MACROECONOMIC IMPACT OF SCHOPENHAUER

Schopenhauer would be extremely pleased with modern day Europeans. Schopenhauer was a Buddhist and a pessimist. His most famous theory was the “will to live” or in German Wille zum Leben. He said that human beings suffer because of their will to live. Humans could be perfectly happy, but it is our desire to procreate, gain more money and move up in the world that makes us sad. He even said that people would almost never be friends with the person they ultimately end up having children with because those who our bodies find attractive are not necessarily someone we would otherwise want to be chained to for the rest of our lives.

If you look at Europeans today, like I said, Schopenhauer would be extremely pleased with them. They don’t let the will to live get in their way. They are above it. At least from current Spanish and French cinema, there is a prevailing notion that few people actually want to have children. I see more and more surveys coming out of the British press that people believe that having children actually makes your life worse. I knew personally several couples of friends who lived in Germany that had almost no desire or overt, soon-to-be, in the future, plans to have children. From an American perspective, this was quite surprising, and at the time, I thought they were quite an inspired people. How smart of them!

I will add this to one other thing. My generation in the United States has less sex than any other generation before us. They say teenage pregnancy rates and smoking rates have gone down, and they believe it is due to the internet and smartphones. You don’t need to smoke a cigarette anymore as an outward sign of rebellion because no one is looking at you in the public space anyhow. You would be better served posting selfies, in the new social life we have. And also, widespread use of estrogen birth control actually, they are finding, has the unintended consequence of making people want to have sex less. Women just have less of a desire to have sex because of the hormone, and which is quite astonishing, their partners also find them less desirable in a sexual way. Couples are having sex less frequently, maybe they actually like each other for their company haha.

Schopenhauer would be so pleased. People have finally bucked their will to live, like a horse from its rider. But herein lies the crisis. We now see in Japan and Europe, the macroeconomic impact of Schopenhauer. Our social security systems will not function without more people paying into them, than people taking out of them. A society simply cannot function with more old people than working age people, even without considering the financial institution. How about just the need to be taken care of?

In China, we see the effect of negative population growth most dramatically. The Chinese government, as it always seems to do, has bungled another social experiment. They intentionally gave themselves a plateauing and now negative population chart, with their One Child policy. They thought it would make things better. Also families aborted female fetuses selectively so now there are more men than women. 

Their economy is going to fracture like a ship hitting an iceberg. The impact will not be subtle, and the country will be affected for years to come. People are abandoning their elderly, and the televised human toll is very sad and not something I want to go any further into. But more on this in a minute.

Let’s go back to Europe and the US. So one might say, well, the Schopenhauerians have taken over, the world will be better now once we stabilize into our slightly less populated world. Wouldn't that be ok?

Enter the Muslims. Leaving out the very fascist ideology they have towards women and, well, anyone who “doesn’t submit”, they are doing things pretty well scientifically. They are very Darwinian. They are very much in tune with their will to live. They have large families. They adapt well to living in somewhat harsh economic conditions, and generally seem to find a way. They are not so different from Hispanic people in the United States (of course except for the ideology).

And it is natural to see that white populations in these areas are dismayed. It is an organized replacement of their populations. But rather than being organized by the government or some dark force, it is simply a quite Darwinian replacement of one group by another group, which is more naturally selective.

If Schopenhauer says don’t procreate, Darwin says Schopenhauerians are not long for this earth. Haha, basically if you refuse to breed, you will be replaced. So we have Schopenhauerians, and we have these more Darwinian groups, but how can we make peace of it all. I mean just for you and I in our heads.

Phil and I often make the joke, that at least we can take solace in the fact that Brazil will never become Muslim. I mean what are they going to do? Have more children than us? Do you really think Muslims will move to the favela and out-procreate our mixed-race people shooting each other up in the ghetto? Do you really think that a Brazilian woman will tolerate a man telling her to do anything, when she has been dealing with drug dealer boyfriends, and gangster vagabundos her whole life? Not likely, haha.

But that’s not really a good second option for the world, having a poor Muslim Europe and a poor Catholic Americas, and everyone mutually in a bad place.

There is one philosopher who figured this all out. He made no conclusions about how the earth came about. He said nothing about the will to live or Darwin’s natural selection. But, his most important value was the most important value in China for millennia (until this one child policy).

