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Over at Cheap Chalupas Central, asdf comments on an assertion by Charles Murray, regarding conclusions from his book “Coming Apart”, that falling marriage rates and rising single mom rates are due solely or mostly to men dropping out and eschewing marital responsibility:

Murray: “If you are arguing that 22-year-old men are saying to their girlfriends, ‘I just need a job and then I’ll behave responsibly…’ Well, that’s just bullshit.”

There are a lot of men this is probably true for. Men know, instinctively, that unless they make more money than their spouse the relationships can never be serious or a family formed. So if they consider their chances of getting a good job slim they will likely not try to do the other things necessary to become a family man.

asdf is spot on. I like Charles Murray. I consider him a leading light in the anti-lie movement. But like a lot of sociologists examining trends in the functioning of the sexual market, he misses or glosses over the relevance of female hypergamy. I understand why feminists would want to avoid confronting the deepest, darkest desires of the female id (aka My Secret Vagina Tingle!), but I can’t see a reason why putative iconoclasts like Murray would ignore it except as a reflection of an instinctive white knight complex that so many beta males harbor.

If women are offering men — well, really, just coolbreeze alpha males — the sex for free, then those men will revert to taking the path of least resistance. They won’t “man up”, because they won’t need to. This reading of market forces implicates women more than it does men. Women are making sexual choices, and men are responding to those choices.

It’s not entirely a female-driven decision tree. Women, particularly women in lower socioeconomic strata, are refusing marriage to jobless layabouts. Men could choose to raise their mate value by getting jobs, however undignified the work. In the past, this “manning up” brought the desired result: those jobless men would improve their marital prospects by taking on work. But the overarching change in the current culture is a one-two punch to the guts of men, especially lower SES men, that damages their ability to raise their status (i.e., their sexual market value, or SMV) via employment:

1. More jobs require advanced skills that left side of the bell curve men don’t have the innate mental capacity to learn, and more jobs require female-oriented dispositions that most working class men don’t care to learn.

2. Women have priced themselves out of their dating pool of men by becoming economically independent. A woman’s entirely natural and reasonable hypergamous instinct (hey, she’s only got so many eggs to spare) to mate with higher status men than herself dooms her to limited prospects if her own status has gone up relative to the men in her dating milieu.

Men are intuitive creatures, as well, even if not as holistically intuitive as women. Men will respond to depressed status enhancement from work by retreating from the employment field. Men will respond to women’s sexual choices by adopting the behavior of those men whom women lavish with their discounted derrieres. In some mating circles, this means men will learn game (i.e. the charismatic arts) and try to catch spillover from the maglev pussy express that roars along during women’s contraceptively-abetted prime years from the late teens to late 20s.

A feedback loop of alpha cock carouseling, single mommery, video gaming and porn watching results which will, in time, begin to infiltrate the upper classes. You can only insulate yourself from dystopian trends for so long before the uruk-hai batter down your private school walls.

In short, no sociological theory into sex, marriage and family trends is complete without a long, hard look at female hypergamy, the one biomechanical force to rule them all, and its intersection with economic realities. The science is out there; when women become financially empowered, they begin to choose men based on criteria other than their ability to provide.

But that’s not all that Murray, et al are missing. I’m here to tell Murray and others perusing his findings that there is another, MASSIVE factor at work skewing the sexual market, and one that, just as unsurprisingly, gets almost no attention from the PC-soaked punditariat: female obesity.

Imagine you are an unmarried working class dude recently unemployed. You look around you and marvel at a sea of grotesquely misshapen fat women, rolls upon rolls of undulating flesh hiding stores of cheesy poofs, porky hellion spawn trailing their wakes, chins resting atop chins, bloated diabetic cankles stomping the Walmartian grounds like lumbering elephants. In some towns, close to 40% of the available single women are clinically OBESE.

This is obesity folks, not just overweight. Overweight women are physically repulsive, but obesity renders them monstrous. To clarify this assertion for the modern indoctrinated female reader: an obese woman is as sexually undesirable to men as a jobless, charmless, humorless, enfeebled, dull man is sexually undesirable to women.

