The Four Icebergs 2

A Parable by Vulpes Veterator

Continued...

The Third Iceberg – The War Between the Worker Bees and the Cunning Little Vixens

And now the third iceberg hove into view. On it appeared to be engraved the title, "The War between the Worker Bees and the Cunning Little Vixens" – but the title itself was obscured by a crudely spray-painted graffito, "These women hate women!" The ship’s chief stewardess had entered the cabin, bringing snacks, and she asked the Captain, "What can that mean?"

The Captain knit his brow and explained it as best he could. He observed that western Judeo-Christian culture in general, and American society in particular, gave more status, respect, and autonomy to women than any other culture. "But," he continued, "in recent decades this trend transfigured into a strange, double-sided reductio ad absurdum that insisted on calling itself ‘Feminism.’"

On the one hand, this had taken the notion of the empowerment of women to an extreme individualism which nearly prevented the establishment of marital unions and families. It even denied the essential responsibility of women for the children they procreated.  Against all biological evidence (let alone common sense), this viewpoint insisted that unborn children were actually a part of the mother’s body, and could be discarded like a fingernail or a hair combing.

On the other hand, despite verbally exalting the notion of the female, it had subverted that notion into a drive to recreate women in the image of men. It mocked ancient forms of manners and gentility toward women. It increasingly adopted male patterns of dress although men quite noticeably failed to do the equivalent. It averred that vulgar, offensive, and aggressive behavior was the hallmark of male behavior but made equally aggressive efforts to copy it. And most importantly, the cult of modern feminists insisted that women would properly fulfill themselves only as independent economic actors.

Careers in business and the professions became the highest good for many of them.  They even belittled the traditional women who did not follow their lead. They had little or no time, or even motivation, for establishing permanent relationships with men, and they claimed that the essential function of sex was casual physical satisfaction. And of course, such women wanted, and had, fewer and fewer children. They turned themselves into the sterile Worker Bees who had no children of their own to inherit their beliefs.

The radical feminists succeeded in seizing the high ground of opinion-making in schools, academia, the communications media, and the stages of  popular culture. Their triumph seemed settled. But they had not accounted for the basic human (or more bluntly, animal) instinct for reproduction

Lo and behold, there began to grow up among the ranks of women a cohort that held another opinion, and these were the Cunning Little Vixens. They believed that their ambitions, and even their sex drive itself, could not be satisfied without producing children of their own. It also became apparent to them that this goal could only be achieved through establishing more traditional families. Dimly at first, but then with growing conviction, they began to perceive that their desire for children was a genuine instinctive drive, and that to deny it would only lead to frustration.

The Vixens observed the contemporary milieu in which they lived. It occurred to them that it was so unstable that it was hostile to successful reproduction itself – for how could they reproduce successfully, except in an environment which provided for stable settings for their offspring until they reached maturity? They also noted that that same environment seemed to encourage dysfunctional behaviors – addictions, diseases, gang violence, loneliness, and a host of other unattractive or even repulsive behaviors. None of these things supported the multiplication, survival, or happiness of their offspring.

They decided that to realize their goals, the Vixens themselves must develop an alternate strategy to survive and to succeed. That strategy would concentrate on establishing stable family units which would minimize risk to their children. But any strategy requires tactics to bring it to realization. They realized that these tactics must involve integrating men into their plans. These tactics would necessarily require leading men into long-term, committed relationships.

Initially, they knew that they must make themselves more attractive to men, but that was not enough. They realized that mere attractiveness itself would lead to merely temporary liaisons. But if attractiveness was combined with insistence on marriage and support, it would lead to a more stable and supportive environment for supporting offspring. They must make themselves "hard to get".

They began to understand that the more traditional forms of sexual morality and family structures that they had heard about from older family members really had reproductive advantages. They also learned, and then shared with each other, the knowledge that previous generations had produced larger families with higher rates of survival than were experienced by their Worker Bee contemporaries.

This in turn led to the realization that contemporary society and its values actively were stacked against creating environments that favored reproduction and multiplication of children. And so it was that the Vixens and their families began to secede from the popular culture.

