In the first quarter of the 21st century, planetary humanity underwent an enormous transformation, one that is more accurately described not merely as historical, but as anthropological, because it alters the very mode of being of the species Homo sapiens. What is striking is not only the evolutionary scale of this transformation, but also the speed with which it occurred. Very quickly, literally within the span of one generation, humanity shifted toward a family-less way of life.
Let us grasp the meaning of what has happened. Human beings of our species were formed, multiplied, and spread across the planet in tightly knit kin groups that expanded into tribes while simultaneously dividing into more compact and distinct families. Aristotle therefore did not invent, but simply described the social nature of the rational human being and called the family the first – that is, the basic and foundational – form of human association.
Incidentally, Aristotle, long before Jesus Christ, also warned of the existential threat to humanity posed by chrematistics (Ancient Greek χρηματιστική, money-making, from χρήματα, money), or capitalism, in modern terms. He regarded chrematistics as a perverted form of economic activity, contrary to human nature and destructive of society, including the family. Then, some three hundred years later, Jesus Christ came and taught that worship of Mammon leads people away from God – with all the consequences that follow.
Two thousand years have passed. Let us omit the details and focus on the essential point. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the end of the 20th century the end of world history. Only frivolous people can think Fukuyama was simply inventing things. The state of global humanity at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as individualized and “liquid,” because all social institutions and concepts had lost their certainty and obligatory force. But Bauman had not yet witnessed the annihilation of the family as the matrix of humanity.
Let us trace the chronology of disintegration. The so-called sexual revolution of the baby-boomer generation in the late 1960s, affirming postmodern values of individual self-expression and hedonism, cast aside religious “narratives” that is, commandments – and severed the root tradition of family life. After that, churches in Western Europe rapidly emptied, and both marriage and childbearing went into decline. The United States, owing to the conservatism of its heartland and the inflow of Latin American immigrants, has lagged slightly behind, but is moving in the same direction, and the process is accelerating. This is clearly visible in the following data. Through the entire first half and middle of the 20th century until the 1970s, the annual marriage rate averaged 10–11 per thousand people, but then began to decline, repeatedly reaching historic lows.
Statistics on marriages and divorces in the 21st century for one hundred countries of the world are collected here. In the 2000s, the United States already had fewer than 8 marriages per thousand population. In Russia at the start of the century, the marriage rate stood at 7.5 per thousand, and in China at 7.1. In Europe, Latin America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, the number of marriages was shrinking even faster. As a result, the average marriage rate across one hundred countries fell below 6 in the 2000s – 5.96 marriages per thousand people.
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the global marriage rate fell to unprecedented lows: today the average indicator across one hundred countries is noticeably below 5, at 4.83 marriages per thousand people. The number of marriages has declined in 81 of those 100 countries. In Japan, South Korea, and Australia, the figure has fallen to 4; in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Britain it is below 3.5 marriages per thousand people. In South America, once considered a bastion of Catholicism, and in black Africa, which is regarded as such today, marriage rates are even lower because most cohabiting couples neither marry in church nor formally register their unions.
At the same time, in 70 out of 100 countries, the fall in the marriage rate is accompanied by a rise in the number of divorces. In 65 countries, the number of divorces already exceeds one-third of the number of marriages, including 30 countries where divorces amount to half or more of marriages.
The result of these processes is a rapid decline in the number of two-parent families with children. Looking at 73 countries, for which detailed information is available, we can see that only in 7 of the 73 countries does the share of families with children exceed 40% of all households, and in only 4 more countries do families with children account for more than one-third of households. In 44 countries – that is, in the overwhelming majority of countries for which there are statistics – the number of families with children amounts to less than a quarter of all households. In the United States, the family share has fallen below 20%, while in Europe it is even lower, down to 16–14% in most cases, and even as low as 10% in Lithuania and Denmark.
Thus, the increasingly informatized and progressive society of postmodernity, having begun with the assertion of individualism and the shrinking of childbearing, entered in the 21st century a phase of radical atomization with the final disintegration of humanity’s family way of life. The cosmic meaning and scale of this metamorphosis lies in the fact that the species Homo sapiens, once having become the demiurge of meaningful life, once overcoming the deathliness of the material world through the life of the human race, is now renouncing its anti-entropic mission as too burdensome. For the mission of humanity, in essence, is labor and faith – and these are exactly what “progress” wears away. Unceasing labor and stubborn faith in the higher meaning of continuing the human line are being replaced by the comfort of self-sufficient individuals, a comfort that ensures the comfortable euthanasia of the species Homo sapiens, fully in keeping with the “scientific picture” of entropy in the material world.
