Pronatalists want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. By Julia Black.

Malcolm and Simone Collins are self-proclaimed pronatalists. Simone told Insider they viewed “the pathway to immortality as being through having children.” …

As long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, “we could set the future of our species.”

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are “pronatalists,” part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles.

People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization.

It’s a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times’ opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

It’s also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us” to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.” …

While they relate to the anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they’re wary of affiliating with what they called the “crazy conservatives.” Last year, they cofounded the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org. …

They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. …

Rich US elite:

The tech industry’s biggest players have been preoccupied with their legacies for years. In the 2010s, the longevity craze swept Silicon Valley and industry titans like Jeff Bezos, 58, Sergey Brin, 49, and Larry Ellison, 78, poured billions of dollars into biotech companies they thought could help them defy death. …

But as the Ellisons and Bezoses of the world get older, the chance of radical life extension in their lifetime becomes more unlikely. So some are turning to the next best thing: their progeny. …

The Genomic Prediction cofounder Stephen Hsu told me he knew many ultrahigh-net-worth, high-birth-rate parents.
“With everything these guys do, whether it’s their investments or even their social lives, they’re applying a very analytic, quantitative way of thinking. And that goes for reproduction too,” Hsu said. …

What these movements all have in common is a fixation on the future. And as that future starts to look more and more apocalyptic to some of the world’s wealthiest people, the idea of pronatalism starts to look more heroic. It’s a proposition uniquely suited to Silicon Valley’s brand of hubris: If humanity is on the brink, and they alone can save us, then they owe it to society to replicate themselves as many times as possible. …

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America.

It’s “big here in Austin,” the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group’s off-the-record retreats. … “The End of Western Civilization,” another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse. …

Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world’s highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in “populating the world with his offspring.” …

Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie “Idiocracy,” in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

“Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception,” he wrote in another tweet this past May. “Most people I know have zero or one kid.”

Musk was echoing an argument made by Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of longtermism, who wrote that he worried declining fertility among “intellectually talented individuals” could lead to the demise of “advanced civilized society.” ….

A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire’s pronatalist ideology. “He’s very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible. …

William MacAskill, who works at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where Musk is a major donor … devoted a chapter of his best-selling book, “What We Owe the Future,” to his fear that dwindling birth rates would lead to “technological stagnation,” which would increase the likelihood of extinction or civilizational collapse. One solution he offered was cloning or genetically optimizing a small subset of the population to have “Einstein-level research abilities” to “compensate for having fewer people overall.”

Malcolm said he was glad to see Musk bring these issues to the forefront. “He’s not as afraid of being canceled as everyone else,” Malcolm told me. “Any smart person with a certain cultural aesthetics of their life is looking at this world and saying, ‘How do we create intergenerationally, durable cultures that will lead to our species being a diverse, thriving, innovative interplanetary empire one day that isn’t at risk from, you know, a single asteroid strike or a single huge disease?'” …

No wonder they’re afraid of Christianity and Islam:

The Collinses worry that the overlap between the types of people deciding not to have children with the part of the population that values things like gay rights, education for women, and climate activism — traits they believe are genetically coded — is so great that these values could ultimately disappear.

A lot of people assume that pronatalists want to ban abortion, but nearly all of the pronatalist supporters interviewed for this article identified themselves as “pro-choice.”

Don’t mention IQ:

Still, many observers are troubled by the fact that pronatalists worry less about how many children people are having and more about who is having them. …

“It’s in some ways the most brutal form of inequality that this guy’s going to be able to have 20 kids and actually 20 very, very healthy — as good as modern technology can make them — kids,” Hsu said. “Whereas other people can’t avail themselves of that.”