Audio only:
In this episode, Trent examines the issue of “childless cat ladies” and the larger problem of demographic winter.
Transcription:
Trent:
In a 2021 interview, JD Vance said, the US is among other people run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. The comment generated backlash and it resurfaced. When Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president signing her endorsement as childless cat lady. A lot of people criticize Vance’s comments as misogyny from the MAGA crowd, but setting aside his specific wording, they do point to a larger problem in our society when it comes to people, be they men or women choosing pets or other pursuits over procreation. Even people like Pope Francis who can hardly be called a MAGA supporter, recognize the problem. During a September, 2024 visit to Indonesia, Pope Francis praised Indonesians for having large families in contrast to people in other countries. He said Those people have a law of death that comes about when one limits births and criticized the purposely childless for choosing to have pets over children.
CLIP:
Keep it up. You’re an example for everyone. For other countries that may be, and this might sound funny, these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child.
Trent:
In 2022, Pope Francis was even blunter than JD Vance and said, couples who chose to have dogs or cats instead of children were being selfish. In response, critics said this was hypocritical because Pope Francis like nearly all Catholic priests except for some in the Eastern church or Anglican converts doesn’t have any children, but the Pope wasn’t saying every single person in the world needs to have children. He’s pointing out that many couples as well as unmarried people, refuse to either get married or to have children because they want to put their desires ahead of the needs of other people in society. That is the textbook definition of selfishness. Caring about yourself to the point of causing detriment to other people. This is evident in the popular and insufferable weird dinks TikTok videos where couples who are double income know kids dinks brag about how much this choice lets them spend a bunch of money on themselves and time on their own happiness or be selfish.
CLIP:
We’re dinks. We go to Trader Joe’s and workout classes on the weekends. We’re dinks. We get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing. We’re dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We’re dinks. We’re already planning our European vacation next year, dinks, we get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more we’re dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We’re dinks. We can play with other kids and give them back.
Trent:
Notice that instead of using their extra disposable income for charity or their extra free time to volunteer, they brag about how they can live consumerist lifestyles focused on maximizing their own pleasure. This is also true of people who brag about not getting married, like one popular account on X that features a woman who posts videos of herself dancing that say, imagine being 42 and being this happy. The right hates this. Of course, there are many people who want to get and want to have children, but tragically cannot due to circumstances beyond their control, and not everyone who chooses to be childless or single are as obnoxious as these people, but when lots of people choose to live this way and especially when they encourage other people to do that, this creates negative effects for society as a whole that makes the behavior selfish. First, those who make this choice often later come to regret it and then resort to evil methods to solve the problem they’ve created like having children through in vitro fertilization, which inhumanely creates children in a laboratory and in many cases purposely kills the children that were created.
These so-called surplus embryos. Full human beings, the church has condemned IVF and Pope Francis recently called for a global ban on gestational surrogacy, the renting out of pregnant women’s wombs. Second, when enough people choose to not have children, this creates an unbalanced society that doesn’t have enough children to support an aging population. In the past 70 years, marriage and birth rates have plummeted to their lowest levels in history. People were twice as likely to get married during the Great Depression than they are today. Even though we live in an age of unprecedented prosperity relative to all of human history. Pope Francis said this kind of behavior creates a less humane society and here’s a recent BBC news report on the problem.
CLIP:
The birth rate is the average number of children that each woman has and when birth rates are discussed, you’ll see this number a lot. 2.1, this is the birth rate needed to maintain population levels. South Korea’s not close. Last year its rate was North 0.72. Japan is at 1.26. To put this in context, the EU average is 1.53 and the UK is at 1.49 and that is a record low. In fact, many countries are now below 2.1 and as people live longer combined with low birth rates, elderly people will make up a greater proportion of the population. As we’ve seen in Japan.
It’s no surprise that Japan, which has had this very, very long, very low fertility rate and the oldest population in the world, has got the worst government finances in the developed world because the government is indeed spending more and more on healthcare and pensions and has fewer and fewer taxpayers.
If that’s Japan in the uk, a shift in the makeup of the population is coming. By 2070, the number of workers is projected to rise by a million. The number of pensioners will rise by 5 million. This will inevitably create pressures. The economist argues that for countries with low birth rates, the implications are higher taxes. Later retirements lower real returns for savers and possibly government budget crises.
Trent:
Now, some people might say it isn’t my responsibility to have kids so that someone in 50 years can have a retirement, but those same people often say we have a responsibility to not have kids in order to stop things like climate change. As noted in a recent Los Angeles Times article with the headline, it’s almost shameful to want to have children or in countless news stories like this one,
CLIP:
So I am giving up my dream of having a family because I will only have children if I know they have something to live for.
