Long ago when I was in high school I had a subscription to Analog science fiction magazine. Once a month it would show up and I’d greedily read it from cover to cover. Much of what I read just sorta fluttered away over the decades, but a few things stuck with me to some degree or another. One story returned to me a year or two ago, but it has only been within the last day that I bothered to go through my late-80’s collection of Analogs to find it, and find it I did.
In the October 1987 issue of Analog is “Worldwreckers” by Lawrence M. Janifer. It’s a short story, told in a fairly light manner, set some time in the distant-ish future. A bunch of people have become concerned about the species known as the Langatiarans; not that these pyramidal jelly-like entities are becoming a threat to the galaxy, but because they have, rather suddenly, lost all interest in sex. Intellectually and emotionally they are much like humans, including having only the two genders… and there have been no detectable environmental changes that have caused this single-planet species to suddenly lose interest in the reproductive act. Within ninety years, the species will go extinct since they aren’t breeding anymore. By the end, the hero of the tale has discovered that a subtle electromagnetic field has encompassed the planet that turns off the Langatiaran sex drive. A generator is discovered, which promptly dissolves itself, leaving no evidence; a counter-field is set up and the jelly pyramids suddenly rediscover the joys of making little jelly pyramids.
They don’t discover *who* set up the field generator, but it is clearly someone smart and malicious. Someone wants to commit genocide quietly and without fuss. If someone started dropping nukes on the planet, not only would it wreck the place, it would be obvious, and everyone would fight back. But if the population simply lost interest in propagating the species… the species would fade away with a shrug.
That’s… huh.
The issue of The Young Uns losing interest in the opposite sex has been vexing the likes of Japan for quite a while now; their birth rate is far below replacement level. The entire western world is well below replacement; even in the United States, our rise in population is largely due to an influx of of immigrants, not baby-making. Why have we drastically lost interest in reproducing ourselves? Reasons are normally given such as people living with their parents longer (which hardly stopped babymaking centuries ago when people lived several generations deep in small, cramped hovels), or economic factors (did the birth rate plummet during FDRs Depression?). But there are other potentially more disturbing partial explanations.
1: Maybe electronic entertainment, from games to naughty videos, really are more interesting than sex. Sex, after all, is something that has been genetically programmed into us over a few hundred million years… but electronic entertainment is something that has been specifically and scientifically laser-focused on grabbing our attention. Anyone who has ever been in a modern casino has seen the hordes of zombies sitting at the machines robotically feeding cash into them, their brains lit up and locked in on the blinking lights and happy beeping sounds. The human brain can be enthralled, and some people are well trained in the techniques.
2: There has been a several decades long effort to demoralize specifically the men of the west. Everywhere you look there’s something telling you that you are awful because you’re a male, or your culture doesn’t matter. WHY that has been happening, or who is behind it – if indeed anyone is really actually behind it – is less important to the discussion than what the end result of constant non-stop demoralization will be. The depressed and downhearted don’t tend to breed like bunnies.
3: Social Justice activism seems correlated with the loss of interest in reproducing as well. Behold THIS and THIS, for example, to which there is really only one reaction for a normal man. Even for those who do not sterilize themselves, a lot of the SJW “uniform” is calculated to make females wholly unattractive to normal males. Not only do many modern SJW feminists just *look* awful, they *are* awful, screeching hate-filled ragemonsters. When presented with this as a dating option, many normal males will naturally decide that staying home to play Call Of Duty or D&D makes a *lot* more sense. How many normal people want to hang around with shrieking nutjobs who hate you?
4: A related issue of the Curse of Wokeness is the loss of masculinity, both culturally and in actual fact. Even the Chinese have noted it and seem to want to do something about it. This is an objectively measurable problem; testosterone levels and sperm counts are rapidly decreasing. Surely a lot of that is due to environmental factors… maybe pollution, maybe plastics used in food, maybe the presence of birth control (and other) hormones in the water supply, maybe changes in diet and that fact that we’ve gotten a whole lot tubbier. But there is an alternate view: how much of a man’s testosterone level is driven by what they *choose* to be? If you naturally have low testosterone, you’re unlikely to be a Manly Man or to have a drive to become a Manly Man. But if your hormone levels are naturally normal but you have been twisted by a farked-up society to believe that actually being a Man is bad, and that you’d rather be a Nu-Male in order to curry favor from your Social Betters, will that drive down your testosterone levels as your self worth is also driven down while your sense of self-hatred and paradoxical smugness are driven upwards?
For the species to continue, men have to find women attractive, women have to find men attractive, and they have the be both willing and able to do something about it. There is a creeping and now clearly obvious movement in some especially loud segments of society to make men and women unattractive to each other and uninterested in each other. Hell, there are those pushing *hard* to convince as many men as possible that they aren’t actually men, and as many women as possible that they’re not actually women. These people are unlikely to breed successfully if they go on hormone blocker and especially if they go under the knife. If they change their minds later… too bad, too late. Transaktion T4 cannot be reversed.
Are we being beset by advanced aliens who want to genocide humanity without damaging the environment or blowing up the cities? Seems very, very unlikely. If western society falls due to the decline of the native populations, the colonizing forces from the third world will be happy to move right in and have as many babies as possible. Total human population levels are unlikely to truly decline, especially if western societies are subsumed within others. The cult of woke supremacy won’t long survive within cultures that simply throw such people off rooftops.
There probably aren’t aliens out there doing this to us. But there clearly *are* worldwreckers among us who are doing their bit – through “social justice” activism, through tainting the food supply with chemical garbage, through disdain for men and science and engineering and civilization – to see to it that babies become a rarer and rarer sight. Perhaps they should be called out as the worldwreckers they are.