Confucius. Confucius’ most famous value was filial piety. It was something that was already hardwired into the brains of the Chinese, and he simply furthered it. Filial piety or 孝, xiào is respect for one’s parents, elders and ancestors. It honors tradition and moderation. It lets everyone know where they are going in life, and helps us feel secure in our role in the world. Yes, your grandmother might be a pain in the butt, but your parents take care of her anyhow and she lives in the house and is cared for until she passes away. When your parents get old, you honor the same, and your children will thusly treat you the same way. This goes on and on, and the culture never dies and people do not suffer from any existential crises. Their future is sitting on the patio in a swinging chair.

Confucius adds to this the values of “everything in moderation” kind of like the ancient Greeks and Jesus and Buddha and lol everyone. He also adds the values of integrity, wisdom, righteousness, and then rounds it out with something called Ritual propriety.

Ceremony is important. Humanists are a type of atheists who try to bring ceremony back into people’s lives. One of the worst things about being an atheist (when I was one) was not being able to say “God bless you” when someone sneezed. That is the American version of Gesundheit. Can you imagine not being able to say a daily expression just because you are an atheist? Can you imagine removing all your traditions? Can you imagine if you removed every one of the cherished ceremonies from your life, Christmas, New Years, birthday parties, family gatherings, your mom making you soup when you are sick? These are things that give us purpose in life. Ceremony is essential. So Confucius said, when one of his followers asked him whether or not he really had to sacrifice a sheep on a specific Chinese holiday, he said, “You love the sheep, but I love the ceremony.” Ceremonies and traditions are ‘in and of themselves’ unnecessary, but we love them and they are good for us.

I spoke with a friend who is Taiwanese. He thought it was funny that I had only now heard of filial piety. He said that filial piety pervades all parts of family life and social interaction in China. And it is only now falling out, for instance, when families move to the US and their children become Americanized.

I think this might be our answer. Rather than being replaced, we need to go back to the things we already knew to be true. Much of the philosophy that came out of the postmodern era, the Derridas and the Wittgensteins of the world, making us second guess everything and believe in nothing, is now having a real and not ignorable effect on our world and populations: The macroeconomic impact of Schopenhauer. 

You cannot really tell the French, sorry this is your fault. You will be replaced by the laws of Darwin. People will not respond well to that. In Denmark, they have advertisements encouraging to people to have children for their mother’s sakes, haha, so they can be grandmothers. What a sexy advertisement campaign, haha.

But, what can happen, and I think what will happen, is that the more conservative members of European society, the people who still honor family, and tradition, and still want to have large numbers of children, will replace their more Schopenhauerian counterparts.

After Jesus died, one of the Pharisees said to the others, now was their chance to crush the Christians: To remove them from the world. And one of the other Pharisees said, if they are of this world, they will remain.

I think that is true for ideologies. The best ideologies remain. There must be some reason that the traditional Chinese way of running a family did so well. There must be a reason that Jewish people did so well in the face of so many obstacles. There must be a reason Muslims do so well, and fill the vacuum of so many previously existing power structures. And for us, there must be a reason that traditional Catholic way of life (rather than the actual beliefs) but our day-to-day practices see us through. There must be something about our traditions that keeps us on this world, that ensures that one generation after the next will continue and propagate. You can’t really argue with that, right? Haha we’re still here, we must be doing something right.

Dad joked one time, rather politically incorrectly, which is his way, that you do not need to worry about AIDS in Africa. Because the religious people will survive. Think about it. Monogamy. Traditional Catholics and Muslims who marry and adhere to their rules strictly, will survive. Even without medicine. And people with loose interconnected sexual partner networks, which is traditionally how people associated themselves socially in certain regions in Africa, will die. Helpful ideologies will survive, and that’s how they came to be in the first place.

I think for ourselves, we can be much happier if we embrace our need for ritual propriety (our love of ceremony) and filial piety (honoring our old people and making a place for them in the home), because even if previous generations ran away from tradition, it doesn’t mean that we have to.

It’s the only answer to the conflict. We must return to our old ways, the most cherished traditions that make us happy and give us a feeling of belonging, a role in life.