A Moratorium on 'Wife Guys'

"Haves" and "Have-nots"

I’ve observed a phenomenon occurring in “This Thing We Call” the Dissident Right.

A literary colleague and fellow traveller recently opined about the dismal state of many thinkers and theorycels on the right while making a broader, underlying point (which I do believe is correct). Long story short,

Johann Kurtz

points out a problem. The problem is that many public intellectuals aren’t capable of, or seem to be struggling with, practicing the philosophy they preach to others. This, I believe, is especially egregious if people make a living producing content. Why should anyone listen to you tell others to get their life in order if you can’t even do it yourself? He also suggests that many people overthink it, which I also agree with.

Fair points. Sounds reasonable. The issue is the context in which the point was made.

Kurtz is not the first person to tell people to have kids, and he won’t be the last. There is a known global fertility crisis. In the Western world, this is compounded by innumerable environmental, sociological, and socioeconomic factors. You all know them: microplastics in the blood, lower testosterone, garbage diet, lack of exercise. You know all of them, and you’ve heard it a thousand times, so I won’t break those down. There is a bigger issue here, which is tying immediate reproductive success to the notion of practicing what you preach, and then the implication that those who don’t have children, or are struggling to have children, shouldn’t be leading others.

I beg to differ.

Just a basic, real world step

Firstly, I am biased because I’m Canadian. The “Canadian Situation,” which I will explore later in this essay, is unique in that it is bad. Really bad. Far worse than you can possibly understand if you don’t live here. If you do live here, the only way to not understand is to be wealthy enough that your life is not impacted. People in this cohort are usually (but not always) the rich and the managerial class.

Let’s start with this notion that having kids is a basic real world step. I’m not saying the following to be deliberately crass or vulgar;

I can download Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge tonight, after I write this, and deliberately have unprotected sex with as many women—ugly or pretty, smart or dumb, Western or non-Western—as my heart desires, in the eventual hope that one of them will keep the baby when they find out they’re pregnant. I could start a fake fertility service where I offer my precious, handsome genetics to some lesbian couple or East-Indian woman desperate to escape her caste. If I really wanted to, I could max out my credit cards, personal lines of credit, rack up multiple unsecured loans, sell all my possessions, and take off to a non-extradition country as a relatively rich person and start a beautiful harem where my children will lord over all the indigenous people like an ancient Hibernian God-King whose physical traits are preserved for millennia in the degenerated dynasty. In the purely physical sense, yes, Kurtz is correct that the act of reproduction is incredibly easy. Look at India. Look at Africa. That’s not really the point. First of all, the fact that the bar is so low actually takes away from it being a standard for relative authority. Yes, having kids is easy. Precisely. So what? You, and a billion others. Westerners are not going to 'outbreed' foreigners, nor should you want to.

Many great people who’ve accomplished incredible feats have done more than Kurtz or I (likely) ever will, and they didn’t have children. Whether myself or Kurtz have children or not, there are nameless, faceless millions who’ve lived and died over millennia who, on a local level, contributed immensely to their communities. Certainly, if not all of them, some of them could share wisdom. Ludwig van Beethoven didn’t have children. Nor did Henry David Thoreau. Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath and probably a genius. He didn’t have kids, nor did Isaac Newton, another similar genius. It was a tremendous shame that their genetics weren’t passed on. Their contributions to humanity are incalculable. If they had written about fertility and family-building, would their opinions on fertility be totally worthless? I don’t think so, and I don’t believe it’s fair to say so.

For most, the issue is not desire

If you ask most people whether or not they’d like to have kids, most will answer yes. This is a healthy, normal response. When pressed as to why they’re not trying, they will give various legitimate answers: not enough economic opportunity, not enough education, not enough opportunity to make the money for that education, to give them more opportunities to make more money. Historically, the majority of women reproduced. A majority of men do as well, but a significant chunk, estimated to be 40-50%, do not. Historically, it was war, disease, famine, and so forth that culled many men’s numbers. Quite a few of them also simply did not find a mate, even with all of the social capital they enjoyed, such as coming from large families or participating in local religious communities.

