By providing free childcare, or by paying people to be stay at home moms, or both or something else?

one could e.g. instigate a policy of financial incentives for childrearing.

This has been tried in many places, the results are generally not encouraging.

I seem to recall defending monarchy back in '12:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2/tell_your_rationalist_origin_story/7e8p?context=3

The point of reaction is thus:

Conservatism and liberalism are each spectrums of political ideas: conservatism is based on correspondence to the logic underlying reality, liberalism is based on projection of the logic of the human mind and its desires.

Thus liberalism clusters all of its ideas around the notion of "equality" where conservatism focuses on consequences; this is why we might draw a line between preference-based utilitarianism and consequence-based reasoning.

If you are anywhere on the leftist spectrum, neoreaction will seem to you like the worst thing ever. To #nrx folk however modern society is the worst thing ever, because in the pursuit of the individual it has replaced real life with technology, government and product-based entertainment. It has rotted out our souls and our decisions are correspondingly bad, but people act in a vast conspiracy to ignore the effects of their actions.

Many people speak of wanting a way out of politics. The only way to do this is to go to philosophy. And then you do not have handy packages in which to wrap up your ideas; how do I vote for "existentialism" (or as said before, where do I vote to end democracy)? But at a philosophical level, we can see how politics does us a disservice. It exists to cripple governments in order to prevent abuses, but in doing so, it prevents societies from taking any forward action especially against the slow creep of consumerism, entertainment culture and other forms of modern blight.

At a philosophical level, once you affirm nationalism (ethnic self-determination) and monarchy (rejection of democracy), you have also rejected equality and thus have rejected the fond human notion that we are all capable of deciding what is best for us and thus that conjecture is equal to results-based analysis.

That is the line in the sand that #nrx has drawn.

When I was a child, I read the classics of literature and philosophy and quickly became a realist.

I don't say I'm a rationalist because rationalism implies a universal quality to human judgment, when empirical evidence convinces me no such thing exists.

Since then, I've left behind liberalism (pure emotion, defensiveness) and become a conservative realist, monarchist, conservationist and idealist (in the Kant/Schopenhauer sense).

When I moved back to the US from Japan, I made an ordered list of the books I had to determine which ones to ship home. This is the top ten:

• Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• Taleb, The Black Swan
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Thomas & Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth
• Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
• Wolferen, the Enigma of Japanese Power
• Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Collapse is good as well, yes. The only small issue I had with GG&S is how it goes a bit too eagerly from a plausible cause for differences in the world to ruling out any other, say ethnic or cultural influences. The writer may or may not be right about that, but it seemed he was a bit too committed to what he wanted to show. Anyway, only a small thing, the book is great still.

Not to be a cynic, but:

Zero-sum is not an illusion.

Every single thing has opportunity cost.

It may not be another person that pays if I pick up my toys, and go found my own community elsewhere.

It may be fewer trees and less open land.

We're all in this together, on the same planet, sharing the same air and water. Nothing is positive-sum if it involves using physical resources.