An alarming statement from a young woman terrified about the consequences of climate change. 18-year-old Emma Lim is starting a campaign and pledge to not have children until leaders take climate change. Seriously,
Trent:
These people agree we have moral duties to make sacrifices for the good of society, but they only want hip virtue, signaling, sacrifices and responsibilities like wearing a mask or driving a Tesla, not the less glamorous responsibility of changing diapers in a minivan. The problem of demographic winter is something that has happened throughout history and yet we refuse to learn from it. For example, the Greek historian Polyus described in the second century before Christ, how ancient Greece declined due to theself behavior of men and their effect on the population rates In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population for this evil grew upon us rapidly and without attracting attention by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idol life and accordingly, either not marrying at all or if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born or at most one or two out of a great number for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury.
The Hellenic empire fell in the next century overtaken by the Roman Republic and one of the first laws the Roman Republic passed were penalizing, unmarried and childless couples with higher taxes while giving benefits to families that had more children. Rodney Stark’s book, the Triumph of Christianity reveals how Pagans had lower rates of reproduction due to practicing female infanticide and holding marriage in low esteem. This allowed Christianity to dramatically increase as a presence in the Roman Empire and later the medieval world. The other problem though with childless cat people be they men or women, is the damage they often inflict upon themselves. Pope Francis describes how the dink lifestyle often ends in disappointment saying in the end, this marriage comes to old age and solitude with the bitterness of loneliness. Now, there are lonely people who have children and there are happy childless people. Demographics become destiny for society as a whole, not necessarily every single individual that it’d be foolish to ignore the risks of living this kind of me centered lifestyle and more and more people are coming to see how foolish it is. People like Melissa Purling who wrote an article for Business Insider titled I’m 38 and single, and I recently realized I want a child, I’m terrified. I’ve missed my opportunity personally, married at 22 but refused to have children with her husband. They later divorced and now at 38 she wants children, but worries, she missed her chance. In an interview she said the following about the feminism that drove her to this tragic decision,
CLIP:
I feel unbelievably betrayed by feminism. I was constantly fed this idea that women can do everything we don’t really need. Men, women can can have the great career and have the kids that they like and change the tires and do this. I mean, I grew up thinking and men are great, but I can do all the same things. I do feel in many ways betrayed by that line of thinking. You
Trent:
Can find similar videos all over the internet of women saying that feminism betrayed them and now they feel like they will never be able to have children that they desperately want, and you can find people who say they’re totally fine, but they don’t act like it. People like feminist Anita Sarkisian who is unmarried but recently had a wedding themed party for her 41st birthday, which is a totally normal thing to do, right? I believe what we’re seeing now is the consequence of so-called third wave Feminism that was at its peak in the mid nineties and up to the 2010s while first wave feminism focused on voting equality with men and second wave feminism focused on workplace equality with men. Third wave feminism focused on so-called sexual equality with men. Women wanted to be freed from older social norms like saving sex or marriage and wanted to be free to be as promiscuous as men without being hindered by various slurs used to describe this behavior.
These were women in high school and college in the nineties and early two thousands who were exposed to radical forms of feminism on the internet as well as changing views of female happiness in media. Think of the promiscuous women on sex in the city, which ran from 1998 to 2004 were the cast of friends which ran from 1994 to 2004, which presented a model of adulthood that resembles delayed adolescence. But 20 years later, many of the women from this generation now find themselves in the throes of powerful maternal desires to have children, but no viable way to satisfy those desires due to a lack of suitable partners interested in women their age and a much, much lower chance of becoming pregnant, and it isn’t just women, I believe in 20 to 30 years we’re going to see a similar reckoning with young men who have bought into red pill propaganda that says marriage is a death sentence for them and they should lead a playboy lifestyle instead and not get married.
This is why I debated Pearl on pints of Aquinas and pointed out that statistically never married men were unhealthier and less happier than ever married men, a group that includes divorced men, red pillars, who tell men that they’ll be miserable if they get married are the photo negative of radical feminists who told women decades ago they will be miserable if they get married. We’re now seeing the bitter fruits of radical and it may take a few decades to see those same bitter fruits with red pilled men who chose a life apart from the sacrifices in marriage that perfect men. But I do think some of the cracks are starting to show. I know some of these men and they’ve told me I think I could have been a good father and they have this sad era about them because they ordered their life around short-term pleasure instead of long-term joy cultivated through discipline and even though it’s easier for a 50-year-old man to get married than a 50-year-old woman, it’s much harder to be a 60-year-old dad of a rambunctious 10-year-old or an 80-year-old grandparent of newborn grandchildren.
If you manage to live that long and if you want to see more about what’s wrong with so-called red pill thinking, check out my discussion with Jordan Cooper in the link below. Finally, I want to be clear that I am not saying everyone is called to marriage. Some people are called to serve society in religious or secular occupations that are incompatible with marriage. I’m also not saying people just belong to the state as part of a socialist collective, and we have to do only what the common good desires. In fact, it was socialists who wanted to abolish the family so that the state could be the foundation of society. The foundation of society is not the state and it’s not the individual. The foundation of society is the family, a union of husband and wife from which children naturally proceed. Not everyone will choose to be married, but that is the normal choice most people will make and when the family stops being the foundation of society, whether through rigid ideology or empty fleeting fads, you get serious problems for society and for the individuals who think making life all about them will make them the happiest.
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.