An absolutely brilliant and foundational analysis which really resonates as a very illuminating diagnosis of our national plight on the cusp of 2024 - 2025. And it’s also very witty. Well done! And yes—please give us an in-depth analysis of the Haredi alternative. Thank you.
One point I would quibble with is this "What makes it worse is the antinatalist nature of modern Western society", as if this is a separate issue, when it is quite clearly a consequence of the former.
A major factor in fertility is the existence of a tight-knit community. Seth Kaplan has written much about this, focusing on his (Orthodox Jewish) community, and Jon Haidt, Lyme Stone and Tim Carney (Family unfriendly) picked up on it.
As I've written previously, what many of the major pronatalists don't realize is that obsessing over 'productivity' as the supreme value is inherently antinatalist. Pronatalism only thrives in a community that values human life for its own sake. And stripping the best and brightest from every community is the surest way to destroy any sense of community anywhere.
It seems to me that the primary complaint of the Exit98 guys is really about the strength of the community. I tried asking for some clear explanation of what oppression they suffer from and how it can be solved but they couldn't answer. It appears that the oppression is that their wives and family love the community so much that they can't bear to part from it. They must feel they were born in the wrong generation. Had they been born anytime until recently, it would have been quite easy to escape, even if one did believe. They rue the success of the community.
> As I've written previously, what many of the major pronatalists don't realize is that obsessing over 'productivity' as the supreme value is inherently antinatalist.
You may want to learn about the culture of the late 19th century Anglo-sphere.
The problem with comparing countries to companies is that companies are ephemeral.
The investors of Intel made good money over the past 50 years, but Intel will probably go bankrupt in the near future due to profit maximization.
Your example of brain draining the heartland is one symptom of profit maximization, and of course, if you believe in free trade then importing is good, so why not import people?
I would concede that the idea of country as a company is great for bootstrapping a county but not for running it after it is established
By sheer luck, Israel has a strict immigration policy (even if some try to manipulate it)
Your solution, like many others that might work, is so outside the Overton window it's irrelevant in western societies
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced my favorite Indian (Balaji) is correct, we are going for Western Anarchy
Unfortunately, the West doesn't have anarchy. As Nestor Ivanovich Makhno said, anarchy is the mother of order. In an anarchy, you could shoot smelly Michael Jackson impersonators and stuff their reeking corpses into the trash can. In the NYC subway, the NYPD comes and arrests you and the DA charges you.
And the Eastern Autocracies appear to be even worse at dealing with their demographic problems.
On the other hand, the demographic problem at least in America seems to be solving itself, at least to judge from the number of high IQ millennials in my tweeters who've suddenly gone baby crazy.
I will forever remain skeptical of the low birthrate argument
What all those big brains "Elon Musk" and all the mids that just repeat those platitudes fails to grasp is that their argument suffers from a continuation fallacy, a very huge assumption that things will just progress in the same trend forever, Sam Harris exemplify this fallacy over and over
>their argument suffers from a continuation fallacy, a very huge assumption that things will just progress in the same trend forever
This is an interesting argument which has some validity-the human race will not be obliterated.
However, currently all predictions about fertility outside of Africa are continuously proven overly optimistic. This has been going on for a while and probably won't change before the end of the century.
I know you're incentivized to call it quits given your current living arrangement, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's game over yet. That being said, I agree completely with your meritocracy critique, and it doesn't look like the strip mining is going to end any time soon. We have a couple of weeks for the chudjaks and tech bros to hammer out some compromise. They're all pretty smart, so maybe they'll come up with something. Power has a way of inflicting compromise on those who wield it, not just those on whom power is wielded.
In 1974, Shockley made a few comments on dysgenics in Appalachia. He cited Caudill's book "Night comes to the Cumberlands" and claimed that "when the more intelligent people left the Cumberlands [...] the incidence of mental retardation of those who were there went up":
Isn't the Haredi lifestyle a product of managerialism, that is it can only be paid for by a developed modern welfare state with a "democratic" political system that can be shaken down by disciplined group actors?
Yes, but no. Those aspects of Haredi society which developed as a result of contact with the modern welfare state are not essential to it; Haredim existed and made a living before the 1960s.
Would the pre-1960s Haredim be closer to national religious / modern orthodoxy than to modern haredim? In particular does the requirement of work requirement some amount of engagement with broader world and non-religious efforts that result in what modern haredim would deem insufficient religious devotion and fatal compromises.