So back to our realistic scenario: Our typical unmarried working class man surveys his cellulite-blasted kingdom (and it does not matter how fat he, himself, is, for fat men and thin men alike prefer the exquisite sight of slender female bodies), and he makes a quick hindbrain calculation. Does he bust his ass in a crappy service sector job doing women’s work for a shot at legally bound long-term commitment to a shuffling shoggoth dragging the bastard spawn of a hundred alpha males in tow, or does he say “fuck it” and turn to video games and porn featuring hot, thin chicks for his status and dopamine fix?

You see where this is heading. It’s entirely reasonable, and expected, that a lot of men would drop out of the intensified competition for the few remaining childless slender babes in a world full of fat asses, single moms, and fat assed single moms. And even among the small contingent of sexually appealing women, they make enough in government and HR paychecks to cover expenses plus gifts for their Skittles Men. What working stiff beta provider can compete on those terms?

Men aren’t refusing to man up; they’re doing exactly what women do, and what both sexes have done since time immemorial: they’re acting in their self-interests. Incentives matter. You’d think Murray, of all people, would know this.

Women are as complicit in the current deterioration of family structure as are men; and, in fact, because of women’s natural roles as sexual gatekeepers, I’d argue that women are more complicit than men. In the arena of sexual choice and fulfillment, men are, on average, followers, and women are leaders. This is not to say that men exercise no choice; only that they exercise less choice in sexual partners than do women. A double whammy of women’s financial independence restricting their mate choices, coupled with a female SMV-destroying obesity scourge restricting men’s mate choices, has compounded to help usher forth the dysgenic shitfest we as a nation find ourselves in today.

If the reigning paradigm is unsustainable but also immune to rectification, as I suspect it is, then perhaps the only solution now is to wait out a total collapse of elite authority. Tick tock…

ps this post hate-list approved.

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Commenter Libertardian sends along this link to a story about a Wisconsin Senator who introduced a bill that amounts to a massive social shaming campaign against single moms.

Wisconsin Bill Claims Single Moms Cause Child Abuse by Not Being Married

In Wisconsin, a state senator has introduced a bill aimed at penalizing single mothers by calling their unmarried status a contributing factor in child abuse and neglect.

Senate Bill 507, introduced by Republican Senator Glenn Grothman, moves to amend existing state law by “requiring the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.

The bill would require educational and public awareness campaigns held by the board to emphasize that not being married is abusive and neglectful of children, and to underscore “the role of fathers in the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect.”

I approve of this bill. If socially shaming women to the point that even one of them avoids becoming a single mom by choice and burdening society will her illegitimate hellion spawn, then it has done far more good for the nation as well as the individual woman than all the trillions spent on leftist wishful thinking, non-judgmentalist programs over the past 50 years.

The facts are out there, for anyone willing to listen. Children do best with a mother and a father. The growing ranks of single moms are creating a degenerate horde of emotionally and mentally destitute orclings, and we — all of us — will pay the price, sooner rather than later. Count on it.

Grothman is also the sponsor of Wisconsin State Bill 202, which would repeal the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act. Last year he claimed in an essay that the “Left and the social welfare establishment want children born out of wedlock because they are far more likely to be dependent on the government.”

In “How The United States and The State of Wisconsin Are Working to Encourage Single Motherhood and Discouraging Children in 2-Parent Families,” he wrote that the government urges women not to get married by making programs like low-income housing assistance, school choice, WIC, tax credits, and food stamps more attractive than marriage.

Sen Grothman: realtalker. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the good senator has been perusing the Chateau archives.

His solution? Restrict the types of foods that can be purchased with food stamps, make Section 8 housing more cramped and limit the value of assets owned living there to $2,000, and eliminate school choice, among other things. “It is inexcusable that a single mother making $15,000 gets her kid out of the Milwaukee Public Schools but a married couple earning $50,000 is stuck in the public schools,” he wrote. “It is also somewhat outrageous that some married couples feel they can only afford one or two children in part because they are paying excessive taxes to provide programs for someone else to have four or five children.

This guy’s policies make so much sense it’s like a cleansing blast of mountain cooled breezes through marshy, addled skulls. Godspeed, Grothman. Do not go defensively into that morning light. Stay the course.

Naturally, the lefties who run the joint are three faulty synapses from a mass epileptic seizure. Case in point: the female “””impartial Yahoo! journalist””” can’t finish writing the story without snarling about Grothman’s own childlessness as some sort of proof positive cunt whistle for the dumbass brigade.

