The perennial underground subject of the nexus where fertility, IQ, education and religion meet gets another go-round on the avant-garde right. You can read a couple of takes here and here. Bottom (literally) line: dysgenics is real, and it’s happening right now.
I have a thought on the issue that I haven’t seen addressed in any of these discussions. Perhaps smarts and dislike of, or cold indifference to, children are intertwined at the genetic level? Hypothesis: The genes that code for smarts also contribute a suite of personality alterations that result in reduced enthusiasm to have kids.
Maybe instead of all these calculated, or emergent, trade-offs accounting for lower fertility among the SWPL class — e.g. more schooling leading to more lost prime fertility years among women — the real reason for the dysgenic trend is that smart people just don’t get as much enjoyment out of kids as dumber people do. As a result, they use the contraceptive tech and cultural memes at their disposal to actively avoid the burden of children, especially when they are younger and the world is full of delights.
Maybe this, too, would explain why there are natural evolutionary limits on selection for high IQ. In small-ish numbers, high IQ confers a group benefit, but in larger numbers high IQ becomes fitness-reducing, if by fitness we restrict ourselves to the gene’s eye view of getting more copies of itself into future generations.
Anyhow, not a sermon, just a thought. My time around smart people, and my observations of their discomfort and/or boredom when in the company of children (particularly the men) leads me to believe they don’t really have a strong internal motivator pushing them in the direction of reproduction. Pushing them in the direction of sex, yes. But thanks to rubbers, the pill, and destigmatization, they are able to thwart the end goal of their genetic programming.
It might be argued smarter people are just a little less interested in people in general. Not as a direct result of being smart but more a byproduct.
Sort of on this topic, check out this article. Be warned, it is long. She starts of by realizing that the feminist BS “you can have it all” is not true. But, instead of following on that path of enlightenment, she comes to the conclusion that the culprit is the “corporate environment being unfair to women”. Her final conclusion is that there is need for more women in government and a woman president to fix the problem. LOL Unbelievable what the feminist mind does to someone.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/
“they are able to thwart the end goal of their genetic programming”
Yes, they are. But might there also be a drive to ensure that their life had a lasting legacy?
It’s possible that the drive that causes men to create works of art, work to create lasting institutions, etc. might exist only to get woman.
But maybe not; maybe some men would feel unfulfilled knowing that everything they’ve worked for is going to be destroyed because there’s going to be no one around to defend it and carry it forward.
We would have wanted to reproduce if the culture hadn’t put laws in place that warned smart men that it might be best to avoid kids. More specifically, during the Reagan years, we whites were trained by the pundits on the right to hate the ghetto alphas who were getting all the black teen girls pregnant. We were told that they were irresponsible, which translated into us thinking that we were responsible by avoiding getting women pregnant. It was actually quite stupid of us that we listened to the right wing pundits on this point.
We were trained to want the laws that clamped down on those ghetto black men. We didn’t realize that they would clamp down on us even worse should we get a woman pregnant. After the fact, we were smart enough to realize when the harsher child support laws came into effect that getting women pregnant was financial suicide for us.
We did this to ourselves by listening to and voting for the evangelical right which aligned with the feminist left on the issue of child support. Reagan was no small government hero to say the least. With his presidency, the evangelicals took over the GOP.
Anyway, there should definitely be no income-based child support mandates in the place where a man lives. If it came to a reasonable $300 per month for men whose partner insists on not letting him or his parents have the baby, then smart men wouldn’t worry so much about getting women pregnant.
Any other type of government policy will promote only dumber men having kids.
Luckier there are societies where having a kid won’t cost a man a lot of money. American men should all make sure that international child support agreements aren’t made like the one between California and Mexico that states that the woman in the poorer region can demand and get the exact child support amount if she were residing in the richer region.
And the invention of DNA testing in 1991 badly hurt the ability of alphas to get women pregnant where they and the women would have been formerly comfortable that the woman’s beta husband would accept and raise the child as his. I believe a lot of married women stopped trying to get impregnated by alphas after DNA testing become normal.
At the risk of going all singularity on you, if life-extension technology is developed, but is not evenly distrubuted (i.e., only the wealthy and intelligent get it at first), it could be an interesting demographic race between the longer-lived but less fecund, and the shorter-live but more fecund.