Look Groucho 🥸- and The Rest of the Comic Extras 👳🏾♀️ ; This isn’t your fight. It’s the ancient 🩸battle between Celtic 🏴☘️American Engineers and the Anglo-Puritan overlords of New England.
>You have fallen Vaudevillian style into the Movie Braveheart, I love a good prank but it’s not your fight, get off my battlefield.
Take The Flying to Mars 🚀Dutchman Afrikaaner with you.
With regard to h1b and imported labor, there is a side I think nobody considers: desire to be a bossman and manage one's lowers. Perhaps we could even extend this logically to the army: being in charge of datim and charedim that socially and legally have to follow your chiloni commands or face punishment and social excision. The signs are already there with beards, with certain units constantly being berated despite valor in combat(NY),etc.
Backtracking to labor I'll give a mashal from my work:
We are excavating a spot that is famous, has what to find, and the pay is pretty high relative to other nothing jobs(50s). Despite this, few have come and few stay longer than a few months. Nobody hasn't taken up better gigs when they happen. All the workers are oleh tour guides bc hummus-brained laziness so sabras feel it is beneath them. Bosses used to get Arabs til it was unpopular post oct7. Their solution? Indians. Someone seems to have been to Dubai and taken notice and derived their own conclusions.
The Indians have worse English than the sabras and nobody up top seems to have cared how much gets done to standard when the help doesn't understand you and you don't understand them. They are not as lazy and they are cheaper overall by the shift, being 6-6 shifts. They work in rain while the rest of us take off. I'm off for several days while they're out there freezing in the rain and sleet. They wear the same clothes without choice day after day because that's all they have to their names.
My job objectively isn't too hard if it's not made to be. Excavations can be painstakingly slow or break-neck fast (Ir David tunneled in 5y from top to bottom UNDER A NEIGHBORHOOD). My boss however is 100% old Yekke Ashkenazi secular university elite professor lady who *must* have control. She thus makes the work hard for the sake of being hard. She powertrips constantly. She can't stand the idea of people sitting rather than being hunched over the dirt as they dig small details. She yells at staff for doing what she asks of them. She complains about bathroom breaks and water breaks ruining the flow, even if it's a 40* summer day. She calls the guy who tore his shoulder a pussy for taking the doctor's 6 month off recommendation.
What am I saying here? This lady *wants* to control someone...and sometimes that's what it really is about. Not the productivity. Not the outcome. Just the raw sense of control. Just like 1984, that speech by Goldstein about how it has nothing to do with who wins the wars.
Your parting question I think could be responded to with "When are we talking about?". While it's not perfect, I do think that meme about hard/soft times does carry some merit. In hard times, those roles are front and center (classical and medieval emphasis on acquiring and harming your rivals' craftsmen). In soft times, gladiators and their present day equivalent of sports teams and musicians, take up the mantle.
There are times when society needs people to prop up the "need to haves" and other times where society neglects them for the "nice to haves". Plumbing had to be rediscovered at least once. Same for a whole bunch of other techs.
Given our current downtrending nature it would make sense that a whole bunch of things are going to be lost unless preserved. Personally I wonder if we'll outright lose them from how far post-industrial life has wandered. All of history you had farmers and farms. All of history you had people with basic crafts knowledge. Now we have people that think the food grows in Walmart and Costco. Generations who have never seen a cow and understood the how's and why's of that steak. Some even believe they're "beyond" that (laughable as it might be). Perhaps we're going to have something on the level of the Bronze Age Collapse until enough brilliant minds see things to aspire toward and propulse society upward once more. Maybe Planet of the Apes wasn't so off-key afterall. The apes were fascinated with and reused old world tech. Same story in the storyline for Fallout. There may be more to these plotlines than meets the eye.
I'll admit my initial thought was to smirk and balk, but, you've redeemed with "because of the kashrut industry".
That 100% would be valuable experience and awareness. A level beyond what halachic education gives.
My only caveat toward the negative is that a good many minhagim and piskei halacha take a lazy "all the things" approach to certain topics where nuance used to exist. The excuse for nikkur, or turkey, or swordfish are all things where fear > closeness to knowledge and accepting someone's expertise.
There is a gulf between practical application and learned knowledge in many fields and kashrut is definitely one of them, for a largely social reason that is stupid and wasteful.
"If something doesn't come up to our standards, we throw it to the rabbanut."
"Don't you check it?"
"Why? We don't eat it anyway."