Saying that people “make fun of old-fashioned families,” Grothman — who has never been married and has no children — criticized social workers for not agreeing that children should only be raised by two married biological parents

Oh, the snark! It’s so delicious, isn’t it? Grothman has no kids! He’s unmarried! Secret decoder ring says: what the hell does he know about single moms?! After your bout of ironic SWPL chortling where you get your feelgood fix remotely lording it over the rubes in flyover country, you may want to examine the raft of logical fallacies in your thinking. Here’s a starting point: you don’t have to be burned alive by non-hateful merry pranksters to know that it’ll hurt.

Libertardian comments:

This strikes me as aiming at the effect (single motherhood) rather than the cause (i.e. society’s unshackling of female hypergamy).

You take your policy improvements where you can get them. The root cause is unshackled female hypergamy, but a policy aimed at shaming one of the symptoms — in this case, single momhood — will do some good as well. Call it the broken persons theory of social policymaking. You fix immediate problems at the margins by shaming individual bad behavior and in time the bigger, mass scaled dominoes begin to fall. At any rate, it’s a better plan than the total cultural immolation we’re currently experiencing.

Of course, some exceptions to the social shaming program will have to be made. For instance, widows with children are not single moms, and shouldn’t be lumped in under that label. The shaming should target those women who choose to have kids outside of marriage and those unmarried women who shack up with unreliable jerks and act all surprised when the jerk heads for the hills after a kid is born. In other words, shame the women who make bad choices, not the women who are stuck in unexpected bad situations through no fault of their own.

Note that a social shaming program against single moms would work regardless of the precise correlations between single momhood and dysfunctional bastards. In what I generously refer to as the Jason Malloy theory of genetically inherited Bad Lifestyle Choosing (he is the occasional web commenter who drops gems of insight in cutting edge blog comments sections) — a theory which holds that the dysfunction of single moms’ kids is due to the kids inheriting the awful genetic predispositions of their trashy parents — the effect of shaming would work at the genetic level as well as the social level. Women with a jagged genetic suite that inclines them to be single moms would be shamed into avoiding pregnancy outside of marriage, and thus refrain from having kids altogether and passing on their shit genes (eugenics, yay!) or would be impelled to choose a marriage-minded mate more wisely given the social strictures against out-of-wedlock childbirth and lack of governmental support for their chosen path.

Either way you cut it — whether the dysfunction is predominantly genetic, environmental, or both — the act of shaming women away from the single momhood cesspit and cutting off the flow of their financial lifelines is good for the women, good for America, and good for Western civilization. And most importantly… it’s good for the children. Especially those children who have evaded the misfortune of being born to selfish single moms.

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I expect the internet to be filled with dweebs lacking life experience, but the sheer number of them sometimes throws me for a loop. Case in point: the torrent of men, mostly American, who desperately cling to the idea that women only care about a man’s looks, and if you don’t look good, you may as well join a monastery.

This tells me one thing: American men have become pussies of the moistest magnitude. A loser attitude like the one above is all the evidence I need that men like this rarely, if ever, approach women and interact with them in a manly manner. Otherwise, they would know better.

Sure, you can throw up your arms along with the majority of men and just sit around waiting for that one girl in a million who will appreciate your average looks. Maybe you get lucky and find her in a month; or maybe you go ten years in the celibate wilderness. Either way, you have abdicated any responsibility for your love life. That makes you a pussy.

For if there’s one thing you quickly learn by not being a pussy with women, it’s that women are less concerned with a man’s looks than they are with his personality. Start interacting with women in a dominant, charming way, and you discover that women respond sexually — yes, sexually! — to your vibe. They begin to like you, and think about you, and then sometimes even fall in love with you. But to get there, you have to stop being a pussy. You have to go up to women and talk to them, and keep talking to them, preferably in the right way, the way that women like, and success with them will stop being a crapshoot. It will be a result of your initiative and your boldness.

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There’s been a spate of studies in recent years pointing to a general trend of declining Western female happiness, and a concomitant rise in male happiness. Self-reported happiness levels tend to go up and down rather haphazardly, but a long-term decline since the feminist devolution seems to be happening. A 2009 study called ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness‘ attempts to answer why women are unhappier today than they were in the halcyon days of the 1950s.

