I'm in favor of this idea because, if for no other reason, it would be hilarious if it was the cause.
The downside, of course, is that it means we lost the culture war.
It seems like comparisons to other contemporary countries would be useful. Japan and South Korea don't seem to be captured by wokeism.
You mention that leftism decreases fertility. (I've never heard that decreasing fertility is the definition of mental illness.) Maybe it works the other way, where lower TFR increases leftism. There's obviously a confounding variable with religiosity. But I could logically see why pampered kids from small families might lean left while larger families lean right. That's certainly the case with current pro-natalists but I'd be curious if it correlates when the Boomers were creating families.
"Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order."
First, please note how the authors of that study define "leftism" — support for LGBT and BLM. My father considered himself to be a leftist, and he always voted for leftist parties, but he disliked identity politics and had heteronormative views (like most people of his generation). So there is little point in controlling for "father's politics." Today's left is simply too different from the left back then.
Second, the study didn't control for educational level or socioeconomic class. Yet parental age at first birth is higher for parents with a university education, and "leftism" as defined by the study's authors is much more prevalent among millennial and post-millennial offspring of that socioeconomic class.
"Among Americans with a bachelor’s degree or more education, seven-in-ten say the legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society, compared with 63% of those with some college experience but no bachelor’s degree. About half of those with a high school diploma or less (51%) say same-sex marriage is very good (26%) or somewhat good (25%) for society, with 45% saying it is somewhat bad (20%) or very bad (24%)."
In my opinion, the findings of that study are better explained by socioeconomic factors. Older parents are more likely to have gone to university and are more likely to have a mindset of being financially "ready" before having kids. Their children, in turn, will more likely go to university and adopt those political beliefs that prevail on campus (i.e., support for LGBTQ and BLM).
this is unlikely because the shared environment of leftism is very low from twin studies. I think you subscribe too much to the SSSM and your heuristics are unconvincing. I don't really think "it's socioeconomic status" is a compelling causal explanation in 2024. Apply what you've learned from the black white IQ gap debate to this. Genetics is the much stronger factor in human behavior, in basically all domains.
You're making the same point that I made. "Leftism" no longer corresponds to a single set of beliefs. Even in my father's time, it was very heterogeneous. We're better off not using that word.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that human populations differ statistically in certain mental and behavioral traits. Such differences seem to me not only plausible but even expectable — we humans have adapted primarily to our cultural environment and not to our natural environment, and culture has evolved along different paths in different populations.
That being said, I'm not an ideologue. Each argument has to be judged on its merits, and the argument of this article leaves me unconvinced. I agree that there are genetic influences on political orientation, but some of those influences may be circumstantial. For instance, there is some evidence that "leftists" are less tuned into the emotional states of other people, i.e., they have less affective empathy. But those studies were not controlled for ethnicity, so "leftism" may be acting as a proxy for ethnicity.
My measure of leftism is what we call leftism today, it correlates at about .7 with American party alignment and self ID. It's based on Turchin's meta-ethnic frontier theory so it's definitely something that varies throughout human history. Not sure what it has to do with socialism yet though, still need to correlate it with socialism. 100 years ago leftism was probably called immorality or progressivism. Not a serious issue to call it leftism today though.
I think if you do not understand the research, you shlould reexamine your priors. You say you are not an ideologue, yet your response to the very high heritability of leftism, a well replicated finding for over 40 years, is to play word games about if leftism is even real, and to say "some genetic influences are circumstancial." What does this mean? It sounds quite like something I would hear from Kevin Bird. I think there is definitely a lot of cognitive bias on this topic, just like the black white IQ gap, but even more than the latter, as many people who understand the IQ gap fail to reason appropriately from the evidence here.
Political affiliation is often confounded with ethnicity. If I did a comparative study of "Democrats" and "Republicans," I would find significant differences in behavior and mentality. And those differences would have a heritable component. Among other things, I would find that Republicanism is significantly associated with religiosity and long-term family stability.
Many of those differences, however, are better explained by ethnicity than by political affiliation. This is something we could argue back and forth without getting anywhere because the two factors are confounded. Often, the level of confounding is very high: many ethnic groups vote en bloc for the same party.
My priors aren't terribly interesting, but here goes.
Ancestry: English, some Irish
Religion: formerly United Church of Canada. I no longer feel comfortable in any church.
Politics: formerly NDP. I no longer feel comfortable in any party. I have voted ADQ, CAQ, and PPC.
Education: anthropology, with training in Marxism, neo-Marxism, and structuralism.
Research interests: gene-culture coevolution (I was introduced to it by Pierre van den Berghe), skin color, hair color, eye color, vitamin D metabolism, etc.
Without dismissing your thesis entirely, I think Matt was recently good enough to publish an extensive piece by Arctotherium on the topic of several well-documented "mind virus" effects, including some driving society in a leftward direction.
These won't show up as shared-environmental factors in long-term heritability estimates because the cultural effects are not localised at the household level but roll out across entire nations almost simultaneously. Everyone "catches the bug" within a couple of years. In principle it would be rather similar to the Flynn Effect not substantially affecting the high heritability and low common-environment of IQ when looking *within* a given age cohort, despite Flynn Effect gains *across* age cohorts being enormous.
It's also worth noting that religious identity is almost entirely inherited from parents through vertical cultural transmission, and given the often-noted similarities between wokeness and a religious memeplex it would be very strange if nothing similar were happening there, though perhaps a 'religion' as novel and rapidly-mutating as wokeness operates differently.
Religious identity is shared env linked but general religiosity is not. Most religions encourage very similar sets of behaviors, so it's kind of just a chance of birth as to which one you attach to if you like those behaviors. But if you're not high religiosity, you just become an atheist. It's most likely like this with leftism. Party lines definitely spread environmentally, but the underlying care for them is genetic.
Flynn effect runs contrary to the expected genetic decline of IQ and a large part of it can be explained by more schooling, which increases IQ by up to 0.33 SDs per year (though this is not "on g", it doesn't really increase human capital, it just makes people better at tests). Another thing is nutrition, like height, may have been increasing brain size. So we have good candidates for what causes the Flynn effect and a definite need to find something to explain the Flynn effect.
Meanwhile in leftism, there is hardly any response to schooling or nutrition so these can't explain a big trend. Also, the mutational pressure is exactly as predicted, so there is no evidence of a leftist Flynn effect. So ultimately, you argument is not theoretically unsound but it's definitely out of nowhere and there's no evidence for it. The most parsimonious view is that leftism is just genetic. You need to find some powerful memes or something to cast doubt on this -- should not be too hard, this lends itself to laboratory experiment unlike genetics, because you can expose people to ideas in a lab. But yet nobody has done this, because memetics is not a serious idea, it's more of blank slatist cudgel.
That... video is almost 4 hours long. Could you point me to a specific timestamp or give me the cliff notes version?
I would also like to see the source for education increasing IQ by 0.33 SDs per year, because twin/adoption studies *do* appear to indicate moderate shared-environment effects on educational attainment and it is hard to see how such an enormous effect size would not translate into shared-environment effects on adult IQ. But I guess that's another discussion.
"Genetics is the much stronger factor in human behavior, in basically all domains."
I agree. This is a contentious idea, but I believe it is true. An article on Aporia released just before this on free will vs determinism (genetics) is interesting.
Your argument about the lack of control of the father's socio-economic class sounds reasonable.
But the fact that it is impossible to combine leftism from the past and modern is absurd. The fact that your father personally was not so much radicalized does not mean that leftism in general is not associated with support for the BLM. Strictly speaking, there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-racist ideas of racial justice against the "oppressive" system of white racism.
