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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

More importantly, he predicted the rise of The Pill (birth control) very eerily too. And the long term effect that it will have on civilization is undeniable.

Whatever your stance on the pill, I think it is naive to think that it will not have a lasting and deep impact on western civilization (and as it spreads globally, to all of human civilization).

Never before has sex been able to be had without consequence. Or the urge to have sex not led to at least the possibility of reproduction. For those that grew up entirely in a world where it exists and is readily available, it will have a huge impact on how they see sex, relationships, dating, and reproduction.

Sure, the world has a lot of people. But a civilization that by default, does not want to produce children? (As Huxley envisioned, and as I think will be the case in the coming decades) is headed for sure collapse.

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> Sure, the world has a lot of people. But a civilization that by default, does not want to produce children? (As Huxley envisioned, and as I think will be the case in the coming decades) is headed for sure collapse.

Contraception and abortifacients have existed for millennia.

People in the developed world are choosing not have children because of costs. Having children in the developing world is an investment that is paid back in the form of free labor, dowries and someone to care for you when you're elderly.

"Contraception and abortifacients have existed for millennia."

Yes, but not reliably (for contraception) or safely (for abortifacients), and by their nature, 80% reliable contraception is of dubious utility.

> 80% reliable contraception is of dubious utility.

You realise the quoted reliability rates are per year, not per act? For example, the withdrawal method (available to everyone, for all time) has a reliability rate of 78% for typical use and 96% for perfect use. [1] Obviously, even at 78% reliability over a year, that is of a great deal of utility. 78% of the time a woman whose partner practises withdrawal will not get pregnant over the course of a year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coitus_interruptus

It is observably a fact that the "sexual revolution" was a qualitative change and not just a quantitative change. Presumably something changed for that to happen. A student of history will note many, many times in the past that cultures would have been willing to make that change, but couldn't for some reason, so "it's just because we moderns are so uniquely awesome and wise and wonderful" doesn't strike me as a likely answer.

I suppose it could conceivably just be the ability to treat STDs, but I don't think that's enough, personally. YMMV. (Plus I'm not sure that the time works out correctly.)

Birth control pills have a 9% failure rate, and anyone who’s taken it will tell you that the experience is far from “without consequence.”

I didn't say "without consequence". I said "safe". And by "safe" I didn't mean "literally no-one ever will ever have a problem with it in any way", but something more like a normal meaning of the term.

The drive to develop them has existed for millennia, sure. But never as reliably or safely as they exist now. The fact that it is so accessible and there is very little stigma around it, is what will change our civilization and culture. The way Huxley depicts it in Brave New World, is the direction it is heading in. And we are at the forefront of that right now for the first time in human history.

You have forgotten about condoms entirely and with them excluded several centuries. Condoms predate the United States.

The regressive moral panic has done far more damage than the subject of moral panics ever have - which is quite impressive.

Sorry but this is not a narrative rooted in reality.

People don’t not want kids. Lots of people want kids at the right time. Others want it but find they would be unable to provide for their children due to a generation and a half of wage stagnation, along with women not wanting to have to change their profession to “full time childcare”.

Giving people access to childcare is documented to work. There isn’t some magic cultural collapse. It’s just capitalism squeezing everything out of people, and people worn out from it.

https://www.dw.com/en/are-family-policy-reforms-to-thank-for...

> People don’t not want kids.

I'm not sure which Gen Z's you've spoken to recently, but the next generations certainly want kids much less than previous generations. And this trend will only continue. We have seen family sizes continually drop, until now the average is about 2. That will soon drop below 1 where most people do not have children. Give it 30-40 years max.

I'm confused. How is what you say opposed to "people don't want kids"?

They were responding to "don't not want" (as in, do want), not "don't want".

they're responding to "people don't not want kids"

Thanks to you and hnick. I'd never seen that kind of double negation.

Actually I think people acts according to circumstances. Kids are a blessing and a burden at the same time, always have been, and some other factors helps decide.

But unwanted pregnancy is not "a help to decide" and it's weird to say that the fate of civilization should rest in people being unable to have safe sex.

Low birth rates are only seen as a problem in the context of race or nation: "if we don't reproduce, our genes/our culture will disappear and foreigners will replace us". Globally there's no problem at all. When low birth rates extend to the whole planet, the problem will solve itself very quickly by elemental incentives.

If it continues at the current rate by 2060 people will all want to murder 1 person! By 2100 every person will massacre an entire small village!

People have been predicting the imminent demise of civilization from lowering birth rates for an awful long time.

When did such prediction start to become popular?

Even if this is true (which I don't believe based on your anecdotal evidence about Gen Z who max out at age 24), why is it bad?

again, this narrative falls flat against empirical evidence that policies that support child care increase birth rates!

If you only care about population decline, you have an easy to undrestand tool for solving this problem, that doesn't involve trying to establish cultural hedgemony to try and convince everyone that they have to have at least 2 kids each.

Amen. The decoupling of the sexual act from the procreative act was transformative to society and I think we're just becoming aware of the consequences. Every developed nation has to import mass quantities of immigrants just to mask the problem, causing social unrest in their traditional populations. Then the newly arrived immigrant communities remain fertile for a generation, but quickly take on the mores of the surrounding nation and birth rates plummet.

Sprinkle on top a nascent anti-natalism coming from the environmentalist left and you have a recipe for a societal disaster.

Amen is used at the end of a prayer or hymn.

> The decoupling of the sexual act from the procreative act was transformative to society and I think we're just becoming aware of the consequences. Every developed nation has to import mass quantities of immigrants just to mask the problem, causing social unrest in their traditional populations

What is the problem you're referring about? Most would argue the world is over populated. Cost of homes are rising from scarcity to how many people there are. Most young people cannot afford a home to even consider having a child.

> The decoupling of the sexual act from the procreative act

The sexual act has been 'decoupled' from the procreative act since forever. People have always had ways to avoid pregnancy (some more successful than others) and sexual acts have always entailed much more than procreation. Not just within our species; look at how bonobos use sex for purposes other than procreation.

And falling birth rates in developed countries are not because of this mythical 'decoupling' you write about. There are many reasons for people not having as many children today and those reasons have been trending for a long time before the invention of the modern birth-control pill.

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