The transition to a childless and family-less way of life has produced a tectonic break in global population dynamics, from a fading demographic explosion to demographic implosion. In 2026, the world’s total fertility rate fell below 2.20, the level necessary for simple replacement. The population of the planet is still growing by inertia of age structure, but if current trends persist, it will peak at roughly 9 billion around 2056, after which it will begin to decline. In fact, however, the real drop in birth rates around the world has recently outpaced all scientific forecasts.
The cited article by economists Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania) and Patrick Norrick (Northwestern University) describes the global demographic collapse as a natural process driven by “modernity” itself: prolonged education, career-building, the high cost of preparing a child for life, weakened kinship networks, and expanding opportunities for women outside the family.
Let us speak plainly. The notion of the objective inevitability of the destruction of the family matrix and the accelerated depopulation of humanity, replicated in countless academic and analytical publications, is a mental projection of the power of globalist elites advancing and implementing a strategy of elitist transhumanism and the divergence of the species Homo sapiens.
Let us cite two counterarguments that refute the hypothesis that humanity’s atomization and depopulation are exclusively natural processes.
First, this hypothesis ignores the anti-religious (“anticlerical”), anti-national (“cosmopolitan”), anti-traditional and anti-historical (“progressive” and “postmodern”), and now also anti-family and anti-humanist (“transhumanist”) cultural revolution that was designed and systematically carried out by capitalist elites as Western civilization transformed and the Western world-system of capital accumulation and concentration expanded globally. It is precisely this global expansion and the total domination of postmodern “values” – value relativism and asocial individualism – that has produced the globality and speed of humanity’s dehumanization.
Second, this family-less and childless “modernity,” on closer inspection, turns out to be heterogeneous – there are exceptions to the dominant trend, and they can in no way be called marginal. Such exceptions force us to think and may explain much.
Let us look at the case of Israel. Hardly anyone would dispute that Israel is a modern society and state. Yet in Israel divorces are comparatively rare, while the share of complete families with children among all households (42.5%) is one of the highest in the world and the highest among developed countries; the total fertility rate in Israel remains at an ideal level, holding steady at 3 births per woman.
Israel’s demographic distinctiveness finds its explanation in the geopolitical context of the emergence and existence of the modern Zionist state. That context is clearly characterized by acute ethnic competition with a religious accent, which in the case of the Jewish state is inseparable from global capitalism. Ethno-religious separation on the basis of chosenness, tied to global capital accumulation, is precisely what constitutes the logic of social apartheid and species divergence.
In this connection, it is also worth noting that the survival of the family institution under today’s conditions has a very clear class dimension. Data from the United States, for example, show that the decline in marriage is concentrated primarily among the poor majority (60%) of American society. Among the richest 20% of Americans, the marriage rate has changed little over recent decades and remains at around 80%. Therefore, the “marriage crisis” is not total, but is occurring at the expense of the lower classes, which constitute the social majority. In other words, marriage and family are ceasing to be a universal human norm and are now becoming an elite privilege of the wealthy and educated minority.
What emerges is the following picture. The crisis of sociality has become total and, following social structures of various historical ages, has now struck the root, matrix institution of human common life – the family. Under the banner of unstoppable progress, the withering of the family has spread across, homogenized, and in effect eliminated almost all civilizations, reaching its greatest destructive force in the most developed countries with the highest standard of living, where complete families with children have become a disappearing rarity, and where former national states have been replaced by conglomerates of populations ever more alienated from historical tradition, ever more atomized, and increasingly lacking independence. Meaningful exceptions to the general trend are visible only in Israel and among the uppermost stratum of global elites.
This evolution of humanity fully corresponds to the strategy of transhumanism, in which the aspirations of the global elite are formulated – today, the dominant and ruling groups of globally corporate and state-monopoly capitalism. In mass consciousness, the transhumanist strategy has been projected in the form of the UN concept of sustainable development. Over several decades, through the system of globalist centers of influence, mainstream expertise, education, and mass media, humanity’s consent to population contraction has been conceptualized, implanted, and implemented as the main condition and criterion of sustainable development. The mental and psychological support for the voluntary castration of the human race has been the economically compelled and mass-culture-enforced transition to a childless, family-less, individualized lifestyle of human units living “for themselves.”
At the same time, the progressive aging and shrinking of the Homo sapiens population is occurring primarily at the expense of the economically unstable and increasingly indebted mass strata – the majority of humanity. Meanwhile, the elites that possess capital and social power are, on the contrary, accumulating and monopolizing the existential resources of life itself, including longer life expectancy, family continuity, and reproductive capacity. In this way, globally interconnected elite communities have neutralized the threat of mass uprising and acquired a new quality of chosenness, cultivating not only property superiority but existential, inherited species superiority over the discarded and withering species of so-called Homo sapiens.