The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.

[T]trends in self-reported subjective well-being indicate that happiness has shifted toward men and away from women. This shift holds across industrialized countries regardless of whether the aggregate trend in happiness for both genders is flat, rising, or falling. In all of these cases, we see happiness rebalancing to reflect greater hap- piness for men relative to women.

The suggested reasons the study authors give follows:

First, there may be other important socioeconomic forces that have made women worse off. A number of important macro trends have been documented: decreased social cohesion (Robert D. Putnam 2000), increased anxiety and neuroticism (Jean M. Twenge 2000), and increased household risk (Hacker 2006). While each of these trends have impacted men and women, it is possible for even apparently gender-neutral trends to have gender-biased impacts if men and women respond differently to these forces. For example, if women are more risk averse than men, then an increase in risk may lower women’s utility relative to that of men.

Thanks to the patented Heartiste Naughty Boy Translator™, we can decode the above passage for the layman:

“Diversity is making women more neurotic.”

The second possibility is that broad social shifts such as those brought on by the changing role of women in society fundamentally alter what measures of subjective well-being are capturing. Over time it is likely that women are aggregating satisfaction over an increasingly larger domain set. For example, life satisfaction may have previously meant “satisfaction at home” and has increasingly come to mean some combination of “satisfaction at home” and “satisfaction at work.” This averaging over many domains may lead to falling average satisfaction if it is difficult to achieve the same degree of satisfaction in multiple domains. One piece of evidence along these lines is that the correlation between happiness and marital happiness is lower for women who work compared with those who are stay at home wives, and the correlation has fallen over time for all women in our sample.

HNBT: “Women have too many goddamn expectations.”

Finally, the changes brought about through the women’s movement may have decreased women’s happiness. The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood of believing that one’s life is not measuring up. Similarly, women may now compare their lives to a broader group, including men, and find their lives more likely to come up short in this assessment. Or women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness.

HNBT: “Contrary to feminist boilerplate, women really don’t want to spend their lives in direct competition with men climbing the corporate ladder and getting pumped and dumped until their wombs crust over like a sun-baked lake bed.”

Hope this hurts the right people!

PS: Mangan’s covered this topic as well.

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The NYBetaTimes Magazine features a small infographic titled ‘Academy award winning acceptance speeches by shout-outs (since 1971)’:

“Wife” is the number two most-thanked entity, thanked more often than even the director (!). The number of times a “husband” was thanked by a winner trailed in a pitiful sixth place. (If the world was fair, the screenwriters would be in third place, after the Academy and director, instead of last place. Better yet, the fans who cough up $14/ticket would be thanked most effusively.) Apparently, male winners think their wives are more responsible for their success than the writer, director, cast or agent. Well, they gotta go home to the wife.

These results aren’t a surprise. (When was the last time you met a humble or grateful attention whore? And there ain’t no bigger attention whore than an actress.) But it’s fun to speculate why female Academy award winners are so much less likely to thank husbands than male Academy award winners are to thank wives. Some reasons:

1. Although male and female awards are split evenly among the best actor and actress categories, there are plenty of awards given to technical categories that are probably dominated by men. Also, most directors have been men. So there are just more male winners overall to thank wives.

2. Women who win are (significantly?) younger than the male winners, and thus less likely to be married. Youthnbeauty is more important to an actress’s success than an actor’s.

3. Related to the above, a high status male award winner, no matter how ugly, is likelier to find a happy wife than a high status female award winner, who has priced herself out of most of the mating market. Also, ugly female award winners, despite their career status, still suffer from Kathy Bates syndrome, i.e., “why isn’t my success translating into a long-lived happy marriage?”

4. The feminist aka beta male-hating revolution kicked into high gear in 1971, so those early years were front-loaded with married (egads!) female Academy winners going out of their way to avoid thanking their husbands.

5. Women are, innately, less grateful than men. When a woman succeeds, it’s all about “me me me! look at me go!”. When a man succeeds, he feels a certain principled obligation to extend expressions of gratitude.

6. A woman who succeeds in her career can’t afford to thank her husband, because many people will presume the husband pulled strings for her, especially if he himself is powerful. A man, in contrast, can afford to thank his wife, because there is a tacit understanding among listeners that the wife really had nothing to do with his success.