The standard left-wing radicals of the past, represented by the early Bolsheviks, even in matters of ethnic politics, differed little from modern SJW activists. They pursued an ethnic anti-Russian policy in the same way as the modern left-wing anti-white:
(Putin said this in an interview with Tucker: from Putin's point of view, if tsarist Russia had survived, it would literally have culturally "eaten" Ukraine and everyone there would have spoken Russian, lived in the Russian monarchy and considered themselves Russians)
Only then did the USSR lose its own ideological essence, one could say that there were more real Marxists in France or the USA in the 1980s than in the entire USSR.
I do not know how your father thought, but I live in Russia and there are many old people with economically socialist sympathies here. The problem is that they cannot be called full-fledged leftists - they are socially conservative, and in terms of economics they are not worried about egalitarianism and class equality, but hatred of oligarchs for their alleged corruption and the possibility of personal enrichment at the expense of a generous state. This cannot be called leftist, egalitarian views, like those of real socialists. In fact, these same old people preferred capitalism in the 1980s, but became disillusioned because of the 1990s.
"there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-racist ideas of racial justice against the "oppressive" system of white racism."
My father was a leftist but he never used the word "racism." Keep in mind that this word didn't enter normal discourse until the 1960s, during which my father turned fifty (I guess that makes me a prime candidate for paternal age degeneracy — he was 46 when I was born). At that time, in Canada, both the Left and the Right had been converted to the belief that all human populations are essentially the same. In fact, it was the Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker that moved Canada to a policy of global immigration:
"In 1962, Diefenbaker's government eliminated racial discrimination in immigration policy. In foreign policy, his stance against apartheid helped secure the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth of Nations"
For most Canadians, like my parents, antiracism was something remote and theoretical. Canada was over 95% white, and most "non-whites" were so mixed that they didn't look much different from us. Until the 1970s, and even beyond in some places, the dominant sources of social conflict were language and religion.
I think of the Canadian Conservatives the same way as the British ones - it's a joke, a meme. Conservatives who defend immigration and fierce opposition to South Africa are not conservatives in fact, they are a kind of "conservative" Angela Merkel by party affiliation.
If your father was 50 years old in the 1960s, then he was simply too old to be radicalized to the left in accordance with the "progressive movement." My grandfather here in Russia was sympathetic to the local "communist" party - but I understand that relying on his example in a general analysis of leftism would be stupid.
I understand what you mean - but then questions similar to anti-capitalism and anti-racism can be extrapolated to questions of religion and language. I'm not that knowledgeable about Canadian politics, but it seems that you had the Canadian-English right-wing forces advocating a common British imperial identity and the dominance of the English language - against the leftists from Quebec (French-speaking). In these circumstances, the English-speaking Canadian leftist who speaks out against his English compatriots and against the "identity of British imperialism" would be most similar to the modern left.
One can argue that antiracism has its roots in anticlassism, but the latter was not fundamentally a Marxist project. It began as a project of liberals in the 18th and 19th centuries who wished to do away with the old class system and create a society of self-maximizing individuals. Marxism arose, in part, as a critique of that project, i.e., the dissolution of the old class system had paved the way for the emergence of a new dominant class and new relationships of domination and exploitation.
In some ways, the new dominant class is worse than the old one because the latter did feel a long-term responsibility for maintaining the social and material conditions that make a functioning economy possible. The capitalist class lives essentially for its own interests within a narrow time frame (no more than 30 years into the future).
Historically, the Canadian center-left was not anti-British. It was anti-imperialist. It felt that Great Britain had taken a wrong turn by annexing India and taking part in the scramble for Africa. This imperialism was at best an exercise in vanity and at worst a tyrannical and unsustainable domination of foreign peoples. Sooner or later, the Indians and the Africans would chase the British out.
Unfortunately, English Canadians became seduced by the mystique of Empire, and we never stopped to think about its sustainability. It would have been far better to have a small empire, which could develop as a British civilization, than a big empire that would inevitably collapse.
Marxism and National Question(1913) written by Stalin
"" We shall not stop to discuss again national-cultural autonomy in general; we have already spoken of its objectionable character. We should like to point out only that, while being unsuitable in general, cultural-national autonomy is also meaningless and nonsensical in relation to Caucasian conditions.
And for the following reason:
Cultural-national autonomy presumes more or less developed nationalities, with a developed culture and literature. Failing these conditions, autonomy loses all sense and becomes an absurdity. But in the Caucasus there are a number of nationalities each possessing a primitive culture, a separate language, but without its own literature; nationalities, moreover, which are in a state of transition, partly becoming assimilated and partly continuing to develop. How is cultural-national autonomy to be applied to them? What is to be done with such nationalities? How are they to be "organized" into separate cultural-national unions, as is undoubtedly implied by cultural-national autonomy?
What is to be done with the Mingrelians, the Abkhasians, the Adjarians, the Svanetians, the Lesghians, and so on, who speak different languages but do not possess a literature of their own? To what nations are they to be attached? Can they be "organized" into national unions? Around what "cultural affairs" are they to be "organized"?
What is to be done with the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are becoming assimilated (but are as yet by no means wholly assimilated) by the Georgians, while the Cis-Caucasian Ossetians are partly being assimilated by the Russians and partly continuing to develop and are creating their own literature? How are they to be "organized" into a single national union?
To what national union should one attach the Adjarians, who speak the Georgian language, but whose culture is Turkish and who profess the religion of Islam? Shall they be "organized" separately from the Georgians with regard to religious affairs and together with the Georgians with regard to other cultural affairs? And what about the Kobuletians, the Ingushes, the Inghilois?
What kind of autonomy is that which excludes a whole number of nationalities from the list?
No, that is not a solution of the national question, but the fruit of idle fancy.""
-Lenin was actually kind of pro-assimilation. He praised USA for that in his book named 《critical remarks on national》
*
Russia in general, and the Bundists in particular, who vociferate most about Russian orthodox Marxists being “assimilators”. And yet, as the afore-mentioned figures show, out of the ten and a half million Jews all over the world, about half that number live in the civilised world, where conditions favouring “assimilation” are strongest, whereas the unhappy, down trodden, disfranchised Jews in Russia and Galicia, who are crushed under the heel of the Purishkeviches (Russian and Polish), live where conditions for “assimilation” least prevail, where there Is most segregation, and even a “Pale of Settlement”,[1] a numerus clausus[2] and other charming features of the Purishkevich regime.
*It is that only Jewish reactionary philistines, who want to turn hack the wheel of history, and make it proceed, not from the conditions prevailing in Russia and Galicia to those prevailing in Paris and New York, but in the reverse direction—only they can clamour against “assimilation”.
*Even if we assume that, in time, there will be a state frontier between Great Russia and the Ukraine, the historically progressive nature of the “assimilation” of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers will be as undoubted as the progressive nature of the grinding down of nations in America
" there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-semitic ideas of gentile justice against the "oppressive" system of jewish
racism."
Or libertarianism:
" there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-government ideas of liberal justice against the "oppressive" system of state."
What is the most obvious distinction between animals and humans? I would argue that it's the ability to override one's instincts when all the facts demand it. A chihuahua isn't fundamentally incapable of understanding that bigger is stronger; but it must bark at that bear anyway. As long as it can count on the protection of even stronger creatures (humans with their guns or spears); it is an evolutionary winner. But if man were to disappear tomorrow it would immediately go extinct.
Conservatism is a looser because, even when it has the facts on it's side it refuses to argue them. Why, argue, when you can just declare 'but this is how we do things, we are in power'. But of course, when you loose power it then inevitably it becomes 'just accept all your enemies premises and hypocritically betray them while pretending you don't know what you're doing'. Trump attacks Hillary and Biden as anti-black racists for using the words 'super-predators'; yet there is no doubt that he would respond differently if he saw a group of black males in a dark alley as opposed to one of whites. Trump, like his followers - doesn't think before he acts. He just has good instincts, but he might as well be a dog. By conceding that one shouldn't design policy on the basis of base rates, or worse that every policy that disproportionately affects blacks must be illegitimate he writes a promissory note condemning his civilization to barbarism.
