What remains for all of us after the death of Nicolaus Copernicus, Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt, or Mother Theresa, we know pretty well. But we are rarely aware of what remains after the death of all the other, mostly nameless people. Unjustly, because that is all of us - simply the world's population today. Without this contribution of the nameless, the contributions of the famous would also be worthless, because there would be no one to perceive this value. Is the contribution of the nameless less valuable only because we will never know their names? Absolutely not. Without the millions of the simple but successful family creations of the Nameless People, humanity would have died out long ago. The longer I think about it, the more the fact that we are still here seems like a miracle, like a matter of course. Despite all the terrible wars and epidemics of the Middle Ages (including the 20th century), there were still enough nameless men and women who together raised enough mentally healthy children so that the generational chain of humanity was not broken. The mental health of these children had to have been stable enough (statistically speaking) for these children to want to start their own families when the time came.
Today's "era" of world population holds a great danger for this continuity. The philosophy of individual freedom and the right to individual self-determination and realisation of the dreams of each of us seems to me to be even more deadly to this evolutionary continuity than all the horrors of Medieval Civilisation. Today, 37.2 % of all households in Germany are single households. 27.6 % of all households are occupied by couples without children. And only 24.9 % (i.e. one in four) households house couples with children. In Berlin, these figures are even more alarming: 49.1 % of all households are single households, 22.5 % are couples without children and only 15.4 % are couples with children. In 40-60 years, when all these singles and childless couples are dead, who will stay in Germany, who will stay in Berlin? The immigrants? Probably. But not only the Germans, but all the weak Western democracies of today are doing away with themselves in this way.
But it is not yet out of the question that they will soon realise that they cannot continue to ruin humanity the way they have been doing. Because demographic ruin also means economic and political ruin. You don't need a new military threat for that. Ongoing climate change seems to me to be only a third-rate threat in this context.
I see no other way to avert this trend than to return to a society of healthy families. And if democracy is to survive, then only as a familial-participatory democracy, which I have already described earlier in this app and in my book "Me, You, and All of Us". We don't have much time left to think about it.