It would be interesting to see this chart for the pre-1971 years, and broken down by award category. I suspect you would find more appreciative women before the SHTF.

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There’s been a lot of talk lately in the mainstream (read: leftist) media organs about the rising numbers of single moms and their bastard spawn in America, a dystopian trend to which hosts at Le Chateau were generous enough to alert the reading audience on and off over the past four years. The hand-wringing, the excusing and the rationalizing have reached a fever pitch as sob stories of tragicomic proportions litter the pages of esteemed broadsheets like the Beta Times. It’s a crescendo of heartwarming, anti-male anecdotes about poor, put-upon single moms with snot machines in tow bitterly complaining about the lack of good, reliable men.

Reading this gruesome tripe, something occurs to me. Not once, not anywhere, is the point of view of the typical man in these benighted communities across America examined. Nowhere did I find a mention, even the slightest acknowledgement, of the responsibility that women bear to attract a decent man for marriage and future fatherhood. It’s just assumed that men alone are the sex abdicating their societal duty, that all women need to do is show up, no matter how broken, bedraggled and burdened with bastards, and men will feel an overwhelming urge to marry these unfeminine, spiteful ogresses and provide for them. Yeah right!

Peruse any feminist or beta male columnist pontificating on the single mom + illegitimate hellion phenomenon, and the message condenses to a screech against male desire, tantamount to a lede saying “Men drop out, women and children suffering, men need to man up”. Someone should acquaint this crowd with the saying “it takes two to tango”.

If you want to know why men are running away from marriage, children and beta provisioning, one major reason is that the women available to these working class men are flat out disgusting. Take a look for yourself. What man of normal mental health and active libido wants to romantically woo and date, let alone marry, a beastly, waddling tatted mountain of pustulence with the issue of three other men barking and nipping at her cankles?

If you were a man with diminishing job prospects and stagnant wages thanks to mass low-skill immigration and automation, would you “man up” and “do your duty” for the sake of societal health and elite approval if the only women in your milieu are snorting megafauna hiding week-old salami in their stomach folds and eager to have you babysit their fatherless womb filth? Or would you say “fuck it”, hit the XBox and apply a dollop of asshole game to score a succession of flings and one night stands with the few remaining slender babes in your neighborhood?

And let’s not forget that economically empowered and government-assisted women, slaves to their hypergamous impulse for higher status mates than themselves, can’t help but winnow the pool of men deemed acceptable marriage material. When women say “there are no good men left”, what the astute observer hears is “there are no good men left thanks to a combination of my increased expectations and decreased attractiveness.”

So instead of facing the sexual market head on and grappling with its workings, you get “family values” white knighting numbskulls like BIll Bennett, lost for anything insightful to say, berating men for abandoning those incorruptible angels known as women, and feminists like Katie Roiphe, doing what feminists divorced from reality do best, recasting single momhood and bastard spawn into a valid alternative lifestyle that we should all show more tolerance toward, and redefining standards of civilized family functioning to avoid the omnipresent gaze of the evil eye of judginess.

And there you have the crassest self-deception of the traditionalist and feminist mindset laid bare: the former refusing to understand that standards of sexual behavior are a two-way street, the latter refusing to accept that standards of sexual behavior can’t be waved away to turn losers into winners.

If single momhood and bastard spawn are the blights on civilized Western society that all the data and real world observations indicate they are, then this blog’s simple program to save the institution of marriage is required reading for the “experts”. I’d add the following suggestions you won’t see in the mainstream media to encourage marriage and the formation of two-parent households among the non-elite classes:

Women —

Lose weight. Stop being so goddamned fat. Men are more willing to provide for women who are young and slender.

Learn to use contraception. Do not get pregnant outside of marriage. Men really don’t like taking on the responsibility of children not their own.

Try not to fuck around so much. Men are not enthusiastic about marrying women whose vaginas have played host to numerous cocks before them.

Government — 

Stop paying women for pumping out broods of bastards. You get more of what you pay for. Let the infants die of exposure if necessary. There’s nothing like the starvation death of a newborn child to clarify the mind.

Stop offering incentives to women to attend college and training classes. End all affirmative action for women. Governmental incentives like this effectively price working class men out of marriage contention.