Why? well here's the problem with conceding to a false argument, and then just insolating yourself from it's consequences through hypocrisy. You know who is most susceptible to arguments about rejecting instinct? The people smart enough to benefit regularly from doing so. The people who thought, 'hey why can't man fly like the birds' and made fortunes making it so. And so, in accepting stupid premises while avoiding the costs through the defensive stupidity in which you say A and reject B, despite the fact that A directly demands B --- You doom your society forever.
Conservatives avoid actual personal conflict on every issue. Should most women get the vote?
Actual argument against: Women are a standard deviation worse than men on water-level tasks; which stand in for an understanding of [physical reality] generally. This leads predictably to them opposing scientific progress, as when you cannot understand something - the reasonable heuristic is simply to reject it (see polling on Nuclear power). This is fatal to a functioning civilized society. A purely [social reality] understanding of the world, in which women excel - while valuable is resolutely inferior not merely in terms of the things that mainly men are obsessed with [rockets!] but also the things that women care about [40% of your kids not dying from disease before they turn 20]. Since the handicap of a poor grasp of social reality is obviously superior to a poor grasp of physical reality in the construction of society - most women should not vote.
Conservative argument: Paul, writing 1900+ years ago said some shit about how women shouldn't talk in church and men should be heads of their households.
Response: Wait, you don't let women talk in church, seems kind of pointlessly mean? I mean, even the greatest sexist has to admit women occasionally make decent points?
Conservative argument: Oh, no we do; but it communicates the general spirit of things... [the three dots stand in for a mountain-load of bullshit obfuscation.]
Result: All women get the right to vote.
Run this kind of stupid argument for every issue in existence and you see how we got here. Conservatives declare that race isn't relevant and all races are obviously equal and so, since Americans would happily ignore immigration laws to accept suffering Brits - surprise, surprise - the logical conclusion is: "Flood the country with Indian South Americans and Haitians, what could go wrong!"
Over and over and over again. Every single critical norm of civilization, every single basic instinct that makes us human; defended only by hypocrisy - till every person with functioning braincells either defects to insane but consistent theoryland, or simply cannot muster the willpower to defend such beasts from the death warrant they signed.
Great analysis. We now seem locked in to several of these death spirals. Women asserting control, ignoring race and the harsh effects of this, and I would argue innumerate monetary and economic policies. They can of course feed off one another, with women and minorities voting for more government.
What changes it? I joke to people only a bracing collapse can change things now. When you mention these issues about female perception and voting patterns it is universally rejected in the West yet it is only countries where women are basically kept under control that are surviving.
"What is the most obvious distinction between animals and humans? I would argue that it's the ability to override one's instincts when all the facts demand it."
I would argue that the most significant distinction between animals and humans is intelligence.
" You know who is most susceptible to arguments about rejecting instinct? The people smart enough to benefit regularly from doing so. The people who thought, 'hey why can't man fly like the birds' and made fortunes making it so. And so, in accepting stupid premises while avoiding the costs through the defensive stupidity in which you say A and reject B, despite the fact that A directly demands B --- You doom your society forever."
- I suppose I should clarify why loosing nearly all of these people - guarantees the death of a movement. The reason is as follows; Even beasts yield in the face of concrete demonstrated results. The average dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, even though it lacks any understanding for why he brings it to a random room where weird creatures stab at it (the vet).
This is one of it's instincts, yielding to undisputed authority.
When nearly everyone that does something great is a Leftie, Lefties ARE THE UNDISPUTED AUTHORITY! They've been so, for decades. The Fascists* were the the only ones that actually challenged this, and they did so by laying out explicitly A - B - C; You cannot win without a coherent ideology, for only coherent ideologies attract the human capital you need to win.
* Unfortunately their reasoning was largely but not entirely wrong.
It is odd that an attack on leftism starts with a genuine revolution that was both necessary and started by normal people who couldn’t be subject to the deleterious genes.
Personally I think most woke ideologies are antagonistic to investigating real power.
The number of people declaring themselves LGBT is more easily explained by the T. Just declare yourself gender non conforming and you’re done. I saw an article once about a bbc writer who was a trans woman married to a trans man. Basically a biological man married to a woman. Or straight, in old money. There’s no skin in the game; in the past to declare yourself bisexual involved actual bisexual relations, now you can be a man but also gender fluid and thus gay on the days you are sleeping with your girlfriend while feeling like a woman.
This study below on twins (limited samples and all that but still interesting) showed that genetics only begin to have an influence around the age of 21 year. And ONLY when subjects left their parental home:
Disucssion:
'The onset of genetic influences at young adult-hood, however, challenges conclusions drawn from theexisting literature. Our analyses suggest that the onsetof genetic influence occurring at about ages 21–25 arerooted in life cycle changes from leaving the parentalhome. There was no evidence of genetic influences onthe attitudes of twins still living with their parents atages 21–25; only twins who no longer shared the par-ental home showed strong evidence of genetic influ-ences on this index of liberal-conservative attitudes'.
And that immediately has you think about US adolescents no longer leaving their parental homes at an early age since the gfc...
While recently in western Europe in many cities the pressure (native high incomes, immigration, refugees, foreign students) on an insuffuent supply of (cheap enough) housing is showing the same pattern.
And students' parents are not seldomly progressive gen x-ers and early millennials...
The recent dramatic turn in major democracies of women's political orientation to the left compared with men's political orientation seems problematic for the mutational load hypothesis. Why should such an issue be so strongly sex linked? Mind you, men have other problems.
Allowing women and men choice on the breeding front is going to create a very strong selection pressure against gays and secondarily lesbians, as they have far fewer children than hetero couples. You should see dramatic reductions in prevalence within a few generations.
a constant offset for women is no problem for ML theory, this exists for many traits like height and IQ. The divergence chart you're referring to, I think was fake. Better data did not replicate it
What better data would you put forward to indicate a lack of sex-based divergence in political outlook? Anecdotally it seems to apply in my own experience.
Political ideology is weakly correlated with paternal age. Most disabled and low income people are Republicans/Conservatives. The memetic equation is laughable. No controls for intensity or diagnosis. I don’t doubt that mutational load is a thing, but to claim it explains a sufficient amount of even small scale changes in polity is ridiculous.
To the disciples of this theory - answer why do Jews in Israel who have a higher mutational load and who have children at a higher age become more right wing overtime?
Great article, though i suppose i didn't need to hear a introduction to what other thinkers argued before per say.
The problem of us arguing about the man sowing seeds alone at minimum and never looking to the soil is quite a good way of putting it.
Whats more that soil was worked, that is too say like industrialism is the plough to the field that makes it increase these seeds growth rate.
We developed prosperity without ever asking what lead to the capacity to develop said prosperity to begin with in our times of poverty and never questioned how we could thereby destroy that very creation process from its roots.
Were you to read further into the paternal age at conception, you would also see significant defects which arise in a specific neural system These genetic changes can make a brain receptor (NMDA receptor) react abnormally, disrupting the normal processing of information and the brain’s ability to change and adapt.
Psychologically, this means the brain has trouble filtering and prioritizing information. This can result in the brain making mistakes in interpreting what’s important, leading to symptoms like hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there) and delusions (strong beliefs in things that aren’t true).
In pathological forms it is simply schizophrenia, or autism; generally in means those afflicted will not abandon prior beliefs at a subconscious level even when presented with indisputable facts.
It’s interesting that you place this well-observed phenomenon into this context, ultimately a version of the “postmodern” nothing is real paranoid delusion.
Very dense reading but a deft connection between the paternal age at conception observation and dysregulated cognitive activity:
I, like a lot of people, was a leftist until the past several years, during which I have shifted steadily rightward (I’m 42 years old now). This rightward shift was due to the increasingly apparent insanity and authoritarianism of other leftists and exposure to right wing ideas while trying to figure out WTF is wrong with these people.
