Could it be that plausible?

An intriguing idea.  From Part 2: Fighting by Anna Gát.  

I am jaundiced about studies and beliefs around birth order and such.  Like a Myers-Brigg test, it is fun and generates entertaining discussions and there are plausible ideas behind it.  But in terms of solid data and useful forecasts - not much there, there.

I have not much patience for the long piece from which I am quoting.  A lot of stream of conscious thought almost.  But there is an intriguing observation in the middle.

Most people first encounter love and war in the form of a sibling, whether they were already there when they were born, meeting them in shock, wonder, and jealousy, or would be born after them, eliciting that same response. Two siblings are the original zero sum game, competing for what indeed is a scarce resource, the 24 hours of the mother, in luckier cases alleviated by fathers’ and grandparents’ contribution. Two-child households don’t have the Pentecostal or Hegelian triad, no third party can really dissolve and to absolve, a lot of clashes feel like life and death, indeed at some point they were, we must have fought in humanity’s crib, if not the womb, we were never our brothers’ keepers.

When it comes to our new polarisation in the West, I’m tempted to think an unexplored underlying cause may well be that now the second generation of mostly two-child households has grown up, people who from early childhood have fought ugly for either/or, to whom it’s her or me!, who have no visceral knowledge of forming allegiances, we know only how to appeal, who understand all things through interest and difference.

One of the conversations I have with some frequency with friends and acquaintances is the question of what exactly has happened on campuses which were once institutions for identifying and selecting future leaders, transmitting knowledge and harnessing many of them into careers supporting knowledge creation.

Places we enjoyed and respected, now seem to be turning out damaged weenies incapable of managing themselves much less leading others or serving a greater good.  

We are edging towards a weeklong meltdown in the kindergarten of young reporters at the Washington Post who are psychologically unstable and incapable of exerting executive function over their sturm und drang driven emotional incontinence.  Far from the central dispute among some of their more fragile and destructive reporters, there are fringe characters who keep emerging as long as the dust-up continues.  

Such as this sad Washington Post reporter two years out of college with a self-diagnosed eating disorder which everyone else needs to accommodate.

Incredible to learn that one of the minor WaPo characters had a student op-ed complaining that he was under-nourished in college because the school didn't prepackage his meals and he was too anxious to serve himself from a buffet

— Park MacDougald (@hpmacd) June 8, 2022

Among all these emotional damaged goods, one has to wonder, per Gát, how many of them are from single or two child families?

Is our mythical polarization merely an artifact of our chattering classes having had the habit of having only one or two child families over the past fifty years?  Kids who never really engaged with zero-sum reality and never had to negotiate, alliance build, or trade with multiple siblings to resolve an issue?

It feels so plausible.  But is it really?  Family size has definitely shrunk so almost tautologically there are more single and two child families and fewer three or more child families than in the past.  But do single and two-child families produce children with greater emotional fragility and a higher propensity to appeal to authority rather than to negotiate with siblings?  

I don't know.  I do know that after the implementation of the one-child policy in China in 1980, the single children from these families gained the moniker of Little Emperors.  But I have seen arguments that that phenomenon is also not well attested.

It would be interesting to see what structured research might turn up.  

In the meantime, I suppose I should treat the hypothesis with some skepticism.  But the rise of the self-centered, pathologically altruistic, real-world adverse, emotionally fragile, woke ideologues of the past dozen years or more would seem plausibly to be the product of urban living, socially well-to-do singletons with no real world or social skills where they are not the center of attention and adulation.

It would be nice if our social challenge were solved simply by the chattering class having a couple of more children.