Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently identified three key drivers of the "civilizational suicide" underway in the West: a "parasitic mindset," climate alarmism, and false religion.

Musk noted midway through his interview with the titular host of the Tucker Carlson Network that while leftist billionaire George Soros is "senile," he has bequeathed a powerful nongovernmental system to his son Alexander Soros and other "like-minded people" who may continue his "anti-civilizational" campaign of normalizing criminality and dismantling borders.

While open borders and unchecked crime are certainly ruinous, Musk intimated that they are merely symptoms of a greater civilizational sickness — a sickness that leaves the body politic tolerating the Open Society Foundations' agenda, spurns life, mutates empathy, and glorifies an unmanned nature.

When asked to assess the current state of Europe, Musk bemoaned the collapse of birthrates.

"My biggest concern for Europe is that their birth rate is half replacement rate," said Musk. "So Europe is rapidly becoming with each passing year older and older with fewer and fewer young people. ... At the most fundamental level, unless Europe has a birth rate at least roughly equal to replacement rate, it is in population free fall, population collapse."

'Their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids.'

In May, a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet revealed that fertility rates have declined in all countries and territories since 1950 and that "human civilization is rapidly converging on a sustained low-fertility reality."

The fertility rate references the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. The replacement rate Musk referenced is 2.1. This is necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals.

Blaze News previously reported that in 1950, the global fertility rate was 4.84. In 2021, it was 2.23. By the end of the 2100s, it is expected to drop to 1.59 globally.

The average fertility rate for the European Union as a whole in 2022 was 1.46. Italy and Spain were among the European nations with the lowest rates — 1.24 and 1.16, respectively.

While Europe is on the greased track to collapse, Carlson reflected on the situation stateside, noting, "It does seem like the U.S. government — if you take three steps back — is pretty committed to making fewer Americans. There's a lot of anti-fertility propaganda. Actually, that seems like their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general fertility rate in the U.S. reached a historic low of 1.61 in 2023. By way of contrast, in 1960, the U.S. fertility rate was 3.7.

Despite these staggering statistics, the Biden-Harris administration has continued championing the slaughter of the unborn and the effective sterilization of vulnerable populations while Democratic lawmakers work to dissuade some young couples from becoming parents.

A big driver of Western anti-natalism in recent years has been climate alarmism.

Morgan Stanley analysts told investors in 2021 that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."

'It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions.'

"The environmental movement in the extreme is fundamentally misanthropic and anti-human," Musk told Carlson. "They start seeing humans as a plague, a blight on the surface of the earth — that earth would be this paradise if only the humans weren't here."

Musk noted that some climate alarmists are forthright about their desire to see humanity destroyed in a massive "holocaust," whereas others have not admitted as much out loud or to themselves.

"A lot of people believe that the earth can't sustain this level of human population, which is utterly untrue. It may seem that in a crowded city there are a lot of people, but actually, if you look down in an airplane and say, 'Am I over a person at any given point in time?' when you're in an airplane, the answer ... 99.9% of the time is 'no.'"

Musk emphasized that the world is in fact underpopulated and that the suggestion to the contrary was the result, in part, of the successful anti-human depopulationist propaganda advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Despite having had the primary claim in his magnum opus proven wrong by real-world trends, Ehrlich doubled down on his anti-human mania in a "60 Minutes" interview last year, stressing the world has "too many people."

Musk said, "I hope he burns in hell, that guy. Seriously. Terrible human being."

After Musk highlighted that amidst the West's activist-supported population collapse, leftist governments — particularly the Starmer government in Britain — are actively censoring those who would dare criticize the native population's replacement and sporadic rape by immigrants, Carlson said, "You've used the phrase 'mind virus,' but it's behaving like a virus. It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions."

Musk recommended the work of evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad, who has argued that the West "has been parasitized by a set of idea pathogens that negate reality and common sense."

Saad noted last year in the National Post that chief among all idea pathogens now plaguing the West is postmodernism:

It is a form of intellectual terrorism as it posits that there are no objective truths since apparently all truth claims are tainted by subjective relativism and personal biases. Postmodernism opens the door to questioning the 'antiquated' reality of what constitutes a man and a woman. Until fifteen minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had ever lived, as a sexually reproducing species, knew exactly how to identify these two phenotypes. This is no longer true.

The other pathogenic ideas Saad suggested are now crippling the West are the "DIE cult (diversity, inclusion, and equity)," cultural relativism, and suicidal empathy.

Saad noted that suicidal empathy is what animates that class of people who would excuse the illegal entry of criminal noncitizens into the homeland despite their track record of preying upon the citizen population.

'The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion.'

"Progressives are driven by misplaced and hyperactive faux empathy," wrote Saad. "According to the tenets of progressivism, criminals are victims of society. Hence, to severely punish them for their acts presumes that they have personal agency."

Musk contrasted the kind of "deep empathy" that would entail a desire to see civilization thrive and continue with this shallow or "suicidal empathy," which he suggested "results in the destruction of civilization."

According to Musk, there is a link between the implantation and spread of this parasitic mindset and the decline of religion.

"Nature abhors a vacuum. So when you have essentially a decline in religion and increase in the secular nature of society, for most people, they need something to fill that void, so they adopt a religion. It's not called a religion," said Musk. "The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion, and they internalize and they feel it with religious fervor."

Musk indicated that the adherents of this woke pseudo-religion then wage a "holy war."

Blaze News recently discussed the implications of America's de-Christianization with Dr. Joshua Mitchell, professor of political theory at Georgetown University.

'Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.'

Mitchell, whose thesis in "American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time" pre-empted Musk's realization by a few years, indicated that identity politics has absorbed much of the attention and energy previously invested into traditional religions.

"So when the Pew Charitable Trusts notes that American church attendance is going down, I say, 'You don't know where to look,'" said Mitchell. "If we call religion 'institutionalized Christianity,' well, then of course the numbers are going down. But if we call religion 'the search for a way to think through purity and stain, innocent victimhood, and historical sin in order to find atonement,' then in America today we're having a religious revival."

Mitchell borrowed a term from Alexis de Tocqueville to describe the woke pseudo-religion Musk recently identified:

We didn't move from Christianity to a secular world. We moved from one incomplete version of Christianity — complete with a designated innocent victim and a moral economy that says who's purified and who’s damned — to the next. Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.

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