Did the millions (?) of us in the West who have undergone this political transformation in the past several years suffer some sort of genetic mutation? Is the red pill a gene therapy? Does 5G cause right wingedness? How about SARS-cov-2 or associated “vaccines”?
This is obviously tongue in cheek, but the widespread shifts in political beliefs a lot of us have experienced recently seems to undermine the genetic hypothesis. This shift was clearly caused by sociocultural factors and exposure/increased susceptibility to new (for us) ideas.
Also, I was previously a leftist because literally everyone I knew was a leftist. Parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, friends, classmates, etc. All leftists. And why were they all leftists? Well, because literally everyone THEY knew was a leftist. This seems to me quite a bit like more of a cultural phenomenon than a genetic one. Unless coastal cities cause the leftist mutation.
I know you have fancy charts and analyses to “prove” me wrong, but when something is this bloody obvious, I’m disinclined to “follow the Science.”
I think many are leftists for two reasons. Most left ideas are emotionally pleasing. Raise minimum wage, for example. What a lovely idea. Make the poor better off. It ignores the complexities of the topic to focus on the emotion.
The second factor is insulation from consequences. Supporting minimum wages is much easier if you are not an employer. If you run a small cafe you may realize the legislation will mean you have to lay off some staff.
For me Covid made consequences concrete for many. Government lying. The media refusing to do even basic investigation and printing government press releases. The army of celebrities giving medical advice. The absurdity of watching politicians on TV every night talking nonsense. Being told a deadly pandemic means we must lockdowm but almost no one was dying.
I think leftism is a luxury and sometimes life is not conducive to luxury beliefs. Being in a war where the enemy is trying to kill you, for example. It is kill or be killed. There is no space for niceties.
That's all it is. No one bothers about all this when life is hard.
Those two factors are essentially one - leftism depends on blindness to negative externalities. Leftist ideas are emotionally pleasing because they presume there are no tradeoffs for policies like raising the minimum wage, welfare, free healthcare, unfettered immigration, etc. For this fantasy to persist, the leftist must be prevented from seeing the negative externalities. Otherwise, they get "mugged by reality," as the saying goes. The reality of Covid policies mugged a lot of people. It took an extremely deluded mind (unfortunately not a rare thing) to ignore the severe harms being caused by lockdowns, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, school closures, etc., in the name of "saving lives."
So your observation of this basic feature of leftism is correct. However, I don't think this feature is the underlying cause of leftist thinking. It is hard to argue historically that leftism is a "luxury" belief system. Most of the Bolshevik, Maoist, Cuban, and Khmer Rouge revolutionaries were hardly suburban soccer moms. People with hard lives living in hard times can also be sold a bill of leftist goods.
Leftism is basically a virus. There are individuals and communities who have developed immunity through experience and/or sound education and values. There are other individuals and communities that are "immunocompromised." Under certain conditions, which can range from conditions of decadence to conditions of hardship, a pandemic of leftism can arise. Coastal urban and suburban America is presently suffering from a pandemic of leftism. In short, leftism is a contagious mind virus, the evolutionary success of which depends on prevailing environmental conditions in a given time and place.
Maybe there's some small genetic component to this, but genes seems to be a pretty weak explanation when looking at the big picture.
I can't disagree with your points. It is probably more like a virus or infection than anything, including luxury beliefs. You are correct, some cases where it arises are in populations experiencing hardship.
Perhaps the link is fantasy. The poor dreaming of a better life under socialism, perhaps nudged by the intelligentsia. The middle classes living in fantasyland imagining utopian ideas like net zero.
Each group is removed from reality to some extent. We can certainly witness those most embedded in reality seem to resist.
2. information exposure explains 10-20% of variance in leftism, while genes explain 60-70%. So some people can show some response to information exposure.
Well, that's an idea that came out of left-field. What an interesting idea! Even so, in the comments section Peter Frost has made what look to me like some very good points. If only I were cleverer I might be able to adjudicate who is right but as it is I'll just have to wait until the whole thing has been dissected by someone I have come to trust.
Yes, a good link at the very limit of my ability to understand. It seems that Peter Frost was indeed right and mutational load doesn't explain the steady leftward drift of our societies. This being the case makes me question Ed Dutton, who I also follow. He is very big on the idea that leftists are 'spiteful mutants'.
It's likely that dysgenic decay is playing *some* role with regard to the leftward drift of politics, but I don't think dysgenics accounts for most of the cultural shift and I don't think mutations account for most dysgenic decay in the present era.
If you combine fertility data with heritability estimates for IQ then we're probably losing something like 3-5 IQ points per century at a genotypic level (which up until recently was completely swamped by phenotypic Flynn Effect gains on most subtests, with some prominent exceptions, such as vocabulary and reaction times. Cue usual discussion about how much of the FE is real.)
3-5 points per century doesn't sound like a particular reason to panic immediately, but obviously it's not sustainable, and there are reasons to be more concerned about it than you might think at first glance. (1) Small changes on the average become large changes at the extremes (fewer geniuses, more mental disabilities, etc.) (2) the effect doesn't just apply to IQ, but probably other traits like mental and physical health as well, (3) this only applies to fertility estimates *within* racial groups- If HBD is correct, then decay could be significantly faster when you compare cross-racial fertility and don't get partly rescued by regression-to-the-mean effects, and (4) the effects will be most concentrated in the youngest age groups we most rely on for labour and innovation.
You add all that together and I'd rank dysgenics somewhat higher than something like anthropogenic climate change/fossil fuel dependency in terms of civilisational impact.
That all makes sense. What I didn't get was why regression to the mean in cross-racial relationships might rescue us a little. Do you mean regression to our mean (white), their mean (black/brown) or both? Isn't that assuming that the mean in the population at large is higher than that of the couple. Why would that be the case?
Yeah, I wasn't terribly clear there- what I meant is that since racial groups regress to different means for IQ (and possibly other consequential traits), the impact of low-IQ white individuals having high fertility is less severe than, e.g, low-IQ black individuals having high fertility. The kids of 85-IQ white parents will regress about halfway to the white mean of 100 (i.e, average 92), whereas the kids of 85-IQ blacks stay at 85, on average, since that's the norm for their genetic lineage (or at least it's observably compatible with HBD.) So if dysgenic fertility WRT intelligence is occurring in part due to racial differences in fertility, you can expect the intelligence decline to be both more rapid and harder to reverse.
I think Cofnas is right that mind virus theory is lacking and blank slatist, but I'm not sure about his strategy. In my opinion there's another sociobiological factor and that's the increase of female leadership - combined with personality and behavior differences between the sexes. It explains a lot about what Rufo and other think is a mind virus but is talked about the least comparatively.
i guess maybe thats because they were not subjected to the relaxed selection pressures induced by the industrial revolution as long as we westerners were
Not yet. All evidence suggests woke and leftism will have a harsher effect on Muslim populations. They have no immunity. We seem to have a hardcore of about 30 percent who don't succumb.
I see others discussing this online. Female Muslims have most to gain from feminism for example, even though it will more or less end their culture.
Here in the UK I know Muslim men under pressure to put their wife's name on title deeds for their house. Not done in Islam but common here. A tiny thing but I do wonder how the third worlders will survive contact with the insane west.
Birthrates have actually been dropping prodigiously across much of the MENA region, even in countries we consider bastions of Islamic conservatism, such as Iran (TFR 1.7). Whether that's entirely due to feminism or urbanisation or something else is up for debate, but yes, it does seem that a lot of western insanity has been transmitted in their direction.
I wonder if Bronski would explain this as a function of mutation rates.
I am aware of this too. One to watch it the Taliban have rewarded their loyal men with Western smartphones. If we consider current western liberal values to be a virus how long can the Taliban last? All that porn. Plus western degeneracy is slick in its presentation.
It is also another reason mass immigration is a farce. Most areas are seeing declining birthrates.
Liberalism is the new religion. Christianity without Christ. That's why they fly rainbow flags on embassies. This is their belief system.