Already been done by Asimov.
1) Not a chance “only the wealthy and intelligent” get it first – both because of politics and economics.
2) If we’re going “all Singularity”, other breakthroughs, such as artificially-enhanced IQ, would make this issue moot.
But it may already be happening:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html
Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation
” New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans… Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.”
I don’t know…the type of “smart” person who flocks to DC is different from smart people elsewhere. Sure sure, high IQ causes approach anxiety leading to less approaches, less sex, less kids but a homogeneous society will lead to the proper beta-male reward paradigm (serendipitous typo, almost wrote paradise) where smart guys get wives too. The smart SWPL set have been programmed to hate tehir biology, only to oh-so-crave children once it’s too late. There is another smart problem of conscientiousness in which we don’t get pregnant by accident because we’ve been told that having kids ruins our lives. As for enjoyment, look to what rich bitches do, they collect those things, once they accept the stretch marks.
Smart irreligious people, where sex is severed from reproduction, have fewer kids because they are better disciplined and artificially detached from the animal instincts that motivate the dumb. Religiosity dignifies and disciplines animal instincts by uniting them to a purpose greater than an individual’s self-interest.
Intelligence is correlated with wickedness because it’s hard for the relatively gifted to humble themselves. The smarter you are, the more challenging it is to keep perspective. Along the smart person’s progression, it is too tempting to stall out at the know-it-all stage, before reality forces the most intelligent perspective of all: that, all things considered, you are a finite, mortal worm with relatively small advantages over the typical man and severe limitations on your capacities, despite your immature dreams and self-esteem puffery courtesy of mom and the culture. Wisdom is hard-earned, so we retain the idea that there is no utility to naïveté. We spent so much youthful energy growing out of our innocence, what fool would want to return there! So humility seems like folly to the boastful “smart.” True wisdom begins in the childish Socratic dictum, “All I know is I know nothing.”
Matt
Sometimes you’re a pretentious prick and this time you happen to be painfully correct to boot.
Start your own damn website already.
I forget where I saw it, but if you control for education level, smart people have as many kids as dumb people. Basically it’s years of education that predict the decrease in kids. Even at that, it’s probably not the education that does it, but the future-time orientation to get through that much college that does it.
Looking after a toddler is cognitively severely understimulating but requires constant vigilance. It is the more psychologically taxing the more active mind you have. I would have been bored to death if I had had to take my kid to the playground alone without any adult company. I usually bring a friend of mine along. I can multitask well enough to keep my kid safe while engaging in a conversation with my friend.
Well, as AE pointed out, when you factor out education, smart people don’t have fewer kids than anyone else. Again, I wonder if your own social milieu is behind your experiences.
It does look like we are headed for a society with a religious elite presiding over an Idiocracy-type mass population.
I’ll note again, that the sexual revolution seems to be selecting for betas (SMV), though alphas seem to be catching up among the lower orders.
Headed for?
simple economics. if you tax the smart and productive to pay for the dumb and unproductive’s offspring, you’ll get less of the former and more of the latter.
“My time around smart people, and my observations of their discomfort and/or boredom when in the company of children (particularly the men) leads me to believe they don’t really have a strong internal motivator pushing them in the direction of reproduction.”
Being around other children is not even close to being around your own. With your own you feel both a responsibility and a satisfaction for which there is no proxy feeling.
There is a simple explanation and common denominator for low birthrates across the globe: good looking women delay pregnancy because they have other, more fun options. The dysgenic are beauty-based, not iq-based. It’s just that the two overlap a lot.
[heartiste: interesting PA. if beauty, and by extension, slenderness, are the common denominators for low birthrates, then are we looking down the barrel of a future filled with fatasses and cigstaches? *SHUDDER*]
and wide shoulders with pudgy arms atop narrow hips.
Civilization has subverted evolution. Technology has removed all need to evolve.
The Tardy McDumbstupids breed like cock roaches while gorging themselves on yellow flavored, fatty cheese-foods and without a single natural predator to thin the herd, evolution, instead rewards, weakness, gluttony, a sense of entitlement and an utter lack of foresight.
It wont be the meek who inherit the earth, it wont be the smart or the strong either. It ‘ll be the classless, feckless bovine-eyed fat-tards that become livestock for the Morlocks.
