When Competition Goes Viral: How Ancient Instincts Might Be Crashing Modern Society

Have you ever noticed how certain messages seem to spread like wildfire on social media? “Focus on your career first.” “Children will hold you back.” “You need to find yourself before settling down.” These ideas feel empowering and modern, but what if they’re actually ancient competitive strategies dressed up in contemporary language?

Dr. Dani Sulikowski, a psychological researcher at Charles Sturt University in Australia, has proposed a controversial theory that might explain why birth rates are plummeting across the developed world. Her idea, called “manipulative reproductive suppression,” suggests that some of our most progressive-sounding social movements might actually be unconscious evolutionary strategies going haywire in the modern world.

Before you roll your eyes or get angry, hear her out. This isn’t about blaming anyone or claiming women are “evil.” Sulikowski herself emphasizes that she’s not 100% certain her theory is correct — she just thinks it’s close enough to be worth discussing seriously. And the implications are fascinating, even disturbing.

The Basic Idea: Competition Works Differently for Different Sexes

To understand Sulikowski’s theory, we need to start with a basic principle from evolutionary biology: males and females of most species compete with each other differently.

Think about it from nature’s perspective. Male competition is often direct and obvious, like rams smashing horns or elk fighting with antlers. Males can potentially have unlimited offspring (at least biologically), so their strategy is often about being the strongest, fastest, or most dominant to get access to mates.

Female competition works differently. Since pregnancy and childrearing require enormous time and resources, females are inherently limited in how many offspring they can have. A woman can’t have 100 children no matter how successful she is. So instead of competing to have more babies themselves, the evolutionary strategy shifts: reduce how many babies your competitors have.

This is where it gets interesting — and a little uncomfortable.

Sabotage Over Direct Competition

Sulikowski argues that female intrasexual competition operates primarily through sabotage rather than direct confrontation. But this isn’t conscious, mustache-twirling villainy. These are unconscious strategies shaped by millions of years of evolution.

In small ancestral groups, which were the kind humans lived in for 99% of our existence, this might have looked like spreading rumors about a rival’s faithfulness, giving “helpful” advice that actually undermines reproductive success, creating social coalitions that exclude certain women, or promoting beauty standards that most women can’t meet.

The key insight is that these strategies increased your offspring’s chances relative to others without requiring you to have more children yourself. If you have two kids and your rivals have one each instead of two, your genetic lineage gains ground in the next generation.

When Ancient Wiring Meets Modern Technology

Here’s where the theory gets really relevant to our world: these competitive mechanisms evolved for small groups of 50–150 people. Everyone knew everyone. Social feedback was immediate. If you went too far with competitive behavior, you’d face direct consequences from your community.

Now imagine taking that same psychological mechanism and plugging it into social media reaching billions, 24/7 news cycles, educational institutions, government policy, corporate HR departments, and popular entertainment.

Suddenly, messaging that would have reached maybe 10 people in an ancestral village can reach 10 million people instantly. And because it’s packaged as empowerment, equality, or progress, it spreads even faster.

Sulikowski points to several modern movements and ideas that might function as reproductive suppression at scale: extreme career prioritization for women, “child-free” lifestyle promotion, redefining traditional masculinity as “toxic,” emphasis on extended education delaying family formation, and messages that frame motherhood as oppressive or limiting.

Again, these ideas aren’t necessarily wrong in themselves. The question is: why do they spread so effectively? Why do they feel so compelling? And why do they predominantly result in fewer children being born?

The Bug, Not a Feature

Here’s where we need to add an important twist to Sulikowski’s theory. She suggests this might be a cyclical pattern — societies grow, competition intensifies, reproduction crashes, only elite lineages survive, and new societies grow from those survivors.

But what if it’s not a cycle at all? What if it’s a bug — an evolutionary mismatch that leads to dead ends rather than renewal?

Think about genetic diversity. If societies repeatedly crashed down to small elite populations, we’d expect reduced genetic variation, populations specialized for conditions that no longer exist (thriving in complex civilizations), and vulnerability when circumstances change.

The problem: people adapted to succeed in a wealthy, stable, complex society might be completely unprepared for collapse or rebuilding. The very traits that make someone “elite” in a late-stage civilization (navigating bureaucracies, accumulating credentials, financial manipulation) are different from traits needed for survival and reconstruction (physical resilience, practical skills, community building).

So maybe this isn’t an adaptive cycle. Maybe it’s a one-way trap: an evolutionary strategy that worked fine in small groups but becomes catastrophic at modern scale.

The Tragedy of the Commons

This creates what economists call a “tragedy of the commons” situation:

Imagine a shared pasture where every farmer benefits from adding one more cow, but if everyone does it, the pasture is destroyed. Each individual acts rationally, but the collective outcome is disaster.

