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).
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[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.