It’s funny how when the movie “Idiocracy” came out, Fox, the company responsible for it, tried to kill it. People don’t like inconvenient truths.
But AFAIK, the higher SES smart people are having more kids than average – I know in my social set having 3 kids is the norm, not the exception.
I think it’s those that are somewhat smart and go to college and incur huge debt – which they can’t now just declare bankruptcy on – and don’t end up with a high paying job, are the most screwed of all. They waste years on college, then more years paying down their debt, and have virtually nothing to show for it all…
The solution to this dysgenic trend is to allow universal abortion on demand – so that any unwanted pregnancy can be terminated, no strings attached.
If you read that wonderful book, “Freakecnomics”:
http://www.freakonomics.com/
You’ll see that access to abortion is the most likely cause of the massive decline in crime in New York City over the last few decades. Basically the criminal element are having fewer children, due to abortion.
Of course ‘tards – like some on this site – can’t acknowledge this causation – due to misplaced moral outrage. So they are to blame for this dysgenic problem!
abolish child support at the same time.
steve sailer argued that the advent of abortion on demand _increased_ the fraction of births of the less endowed/criminally inclined compared to total births. not everyone will terminate an accidental pregnancy, e.g. the most dysfunctional who may not ever get around to it. not to mention those young women who have nothing going for them and would welcome a child even enduring a reduced quality of life that would be intolerable for most .
but even the lower middle class not absolutely feckless will frogmarch their daughters to an abortion clinic. who’s left? the dregs.
not everyone will terminate an accidental pregnancy, e.g. the most dysfunctional who may not ever get around to it.
Yeah, we got those black dudes who are on the hook for child support for 30 kids by a dozen different women.
The movie “Idiocracy” is prophecy, and accurate. I suggest seeing it, for those interested in what the future will look like.
The movie Idiocracy offers a good glimpse of the future, but there’s a big hole in the plot: apparently not *everyone* is a total idiot, because someone, somewhere, is producing and marketing the stuff that keeps the idiots content and in check, namely those TV shows, the junk food, the machines, and so forth.
I like to think the hole was deliberate or at least semi-deliberate (Mike Judge knows his trade), because it’s a comedy, and the presence of a Smart Class softly lording over the Idiot Class with a modern, technological version of bread & circuses would’ve been a tad too dystopic and difficult to play for laughs.
And yet, I think that’s how the future will look. The class divide will widen more and more, the rich & smart will tend to separate completely from the poor & stupid, retreating to polite, squeaky-clean havens where they’ll apply their own rules, laws, economy and social mores facilitated by technology.
To the Hoi Polloi they will be de facto invisible, just “the rich”, and thanks to automated machines, copious amount of Brawndo and fine TV fare such as “Ow, my balls!”, they won’t even care that much.
I, for one, am trying to secure my spot.
The bottom line is that Idiocracy ultimately supported the status quo of the feminists on the left and right trying to tell men how to live their lives. And it started by lamenting the existence of an alpha male reproducing while simultaneously lamenting how a beta married male of a supposed high IQ had failed to reproduce. It was funny but it had a flawed premise. Alpha males, by definition, deserve to reproduce. The meek SWPL male at the beginning deserved to see his line end.
Every man’s goal in life should be to have a son someday and to try his best to have that son be more successful than he was. A proper Alpha son leaves a legacy of one’s genetics, one’s name, one’s wealth, and one’s upbringing. Men striving to leave their legacy through a proper Alpha male son has been an ingredient to human progress throughout all of history. To not do so means you have failed at the purpose of life. (Succesful) men losing the drive to reproduce (actual reproduction, not just sex) will be disastrous for society and for human progress.
And Ghengis Khan was more successful than most. Sure, an alpha male can have sons. That doesn’t, of course, mean that he’ll stop having sex with younger, hotter, tighter.
That Guy,
Assuming you’re not being tongue and cheek, the story certainly is not that clear cut. Levitt’s theory has some major problems, first among them timing of the drop in crime rates as they relate to the cohorts born after Roe v Wade.
The (potential) problem with open access abortion is that it requires some level of forward thinking to realize just how drastically having a child changes a person’s life, so it’s not the people at the bottom who end up taking advantage of easy abortion, but the people in the lower-middle and middle who do. I’d suspect easy abortion guts the middle more than it does either tail.