Well, yeah. That's how it works. The job of the rabbanut guys (who are Haredim also) is to check that the kashrut of what they get is up to the standards of the rabbanut.
B) The point of the whole thing is to demonstrate that the Haredi lifestyle is a form of separatist scholarly-supremacist system, not a system by which a healthy society can govern itself.
BTW the Rednecks are rejuvenating our talent and people and we owe it all to the Democratic Party. No joke.
BLM+COVID+Work From Home+Crime=Flee the Cities.
In my case of WNY redneck ROC and BUF (Buffalo NY) are being fled for the Urban Areas, as is business. This has been happening for about 4-5 years.
The Redneck Rapid Self Organizing response teams being seen round the world is helping us too - and I saw this myself during August Floods from my porch. The road 21 feet from my porch had become a stream, the river moved 100 meters towards me… always check the cellar for waterline and get even 1 meter higher and you’re in good shape with houses.
This is a great article. Outstanding work.
Thank you. Now I don't know whether to keep arguing with you about kosher meat.
A word on Jimmy Carter:
https://x.com/afshineemrani/status/1873500583656927583/photo/1
An absolutely brilliant and foundational analysis which really resonates as a very illuminating diagnosis of our national plight on the cusp of 2024 - 2025. And it’s also very witty. Well done! And yes—please give us an in-depth analysis of the Haredi alternative. Thank you.
My mother says, the solution is simple.
People don’t want to do it.
I think that sums it up.
This is really top quality.
One point I would quibble with is this "What makes it worse is the antinatalist nature of modern Western society", as if this is a separate issue, when it is quite clearly a consequence of the former.
A major factor in fertility is the existence of a tight-knit community. Seth Kaplan has written much about this, focusing on his (Orthodox Jewish) community, and Jon Haidt, Lyme Stone and Tim Carney (Family unfriendly) picked up on it.
As I've written previously, what many of the major pronatalists don't realize is that obsessing over 'productivity' as the supreme value is inherently antinatalist. Pronatalism only thrives in a community that values human life for its own sake. And stripping the best and brightest from every community is the surest way to destroy any sense of community anywhere.
It seems to me that the primary complaint of the Exit98 guys is really about the strength of the community. I tried asking for some clear explanation of what oppression they suffer from and how it can be solved but they couldn't answer. It appears that the oppression is that their wives and family love the community so much that they can't bear to part from it. They must feel they were born in the wrong generation. Had they been born anytime until recently, it would have been quite easy to escape, even if one did believe. They rue the success of the community.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/my-communist-vision
Another non-Jew jealous of Orthodox Jewish communities
> As I've written previously, what many of the major pronatalists don't realize is that obsessing over 'productivity' as the supreme value is inherently antinatalist.
You may want to learn about the culture of the late 19th century Anglo-sphere.
Please elaborate a little more.
Something about the first fertility collapse outside France? The Victorian era? The Industrial Revolution?
The Victorians had rather healthy fertility despite being even more obsessed about productivity than we are.
The fertility crash happened in the Victorian era and lasted to about 1920.
I guess you are referring to the beginning of the Victorian era. I would say that it just time for society to change, but I need to do more research.
Why did write "the late 19th century Anglo-sphere"? That was when the fertility crash happened.
The problem with comparing countries to companies is that companies are ephemeral.
The investors of Intel made good money over the past 50 years, but Intel will probably go bankrupt in the near future due to profit maximization.
Your example of brain draining the heartland is one symptom of profit maximization, and of course, if you believe in free trade then importing is good, so why not import people?
I would concede that the idea of country as a company is great for bootstrapping a county but not for running it after it is established
By sheer luck, Israel has a strict immigration policy (even if some try to manipulate it)
Your solution, like many others that might work, is so outside the Overton window it's irrelevant in western societies
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced my favorite Indian (Balaji) is correct, we are going for Western Anarchy
If Western societies are impervious to solutions, then they will be overcome by their problems.
What does Balaji say? Anarchy might be an improvement.
Balaji says the world will split:
Western Anarchy (SF, NY subways are examples that will permeates through all western countries over time)
Eastern Autocracy (China and Singapore as prime example, where you sacrifice some freedoms for order)
He lays down the theory in his wacky book "The network state", crazy impracticle idea book, but still worth a read
Unfortunately, the West doesn't have anarchy. As Nestor Ivanovich Makhno said, anarchy is the mother of order. In an anarchy, you could shoot smelly Michael Jackson impersonators and stuff their reeking corpses into the trash can. In the NYC subway, the NYPD comes and arrests you and the DA charges you.
