No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have somethin… - Stephen Baxter

Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”

A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis.

Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller.
What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math.
And that’s exactly what is happening.