Contrary to a lot of rhetoric about hookup culture and orgiastic degeneracy among the top 20% of men hoarding 80% of the women, a majority of young men are not even in relationships or having sex at all. Sixty percent of young men in America are currently single. According to the same article...

Young men are, in fact, watching a lot of porn. Data from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy suggest between 76-87 percent of 18- to 29-year-old men are consuming porn regularly.

Young men across the Anglosphere are brimming with profound sexual urges, enough that the majority regularly consume porn as a substitute for their inability to obtain a girlfriend who shares their socioeconomic status and is their “looks match.” Data from 2022 shows that the average number of children desired among people aged 15 to 49 is 1.5. About 36% of people in this age group want two children, while 34% do not intend to have any children. The remaining percentages are split between those desiring one child (12%), three children (14%), and four or more children (6%) (Statistics Canada).

Combining the data from Canada and the United States, approximately 72% of people either have children or want to have children. This calculation takes into account the percentage of people in Canada who have biological children and the percentage of people in both countries who desire to have children.

In Canada, marriages that occurred in the early 2010s contribute significantly to the current population of married couples. For instance, the crude marriage rate (CMR) in Canada has shown long-term trends with marriage rates declining steadily. By 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this rate dropped significantly to 2.6 marriages per 1,000 people (Statistics Canada).

In the United States, data from the National Center for Health Statistics shows a similar trend. The marriage rate in the early 2010s averaged about 6.8 per 1,000 people, which is higher than in more recent years. By 2019, the marriage rate had declined to 6.1 per 1,000 people (CDC, Census.gov).

This is literally a 40% decrease in married couples from 2010 to 2020​ in Canada.

The decline in marriage rates from 2010 to 2021 in the U.S. is around 25%​

These already low numbers that don’t lead to replacement-level birthrates or family formation were struck a catastrophic blow over the last 15 years, pushing them further down. In response to my notes, many men in their late 30s and early 40s, usually older millennials, are telling me they feel they’ve caught the “last flight out.” I had a drink at the bar with

N.D. Wallace-Swan

who felt this was his experience. They met their spouses under more stable socioeconomic circumstances, with slightly better opportunities and a more favorable dating market. Many say that if they had to do it again 10 years later, they wouldn’t make the cut. It’s easy to shout “BOOTSTRAPS” every time a young man laments circumstances outside his control, but it does nobody any favors.

“Just make the sacrifice”

The right-wing version of “you will own nothing and be happy” is telling people to “make the sacrifice.” This is usually under the presumption that these young men and women want a perfectly middle-class home, with all the bells, whistles, and other amenities. That they want a suburban McMansion with a snowmobile in the garage that they never touch, a family dog, and a white picket fence. Nothing could be further from the truth. These young men and women don’t want this; they want the bare minimum, which is still not possible for most. Most would be content with a one or two-bedroom condo. Telling people to move to a rural, economic dead zone, where they’ll be a stranger, and where they don’t have the professional skill set (such as a work-from-home job or a government job), with no means of income for a “starter home” that needs more work than it’s worth and has black mold in the basement, is not an appealing offer to anybody. In fact, it is sacrificing substantially more than their ancestors, who may have traversed vast distances with nothing, braved negative 45-degree winters with five feet of snow, but possessed more social capital, family, friends, and community than is imaginable by most Westerners over the last three generations. The juice is not worth the squeeze. This is not motivating anybody. As Megha at

Classical Ideals

implies, why should people make this sacrifice that so many even ten years ago did not have to, for a lesser quality of life? It takes an obscene level of audacity to callously suggest this to young men in the 16-35 cohort. Kurtz may say that those without children have no right to speak about families. I pose a question in reverse to Wife Havers: why should you get to speak when you objectively had it easier? If only slightly. Get the hell out of here.

Lastly, for those who recommend moving to a rural area temporarily for a starter home they can fix up and resell on the market for more money, is this not exacerbating the housing issues? Is it fair to the locals of other states or provinces when you, with the money you made outside of their locale, gentrify their historic villages, towns, or cities and buy up all the property? You are barely different from the foreigners speculating on the market who were sold five-figure homes for seven figures.