Have We Given Up On Ourselves?

First, a brief Tucker Carlson video:

Carlson is asking a critical question here. It pays to spend a few moments over it.

There are three polar attitudes toward time that a man can have:

Past-oriented: He can spend his conscious hours reminiscing, recalling past experiences and achievements, and grousing over past failures and injustices.
Present-oriented: He can focus on his present needs, obligations, desires, and short-term ambitions.
Future-oriented: He can devote his efforts to the attainment of goals or statuses that are distant in time.

Not too difficult, eh? Most of us distribute our energy and attention over those three states rather than devoting ourselves wholly to any one of them. We work toward some long-term goal (e.g., retirement); we slake current needs and scratch current itches; and we remember where we’ve been and what we’ve done for the sake of what we can learn from it. That’s typical for a mature, healthy human being.

To obsess over one pole is plainly unhealthful. To neglect one entirely is equally unhealthful.

Tucker Carlson has focused on the dwindling interest Americans are exhibiting toward the future: their future, that of their progeny, and that of their nation. There are symptoms of a wide-scale loss of confidence in those things:

Present-oriented spending patterns;
Lack of willingness to save;
Few or no children.

These are baleful trends. Moreover, there are powerful forces – economic, social, and political – behind all of them, especially the drive to depopulate the Earth.

I’ve mentioned the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement several times before this. I have no doubt that most Gentle Readers scoffed at it. But think how it dovetails with the other elements of the death cults Pascal and I have enumerated:

The nihilists;
The anti-natalists;
The extreme medicalizers;
The radical environmentalists;
The promoters of youth culture;
The anti-growth activists of all kinds;
The homosexual and transgender evangelists;
The growing body of preachers against the work ethic.

Those are merely the ones that come to mind at 5:30 AM after one cup of coffee. There are others.

At this time, were it not for uncontrolled immigration, Americans would not be replacing themselves. Other nations that have fallen below the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) reproduction rate – currently, approximately 2.07 children per fertile couple – are visibly on the way to the ashbin of history. Read Mark Steyn’s indispensable book America Alone for further details.

I shan’t flog this corpse into the magma. My job here is to note patterns. This one is worthy of more attention than it usually gets.

Another fact of note is that a people that has become radically present-oriented is virtually impossible to reorient. As I’ve written before, encouraging people to work, save, and breed for the sake of “the future” is a difficult undertaking. We’re here now, living, enjoying, and suffering in the present. How shall we deflect a man from his present concerns and focus him on a future he may not believe he’ll see?

Bravo, Tucker. Oh, Happy 1984 Day, Gentle Reader: