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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Nathan Smith.
We Are All Gay Men Now
n 2005, the Slovenian people rejected a referendum to legalise gay marriage. They rejected similar bills in 2012 and again in 2015. Yet, earlier this month, the country’s top court legalised it anyway.
The low-hanging fruit with this story is to use it as another example of the farce of democracy. A slightly deeper level of analysis would use it to reveal how the supreme court of any country is the true sovereign because it alone has the power to choose the exception.
But while those are interesting angles that could easily fill my weekly column, they won’t help reveal how power works. A more insightful question is: Why did the courts legalise gay marriage at this particular time?
Perhaps gay marriage shouldn’t have been put before a plebiscite in the first place. After all, gay marriage isn’t a legal matter, it is a basic human right. But marriage is a function of the state, so subjecting it to a referendum did make a bit of sense. What didn’t make any sense was why the court took seventeen years to overturn the popular will and legalise gay marriage by fiat.
To find the answer to that, we must turn to the OECD. According to the June economic forecast, Slovenia’s GDP growth is expected to slip from 5.2% in 2021 to 1.7% in 2023, in part due to the negative impact of the war in Ukraine.
This drop is happening in the middle of a transition to a “smaller and older workforce.” A decline in GDP growth will be a problem because Slovenia’s ability to pay for “the fiscal costs of population ageing” requires it to either find more money or cut the costs of pensions and healthcare.
Thankfully, for its sins, Slovenia has been part of the European Union since 2004. I would usually suggest this is a bad thing. But being part of the EU gives Slovenia some options it otherwise wouldn’t have. For example, it can leverage the “brain trust” of EU bureaucrats who know how to squeeze more money from the productive (read: young) population to pay for the oldies.
One of those tricks is legalising gay marriage. It’s certainly not about making Slovenians more comfortable with homosexuality. Gay marriage is part of an economic model to kick the fiscal can further down the road to avoid an economy collapsing from too many old people. Other than euthanasia, the only solution is to wait them out and pray you aren’t invaded in the meantime.
The key dynamic in this economic model is about creating the “ideal economic unit” (what you and I would primitively call “a person”). While the characteristics of this ideal unit change over time, there is always a Goldilocks Zone which a country’s entire marketing and advertising apparatus aims to create in a desperate attempt to generate maximum productivity and minimum cost.
For example, in the post-WWII decades, the “ideal economic unit” was a father. By propagandising a young man to marry early and find a steady job during his 20s and 30s (the most tumultuous period for males), he would be trapped in the never-ending cycle of production until he reached retirement, when he was expected to spend every cent and die with zero dollars to his name. This ideal unit was chosen because the system had a lot of debts and an empire that needed funding.
All the movies, advertising and role models reinforced a single message to the fathers: “You are OK. Nothing in your life needs to change. This is what happiness looks like.”
A couple of decades later, the fathers were tapped out. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. So the system found more hours in Japan and China. By extending the workday to 24/7, production could continue indefinitely. Bonus: East Asian workers were astoundingly cheap.
You might think at this point that the ideal economic unit was the East Asian worker. But you would be wrong. The East Asian worker is functionally identical to a single mother: due to their overwhelming family commitments and low pay, both have no choice but to be all in on production/consumption just to stay above water.
Every piece of media and advertising from the 80s to the 2000s generated the same message that was beaten into men decades prior: “You are OK. Nothing in your life needs to change. This is what happiness looks like.”
The new squeeze worked for a while. But in a usury-based economic system, even breaking the family wasn’t enough to generate enough GDP to chase the consequences of compound interest and an imbalanced system. The answer wasn’t more production, it was doubling down on consumption.
Sometime around 9/11, the system figured a great idea would be to encourage homosexuality, particularly in males. Gay men were an ideal economic unit for putting high octane into the consumption levels because they have no children (zero overheads), work high-paying jobs (great income) and tend to spend all their money on a lavish lifestyle (higher tax opportunities).
As the millennial generation came of age in the 2010s, they were bombarded with media messages encouraging them to act like a gay man. “Dating”, “clubbing”, lavish holidays, “casual sex” and pathological narcissism all have one thing in common: your pocket gets picked.
This economic shift came with more of a risk than the previous two because homosexuality is an inherently sterile lifestyle. If a large enough percentage of the population is acting sterile, a tipping point is reached whereby productivity cannot counteract the effect of low fertility.
However, the brains trust of the world reckoned they could solve that with a few legislative tweaks on immigration. With open borders, the system could safely encourage heterosexuals to adopt “gay” lifestyles and supercharge their consumption because immigration could always replace the babies they didn’t have.
In other words, gay marriage has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, why did it take so long for a “progressive” society to tolerate it? The media can make lies into truth as easily as you can eat a bag of chips. We only started seriously tolerating homosexuality in the past 20 years because, well, the system needed more of us to act “gay” so it could squeeze more money from our pockets.
Given its economic performance and lopsided demographics, Slovenia doesn’t really have a choice in all this. This is why the courts decided not to give Slovenians any more chances to pick the wrong choice. If Slovenians won’t work more hours, then increasing consumption is the only way to survive to 2050.
Of course, the Slovenian Government will need to change its tune on immigration if it hopes to square this circle. Naturally, it is worried about popular pushback against migration should the borders be opened more widely. But that’s the great thing about homosexuality, it can be used as a weapon to achieve the perfect political outcome among young men: self-policing.
The mechanism for this dynamic is “homophobia,” one of the best magic spells ever created. Homophobia implies that heterosexual men are afraid of gay men. But they are really afraid of not being seen as masculine by women.
So quite the opposite to conventional wisdom, the origin of the pressure to marginalise gayness actually comes from the signals broadcast by women about what they find sexually attractive. It doesn’t matter what a man thinks a woman should be attracted to. If she doesn’t find you attractive, then you aren’t masculine. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
Since heterosexual men want sex, they must attract females. And since girls aren’t sexually attracted to gay men, heterosexual men will do anything to avoid appearing gay. In a world where gayness is normalised, heterosexual men know if they hang out with other men, there is no clear signal that tells women, “I’m not gay.” Today, a group of men always carries a suspicion that one or all of them might be homosexual.
The result is that men avoid creating deep relationships and close bonds with each other. None of them can ever be sure that the other men may be bonding for sexual reasons instead of mutually supportive camaraderie. And no matter how “progressive” our society becomes, it will always be true that a heterosexual man’s worst fear is that a girl might think he is gay.
And just like that, abracadabra, the magic spell of “homophobia” has solved 90% of serious male political activism. It’s child’s play to police the remaining 10%.
By adopting these magic tricks, Slovenia is trying to delay the consequences of usurious debt, an ageing population and deracination. But it has no way to solve these problems. Even the West hasn’t figured out what to do when the gay man is no longer sufficient as the ideal economic unit to help kick the can of economic consequences down the road. Maybe robots are next?
If that’s the case, I guess we’ll see how much your “human rights” really matter.
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