Stop making laws that mandate companies have to accommodate pregnant women and mothers. Substituting big daddy government for beta provider men means fewer beta provider men.

“Experts” —

Relearn the valuable lesson that shame is a great motivator of human behavior. Stop normalizing the abnormal. Call a spade a spade, a bastard spawn a bastard spawn. This is the kind of hammer blow to the head that the lower classes need so that they know which life choices are good for them and which life choices are bad for them.

Do not be afraid to be judgmental. Judgment is alpha.

Self-esteem is not a virtue, it is a symptom. Get the causality straight.

Feminists —

Shoot yourselves. Seriously. You do no one but your own tender egos any good. Your semantic wordplay does nothing to thwart the inevitable reckoning.

Lords of Lies —

Start thinking about what kind of society your lies will create in the long term. That is, if you care at all.

Men —

Read this blog. If the rules won’t play by you, then learn to play by your own rules.

And finally, to the factory-farmed ivory tower sociologists studying marriage trends and turning out paper after paper of half-assed hogwash: there’s a whole other world out there. It’s the world of men, and in that world, men’s desires matter. You should think about incorporating that ugly reality into your theories.

In short, men will man up when women woman up. Because women, as the gatekeepers of sex, get the men they deserve. And, more often than not, what they deserve is what they want.

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What, ultimately, is the cause of the decay happening in the West?

Reader carolyn writes:

[do] all young women nowadays go for the alpha exclusively, disdain the beta?

there must be women even now who size themselves up realistically. and don’t shoot for the unattainable, or more accurately, the alpha who’ll use them but never settle for them.

my own experience back when dinosaurs roamed the earth as the baby-faced ‘fattie’ (so dreaded around here) led to a fear of any overly aggressive ‘alpha’ types that came my way. i just knew intuitively it would not end well. i aspired to get a smart guy, hopefully one with a sense of humor; a _cool_ guy was out of the question. which characterized the man i married. sorry to refer to my own experience but it’s the one i know best.

my point is that there must be plenty of young women out there with a similar mindset. did all girls suddenly become stupid?

I would answer it’s not a question of exclusive vs inclusive, smart vs stupid, right vs wrong. Female hypergamy (and male preference for younger women) just IS. It’s a fact of life, and society accommodates it or corrals it depending on its goals. It’s best to think of women’s love of alphas as residing along a sexual/personality continuum (mediated by the wiring of the hindbrain), where at one end we see the thug lovers who run back to boyfriends who beat them up, and at the other end we have the wilting flowers who prefer the less volatile alpha males drawn from the pool of soft betas.

As society relaxes its controls of female sexuality — and unleashed female sexuality is the wilder and more fluid and more dangerous of the sexes — more women rush to the “thug lover” side of the hindbrain continuum, and away from any latent preference for dutiful betas. Conversely, when society strengthens its controls over female sexuality, something close to the opposite happens: women are incentivized to favor the company of beta males.

Thug loving serves a useful purpose in evolutionary terms. The sons of thugs make better protectors of the tribe, and in point of fact stupider, thuggier people outbreed smarter, empathetic people. Experiments in fruit flies have actually proven the concept of an emergent idiocracy.

Soft alpha/beta loving serves a useful purpose in civilizational terms. The sons of K selected women make better builders and maintainers of prosperous societies.

Both strategies come with their weaknesses and strengths, but it has to be said that, in most practical senses, the evolutionary goals are at odds with the civilizational goals. In simpler terms: what’s good for the individual man or woman is not necessarily, or very often, good for a prosperous society. This has been a core concept here at the Chateau since its inception.

And so a great truth about humanity is revealed that liberals mostly, and conservatives to a lesser degree, have trouble wrapping their brains around.

Jason Malloy, a drive-by commenter at blogs I occasionally read, usually has very smart things to say about the form a dystopia might take, and the factors that lead to cultural and national dissolution. When he writes, I generally give his words more than a second’s thought. And lately, his words have been echoing much of what is written here.

The larger sorting patterns [seen in rates of dysfunction between the upper and lower classes] need to be viewed through the lens of latent behavioral variation. Social pressures were already biased towards high investment reproduction. People were shamed for having premarital sex or children outside of marriage. Female economic dependency was just one more practical limit on these behaviors. However, once prosperity and secularism unraveled the cultural expectations, only internal behavioral motivators were left, and the motivations previously dampened and suppressed through practical and social limits could now express themselves.

