A chilling academic paper titled “The Population Cycle Drives Human History — from a Eugenic Phase into a Dysgenic Phase and Eventual Collapse” landed like a soggy Sunday paper at the Chateau doorstep.
In the period before the onset of demographic transition, when fertility rates were positively associated with income levels, Malthusian pressure gave an evolutionary advantage to individuals whose characteristics were positively correlated with child quality and hence higher IQ, increasing in such a way the frequency of underlying genes in the population. As the fraction of individuals of higher quality increased, technological progress intensified. Positive feedback between technological progress and the level of education reinforced the growth process, setting the stage for an industrial revolution that facilitated an endogenous take-off from the Malthusian trap. The population density rose and with it social and political friction, especially important at the top of the social pyramid. Thus, from a certain turning point of history, the well-to-do have fewer children than the poor. Once the economic environment improves sufficiently, the evolutionary pressure weakens, and on the basis of spreading egalitarian ideology and general suffrage the quantity of people gains dominance over quality. At present, we have already reached the phase of global human capital deterioration as the necessary prerequisite for a global collapse by which the overpopulated earth will decimate a species with an average IQ, still too mediocre to understand its own evolution and steer its course.
Executive summary: Equalism is death.
Longer version: Economic success contains the seed of its own destruction. As a people become wealthier and their miseries alleviated by technology, equalism (formerly known as egalitarianism, or in its looser form as liberalism) finds fertile ground in social discourse, and welfare safety nets grow in breadth and complexity, thwarting the natural evolutionary culling process until the reproductive rewards are shared equally between the fit and unfit, and finally reaching a nadir when the economically unfit become reproductively favored at the expense of the economically fit.
Idiocracy, as I have stated, may be the most prophetic movie of any time. The earth becomes overpopulated with mediocrities and dummies as technology interferes with the natural and healthy culling process, the equalist ideology hastens the dysgenic trend, and finally the barbarians swarm over their demographically dying equalist overlords, ending the civilizational project until the cycle renews and rebirth can find purchase in the smoldering ashes.
The difference now? Nukes. All bets are off on how this iteration of doom will realize its potential. It’s possible the destruction this time around is so complete a new cycle of human transcendence will be stillborn.
What does it mean for humanity to understand its own evolution and to “steer its course”? It means knowing that bleeding hearts lead to bleeding civilizations. A few far-seeing people know the score. A great paternalistic (patriarchal, even) impulse — but one that is necessarily cruel (to be kind) — is needed to steer this darkly enlightened course to a happier outcome. I envision a CH six-point insurance program of collapse prevention:
1. Close the borders to Western nations indefinitely. (Reason is self-evident.)
2. Create voluntary incentives to reduce dysgenic fertility. (Dollars for Depo.)
3. Discourage IQ- and education-based assortative mating. (Successful men pairing off with pretty, but less educationally attained women, is eugenic. The smart, industrious genes are passed more fully around the general population.)
4. Reinvigorate protectionism. (Gutted native wages only intensifies public pressure for government largesse to a growing segment of long-term unemployed.)
5. Eliminate all female-friendly public policies. (No more Title IX, mandated day-care, freebie contraceptives, etc. The evidence is strong that publicly catering to women’s fickle pleasures incentivizes bad things like single mommery, latchkey kids, late marriage, low fertility of the higher classes, and punishment of creative iconoclasts who are the engine of progress.)
6. Reduce proximate diversity. (Social atomization encourages short term time orientation, distrust, and corruption, which lead to incompetence and decay.)
That last one may require a break-up of the US. Ironically, to save America, you must kill it first.
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