Women before mothers

A spectre is haunting the world. It is the spectre of demographic regression. The ideological organs of patriarchy are sounding the alarm: “More and more women on all continents are rebelling and not having children“.   In a study published in 2020, THE LANCET magazine set the year 2064 as the date for the end of human population growth on Earth. Between then and 2100 there will be 900 million fewer of us. From then on, the population decline will not be gradual, but in free fall. The key is the fertility rate of human females (average number of children during their lifetime), which will fall to 1.66 children per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 per cent. More women and fewer mothers will fulfil Isadora Duncan’s liberating dream which is the necessary condition for equality between men and women and which, at the same time, will favour workers (fewer workers = higher wages) and the environment.

The phenomenon of women who do not want to be mothers – according to the study by THE LANCET magazine – is particularly intense in Japan, China and Russia, three countries where patriarchy has historically been relentless. Japanese women were pioneers putting an end to population growth in their country as early as 2011. Their efforts are expected to halve Japan’s population by 2100. In China there are 118 women for every 100 men, a phenomenon that can only be explained by decades of selective abortions of female foetuses. This ratio acts as a multiplying factor for the efforts of the women of the NoMo movement (NotMothers) and will lead China in 2100 to have exactly half of its current population of 700 million. Russia’s Slavic women have been avoiding motherhood since the 1990s, and will put Vladimir Putin’s successors in serious trouble to maintain the viability of the Russian empire. By 2050, Russia’s population is expected to fall by 20 to 30 per cent to 113 to 100 million. This will be accompanied by an unstoppable trend of Russians concentrating in European cities and leaving the inhospitable Asian steppe.

Could the fall in the fertility rate of women to 1.66 per cent that calls into question the theories of Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus mean that genes are losing control of mankind?  As the NPO BIOLOGOS sin FRONTERAS argues, GENES are our masters and have an absurd mission in life: to replicate themselves to infinity. How do genes replicate? Well, by transferring their absurd destiny to their survival machines (us humans) through complex manipulation tools that reside in the brain and among which is what popular wisdom calls the MATERNAL INSTINCT.

In order to make humans more competitive in the race for survival against other species competing for the Earth’s resources, GENES did not mind that evolution endowed us with a huge brain (with no known equivalent in the animal world) and whose functioning is so complex that it requires something as unusual as CONSCIOUSNESS, which enables us to exercise something even more unusual as introspection. As Nicholas Humphrey points out, it makes us perceive ourselves as a subject unto ourselves, with a self-sufficient individual consciousness, and the rest of humans as objects – with individualised consciousnesses beyond our reach, on the same level as other objects – such as our house, our car, or our summer holidays. Robert Sapolsky expresses the same idea as follows: “We judge ourselves by our internal motives and other people by their external actions“.

To date, humans have obeyed the dictatorship of GENES with remarkable docility. For their part, the genes’ strategy of not letting any important decision depend on our will and not being aware of the true motivations behind many of our behaviours has proven to be very effective. For example, such vital decisions as choosing a love partner, buying a flat, or getting into debt up to our eyebrows escape conscious reasoning. However, the essential manipulation of genes with us is to trick us into having children using the lure of orgasm. The great apocalyptic religions, such as Christianity and Islam, were inspired by this systemic fraud based on the approaching end of the world to use their proselytising among simple people. Thus the fraud of eternal life is nothing but a metaphor for the biological orgasm.

To be so unquestionably successful as a species, humans have historically organised themselves into societies with ideologies that are compatible with the orders generated by GENES: survive at any cost and reproduce. A paradigmatic example is PATRIARCHY, which was born when we became farmers – some 11,000 years ago – and which, despite its inherent injustice, was so efficient that neither men nor women questioned it until very recent times. In fact, Romeo and Juliet (a commissioned play by a William Shakespeare in the pay of the powerful) is still immensely popular with those MOTHERS before WOMEN.

GENES allowed our huge brains to develop in the vastness of evolutionary time. The brain created language and from it culture was born. In particular, Western culture, which is defined through a few great heroic characters such as the authors of the Bible, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Darwin, Freud, Pasteur, Edison, Tesla, Einstein, John Von Newmann and Turing, among others. Scholars and biographers of the aforementioned geniuses (like Dean Keith Simonton, author of the book The Origins of Genius) document time and time again the lack of knowledge received by the geniuses from their progenitors, as well as the lack of transmission of their genius to their offspring. Genius, that is to say wonder, is something that is not inherited from parents. It escapes GENES and seems to be an emergent property of culture.

One of the most visible manifestations of the independence we humans are receiving from the GENES lies in the notion of WOMEN before MOTHERS, in the gestation of which seems to have had a great deal to do with a cultural product (especially abundant in its western version) called INDIVIDUALISM. As Charles Murray proclaims in his work Human Accomplishment, individualism explains the pre-eminence of Western culture, the ultimate expression of which is the existence of individuals who insist on the idea of being right and that they alone are correct.

Although individualism is a more visible characteristic in men than in women, it should not be forgotten that a human GEN (which is immortal) spends half of its existence in male bodies and the other half in female bodies. So it could be the case that our colossal brain, through the mediation of culture, in its eagerness to free us from genetic dictatorship, has implemented the strategy of male individualism to engender geniuses that will lead us to immortality and the strategy called “WOMEN before MOTHERS” to bury that nasty lackey of GENES called PATRIARCHY once and for all. Jewish geniuses Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond envisioned the forementioned hypothesis at the end of the film Some Like it Hot.