(Legal Equality is Necessary, Economic Equality is Unattainable, and Genetic Equality is Undesirable – Your Genes Matter)
A friend posted an interestingly common white lament, that provides an excellent jumping off point for criticizing postmodern values.
Lee: I am in the top 1% economic class of the world. This is due purely to an accident of birth and nothing more. … Whatever intelligence or resolve I may have is due to the genetic lottery. … But these genetic endowments do not mean that I have been randomly placed in the economic hierarchy by the greedy powers that be. My limited intelligence and conscientiousness is actually worth something to my employer.
Jeorg: Unless conscientiousness is also genetic.
Lee: Yes… It is likely that we have some control. Setting an alarm clock requires forethought …
François-René: “is genetic” and “we have some control” are not mutually incompatible. At all.
We have many genetic predispositions that we override. We do this through incentives via habits, traditions, myths, norms, laws and institutions. But there is a very great difference between redirection, avoidance and suppression through incentives and changing or eliminating genetic dispositions.
The statement that you have no right to advantage because of the accident of your birth, is logically interesting because its the down side of western individualist thought.
You cannot exist without your familial relations.
[pullquote]You are a reflection of a long sequence of choices.[/pullquote]
Does it make sense to you that humans can instinctively identify those traits and reward them?
Does it make sense that the evolutionary consequences of not doing so would be detrimental? Even suicidal for a species?
It is important in disputes that law treat us equally because it is necessary for the preservation of suppressing violence by forcing all competition into voluntary exchange. Otherwise the institution cannot provide the incentive to suppress our instincts and redirect our efforts.
But [pullquote] the western illusion that those values necessary to create incentives for us as an individual economic unit can insulate us from our family, and clan, and the necessary operation of our reproductive evolutionary system is a postmodernist, socialist fiction that assumes economic and legal equality can be extended to genetic equality[/pullquote] – contrary to all evidence and reason.
The rawlsian veil of ignorance is a complex rhetorical device for the neurolinguistic programming of the masses precisely to confuse them into the illusion of biological equality and to divorce the individual from his ancestry so that his loyalties are to the state and rather than to his familial genetic heritage.
The blank slate, likewise is a device for the same purpose. So are diversity and open immigration.
Other civilizations do not make this error. Ours is in numeric decline partly because of it.
So no you are not an individual comparable to other individuals except to the blindfolded statue of justice under the law and the gavel.
Socially you are the representation of a sequence of choices embeded in genes and are the recipient of more opportunities for influence and reproduction because of it.
And dysgenia, and even extinction would of necessity occur if humans acted otherwise.
We are in a constant battle against the evolutionary red queen, and against reproductions regression toward the mean. The only solution is assortive mating and the concentration of influence, opportunity, capital and reproduction behind such genes.
One more thing.
Time preference, and ‘frustration budget’ are genetically determined.
IQ is significantly heritable (it’s complex though), and social classes are organized almost entirely by IQ.
Variation in social classes is determined by time preference, frustration budget, or what we tend to call the discipline-impulsiviness spectrum.
Variation in the social classes is also determined by attractiveness: symmetry, height, thickness of skin, clarity of skin, and a variety of other factors that suggest genetic fitness.
Economic classes vary from social classes because under consumer capitalism, a Watkins or Crick does not produce as many paying customers as the designer of velcro, or fast, consistent, cheeseburgers.
Economic outliers are determined by lottery.
But that is not to discount the value of lottery. If the lottery reward does not exist, then there is no motivation for high risk.
So yes, discipline and looks matter in society because they matter to our genes, and they matter to humanity as a species.