Asleep at the Wheel
None of this was a surprise.
The demographic collapse unfolding across Europe, East Asia, and much of the developed world was not discovered last week. It was not an unforeseen side effect of smartphones or dating apps or bad vibes. It was mapped, modeled, and warned about decades ago by demographers and sociologists who understood a simple constraint: societies that stop reproducing themselves do not continue by rhetoric alone.
This was already clear in the mid-twentieth century. Industrialization detaches work from family. Urbanization raises the cost of children. Education delays adulthood. Sexual liberation separates intimacy from reproduction. Individual autonomy replaces obligation. Fertility falls. Not maybe. Not occasionally. Structurally.
We even ran a historical stress test under extreme conditions. After the Bolshevik Revolution, early Soviet policymakers attempted a radical redesign of family life. Marriage was loosened. Divorce was trivialized. Traditional households were dismissed as bourgeois remnants. Women were to be freed from domestic constraints. Children, in theory, would be raised collectively.
The experiment failed almost immediately.
Birth rates collapsed. Abandonment surged. Social disintegration followed. The state was flooded with homeless children and broken households it could not administrate away. Within little more than a decade, even Soviet leadership reversed course. Divorce was restricted. Family stability was re-emphasized. Motherhood was incentivized. The traditional family, previously mocked as reactionary, was quietly rehabilitated as a functional necessity.
This matters because it establishes a boundary condition. Even regimes committed to total social redesign discovered the same limit: human reproduction is not infinitely malleable. Family structures are not decorative customs. You cannot dissolve them and expect continuity to emerge on its own.
Western liberal democracies dismantled the same structures more slowly, with softer language and better marketing.
For decades, policymakers drifted. Education expanded without addressing family formation. Flexibility was celebrated while permanence eroded. Children were reframed as lifestyle choices rather than the biological core of social continuity. Systems optimized for individual preference and hoped the collective would somehow stabilize itself.
This is what being asleep at the wheel looks like. Not ignorance, but refusal to integrate inconvenient knowledge into policy.
Now, faced with collapsing birth rates, aging populations, and shrinking workforces, governments scramble for fixes that avoid the root problem.
Migration is the most obvious one.
It is presented as a demographic patch, as if population were a purely numerical variable. People in, problem solved. But this treats society like an Excel sheet and culture like a rounding error. It assumes seamless substitution where none exists.
There is a crucial distinction that is routinely blurred: controlled migration and uncontrolled migration are not the same phenomenon. The first is difficult, slow, and administratively demanding, but at least intelligible. The second is a roll of the dice. Once scale, speed, and selection are lost, integration stops being a policy challenge and becomes an emergent gamble.
This is not an abstract concern. It is not something learned from opinion pages or policy papers. It is something you learn by working with migrants directly. Migration is a morally loaded topic because we are told, correctly, that all human beings have equal dignity. What follows from that, however, is often quietly misinterpreted. Equal dignity does not mean identical norms, identical trust assumptions, or identical social reflexes. People can be profoundly different without being inferior.
The mistake is not welcoming migrants. The mistake is assuming plug-and-play works.
Norms, trust structures, institutions, and expectations do not transfer frictionlessly. Even when cultural distance is small, integration is hard. When it is large, pretending otherwise is not compassion. It is denial.
This is not an argument against migration. It is an argument against pretending migration can replace a society’s own capacity to reproduce itself and its values.
A society that cannot reproduce its own population and norms is not diverse. It is hollow. Importing people to fill demographic gaps without rebuilding the conditions for family formation does not prevent collapse. It postpones it.
Other responses are equally cosmetic. Tax bonuses. Child allowances. Advertising campaigns urging people to have children “for the future.” These arrive decades too late and operate at the margins. You cannot incentivize meaning after dismantling the structures that once made meaning durable.
The core failure was philosophical.
Modern states treated reproduction as a private lifestyle preference rather than a civilizational function. They assumed history was self-sustaining. That liberation would reproduce itself. That biology would wait.
It didn’t.
The same systems that dissolved obligation now panic about dependency ratios. The same elites who dismissed demographic warnings as reactionary now search for administrators to manage decline. The same institutions that optimized for autonomy now wonder who will carry the load.
This crisis was forecast. It was demonstrated. It was even corrected once before.
The tragedy is not that we didn’t know.
The tragedy is that steering felt ideological.
And now the ditch is no longer theoretical.