A few days ago, a Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry tweeted a chart showing the plummeting birth rate of Oman. Oman is a hereditary monarchy under sharia law—the last place you would expect the longhouse and the resulting TFR decline to touch. Pascal tweeted: “Something incredibly bizarre is happening, all over the world, and it is completely unstudied.”

And it’s true. We can blame American wokeness all we want, but in fact we’re facing a worldwide problem that seems to permeate everywhere. It’s such a huge change occurring right in front of our eyes that we can barely see it.

One explanation is technology—“the Borg” as thinkers like James Poulos call it. The idea here is that wokeness is actually just the special sauce on top of a all-powerful machine that wants to reduce human beings to easily interchangeable cogs. Immutable characteristics like race and gender get in the way of human fungibility, so there’s a ever-present inertia to get rid of them.

However, the explanation that I keep coming back to over and over again is Astral’s metaphysical one. Put simply, we were in the Age of Pisces for 2000 years, and we just shifted to the Age of Aquarius. Pisces is the last sign in the zodiac, Aquarius is the first.

The meaning? Everything is new. The whole world is upside down/underwater. All the old monsters—famine, flooding, raiding, etc—are dead. They’e been replaced by new ones like, perhaps, sterility. And with new kinds of monsters come new kinds of heroes to slay them.

Astral’s pod where he breaks this down:

Astral’s Substack

Video of this episode:

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