“Being around other children is not even close to being around your own. With your own you feel both a responsibility and a satisfaction for which there is no proxy feeling.”
This ABSOLUTELY correct. There is no similarity at all between a man’s feeling for his own kids and any feelings toward children generally. When you have your first kid it is like some powerful machinery deeply buried in your head that you didn’t know you had suddenly turned on with a building-shaking rumble. You love your children without cognition or words or warm feelings, it is a new state of existence. You love them with an animal intensity that has to be lived to be understood. It is far below the level of conscious thought, it is more at the level of hunger for food or lust or needing to breathe. A threat to yourself you can assess cooly, a threat to your kids and even the most ordinarily mild mannered father would without an instant’s hesitation kill the source of the threat with a rock, steak knife or whatever is at hand, and stomp on the guy’s head to smash his skull to make sure he was dead. Your protective instincts come online with blinding speed. You will without any thought do absolutely anything to remove a child from danger, instinctively. You become acutely aware of anything in the environs that could be hazard to the kid. And the joy that they give you, especially when they are good or achieve something or seem to be turning out well, is far beyond what words can express. And if you are blessed to have them reach teen years and you see them becoming people you like and respect, it is better than every material satisfaction there is.
I have been continually surprised as a father about how this all works. I had no idea it would be like this. We are build to fuck, yes. But if we give ourselves over to being fathers, we find that we are built for that too.
Even more interesting, women are built to be mothers, but what they do and how they feel is radically different, but I will stop because this comment is too long already. There is no such thing as “parenting” — a word that is yet another pretty lie that should be repudiated.
yup. you then know you’d give your life in a heartbeat for your kid’s sake. not before.
No, do the female part too. That was awesome.
[b]if beauty, and by extension, slenderness, are the common denominators for low birthrates[/b]…*snip*
Surely you jest. At most, we can probably guess that higher IQ women have the drive to keep themselves in shape after kids and/or as they age, but I see nothing to indicate dumb women aren’t as hot, on average, during peak fertility years, if not even hotter, on average, and with a greater number of hotties per capita. Just because some Trailer Trash Tammie looks like she 60 at 30 after 5 kids and a two-pack-a-day habit doesn’t mean she wasn’t bangin’ at 18.
Of course changing diapers is wasting the life of the intelligent.
The society could pay intelligent people to donate seed, if this is what you want.
And same obviously, intelligence is inversely correlated to religiosity. It is the dumb who thinks there is an earthquake so it is a punishment by god.
To enjoy children, you have to know how to communicate emotions and not just thoughts. The ability to do this is heavily influenced by class – in fact it might even be the chief determinant. This is why women have historically liked kids more than men, the global south more than the cold and stern north, and the educated class less than the animal wage laborers. It only makes sense.
I’m not wild about other people’s kids. Sure, I like some of them alright, but that’s about it. It’s totally different with my own.
From the moment I got the positive pregnancy test result and knew there was a baby growing inside my body, I loved them. The feeling intensified when I could feel the baby moving. With both pregnancies, I willingly underwent bed rest and godawful medical procedures to halt preterm labor, because I loved the child and wanted her, and for the second pregnancy him, to make it into this world as close to full term and as healthy as possible.
There’s no adequate way to describe the outpouring of love I felt when my children were born. They’re worth every long hour spent walking and singing to a colicky baby, every sleepless night rocking a sick child, and all the extra work that children bring. They bring more joy than worry, and more love than work. I wouldn’t ever go back to life without my children, even if I could. They’re worth everything. I’d die for them if it ever became necessary.
Yes, women are made to be mothers. Some women are defective and don’t make good mothers. For the rest of us, motherhood is an incredible completion, an ultimate meaning in a meaningless world.
Oxytocin is a helluva drug.
That was lovely to read, Linanati.
It’s true, it’s true:
http://www.bakadesuyo.com/is-the-world-getting-stupider
I’m sure people here already know that intelligence doesn’t impress a woman that much:
http://www.bakadesuyo.com/is-intelligence-sexy
The technology is increasing in ways that smart and ruthless people willing to disregard the ideas of democracy should be able to head off Idiocracy if they are so motivated. Whats preventing this are post WW2 cultural changes especially vis a vis eugenics and complacency.
