When a Nation Stops Wanting Tomorrow

A people that no longer produces children has not merely “forgotten” reproduction, it has pronounced judgment on its own way of life. South Korea’s number, 0.75, and Seoul’s still colder 0.64, are not statistics to be bribed upward with subsidies. They are a confession: life there has become too expensive in money, yes, but more deeply, too expensive in spirit.

When the state spends billions to purchase births, it speaks as the coldest of monsters, lying in the language of “the people,” while arranging its own continuance. @The modern state is the coldest of monsters: it lies by calling itself ‘the people,’ lives by theft and falsification, confuses moral languages, and serves the will to death and the superfluous. The child becomes an economic instrument, a future taxpayer, a pension plug, a demographic sandbag against collapse. What woman, what man of pride, wants to be recruited into such bookkeeping? The state cannot command creation, it can only command compliance.

I hear, beneath the housing loans that swallow an income, beneath the private tutoring that eats the evening, a harsher tyranny: the tyranny of the “small, safe life,” the life that fears risk, illness, interruption, and therefore fears the child. @The ‘last human’ is the most despicable type: a small, comfortable, risk-averse herd-being who levels differences, avoids suffering, and calls its tepid security ‘happiness.’ A child is not compatible with a culture that worships the smooth career path, the perfect résumé, the controlled sleep, the curated “happiness.” You call this prudence, I call it a slow suicide, conducted politely.

Marriage and parenthood are not moral duties and not national service. They are the will of two to create something higher than themselves, a monument of victory and self-command. @Marriage is the will of two to create a higher one beyond themselves; only those who are victorious, self-commanding, and ‘built four-square’ should will a child and marriage. Where such self-command is crushed between competition and exhaustion, the womb closes, rightly, like a fist.

And yet, do not misunderstand me: suffering easily cries, “I want heirs,” because it wants to escape itself into the future. Joy is rarer, joy wills itself, eternity, recurrence. @Suffering wants heirs and children—temporal continuation and succession—whereas joy wills no heirs; joy wills itself, eternity, recurrence, the all-eternally-self-same. The question is not “How do we raise the fertility rate?” The question is: what kind of life would make young people say Yes, not once, but again and again, even to the heaviest weight of a child.