I'm misrepresenting his ideas a bit.
He ment the west will be in a state of what he calls "anarcho-tyranny"
taking a quote from Xeeter:
Anarcho-tyranny: is when the state stops upholding its end of the social contract to use its monopoly on violence for its own ends.
“the law is powerless to help you, but it can still harm you.” --Balaji Srinivasan
Reads like the plotline of Robocop
And the Eastern Autocracies appear to be even worse at dealing with their demographic problems.
On the other hand, the demographic problem at least in America seems to be solving itself, at least to judge from the number of high IQ millennials in my tweeters who've suddenly gone baby crazy.
I will forever remain skeptical of the low birthrate argument
What all those big brains "Elon Musk" and all the mids that just repeat those platitudes fails to grasp is that their argument suffers from a continuation fallacy, a very huge assumption that things will just progress in the same trend forever, Sam Harris exemplify this fallacy over and over
Things move dialectically.
Low birthrates lead to population recovery from those segments which are least susceptible to the factors depressing them. The resistant.
>their argument suffers from a continuation fallacy, a very huge assumption that things will just progress in the same trend forever
This is an interesting argument which has some validity-the human race will not be obliterated.
However, currently all predictions about fertility outside of Africa are continuously proven overly optimistic. This has been going on for a while and probably won't change before the end of the century.
African population estimates are also very fudged and probably significantly overblown.
I know you're incentivized to call it quits given your current living arrangement, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's game over yet. That being said, I agree completely with your meritocracy critique, and it doesn't look like the strip mining is going to end any time soon. We have a couple of weeks for the chudjaks and tech bros to hammer out some compromise. They're all pretty smart, so maybe they'll come up with something. Power has a way of inflicting compromise on those who wield it, not just those on whom power is wielded.
Quits? Me? You must be thinking of somebody else.
In 1974, Shockley made a few comments on dysgenics in Appalachia. He cited Caudill's book "Night comes to the Cumberlands" and claimed that "when the more intelligent people left the Cumberlands [...] the incidence of mental retardation of those who were there went up":
https://youtu.be/7JOIqkh2ms8&t=2180
Yes but no
If you are going to write cryptic comments that communicate nothing, you might as well not write at all.
Great article
Isn't the Haredi lifestyle a product of managerialism, that is it can only be paid for by a developed modern welfare state with a "democratic" political system that can be shaken down by disciplined group actors?
Yes, but no. Those aspects of Haredi society which developed as a result of contact with the modern welfare state are not essential to it; Haredim existed and made a living before the 1960s.
Would the pre-1960s Haredim be closer to national religious / modern orthodoxy than to modern haredim? In particular does the requirement of work requirement some amount of engagement with broader world and non-religious efforts that result in what modern haredim would deem insufficient religious devotion and fatal compromises.
Not really. Most Haredim today work, btw.
Look Groucho 🥸- and The Rest of the Comic Extras 👳🏾♀️ ; This isn’t your fight. It’s the ancient 🩸battle between Celtic 🏴☘️American Engineers and the Anglo-Puritan overlords of New England.
>You have fallen Vaudevillian style into the Movie Braveheart, I love a good prank but it’s not your fight, get off my battlefield.
Take The Flying to Mars 🚀Dutchman Afrikaaner with you.
[CUT]
🎥
With regard to h1b and imported labor, there is a side I think nobody considers: desire to be a bossman and manage one's lowers. Perhaps we could even extend this logically to the army: being in charge of datim and charedim that socially and legally have to follow your chiloni commands or face punishment and social excision. The signs are already there with beards, with certain units constantly being berated despite valor in combat(NY),etc.
Backtracking to labor I'll give a mashal from my work:
We are excavating a spot that is famous, has what to find, and the pay is pretty high relative to other nothing jobs(50s). Despite this, few have come and few stay longer than a few months. Nobody hasn't taken up better gigs when they happen. All the workers are oleh tour guides bc hummus-brained laziness so sabras feel it is beneath them. Bosses used to get Arabs til it was unpopular post oct7. Their solution? Indians. Someone seems to have been to Dubai and taken notice and derived their own conclusions.
The Indians have worse English than the sabras and nobody up top seems to have cared how much gets done to standard when the help doesn't understand you and you don't understand them. They are not as lazy and they are cheaper overall by the shift, being 6-6 shifts. They work in rain while the rest of us take off. I'm off for several days while they're out there freezing in the rain and sleet. They wear the same clothes without choice day after day because that's all they have to their names.