Both those conditions can be altered and with a combination of carrot and stick. the stupid kept from breeding in numbers.
The problem is of course this necessitates a smaller population, a much smaller population and getting the 120+ crowd (the talented 1/4 say) to have enough kids is challenging.
No society can thrive with indefinite population shrinkage, smart or not, capitalist or not.
Also the governing class, many of whom do qualify would freak. Beyond the moral questions comes one of status. If you have mostly equals its harder to maintain status. Every powerful man is a would be king and desires serfs.
This status drive is also why IMO most rich people make decisions that harm others. after you reach a certain point, the only way you can get that rush from success is for other people to suffer.
Stepping over say a homeless person makes a wealthy or powerful feel the rush again and thus baring overwhelming fear, they always choose the selfish path.
This certainly includes issues of eugenics and immigration which properly applied (high eugenics, low immigration) would grossly increase competition for smart billets and reduce the pleasure rush. This is roughly like trying to take away someones crack and will be resisted
Bullshit. Most wealthy (and/or high-income, trust me, I know enough people who make seven figures) people quite simply do not have the time to care about making others suffer. Mainly they care about growing their power/wealth. Or enjoying theirs, but again, usually not by acting sadistic.
I dunno. I’ve wanted a stable marriage and kids for at least the last ten years, but as a nerdy Asian male in the US, I couldn’t find a suitable partner unless I committed to feigning a different personality for the rest of my life. (I’ve since moved to East Asia; things are looking much better here.)
I think the current dysgenic trend is more female- than male-driven.
“The real reason for the dysgenic trend is that smart people just don’t get as much enjoyment out of kids as dumber people do. As a result, they use the contraceptive tech and cultural memes at their disposal to actively avoid the burden of children […]”
True for me.
To be entirely honest, I do enjoy kids, and for some reason they like me back in a cool-uncle way, but not all of them and not in every situation. I can’t relate to pre-verbal babies, at least when they’re not mine, and when they hit puberty they are an emotional mess. And I can’t stand whiny, spoiled, screechy, dumb kids regardless of age.
That’s not the main point, though. I assume I’d love my own kids no matter what. I just don’t want a kid because of the mother, to be honest. I just don’t trust women enough, and mothers even less, since children are the most powerful weapon they possess, and are not afraid to use it, since they live in a society that allows and often encourages them to do so.
We all know very well how a lovely, sweet lady can morph into a screeching gorgon literally overnight for no discernible reason. The thought that I could have my child spirited away, my finances ruined and my entire life wrecked in days, with very little recourse, is just too real and too tangible. Being schooled in game is no guarantee. The stakes are just too high.
One of the hallmarks of intelligence is vision, being able to think long-term and to assess risks. I bet a lot of smart people, mostly men in this case, just look around them, take heed of what’s happening to other guys, crunch the numbers, realize that in today’s world there’s no shortage of ways to feel fulfilled with little consequences, and say “Uuuh… how about you keep breeding and I invent time travel while playing Halo?”
Sad but true.
You should wait until you are 40+, have your finances in order, put your money where an ex can’t get them, marry a suitable woman of younger age, and have a family and children. It can be very happy. But, proceed with caution, trusting nothing to luck.
BTW, reading the newspaper too much can make you very pessimistic. The internet is even worse in this regard. Real life is not quite so bad.
True, but I doubt you’re inventing time travel.
As a lot of people have said, this effect disappears if you control for education. College and grad/professional school take you out of the breeding market, particularly if female.
I have not ever felt the urge for children of my own and every time I hear the screeching of one I am joyfully reminded that I made the correct choice. The situation we currently have in the UK where illegitimate children equals free housing, and income without work has led to increased breeding among the lower orders. Many say that this okay because we will need the plebs in the future to do all the shit jobs, my contention with this is that most of the benefit generation children will turn out to be feckless scroungers just like their parents.
Smarter people just have a general propensity to have quality children vs quantity. When you have bad production it’s just more likely you’ll have a good egg with a whole basket. Good gene people shouldn’t have an accidental bad egg because it would consume too much of their time/resources. Create quality eggs to maximize your potential, so it would make sense to create a defense mechanism to be picky and only have kids with an equal or better gene pairing. But then again if you can have kids without any time/resources(other person raising the kid) then spray away and create a basket.