Now apply that to reproduction. Each woman has an incentive to slightly suppress competitors’ fertility. In a small group, this was zero-sum: your gain, their loss, but the group stayed viable. In modern society, however, these strategies aggregate through media and institutions. Everyone ends up adopting suppressive behaviors, and total fertility collapses (South Korea: 0.72 children per woman; Japan, Italy, Spain: below 1.3). Yet no individual can stop without losing competitive ground.

What was adaptive at individual level becomes catastrophic at population level.

Enter Individualism: The Perfect Disguise

This is where things get really interesting. How do these competitive strategies spread without being recognized as competitive?

Answer: wrap them in individualism.

Consider how these messages sound when framed around individual autonomy: “Focus on YOUR dreams,” “Don’t let anyone tell YOU what to do,” “YOUR body, YOUR choice,” “Find YOURself first,” and “Live YOUR truth.”

They sound empowering. Liberating. They appeal to our desire for autonomy and status. They carry moral weight because resisting them seems like accepting oppression.

But look at the function: they reliably lead to delayed or foregone reproduction. And they spread rapidly because they’re packaged as moral progress rather than competitive sabotage.

Why Individualism Is Outdated

Individualism made sense and even worked well under certain conditions. It functioned when small communities provided social pressure as guardrails, when limited technology made avoiding reproduction difficult, when economic systems rewarded family formation, and when strong institutions were maintained by collective effort.

But those conditions are disappearing. Anonymity means no social costs for breaking reproductive norms. Perfect contraception means individual choices can completely prevent children. Economic systems now punish family formation through childcare costs and housing prices. And institutions are eroding because individualism can’t coordinate their maintenance.

Here’s the core problem: individualism worked when it was parasitic on collective structures. Once those structures weaken, hyper-individualism can’t coordinate responses to collective challenges. Who maintains infrastructure? Who has children to sustain society? Who sacrifices individual benefit for group survival? How do we compete with societies that haven’t atomized?

The math doesn’t work. “Every person for themselves” plus effective reproductive suppression plus modern technology equals no next generation.

The Self-Protecting Ideology

Perhaps the most insidious aspect: individualism has become self-protecting. Try suggesting “maybe we need some collective coordination around reproduction” and watch what happens. You’ll hear responses like “You want to control women!” or “That’s oppressive!” or “You’re against freedom!”

The ideology prevents you from thinking the thoughts necessary to escape it. It’s a memetic trap.

Meanwhile, societies that haven’t fully embraced individualism (Israel, parts of the Middle East, some religious communities) maintain replacement-level fertility. They’re not smarter or more enlightened; they just retained collective coordination mechanisms around reproduction.

What This Means

If Sulikowski’s theory has merit, and if the “bug” interpretation is correct, then we’re watching evolutionary psychology scaled through modern technology create a civilizational dead end.

The mechanisms work like this: Ancient female competitive instincts evolved for small groups get amplified through mass media and institutions, reaching millions instead of dozens. These strategies are disguised as empowerment through individualist framing, which makes them spread rapidly. Individualism removes collective coordination, eliminating any correction mechanism. The result is below-replacement fertility and eventual societal collapse.

And there’s no obvious exit. The ideology is self-protecting. The competitive dynamics continue. The institutions are captured. Individual incentives remain misaligned with collective survival.

Questions Worth Considering

You don’t have to accept Sulikowski’s theory completely to find these questions worth thinking about.

First, why do certain messages spread so effectively? What makes “lean in” culture or child-free ideology so compelling compared to messages about family formation?

Second, who benefits? When fertility collapses, who gains relative advantage? (Hint: those who still have children)

Third, can individuals opt out? If you’re surrounded by suppressive messaging and everyone else is competing, can you simply choose not to participate?

Fourth, what happens next? If developed nations drop below replacement fertility while others don’t, what does the world look like in 50 years?

Finally, is there a middle path? Between oppressive traditional roles and hyper-individualist fertility collapse, is there a sustainable balance?

A Final Thought

Dr. Sulikowski isn’t claiming to have all the answers. She’s proposing a framework for understanding patterns we’re observing. Whether you find her theory compelling or not, the basic facts are undeniable: fertility is collapsing across the developed world at historically unprecedented rates.

Something is happening. The question is: what’s driving it?

Is it simply economic (housing costs, education expenses)? Is it environmental (pollutants affecting fertility)? Is it technological (contraception, social media)? Or is it, as Sulikowski suggests, something deeper: ancient psychological mechanisms running unchecked through modern systems?

Maybe it’s all of the above. But if there’s even a grain of truth to the evolutionary mismatch theory, we’re watching instincts designed for small groups accidentally destroy large civilizations.

And the really uncomfortable part? Those instincts feel like freedom.

What do you think? Are we experiencing an evolutionary bug at civilizational scale? Or is there something else going on? The conversation is just beginning.