My job objectively isn't too hard if it's not made to be. Excavations can be painstakingly slow or break-neck fast (Ir David tunneled in 5y from top to bottom UNDER A NEIGHBORHOOD). My boss however is 100% old Yekke Ashkenazi secular university elite professor lady who *must* have control. She thus makes the work hard for the sake of being hard. She powertrips constantly. She can't stand the idea of people sitting rather than being hunched over the dirt as they dig small details. She yells at staff for doing what she asks of them. She complains about bathroom breaks and water breaks ruining the flow, even if it's a 40* summer day. She calls the guy who tore his shoulder a pussy for taking the doctor's 6 month off recommendation.
What am I saying here? This lady *wants* to control someone...and sometimes that's what it really is about. Not the productivity. Not the outcome. Just the raw sense of control. Just like 1984, that speech by Goldstein about how it has nothing to do with who wins the wars.
Your parting question I think could be responded to with "When are we talking about?". While it's not perfect, I do think that meme about hard/soft times does carry some merit. In hard times, those roles are front and center (classical and medieval emphasis on acquiring and harming your rivals' craftsmen). In soft times, gladiators and their present day equivalent of sports teams and musicians, take up the mantle.
There are times when society needs people to prop up the "need to haves" and other times where society neglects them for the "nice to haves". Plumbing had to be rediscovered at least once. Same for a whole bunch of other techs.
Given our current downtrending nature it would make sense that a whole bunch of things are going to be lost unless preserved. Personally I wonder if we'll outright lose them from how far post-industrial life has wandered. All of history you had farmers and farms. All of history you had people with basic crafts knowledge. Now we have people that think the food grows in Walmart and Costco. Generations who have never seen a cow and understood the how's and why's of that steak. Some even believe they're "beyond" that (laughable as it might be). Perhaps we're going to have something on the level of the Bronze Age Collapse until enough brilliant minds see things to aspire toward and propulse society upward once more. Maybe Planet of the Apes wasn't so off-key afterall. The apes were fascinated with and reused old world tech. Same story in the storyline for Fallout. There may be more to these plotlines than meets the eye.
Haredim, paradoxically, stay closer to the agricultural means of production than other city dwellers, because of the kashrut industry.
I'll admit my initial thought was to smirk and balk, but, you've redeemed with "because of the kashrut industry".
That 100% would be valuable experience and awareness. A level beyond what halachic education gives.
My only caveat toward the negative is that a good many minhagim and piskei halacha take a lazy "all the things" approach to certain topics where nuance used to exist. The excuse for nikkur, or turkey, or swordfish are all things where fear > closeness to knowledge and accepting someone's expertise.
There is a gulf between practical application and learned knowledge in many fields and kashrut is definitely one of them, for a largely social reason that is stupid and wasteful.
Re Haredis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ5d8rrFqLY
This is retarded.
"If something doesn't come up to our standards, we throw it to the rabbanut."
"Don't you check it?"
"Why? We don't eat it anyway."
Well, yeah. That's how it works. The job of the rabbanut guys (who are Haredim also) is to check that the kashrut of what they get is up to the standards of the rabbanut.
A) You're picking on one example.
B) The point of the whole thing is to demonstrate that the Haredi lifestyle is a form of separatist scholarly-supremacist system, not a system by which a healthy society can govern itself.
I'm not watching this whole thing, life is short. If the first thing I see is bullshit, it's all bullshit.
Haredi separatism is the point-the response modern Israeli society should evoke in any healthy person is the desire for separatism.
Aren't your comments about Israel similar to Vivek's comments about America? Something an immigrant should avoid sounding for a few generations?
America was never established with Indian money as a homeland for the Indian diaspora
Vivek think it was.
Great article
A vitally important article, thank you.
BTW the Rednecks are rejuvenating our talent and people and we owe it all to the Democratic Party. No joke.
BLM+COVID+Work From Home+Crime=Flee the Cities.
In my case of WNY redneck ROC and BUF (Buffalo NY) are being fled for the Urban Areas, as is business. This has been happening for about 4-5 years.
The Redneck Rapid Self Organizing response teams being seen round the world is helping us too - and I saw this myself during August Floods from my porch. The road 21 feet from my porch had become a stream, the river moved 100 meters towards me… always check the cellar for waterline and get even 1 meter higher and you’re in good shape with houses.
Happy New Year.