Everyone is the same, all disparities are sexism, racism, hate etc. These just be actively fixed. Everyone must be controlled through surveillance. Finally disinformation must be stopped.
I can also see conservative men delaying children to accumulate resources to gain better mate options. Not everyone is giddy and stupid about women.
Indeed this is now standard red pill advice for young men. In your 20s you'll struggle with women because you lack the things women like. Resources, status, confidence. So spend your 20s working on your body, career and maturity. Men can pick younger brides etc.
This is good advice and quite consistent with conservative thought.
It does seem rather hard to distinguish higher paternal age from lower time preference, which would be considered broadly adaptive/pro-civilisation in any other context. I personally don't think the mutational headwind could be this strong and still allow purifying selection to make much headway.
It all seems suspect to me. Low preference men would stand a chance of attracting better mates because women notice accumulated resources and value them.
Aren't there like 6 base pair denovo mutations (even in high paternal age parents)?
Seems like that would not result in complex behavioral changes.
...I think the explanation for this phenomenon has more to do with "an environment of prosperity"
Left Wing genes proliferate in an an environment of abundance....Right Wing genes proliferate in an environment of scarcity.
What we are experiencing is downstream consequences of post WW2 prosperity in the US....this is selecting for left wing phenotypes.
Makes no difference how the mutations arrise...the genotype is always mutating. What matters is why the environment is favoring left wing mutants of right wing mutants.
I think the average is something like 7 germline mutations per generation in protein-coding regions of the genome, yes, and it does seem unlikely this could have large dysgenic effects. I've been trying to find good study estimates for the fitness impact of deleterious mutations in complex organisms but really I haven't found anything persuasive so far.
I'm in favor of this idea because, if for no other reason, it would be hilarious if it was the cause.
The downside, of course, is that it means we lost the culture war.
It seems like comparisons to other contemporary countries would be useful. Japan and South Korea don't seem to be captured by wokeism.
You mention that leftism decreases fertility. (I've never heard that decreasing fertility is the definition of mental illness.) Maybe it works the other way, where lower TFR increases leftism. There's obviously a confounding variable with religiosity. But I could logically see why pampered kids from small families might lean left while larger families lean right. That's certainly the case with current pro-natalists but I'd be curious if it correlates when the Boomers were creating families.
"Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order."
First, please note how the authors of that study define "leftism" — support for LGBT and BLM. My father considered himself to be a leftist, and he always voted for leftist parties, but he disliked identity politics and had heteronormative views (like most people of his generation). So there is little point in controlling for "father's politics." Today's left is simply too different from the left back then.
Second, the study didn't control for educational level or socioeconomic class. Yet parental age at first birth is higher for parents with a university education, and "leftism" as defined by the study's authors is much more prevalent among millennial and post-millennial offspring of that socioeconomic class.
"Among Americans with a bachelor’s degree or more education, seven-in-ten say the legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society, compared with 63% of those with some college experience but no bachelor’s degree. About half of those with a high school diploma or less (51%) say same-sex marriage is very good (26%) or somewhat good (25%) for society, with 45% saying it is somewhat bad (20%) or very bad (24%)."
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/about-six-in-ten-americans-say-legalization-of-same-sex-marriage-is-good-for-society/
In my opinion, the findings of that study are better explained by socioeconomic factors. Older parents are more likely to have gone to university and are more likely to have a mindset of being financially "ready" before having kids. Their children, in turn, will more likely go to university and adopt those political beliefs that prevail on campus (i.e., support for LGBTQ and BLM).
this is unlikely because the shared environment of leftism is very low from twin studies. I think you subscribe too much to the SSSM and your heuristics are unconvincing. I don't really think "it's socioeconomic status" is a compelling causal explanation in 2024. Apply what you've learned from the black white IQ gap debate to this. Genetics is the much stronger factor in human behavior, in basically all domains.
You're making the same point that I made. "Leftism" no longer corresponds to a single set of beliefs. Even in my father's time, it was very heterogeneous. We're better off not using that word.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that human populations differ statistically in certain mental and behavioral traits. Such differences seem to me not only plausible but even expectable — we humans have adapted primarily to our cultural environment and not to our natural environment, and culture has evolved along different paths in different populations.
That being said, I'm not an ideologue. Each argument has to be judged on its merits, and the argument of this article leaves me unconvinced. I agree that there are genetic influences on political orientation, but some of those influences may be circumstantial. For instance, there is some evidence that "leftists" are less tuned into the emotional states of other people, i.e., they have less affective empathy. But those studies were not controlled for ethnicity, so "leftism" may be acting as a proxy for ethnicity.
My measure of leftism is what we call leftism today, it correlates at about .7 with American party alignment and self ID. It's based on Turchin's meta-ethnic frontier theory so it's definitely something that varies throughout human history. Not sure what it has to do with socialism yet though, still need to correlate it with socialism. 100 years ago leftism was probably called immorality or progressivism. Not a serious issue to call it leftism today though.
I think if you do not understand the research, you shlould reexamine your priors. You say you are not an ideologue, yet your response to the very high heritability of leftism, a well replicated finding for over 40 years, is to play word games about if leftism is even real, and to say "some genetic influences are circumstancial." What does this mean? It sounds quite like something I would hear from Kevin Bird. I think there is definitely a lot of cognitive bias on this topic, just like the black white IQ gap, but even more than the latter, as many people who understand the IQ gap fail to reason appropriately from the evidence here.
Political affiliation is often confounded with ethnicity. If I did a comparative study of "Democrats" and "Republicans," I would find significant differences in behavior and mentality. And those differences would have a heritable component. Among other things, I would find that Republicanism is significantly associated with religiosity and long-term family stability.
Many of those differences, however, are better explained by ethnicity than by political affiliation. This is something we could argue back and forth without getting anywhere because the two factors are confounded. Often, the level of confounding is very high: many ethnic groups vote en bloc for the same party.
My priors aren't terribly interesting, but here goes.
Ancestry: English, some Irish
Religion: formerly United Church of Canada. I no longer feel comfortable in any church.
Politics: formerly NDP. I no longer feel comfortable in any party. I have voted ADQ, CAQ, and PPC.
Education: anthropology, with training in Marxism, neo-Marxism, and structuralism.
Research interests: gene-culture coevolution (I was introduced to it by Pierre van den Berghe), skin color, hair color, eye color, vitamin D metabolism, etc.
Fun Fact :
*Biden's father was 27 when he was born
*Trump's father was 41 when he was born
*Hitler's father was 52 when he was born
*Stalin's father was 28 when he was born
Without dismissing your thesis entirely, I think Matt was recently good enough to publish an extensive piece by Arctotherium on the topic of several well-documented "mind virus" effects, including some driving society in a leftward direction.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/mind-viruses
These won't show up as shared-environmental factors in long-term heritability estimates because the cultural effects are not localised at the household level but roll out across entire nations almost simultaneously. Everyone "catches the bug" within a couple of years. In principle it would be rather similar to the Flynn Effect not substantially affecting the high heritability and low common-environment of IQ when looking *within* a given age cohort, despite Flynn Effect gains *across* age cohorts being enormous.
It's also worth noting that religious identity is almost entirely inherited from parents through vertical cultural transmission, and given the often-noted similarities between wokeness and a religious memeplex it would be very strange if nothing similar were happening there, though perhaps a 'religion' as novel and rapidly-mutating as wokeness operates differently.
That arctotherium article was really bad, none of the evidence really showed anything and his rhetoric was way over the top confident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFxsig1ZlG8
Religious identity is shared env linked but general religiosity is not. Most religions encourage very similar sets of behaviors, so it's kind of just a chance of birth as to which one you attach to if you like those behaviors. But if you're not high religiosity, you just become an atheist. It's most likely like this with leftism. Party lines definitely spread environmentally, but the underlying care for them is genetic.