The internal motivators tend to form a psychological and behavioral package: some people are oriented towards higher investment reproduction and this entails higher cognitive ability, long term goals about education and career, later first intercourse, fewer and more stable relationships, reproduction within secure pairbond, and mate selection biased towards reliability and parenting qualities. Other people are oriented towards lower investment reproduction and this entails lower cognitive ability, few long term goals, early first intercourse, more sex partners and less stable relationships, reproduction outside of pairbond, and mate selection biased towards “sexy” qualities (looks, charm, creativity, athleticism). (Many of these traits are functionally related (e.g. lower IQ mostly is a major cause of higher time preference), but they are also compounded through assortative mating).

***

[Re: the upper half of women having sex before marriage but still getting married.]

As much as I appreciate [Charles] Murray’s sociological perspective, I think this is his weakness as a bio-conservative trying to piece together the trends. The upper and the lower classes aren’t sorting by cognitive ability, so much as they are by life history behavior (which also includes cognitive ability).

A conservative libertarian has a lot to grapple with here: freedom and prosperity are the real “culprits” here, and their interaction with natural genetic variation. Not the welfare state. Not the government. Not apathetic elites. Not globalism or “stagnant wages”. Any major reversals in these trends would seemingly require major, forceful social controls, because they are the consequences of a very pervasive kind of individualism and of freedom of thought.

Chew on that. Realize what is being said here. If you do, you should feel a shudder descend your spine. Individualism and freedom of thought are the enemies of the very values and morality which gave birth to them and elevated them to primacy among advanced nations.

What libertarian, conservative OR liberal could read and accept the above premise and not feel at least some elemental — some PRIMAL — part of his worldview shatter into a million pieces. Libertarians: laissez faire means the cementing of intractable human hereditary differences into antagonistic classes and milieus. Conservatives: freedom and prosperity mean a slackening of external behavioral motivators and the erosion of commonality and shared values and the means with which to argue for them. Liberals: nonjudgmental individualism means a collapse of social capital and a surrender of any moral or aesthetic authority.

None of this is to say that people would, or should, prefer to live in less prosperous, backward nations. I don’t see too many Westerners clamoring to move to Zimbabwe for the quality of life. And yet, there has to be a recognition among the cognoscenti that a deeply embedded human nature exists, and that this nature — immutable, unalterable, suppressed only with great effort — when allowed to fully express or, alternately, when stifled at great psychic expense guarantees the slow unwinding of the very prosperity it desires and refuses to relinquish when it achieves.

Maxim #1,000: Prosperity contains within it the seed of its own destruction.

Could this ever not be the case? Perhaps if there were not significant differences in ability and talent between people and groups of people, differences in possession of civilizationally advantageous traits, you could say then that prosperity may become, theoretically, self-perpetuating. Feeding and growing without limit.

But evolution would not exist were that the case. Evolution would have to stop for such a social condition to manifest. Thus, we grapple with reality, whether we choose to or not. Because it grapples with us.

The prosperity America achieved will be her undoing. This isn’t idle apocalyptic talk. There is plenty of historical precedent. There are plenty of indicators that cultural and economic and lifestyle collapse are beginning their long march through the Western citizenry and institutions. The armies of disintegration have amassed and the first waves have stormed the citadel. Aided and abetted by people who don’t understand the forces at work, and who wouldn’t change direction even if they did understand. Prosperity is enervating. The will to dismantle it, temporarily, to save it, is weakened totally by the comforts it provides.

America is dying. Unless the powerful divest themselves from their voracious egos and accept that they have been steeped in a mountain of lies for 60 years, perhaps 150 years depending on your point of origin, and until that day they reverse the path they have taken this country, America’s slow, asphyxiating dying will finally, unmercifully, reach closure… in her death. Today, the Lords of Lies are our masters. Tomorrow, the truth will reign, over a rejuvenated America or a bitter wasteland. Either way, the truth will reign.

The Lords of Lies must first be defeated if the path we are on has a chance to be corrected. The only thing we know for certain is that they won’t go easily to their irrelevance.

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