Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

Q&A: LIMITS TO WESTERN EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY?

—“Curt, you’ve been hinting that you think that high trust, low ethnocentrism is not an evolutionary strategy superior in every regard.”—

This is an interesting question because like supply-demand curves, no evolutionary strategy is beneficial under all conditions – other than rate of adaptation. Humans are special in our rate of adaptation because not only can we adapt by developing tools, we can adapt by changing our behavior, AND we can adapt merely by selective reproduction for the EXPRESSION of genes, AND we can adapt by selective SUPPRESSION of genes (genetic pacification), rather than merely waiting for mutations. As such we actually only have to modify our behavior, and reproductively select for different goods and pacify other traits as conditions change.

So we naturally encounter three overlapping fallacies in study of ourselves: The fallacy of linear progression(instead of supply-demand curves). The fallacy of progress (rather than adaptation). The fallacy of evolutionary direction (rather than evolution has no direction other than a bias for complexity in order to exploit niches).

Well, small, a high trust, highly innovative, technically advanced, militarily excellent, aristocratic population that is willing to conquer and rule can compete. Conversely, a small, high trust, highly innovative, technically advanced that is unwilling to maintain military excellence, unwilling to rule, and unwilling to defend its territory from incursion cannot compete.

So the reason I’m addressing these issues is the theory of “Peak Human”. Its not necessarily true that intelligence and limited reproduction are more beneficial than rapid reproduction and aggression. Malthus unbound means reproduction and aggression are more competitive than intelligence, innovation, and quality of life. Expensive and pacifist humans are a liability in a world of inexpensive and aggressive humans. More reproductive, less intelligent, more aggressive people will defeat less reproductive, more intelligent, less aggressive people. And it’s happening.

Which is obvious when we state it that way.

—“I got the impression that you thought the West would eventually be able to detect lying high ethnocentric cultures. Do you no longer feel this way? Because your exchange with him made it seem they’d have to become familial, rather than simply upgrade infringements of trust.”—

We can put into a constitution, and therefore into the common law an equivalent of the requirement for mathematical proofs (demonstrations of possibility), and scientific papers (a loose analogy but the best I can do). We can enumerate the steps necessary to propose a political statement (an offer of contract, bound by contract). We can return grammar, rhetoric, and logic to education. We can prosecute offenders, and suppress lying as well as error, bias, and wishful thinking. It might take six to ten years to work its way through the culture, but at some point after ten or more years, people will be so habituated into the demands of truth telling by simple exposure to it, that they’ll spot error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit easily. I mean, a lot of the most important disciplines do this today already. Law is not strictly constructed, but contracts are very close to programming at this point. Science does a fairly good job of peer review in the top journals – and law is nowhere near as difficult a problem as is physical science, because law (contract) is a justificationary process (known) and physical science is a critical process (unknown).

Now, I advocate a return to the traditional family because the absolute nuclear family is no longer useful because we move around too much. It was useful for forcing people to obtain homes, and for delaying child bearing, when they lived near one another. But what’s happened is that our people are becoming unhappy because they’re alone. And (in particular, our women) are more susceptible to ideology if they are alone rather than in families. And our rates of reproduction are better in traditional families with greater mutual economic, emotional, and generational support. For men, the ANF and divorce means early death.

Germany has for example, built large family sized apartments in the postwar era while Asia and to some degree, america, are building every smaller apartments – which is terrible for everyone involved.

The argument is that ANF families are higher trust than TRAD/STEM families, but that is because of norms not laws. If we have a legal system that enforces truth telling (now that we know how), that means that trust can be created regardless of reproductive family structure.

I try to say it this way: that while only northern europeans could EVOLVE high trust, once the technology is know everyone else can APPLY high trust ethics in law. Just like we invent other technologies that different cultures adapt.

My fantasy world is a future of high trust societies slowly suppressing low trust societies, just as agrarian societies suppressed banditry and raiding. As far as I can tell this is a logical progression of the incremental suppression of parasitism. Not that it’s a deterministic process, but because it’s a competitive evolutionary strategy just as the suppression of fraud, theft and violence were competitive strategies.

—“It’s hard for me to see how regression back to familialism is progress by any perspective. This “propagation of local genes” seems a flawed model, because it’s often not ultimately eugenic.”—

Well I think I answered the first part of this question already, but the second part is a common misunderstanding of inbreeding. It’s true that there is a minimum population necessary to prevent the problems of inbreeding. But it’s also true that there is a maximum population before we prevent error-correction. And a maximum population to produce attractive people by pairing off. Large Cities, particularly diverse large cities, are dysgenic as hell. What we see today is very much the reproductive strategy of crows: young people move to the city for opportunity and mating, then move to the suburbs to raise children.

—“I have my own Nietzschean critiques of the West, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t continue to pursue their evolutionary strategy of building a superior commons.”—

I agree. And that commons will be superior under Truthful Speech, Propertarian ethics, the traditional (extended) family, the elimination of the death tax, and the restoration of nobility (access to the senate) to a family that maintains its military, economic and social status sufficiently to afford to contribute to the commons over three or more generations.

Honestly, the forced exit of the martial class from politics since the Vietnam war is a significant part of the problem here. And it’s easy to fix.