Naturally, they began to spend more time with people who agreed with them. Equally naturally, they began to join existing institutions that appealed to them, such as church groups, private schools, and home-schooling organizations. And their economic behavior began to change too. They began to spend less on the entertainment aspects of the popular culture. More ominously to their rivals, they began to petition government, especially through their votes, to support their interests and discourage their rivals.

As the Vixens began to be more visible in society, the Worker Bees began to take notice. They derided the Vixens as reactionary, as "anti-woman", and in any number of other ways, as unappealing. They used the pulpits they had in the government educational institutions and the popular culture to glorify their Worker Bee mentality. They mocked the Vixens, and when that didn’t work, they scolded them.

But the numbers of the Vixens began to grow. After all, from the start they had placed a premium on fertility. They did indeed begin to have more offspring than the Worker Bees, and since the Vixens raised their children according to their traditional beliefs, these offspring tended to thrive and succeed more than their rivals. And worst of all for the Worker Bees, the offspring of the Vixens tended to adopt the beliefs and feelings of their parents, because they were living in a genuinely supportive environment.

The Worker Bees fought back with all the massive resources at their disposal: the public (i.e. government) schools, the entertainment industry, the traditional print media, the professors in upper-level, state-supported academia. The anti-Vixen indoctrination of the young became frantic. But the more frantic it became, the more tiresome it became. 

…And the children of the Vixens responded with a tactic known to students from time immemorial. It was a tactic probably even used by Aristotle when he was a student of Plato: in class, they gave their teachers the answers the teachers wanted to hear. But with that orneriness that young people seem always to have had, they shared opinions among themselves that conflicted with what their teachers thought. 

Their numbers continued to grow, while at the same time the numbers of the children of the Worker Bees continued to fall. Ultimately, within two or three generations of the appearance of the Vixens, the numbers of their offspring achieved a kind of sociological critical mass. The Worker Bees, by their own device, failed to reproduce themselves, and the Vixens and their families overwhelmed and replaced them.

It was the supreme irony. As an integral part of their war against tradition, the Worker Bees had tried, through public education, to indoctrinate the young with doctrinaire Darwinist evolution. And now their own Darwinism shot them down. They had failed to reproduce successfully, and they thus proved themselves unfit to survive.

The Fourth Iceberg – The Great Dying

Then suddenly, the Captain barked out a command to the helmsman, "Hard to starboard! Hard to starboard!" Bells rang, and the great ship lurched to the right.  Other members of the crew fell to the floor, but the helmsman clung to the wheel, and the captain alone remained standing on his own.

Ahead of them was a huge mass of ice, taller and more immense by far than the previous icebergs - but strangely dark and hard to see. The American Destiny slid by it, escaping collision by the narrowest of margins. But along the iceberg’s base, there were stripes of paint from the hulls of many ships that had hit it hard, and there were even pieces of wreckage from them, lying on the ice. Deeply chiseled in the ice were the words, "The Great Dying".

The other crew members on the bridge picked themselves up and collected their wits. As they passed it, the cold of this iceberg even penetrated to the place where they stood. They all began to ask the captain, "What does it mean?" and, "Where did it come from?" and, "Since it is so very huge, how could we have failed to see it?"

The captain looked straight at them, and said, "You could not see it, because you have been taught and trained not to see it. It comes from the Culture of Death. You have been taught in all your schools and by all your peers that you must not see it or even imagine it, and that you will be punished for even discussing it. I have been able to see it because my glasses are of an older and a finer type than are usually made today."

"What you see before you is the death of the nations of the modern world. Their populations are collapsing everywhere, and they seem to be incapable of the basics of reproduction. And I do not mean just the Western world; I mean the modernized nations of the East as well. Of course, they may as well be called ‘westernized’ nations, since they have ‘bought’ the entire notion of what modern times should be. They ape the modern West in everything from clothes to computers to hamburgers. Even though some of them have pretensions of surpassing their western models, they seem incapable of rejecting the compulsive auto-genocide of their western models.

"There are fewer Germans now than there were when we passed the first iceberg and the same is true of French and Italians and Japanese and Russians, just for starters. These nations are not dying because of starvation. They are all more well-fed and prosperous than ever before. But their reproductive rates are catastrophic.

