The Parabola

Every society, every culture, every nation, begins and ends, its life a parabola, birth to death. Some parabolas are briefer than others, some arcs are shallower than others, but all ultimately end as they began. The parabolas of the lifespans of Carthage and Rome and the Venetian Republic can be plotted on a graph, and so can ours. The parabola of our current Western culture and dominance is incomplete, but clearly downward, for Western women have opted, individually and all unknowingly, for extinction, by taking advantage of technology to stop having babies in numbers sufficient to maintain the parabola. Demographics is destiny, and as the increasingly rapid descent of the Western parabola becomes evident to all, there will be those who rage against the fates, to no avail, for as fewer babies are born there will, in measurable time, be fewer women to deliver them, and when a low birth rate becomes unsustainable, species extinction is inevitable. We will not disappear entirely, someone else will live in what is now the West, and we will become a subset of a larger culture. A parabola is simply a visual mathematical expression, and arithmetic always wins.

The West was born along the shores
Of the great Inland Sea
Empires rose, empires fell
But all left in their lee
Our language, law and way of life
Technology and art
Some left us more than others
But each one has played a part
And so shall we leave to the world
The best we had to give
The notion of the rule of law
And a man’s right to live

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