The Contemporary Magellan

The Contemporary Magellan I watched a film called Magellan where the indigenous people ended up appearing more frequently than the expedition—or perhaps what stayed with me were the empty shots of sailboats slowly crossing the Pacific, the sound of rain on the river in the Philippine rainforest, and finally the seawater washing away all the bloodstains on the beach. Strip away the narrative, and it's just a group of people in armor arriving in the rainforest, understanding nothing, immediately trying to convert the locals. The locals, completely bewildered, continued roasting their pigs and fighting their fights. The armored men charged forward to demonstrate the wrath of God—and got killed. Of course, we can categorize all these perspective shifts under various -isms, but it feels like there's actually a deeper force driving things. I feel like many things happening this century can ultimately be explained by fertility rate differentials. Simple arithmetic: parents need to have an average of two children just to keep the total population stable. When families in rural Egypt have five children, with babies still being born, while some OECD countries don't even reach one—naturally, when we talk about 'people,' the composition of that 'people' is monotonically shifting in one direction. Places with fewer than one child per family start aging collectively; decisions across all domains begin reflecting the views of the older generation—even if most people won't live to see the consequences of those decisions. Places with five children per family may have increasingly vibrant populations, but it also means everything needs to support more and more people. And since fertility rates typically correlate inversely with education levels, places with five children are often places where the process hasn't been completed (often because the process itself bears historical scars that create psychological resistance, like Iran forty years ago), making it difficult to create opportunities for all five. So people start migrating—like a physics experiment, diffusing from high concentration to low concentration. It's actually been this way every time, just in different directions. But in places with one child, it's still people from the pre-diffusion era making the decisions, so tension is inevitable. The physical law of diffusion from high to low concentration can't be changed. Those places with one child can't control the absorption quantity, but they can set conditional criteria. The results of these criteria will profoundly affect that place two or three generations into the future (because newcomers' fertility rates basically exceed the natives', and adding two or three to an exponent creates qualitative change). Of course, they can set the gating conditions based on technical skill or productivity levels. But a country is ultimately meant for living, not as a research institution or factory. And living ultimately requires a group that can coexist harmoniously.