Flynn effect runs contrary to the expected genetic decline of IQ and a large part of it can be explained by more schooling, which increases IQ by up to 0.33 SDs per year (though this is not "on g", it doesn't really increase human capital, it just makes people better at tests). Another thing is nutrition, like height, may have been increasing brain size. So we have good candidates for what causes the Flynn effect and a definite need to find something to explain the Flynn effect.
Meanwhile in leftism, there is hardly any response to schooling or nutrition so these can't explain a big trend. Also, the mutational pressure is exactly as predicted, so there is no evidence of a leftist Flynn effect. So ultimately, you argument is not theoretically unsound but it's definitely out of nowhere and there's no evidence for it. The most parsimonious view is that leftism is just genetic. You need to find some powerful memes or something to cast doubt on this -- should not be too hard, this lends itself to laboratory experiment unlike genetics, because you can expose people to ideas in a lab. But yet nobody has done this, because memetics is not a serious idea, it's more of blank slatist cudgel.
That... video is almost 4 hours long. Could you point me to a specific timestamp or give me the cliff notes version?
I would also like to see the source for education increasing IQ by 0.33 SDs per year, because twin/adoption studies *do* appear to indicate moderate shared-environment effects on educational attainment and it is hard to see how such an enormous effect size would not translate into shared-environment effects on adult IQ. But I guess that's another discussion.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618774253
"Genetics is the much stronger factor in human behavior, in basically all domains."
I agree. This is a contentious idea, but I believe it is true. An article on Aporia released just before this on free will vs determinism (genetics) is interesting.
Your argument about the lack of control of the father's socio-economic class sounds reasonable.
But the fact that it is impossible to combine leftism from the past and modern is absurd. The fact that your father personally was not so much radicalized does not mean that leftism in general is not associated with support for the BLM. Strictly speaking, there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-racist ideas of racial justice against the "oppressive" system of white racism.
The standard left-wing radicals of the past, represented by the early Bolsheviks, even in matters of ethnic politics, differed little from modern SJW activists. They pursued an ethnic anti-Russian policy in the same way as the modern left-wing anti-white:
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1485262657431212042
(Putin said this in an interview with Tucker: from Putin's point of view, if tsarist Russia had survived, it would literally have culturally "eaten" Ukraine and everyone there would have spoken Russian, lived in the Russian monarchy and considered themselves Russians)
Only then did the USSR lose its own ideological essence, one could say that there were more real Marxists in France or the USA in the 1980s than in the entire USSR.
I do not know how your father thought, but I live in Russia and there are many old people with economically socialist sympathies here. The problem is that they cannot be called full-fledged leftists - they are socially conservative, and in terms of economics they are not worried about egalitarianism and class equality, but hatred of oligarchs for their alleged corruption and the possibility of personal enrichment at the expense of a generous state. This cannot be called leftist, egalitarian views, like those of real socialists. In fact, these same old people preferred capitalism in the 1980s, but became disillusioned because of the 1990s.
"there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-racist ideas of racial justice against the "oppressive" system of white racism."
My father was a leftist but he never used the word "racism." Keep in mind that this word didn't enter normal discourse until the 1960s, during which my father turned fifty (I guess that makes me a prime candidate for paternal age degeneracy — he was 46 when I was born). At that time, in Canada, both the Left and the Right had been converted to the belief that all human populations are essentially the same. In fact, it was the Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker that moved Canada to a policy of global immigration:
"In 1962, Diefenbaker's government eliminated racial discrimination in immigration policy. In foreign policy, his stance against apartheid helped secure the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth of Nations"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Diefenbaker
For most Canadians, like my parents, antiracism was something remote and theoretical. Canada was over 95% white, and most "non-whites" were so mixed that they didn't look much different from us. Until the 1970s, and even beyond in some places, the dominant sources of social conflict were language and religion.
I think of the Canadian Conservatives the same way as the British ones - it's a joke, a meme. Conservatives who defend immigration and fierce opposition to South Africa are not conservatives in fact, they are a kind of "conservative" Angela Merkel by party affiliation.
If your father was 50 years old in the 1960s, then he was simply too old to be radicalized to the left in accordance with the "progressive movement." My grandfather here in Russia was sympathetic to the local "communist" party - but I understand that relying on his example in a general analysis of leftism would be stupid.
I understand what you mean - but then questions similar to anti-capitalism and anti-racism can be extrapolated to questions of religion and language. I'm not that knowledgeable about Canadian politics, but it seems that you had the Canadian-English right-wing forces advocating a common British imperial identity and the dominance of the English language - against the leftists from Quebec (French-speaking). In these circumstances, the English-speaking Canadian leftist who speaks out against his English compatriots and against the "identity of British imperialism" would be most similar to the modern left.
One can argue that antiracism has its roots in anticlassism, but the latter was not fundamentally a Marxist project. It began as a project of liberals in the 18th and 19th centuries who wished to do away with the old class system and create a society of self-maximizing individuals. Marxism arose, in part, as a critique of that project, i.e., the dissolution of the old class system had paved the way for the emergence of a new dominant class and new relationships of domination and exploitation.
In some ways, the new dominant class is worse than the old one because the latter did feel a long-term responsibility for maintaining the social and material conditions that make a functioning economy possible. The capitalist class lives essentially for its own interests within a narrow time frame (no more than 30 years into the future).
Historically, the Canadian center-left was not anti-British. It was anti-imperialist. It felt that Great Britain had taken a wrong turn by annexing India and taking part in the scramble for Africa. This imperialism was at best an exercise in vanity and at worst a tyrannical and unsustainable domination of foreign peoples. Sooner or later, the Indians and the Africans would chase the British out.
Unfortunately, English Canadians became seduced by the mystique of Empire, and we never stopped to think about its sustainability. It would have been far better to have a small empire, which could develop as a British civilization, than a big empire that would inevitably collapse.
Marxism and National Question(1913) written by Stalin
"" We shall not stop to discuss again national-cultural autonomy in general; we have already spoken of its objectionable character. We should like to point out only that, while being unsuitable in general, cultural-national autonomy is also meaningless and nonsensical in relation to Caucasian conditions.
And for the following reason:
Cultural-national autonomy presumes more or less developed nationalities, with a developed culture and literature. Failing these conditions, autonomy loses all sense and becomes an absurdity. But in the Caucasus there are a number of nationalities each possessing a primitive culture, a separate language, but without its own literature; nationalities, moreover, which are in a state of transition, partly becoming assimilated and partly continuing to develop. How is cultural-national autonomy to be applied to them? What is to be done with such nationalities? How are they to be "organized" into separate cultural-national unions, as is undoubtedly implied by cultural-national autonomy?
What is to be done with the Mingrelians, the Abkhasians, the Adjarians, the Svanetians, the Lesghians, and so on, who speak different languages but do not possess a literature of their own? To what nations are they to be attached? Can they be "organized" into national unions? Around what "cultural affairs" are they to be "organized"?
What is to be done with the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are becoming assimilated (but are as yet by no means wholly assimilated) by the Georgians, while the Cis-Caucasian Ossetians are partly being assimilated by the Russians and partly continuing to develop and are creating their own literature? How are they to be "organized" into a single national union?
To what national union should one attach the Adjarians, who speak the Georgian language, but whose culture is Turkish and who profess the religion of Islam? Shall they be "organized" separately from the Georgians with regard to religious affairs and together with the Georgians with regard to other cultural affairs? And what about the Kobuletians, the Ingushes, the Inghilois?
What kind of autonomy is that which excludes a whole number of nationalities from the list?
No, that is not a solution of the national question, but the fruit of idle fancy.""
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#n6
-Lenin was actually kind of pro-assimilation. He praised USA for that in his book named 《critical remarks on national》
*
Russia in general, and the Bundists in particular, who vociferate most about Russian orthodox Marxists being “assimilators”. And yet, as the afore-mentioned figures show, out of the ten and a half million Jews all over the world, about half that number live in the civilised world, where conditions favouring “assimilation” are strongest, whereas the unhappy, down trodden, disfranchised Jews in Russia and Galicia, who are crushed under the heel of the Purishkeviches (Russian and Polish), live where conditions for “assimilation” least prevail, where there Is most segregation, and even a “Pale of Settlement”,[1] a numerus clausus[2] and other charming features of the Purishkevich regime.
