Random Thoughts on Governance, the Ideas of the Majority, and the Effect of birth rates on propagation of religious beliefs.

Random Thoughts on Governance, the Ideas of the Majority, and the Effect of birth rates on propagation of beliefs and values.

Federalist #51

A professor told me about an essay contest. The winner of the essay contest takes $5,000. The contest is open to the public, and as a member of the public, I am giving it some thought.

The Federalist Society hosts the contest, and they have set the topic on an issue related to "Federalist Essay #51," which discusses the division of power in government and how the branches of government ought to be created to oppose each other.

Toward the end of the essay, James Madison (the author) notes that a similar division must also exist between different segments of society. He argues that when one group becomes too large, it crushes and destroys the others by imposing its will through elected officials and laws. As the majority, it has the power to out-vote all other segments of society. In essence, the essay argues that America's identity as a "melting pot" is critical to our continued existence, because this prevents any one way of thinking from dominating.

The Effects of Time on Thought Diversity

Time is the enemy to free thought. If you leave a man in a strange group for a long period, his different thoughts will necessarily converge with the thoughts of the others. No matter how disparate, his thoughts will become uniform over time. He may even protest still, but speak like the others because he tires of the struggle that comes from being different.

In the same way, the other members of the group will also be effected by the one man, although his impact will be smaller.

The Effects of Generations on Thought Diversity

We might expect the same kind of effect within generations of people who are restrained to the same community. The children derive their ideas from two sources: (1) from their parents, who tell the children how to view the world as they grow; and (2) from their peers, who bring fresh ideas from other places. If the full range of ideas in one generation can be plotted as a large circle, then the range of ideas held by the child generation would be a similar circle with smaller radius. If children only believed the same as their parents, then the circle would have the same size and shape, but because the children are influenced by their peers, their ideas move on this time graph to a point below their parents and slightly inward toward the center of the circle. Thus, each generation, left on its own in a closed society, is one step closer to a unified thought on any particular idea.

We see this already. Currently, we see each new generation being more similar in thought on ideas of race, technology, and sexual identity or preference. What starts as a wide funnel of range of new ideas between parents who can find no common ground, becomes a society of children who have a less dispersed range of ideas (influenced by parents and peers equally), and grandchildren that have an even less dispersed range of ideas regarding the same topics.

In general, this process is favorable to the young who enjoy and "agree" with the world created by their ideals. It is less favorable to the previous generations who see the transition as a deviant shift from "what is correct" (from each independent perspective).

How Today's Generation can Impact Future Generations By Creating a Majority

If future generations are certain to shape a majority by a trend of slowly conforming ideals, then past generations are rewarded for having more children. Those ideals and believers who produce the most children will put the largest gravitational pull on the ideas they support. Each generation multiplies, and those belief systems that lead toward increasing populations will dominate over multiple years.

Put another way, in each generation, the parents who produce the most children will have the greatest impact on future thought patterns, because they add four, five or six people to the pool who think similarly to themselves, whereas other parents add only one or two people to the pool. Like the effect of the group on the single new member, and his similar effect on them. A single child representing a point of view vehemently will be more likely to conform to the ideas of the other children, when he is outnumbered five-to-one. The five children, however, reinforce their ideas and, while they will be affected by the arguments of the one child, they will be less effected by the one child than he is by them.

Extrapolate this over entire societies, and we will see that future generations will be swayed more strongly by subgroups that are highly prolific. A complaint I hear frequently about the current generation of young is that they have a sense of entitlement, that the government should provide everything for free: healthcare, education, food, etc. This is evidence of the trend, because welfare recipients (people for whom the government does provide free things), on average produce more children than people who are not receiving assistance.

Studies show that higher income and higher education predict smaller family sizes. Arguments can be made that these individuals focus on their careers rather than the family and thus do not start making families until late in life. So, it is not surprising that current generations are more heavily influenced by a "welfare mentality" then the parent generations would like.

Although states do not act to prevent or curb the large size of welfare families, some have acted to discourage the size of welfare families from growing even larger after welfare has begun by disallowing children born more than 10 months after the start of welfare services from being counted toward the size of benefits dispersed. If successful, this should at least slow the process and effect of the large welfare family sizes on the belief system of the country as a whole.

Hard Times Ahead

Hard-working Americans know that money must be provided before it can be distributed. A welfare society cannot survive, because when everyone takes and no one gives, then the pool of available resources is empty. For those people who have lived without seeing the effect of this dynamic, the thought is not fathomable. The government should just make more resources if it does not have enough. Right?

As much as we might try to convince the next generation that they might be making a mistake, some lessons are learned hard. If the whole society converts to a welfare mindset, the laws of economics will show the next generation the cliff edge. In the same way that gravity refuses to care about what a man believes about whether an apple "should" fall, the apple will. Similarly, economics will become the ultimate teacher with whom the future generations cannot argue.

The only question is can we slow down the decent enough of our way of thinking as a society enough to avoid long-term permanent effects. Will we be in a state of such vacuousness that we will be unable to reclaim the work ethic and value of contribution necessary to rebuild our society?