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Ok. You get to be king of a hypothetical Western country. How would you reverse dropping fertility rates while respecting individual freedom? I’m open to bei

• somenameforme 1y ago
  I don't think culture changes from the top, but rather from you and I. And that eventually leads to the top. Lincoln, for instance, did not end slavery - society ended slavery. Had it not been Lincoln it would have been somebody else imminently, perhaps done far more gracefully. Of course the top can enact change through forceful measures, and they can also try to influence culture, but more often than not they are products of us all. And the idea for cultural shift is not hard or illogical in the least. Get rid of the consumerist mindset and you're probably 99% of the way there. Of course the problem there is that consumerism maximizes profits for corporations and GDP for politicians. Further emphasizing that the change must start with you and I. Like you said, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that infinite economic growth isn't really a realistic or even desirable goal. There also seems to have been a collaborated push against traditional norms, which was probably just the natural extreme of expressions of freedom rather than any grand conspiracy - in fact Plato discussed this exact phenomena in his arguments against democracy thousands of years ago. And traditional norms should not define us, but they should be the norm. And indeed they already are, but you'd never know that if you paid any attention to marketing, media, and so on. Basically I think we want to create a society that walks a more reasonable middle ground rather than being on one extreme of norms = dogma, or on the other extreme of anti-norms = dogma.