*It is that only Jewish reactionary philistines, who want to turn hack the wheel of history, and make it proceed, not from the conditions prevailing in Russia and Galicia to those prevailing in Paris and New York, but in the reverse direction—only they can clamour against “assimilation”.
*Even if we assume that, in time, there will be a state frontier between Great Russia and the Ukraine, the historically progressive nature of the “assimilation” of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers will be as undoubted as the progressive nature of the grinding down of nations in America
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/3.htm#v20pp72-027
This logic can be apply every case
" there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-semitic ideas of gentile justice against the "oppressive" system of jewish
racism."
Or libertarianism:
" there is no fundamental difference between believing in anti-capitalist ideas of class equality against the "oppressive" system of capitalism and believing in anti-government ideas of liberal justice against the "oppressive" system of state."
Leftism is human, conservatism is beastly
What is the most obvious distinction between animals and humans? I would argue that it's the ability to override one's instincts when all the facts demand it. A chihuahua isn't fundamentally incapable of understanding that bigger is stronger; but it must bark at that bear anyway. As long as it can count on the protection of even stronger creatures (humans with their guns or spears); it is an evolutionary winner. But if man were to disappear tomorrow it would immediately go extinct.
Conservatism is a looser because, even when it has the facts on it's side it refuses to argue them. Why, argue, when you can just declare 'but this is how we do things, we are in power'. But of course, when you loose power it then inevitably it becomes 'just accept all your enemies premises and hypocritically betray them while pretending you don't know what you're doing'. Trump attacks Hillary and Biden as anti-black racists for using the words 'super-predators'; yet there is no doubt that he would respond differently if he saw a group of black males in a dark alley as opposed to one of whites. Trump, like his followers - doesn't think before he acts. He just has good instincts, but he might as well be a dog. By conceding that one shouldn't design policy on the basis of base rates, or worse that every policy that disproportionately affects blacks must be illegitimate he writes a promissory note condemning his civilization to barbarism.
Why? well here's the problem with conceding to a false argument, and then just insolating yourself from it's consequences through hypocrisy. You know who is most susceptible to arguments about rejecting instinct? The people smart enough to benefit regularly from doing so. The people who thought, 'hey why can't man fly like the birds' and made fortunes making it so. And so, in accepting stupid premises while avoiding the costs through the defensive stupidity in which you say A and reject B, despite the fact that A directly demands B --- You doom your society forever.
Conservatives avoid actual personal conflict on every issue. Should most women get the vote?
Actual argument against: Women are a standard deviation worse than men on water-level tasks; which stand in for an understanding of [physical reality] generally. This leads predictably to them opposing scientific progress, as when you cannot understand something - the reasonable heuristic is simply to reject it (see polling on Nuclear power). This is fatal to a functioning civilized society. A purely [social reality] understanding of the world, in which women excel - while valuable is resolutely inferior not merely in terms of the things that mainly men are obsessed with [rockets!] but also the things that women care about [40% of your kids not dying from disease before they turn 20]. Since the handicap of a poor grasp of social reality is obviously superior to a poor grasp of physical reality in the construction of society - most women should not vote.
Conservative argument: Paul, writing 1900+ years ago said some shit about how women shouldn't talk in church and men should be heads of their households.
Response: Wait, you don't let women talk in church, seems kind of pointlessly mean? I mean, even the greatest sexist has to admit women occasionally make decent points?
Conservative argument: Oh, no we do; but it communicates the general spirit of things... [the three dots stand in for a mountain-load of bullshit obfuscation.]
Result: All women get the right to vote.
Run this kind of stupid argument for every issue in existence and you see how we got here. Conservatives declare that race isn't relevant and all races are obviously equal and so, since Americans would happily ignore immigration laws to accept suffering Brits - surprise, surprise - the logical conclusion is: "Flood the country with Indian South Americans and Haitians, what could go wrong!"
Over and over and over again. Every single critical norm of civilization, every single basic instinct that makes us human; defended only by hypocrisy - till every person with functioning braincells either defects to insane but consistent theoryland, or simply cannot muster the willpower to defend such beasts from the death warrant they signed.
Great analysis. We now seem locked in to several of these death spirals. Women asserting control, ignoring race and the harsh effects of this, and I would argue innumerate monetary and economic policies. They can of course feed off one another, with women and minorities voting for more government.
What changes it? I joke to people only a bracing collapse can change things now. When you mention these issues about female perception and voting patterns it is universally rejected in the West yet it is only countries where women are basically kept under control that are surviving.
"What is the most obvious distinction between animals and humans? I would argue that it's the ability to override one's instincts when all the facts demand it."
I would argue that the most significant distinction between animals and humans is intelligence.
" You know who is most susceptible to arguments about rejecting instinct? The people smart enough to benefit regularly from doing so. The people who thought, 'hey why can't man fly like the birds' and made fortunes making it so. And so, in accepting stupid premises while avoiding the costs through the defensive stupidity in which you say A and reject B, despite the fact that A directly demands B --- You doom your society forever."
- I suppose I should clarify why loosing nearly all of these people - guarantees the death of a movement. The reason is as follows; Even beasts yield in the face of concrete demonstrated results. The average dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, even though it lacks any understanding for why he brings it to a random room where weird creatures stab at it (the vet).
This is one of it's instincts, yielding to undisputed authority.
When nearly everyone that does something great is a Leftie, Lefties ARE THE UNDISPUTED AUTHORITY! They've been so, for decades. The Fascists* were the the only ones that actually challenged this, and they did so by laying out explicitly A - B - C; You cannot win without a coherent ideology, for only coherent ideologies attract the human capital you need to win.
* Unfortunately their reasoning was largely but not entirely wrong.
It is odd that an attack on leftism starts with a genuine revolution that was both necessary and started by normal people who couldn’t be subject to the deleterious genes.
Personally I think most woke ideologies are antagonistic to investigating real power.
The number of people declaring themselves LGBT is more easily explained by the T. Just declare yourself gender non conforming and you’re done. I saw an article once about a bbc writer who was a trans woman married to a trans man. Basically a biological man married to a woman. Or straight, in old money. There’s no skin in the game; in the past to declare yourself bisexual involved actual bisexual relations, now you can be a man but also gender fluid and thus gay on the days you are sleeping with your girlfriend while feeling like a woman.
This study below on twins (limited samples and all that but still interesting) showed that genetics only begin to have an influence around the age of 21 year. And ONLY when subjects left their parental home:
Disucssion:
'The onset of genetic influences at young adult-hood, however, challenges conclusions drawn from theexisting literature. Our analyses suggest that the onsetof genetic influence occurring at about ages 21–25 arerooted in life cycle changes from leaving the parentalhome. There was no evidence of genetic influences onthe attitudes of twins still living with their parents atages 21–25; only twins who no longer shared the par-ental home showed strong evidence of genetic influ-ences on this index of liberal-conservative attitudes'.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231829764_Genetic_and_Environmental_Transmission_of_Political_Attitudes_Over_a_Life_Time
And that immediately has you think about US adolescents no longer leaving their parental homes at an early age since the gfc...
While recently in western Europe in many cities the pressure (native high incomes, immigration, refugees, foreign students) on an insuffuent supply of (cheap enough) housing is showing the same pattern.
And students' parents are not seldomly progressive gen x-ers and early millennials...
Very interesting. Thanks for bringing up this study.
The recent dramatic turn in major democracies of women's political orientation to the left compared with men's political orientation seems problematic for the mutational load hypothesis. Why should such an issue be so strongly sex linked? Mind you, men have other problems.