"Take Italy for example—but it is just one example among many; it is not unique. The average Italian couple is only producing 1.3 offspring. In other words, 1 + 1 = 1.3. That kind of mathematics would get you a failing grade even in grade school, and it is giving the modern world a failing grade as we speak. In real life it takes slightly more than 2.1 children per couple to merely maintain a population. Why? Some of the guys kill themselves off in motorcycle accidents, some of the girls become nuns, more and more of both OD on drugs, some decide they are "gay", and so forth and so on. You can fill in the blanks."

The Chief Engineer, a recent immigrant, spoke up. "But Captain", he said, "I have read than some western countries such as France and the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, are holding their own population-wise. How is that?" 

The captain shrugged his shoulders. "Exactly so. But look at those countries again. You could call that phenomenon ‘the colonial dividend’. The countries you named are countries with former colonial empires, and liberal immigration policies for their former possessions. Yes, indeed, they are keeping their populations up, but they are changing their entire demographic profile. Their better reproductive rates (which are just barely enough to maintain equilibrium even so) are almost entirely due to their immigrant populations. If that is a good or a bad thing is still an open question."

"And oddly enough," the captain said, "despite all of our various public health programs, nation after nation is noticing falling life spans. It was noticed first in the old Soviet Union, and they have spread west like falling dominoes. Now, even life spans in the furthest west domino, our own United States, are falling. Rising levels of obesity, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and generally dysfunctional living patterns are taking their toll. The piper of hedonism is exacting his pay.

"The piper of hedonism is a deceiver," the captain continued. "He is actually the Mephistopheles of individualism, and he has made a Faustus of us all. He has promised all of us present bliss, if we will only forget the future.

"In a way, he is worse than that original devil, because Mephistopheles only promised Faustus 20 years of fun, which meant that Faustus could have a lot of his life left before him if he repented. But the Mephistopheles of individualism promises an unlimited human life of satisfaction combined with a denial of a life to come. The forms this promise takes are limitless sexual satisfaction and the realization of personal professional success. These are the yardsticks of modern individualism.

"It is the interaction of these two that is causing the population death-spiral we see in all the modernized countries. Initially, modern contraception was the chosen instrument for this auto-genocide. But once reproduction is removed from the sexual equation, the desire for limitless sexual satisfaction leads to society’s ever-growing normalization of any form of sexual behavior—even forms which were met with revulsion in the past.

"This trend is reinforced by the drive for personal professional success. For what could be a greater restriction on worldly success than the need to expend resources on the raising of children? Childrearing requires vast spending, especially that scarcest of all resources, personal time. So now, despite monetary resources that would have shamed a medieval ruler, the modern married couple often feels that it cannot afford two or more children. How strange, when the same couple will often tell you that their presumably poorer forebears raised much larger families!

"But it gets worse. Throughout the West, marriages and even un-married partnerships are falling rapidly in numbers. More and more, adults are coming to feel that professional careers should displace producing offspring and raising families. They have no obligation to the future because their own present is the whole of their event horizon. They have met a demographic dead end.

"And it gets even worse than that. Without children to renew a society, a society grows older and older. Perhaps modern Japan is the worst example of this development, but Italy and South Korea are close behind. In these countries, the proportion of the population over 50 years of age is approaching 40%. Such population figures have never before happened in history. 

"Several western countries—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom provide examples—have taken the route of compensating for their own dismal reproductive rates by importing immigrants. Mostly, these countries accept immigrants who have radically different cultural characteristics from their own. But these countries have no choice. They must do this to acquire working age inhabitants to support the growing proportion of aging, retired citizens. They are importing human lives to take the place of lives they cannot procreate themselves."

"But Captain," said the crew members, "those populations physically could procreate if they wanted to do so, correct?" The captain replied: "It matters not if they have the physical capacity to do so. The fact that they refuse to do so is incapacity in itself. What is it," he asked his crew," when a nation imports the life it needs, instead of producing that life itself? Is it not demographic vampirism? Does that not show that the nation itself is already dead?"

The great, dark iceberg slid silently by and receded from view. The other crew members left the bridge equally silently, leaving the captain and the helmsman there alone. The captain took one last gaze into the distance through his glasses, and then slipped them back into their leather case. "There are probably more icebergs out there in the distance," he thought, "that are equally dangerous, and which we have yet to see."