Palmer Luckey is an inventor who co-founded Anduril, one of the fastest-growing military contractors. He’s a darling of the podcast and panel circuit. He’s well spoken and insightful, and he often says provocative things. He did so on a recent panel, when he suggested using oxytocin as part of marriage counseling to raise America’s birth rate.
Luckey had been asked what he would do if he were starting a company today. “I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling,” he said. “We understand mammal pair-bonding pretty well. There’s a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don’t want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids.”
Luckey says this idea stems from his obsession with natalism and the birth rate in America. For him, natalism is in part a civic duty. The nation survives only if Americans have many children.
Of course, oxytocin is real medicine. Doctors use it to induce labor. The body releases it when a mother nurses her baby. There may be some place for it in marriage counseling. Some people do have health conditions which leave them short of critical hormones.
The problem lies in reducing humans to biology. That is a frequent temptation among technologists like Luckey. These are the types that speak of human behavior only in terms of incentives and chemical reactions. But not all human problems can be reduced to chemistry. Nor are they all subject to better social engineering.
Luckey is not a random crank. He’s intelligent, and he’s behind two major innovations. First, he designed an early virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift. Second, he helped build a business model that has challenged the grip of the prime contractors at the Department of Defense. It promises to save money for American taxpayers.
His company, Anduril, is at the cutting edge of autonomous weapons systems. This tech is used not only for national defense abroad, but also at home. Luckey has helped design drones that detect and fight wildfires on their own. And Palmer Luckey is only 34 years old.
He’s a self-taught polymath, able to speak well on a range of subjects. He’s affable and funny. But his style is a curious mix of seriousness and flippancy about problems like the birth rate. He can speak plainly about waste in government procurement one moment and comment on meme culture the next.
In his ironic detachment, Luckey is decidedly a millennial. His signature outfit is the aloha shirt. In recent years he’s taken to rocking a mullet and goatee. Anduril makes drones that blow up enemy combatants. It also sells NASCAR-branded gear that appeals to the fashion tastes of Gen Z.
Yet for all his charm, intelligence, and success, Luckey is not yet wise about procreation. He has missed the root of America’s birth-rate crisis. We have lost sight of what the human person is and what human life is for.
The birth-rate crisis is especially acute in Hawai‘i. We have doubled our population in the past half century, yet we have fewer school-aged children now than we did 50 years ago.
Luckey is not the only tech natalist. Elon Musk has had at least 14 children with four women. They include the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain-implant company, Neuralink. He recently parted with Zilis, with whom he has four children.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Musk has offered large payments to the mothers of his children in exchange for signed NDAs. Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk, said she was offered $15 million plus $100,000 a month to keep quiet about the baby. She refused the offer. According to the Journal, Musk also asked the influencer Tiffany Fong to have his child.
Natalism is a frequent talking point for Musk. He shows much less regard for traditional institutions like marriage, or for fathers being present in their children’s lives. At a certain point, that requires the commitment of time. It’s hard enough as a working father of four, and I don’t have the burden of running Tesla and SpaceX. Luckey at least wants marriages. Musk seems to have little use for the nuclear family.
Both men represent eccentricity backed by capital. There have always been men with odd ideas on how to reform the world. But rarely have they had the capital and reach that they do today. The industrial titans of a century ago had to build the tools for turning wealth into influence. Today’s billionaires make their fortunes early in life. They find Super PACs, family offices, and foundations already waiting.
The wealthy have long shaped public opinion, but usually through other institutions. In the early days, it was newspapers. Then it was think tanks. Now it’s whole networks of groups, run through family offices. Their job is to translate the will of the billionaire into lasting wealth and influence on the ground.
Think of Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, or Pierre Omidyar. They have built or bankrolled such networks to promote their philanthropic and political agendas. Philanthropy and politics are merely two names for the same goal of shaping society. The main thing that separates them is the tax code.
Modern billionaires also have a unique ability to shape public discourse, because they can use social media platforms to appeal directly to their followers. This influence is reinforced by celebrity culture, which lavishes attention on whichever figure captures the public imagination.
Musk is the subject of a new, nearly four-hour documentary. He controls X, the social media site once known as Twitter. Luckey is less famous, with a cult following that skews nerdier than Musk’s mainstream audience.
But influence need not be widespread. If Luckey sways other tech billionaires, that’s enough.
How billionaires define problems and deploy capital to solve them matters, because they can build institutions that last. Think of the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, or the Carnegie Corporation. Fast forward a century, and the Musks and Luckeys may still have their thumb on the scale of the national debate.
So it matters that they get to the root. The birth rate is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. At the root is a misunderstanding of man’s nature and man’s purpose.
Luckey professes faith in Christ, and he has spoken of man as made in God’s image. Man is also marred by sin, and redeemable by Christ. Musk calls himself a cultural Christian, which is to want the fruit without the tree.
Man was commanded from the beginning to be fruitful and multiply. Redeemed man is called to labor on Christ’s behalf to make earth like heaven.
Without belief in God, it’s hard to convince people that children are a blessing and not a burden. Children are not to be sought as a means to national competitiveness. Rather, they are to be prayed for.
Oxytocin may indeed help repair some marriages, but it cannot keep a vow. To treat a husband or wife as a chemical robot with no will — merely controlled by hormones — is to degrade them.
Wanting more children, as a parent, is a good thing. Wanting a nation to be fruitful is also a good thing. But it’s possible to want the right thing for the wrong reason. If we want a fruitful America only to prevail in a contest with China, our labors on behalf of that goal cannot please God. If we want a fruitful America only so we can stop mass immigration, our labors on behalf of that goal cannot please God.
If Luckey wants to lead America to a more fruitful future, he can begin with what he already confesses. Man is made in God’s image. Such creatures can’t be dosed into faithfulness. They have to be called to it, and their children are answers to prayer before they are anything else.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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