Mar 25, 2022
A Word From Our Pet Reactionary
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of lunatics.
I’d like to thank the Times for maintaining a balanced editorial page. My last column, “Pop ’Em Out,” made a simple argument: children are the future, and without them you have none. Yet it spawned waves of censorious comments, tweets, and walkouts. Hopefully today’s topic proves less controversial.
I’m often told to “trust the science” on a range of issues. I do. That’s why my think tank, the Institute for Yesterday, maintains a team of Liberty University’s best data scientists. After months of process-driven research, we’ve found a solution to our aging population: dowries. We should restore, promote, and enforce them immediately.
Like many family-preserving traditions, dowries have fallen out of fashion in the “me” generation. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the concept entirely. Allow me to close the gap. A dowry is simply a nominal payment to a groom for lifting a burden from tired parents’ shoulders. It fell out of fashion in the West as isolation and spinsterhood fell in. The last American dowries were paid by generous industrialists to open-minded European nobles, elevating the bride from anonymity and the groom from bankruptcy.
That’s not just historical trivia. Recently, several advanced economies have entered population decline, including our own. My team compiled centuries of data and prayers, and found an undeniable trend: more dowries mean more marriages and more children. In a perfect world I could stop there, but the new generation is possessed by the ghosts of Marx, Malthus, and B. Anthony.
Bad-faith critics enjoy tying my work to the reactionaries of the day. This time, I’ll get ahead of it: the Institute for Yesterday rejects racialist “replacement theory.” Dowries offer equal benefits to the Black, Hispanic, Asian, Other, and American communities. Granted, some demographics have less money to cover costs than others. But our data indicates reproductive competition will spur entrepreneurship.
Speaking of entrepreneurship, dowries represent a major opportunity for a stagnating economy. These won’t be the horse-and-buggy dowries of the nineteenth century: the tech sector will sprint to invent digital solutions for finding and purchasing suitable partners. Imagine replacing mindless swiping with a simple Web3-compatible storefront. Aspiring spouses could search partners by location, cultural keywords, and price. The Amazon of Love is right around the corner. In fact, odds are it will be Amazon. We just need to give Amazon Heart a chance.
Which brings us to Amazon’s natural enemy: the rainforest. The loudest eco-Bolsheviks consider energetic population growth irresponsible. To them, I pose a simple question: where’s your think tank? My work’s backed by ivy-league analysts, sitting congressmen, and peer-reviewed scripture. Come back when you’re in the paper of record.
Finally, there’s the inevitable claim that dowries will be bad for women. No they won’t.
Why does population decline matter? Social Security, family values, and Beijing. China has many, many more people than us, and our projections indicate that’s scary. To borrow the parlance of my nephew, an avid “video gamer:” they could win World War III with a zerg rush. We owe our children more children.
Do you support science? Thriving American families and armies? Giving demographics a nudge? Then it’s time to bring dowries into the conversation. Anything less is Luddite sophistry. And in a world that could move forward, there’s no excuse for sliding back into reactionary darkness.
Ethan Cole is a Times Opinion columnist and Grand Wizard of the Institute for Yesterday. He won the 2015 Evola Award for his biography of George Wallace. Ethan has two dogs, and is a proud uncle.
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