it means. Money, optimism, pessimism, policy, politics. It's a long read; it's a big topic.

the 4X game of life

People in power want you to have kids because kids become adults and adults become workers, soldiers, and taxpayers. It really does just boil down to that, in my view.

Political science types like Jennifer Sciubba are smart enough to know that population does not necessarily equate power, especially accounting with different systems of representation and etc etc etc. Sciubba isn't the president, though. Sciubba isn't playing the game.

The game is a 4X game.

The 4X genre is named for its core gameplay mechanics: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Examples of 4X games include Civilization, Stellaris, and Polytopia.

Polytopia is Elon Musk's favorite game. I like Polytopia too, it's easy and fun.

I bring up Elon Musk and Polytopia in response to two articles I've recently read.

First, from the New York Times: Elon Musk’s Plan to Put a Million Earthlings on Mars in 20 Years

Second, from Bloomberg: ELON WANTS YOU TO HAVE MORE BABIES

So that's Elon Musk, the big-tech thought-leader that people either think is a genius or a moron. And that's J.D. Vance, the author-cum-veep. One wants to rule Mars, one wants Donald Trump to die so he can become president.

I don't think these two care about "Western civilization" or "democracy" or "the republic" or any of that abstract stuff. I think they like power. Having, wielding. There's never enough. Money is power. Money is a number on a scoreboard. People are power. People are numbers in a census record. Scores are numbers. You win the game by having the biggest number.

What if you already have the biggest number? It always has to be bigger! That's why Elon Musk hasn't retired. He's simply not satisfied. He is the richest man in the world, and that's simply not enough. I would decide to retire with far less money in my bank account, personally.

So it's not a winning game. You win and you're left unsatisfied.

When you play Civilization and you win, do you stay in the game? Do you let the game keep running so that everybody can live out their lives in the completed kingdom?

i'm quite pleased that western populations are in decline

In the Sciubba article I linked above, she notes America is below replacement rate. Scandinavia is below replacement rate. Japan is below replacement rate. Korea. China. India. Russia. Everybody is getting older and having less children.

The exception here is Africa. That's where all the kids are. That's where the future is. There's no future here, the future is over there.

I think that's great. I cannot imagine a better end to the empire. The empire finishes plundering. Everyone inside the empire weeps, seeing as they had no more worlds to conquer. They get depressed, bored, pessimistic. They stop having kids.

No kids in the third row of the crossover SUV. No kids not getting taught to cook so they grow up ordering DoorDash for every meal. No kids breaking their iPhone so they have to throw away the iPhone and buy a new iPhone. No kids shooting up their schools because they hate their schools and everyone in it and want everyone in the school to die. No kids growing up with the knowledge they were unwanted from the start and living their lives holding that knowledge.

I know I'm not the only one sick of it. I hate being sick of it. I think about the world and all I can think of is that the only solution is to starve it. The machine runs on people. No more people.

No more Amazon, no more U.S. military, no more government, no more shooting, no more shooting up, no more waste, no more growth, no more GDP, no more disease, no more no more no more. I don't want it for myself. I don't want it for my kids. I don't want to have kids for them. I won't give them my kids. Thinking about it makes me crazy!

It's crazy!

they want you and me to have more kids! it's crazy!

They want to get rid of abortion because they want you to have more kids!

They want rigid gender roles because that makes more kids!

They want you to be Christian because Christians have more kids!

They don't want you to be educated, because educated people have less kids!

They just want you to have kids! Make the number bigger!

Am I crazy? Yes! How am I supposed to not be crazy, looking at all this? This is fucking crazy!

I wanted to write a whole thing about the ideology of 4X games and take different examples from different pieces of media, but the more I researched the crazier I became. You can see me gradually getting crazier as the post goes on. I feel like something has finally clicked in my head. "Soylent green is people!" They want to use you as breeding stock!