Allowing women and men choice on the breeding front is going to create a very strong selection pressure against gays and secondarily lesbians, as they have far fewer children than hetero couples. You should see dramatic reductions in prevalence within a few generations.
a constant offset for women is no problem for ML theory, this exists for many traits like height and IQ. The divergence chart you're referring to, I think was fake. Better data did not replicate it
What better data would you put forward to indicate a lack of sex-based divergence in political outlook? Anecdotally it seems to apply in my own experience.
if you check my twitter I retweeted a data set where it didn't replicate
Political ideology is weakly correlated with paternal age. Most disabled and low income people are Republicans/Conservatives. The memetic equation is laughable. No controls for intensity or diagnosis. I don’t doubt that mutational load is a thing, but to claim it explains a sufficient amount of even small scale changes in polity is ridiculous.
To the disciples of this theory - answer why do Jews in Israel who have a higher mutational load and who have children at a higher age become more right wing overtime?
Don’t think this should have been published.
"Most disabled and low income people are Republicans/Conservatives."
Where did you get that data?
https://x.com/BronskiJoseph/status/1757877349738004703?s=20
Great article, though i suppose i didn't need to hear a introduction to what other thinkers argued before per say.
The problem of us arguing about the man sowing seeds alone at minimum and never looking to the soil is quite a good way of putting it.
Whats more that soil was worked, that is too say like industrialism is the plough to the field that makes it increase these seeds growth rate.
We developed prosperity without ever asking what lead to the capacity to develop said prosperity to begin with in our times of poverty and never questioned how we could thereby destroy that very creation process from its roots.
Were you to read further into the paternal age at conception, you would also see significant defects which arise in a specific neural system These genetic changes can make a brain receptor (NMDA receptor) react abnormally, disrupting the normal processing of information and the brain’s ability to change and adapt.
Psychologically, this means the brain has trouble filtering and prioritizing information. This can result in the brain making mistakes in interpreting what’s important, leading to symptoms like hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there) and delusions (strong beliefs in things that aren’t true).
In pathological forms it is simply schizophrenia, or autism; generally in means those afflicted will not abandon prior beliefs at a subconscious level even when presented with indisputable facts.
It’s interesting that you place this well-observed phenomenon into this context, ultimately a version of the “postmodern” nothing is real paranoid delusion.
Very dense reading but a deft connection between the paternal age at conception observation and dysregulated cognitive activity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5147460/
I, like a lot of people, was a leftist until the past several years, during which I have shifted steadily rightward (I’m 42 years old now). This rightward shift was due to the increasingly apparent insanity and authoritarianism of other leftists and exposure to right wing ideas while trying to figure out WTF is wrong with these people.
Did the millions (?) of us in the West who have undergone this political transformation in the past several years suffer some sort of genetic mutation? Is the red pill a gene therapy? Does 5G cause right wingedness? How about SARS-cov-2 or associated “vaccines”?
This is obviously tongue in cheek, but the widespread shifts in political beliefs a lot of us have experienced recently seems to undermine the genetic hypothesis. This shift was clearly caused by sociocultural factors and exposure/increased susceptibility to new (for us) ideas.
Also, I was previously a leftist because literally everyone I knew was a leftist. Parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, friends, classmates, etc. All leftists. And why were they all leftists? Well, because literally everyone THEY knew was a leftist. This seems to me quite a bit like more of a cultural phenomenon than a genetic one. Unless coastal cities cause the leftist mutation.
I know you have fancy charts and analyses to “prove” me wrong, but when something is this bloody obvious, I’m disinclined to “follow the Science.”
I think many are leftists for two reasons. Most left ideas are emotionally pleasing. Raise minimum wage, for example. What a lovely idea. Make the poor better off. It ignores the complexities of the topic to focus on the emotion.
The second factor is insulation from consequences. Supporting minimum wages is much easier if you are not an employer. If you run a small cafe you may realize the legislation will mean you have to lay off some staff.
For me Covid made consequences concrete for many. Government lying. The media refusing to do even basic investigation and printing government press releases. The army of celebrities giving medical advice. The absurdity of watching politicians on TV every night talking nonsense. Being told a deadly pandemic means we must lockdowm but almost no one was dying.
I think leftism is a luxury and sometimes life is not conducive to luxury beliefs. Being in a war where the enemy is trying to kill you, for example. It is kill or be killed. There is no space for niceties.
That's all it is. No one bothers about all this when life is hard.
Those two factors are essentially one - leftism depends on blindness to negative externalities. Leftist ideas are emotionally pleasing because they presume there are no tradeoffs for policies like raising the minimum wage, welfare, free healthcare, unfettered immigration, etc. For this fantasy to persist, the leftist must be prevented from seeing the negative externalities. Otherwise, they get "mugged by reality," as the saying goes. The reality of Covid policies mugged a lot of people. It took an extremely deluded mind (unfortunately not a rare thing) to ignore the severe harms being caused by lockdowns, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, school closures, etc., in the name of "saving lives."
So your observation of this basic feature of leftism is correct. However, I don't think this feature is the underlying cause of leftist thinking. It is hard to argue historically that leftism is a "luxury" belief system. Most of the Bolshevik, Maoist, Cuban, and Khmer Rouge revolutionaries were hardly suburban soccer moms. People with hard lives living in hard times can also be sold a bill of leftist goods.
Leftism is basically a virus. There are individuals and communities who have developed immunity through experience and/or sound education and values. There are other individuals and communities that are "immunocompromised." Under certain conditions, which can range from conditions of decadence to conditions of hardship, a pandemic of leftism can arise. Coastal urban and suburban America is presently suffering from a pandemic of leftism. In short, leftism is a contagious mind virus, the evolutionary success of which depends on prevailing environmental conditions in a given time and place.
Maybe there's some small genetic component to this, but genes seems to be a pretty weak explanation when looking at the big picture.
I can't disagree with your points. It is probably more like a virus or infection than anything, including luxury beliefs. You are correct, some cases where it arises are in populations experiencing hardship.
Perhaps the link is fantasy. The poor dreaming of a better life under socialism, perhaps nudged by the intelligentsia. The middle classes living in fantasyland imagining utopian ideas like net zero.
Each group is removed from reality to some extent. We can certainly witness those most embedded in reality seem to resist.
1. you are probably still a leftist.
2. information exposure explains 10-20% of variance in leftism, while genes explain 60-70%. So some people can show some response to information exposure.
Well, that's an idea that came out of left-field. What an interesting idea! Even so, in the comments section Peter Frost has made what look to me like some very good points. If only I were cleverer I might be able to adjudicate who is right but as it is I'll just have to wait until the whole thing has been dissected by someone I have come to trust.
The best critique I read is:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/against-the-mutational-load-hypothesis
Yes, a good link at the very limit of my ability to understand. It seems that Peter Frost was indeed right and mutational load doesn't explain the steady leftward drift of our societies. This being the case makes me question Ed Dutton, who I also follow. He is very big on the idea that leftists are 'spiteful mutants'.
It's likely that dysgenic decay is playing *some* role with regard to the leftward drift of politics, but I don't think dysgenics accounts for most of the cultural shift and I don't think mutations account for most dysgenic decay in the present era.
If you combine fertility data with heritability estimates for IQ then we're probably losing something like 3-5 IQ points per century at a genotypic level (which up until recently was completely swamped by phenotypic Flynn Effect gains on most subtests, with some prominent exceptions, such as vocabulary and reaction times. Cue usual discussion about how much of the FE is real.)
3-5 points per century doesn't sound like a particular reason to panic immediately, but obviously it's not sustainable, and there are reasons to be more concerned about it than you might think at first glance. (1) Small changes on the average become large changes at the extremes (fewer geniuses, more mental disabilities, etc.) (2) the effect doesn't just apply to IQ, but probably other traits like mental and physical health as well, (3) this only applies to fertility estimates *within* racial groups- If HBD is correct, then decay could be significantly faster when you compare cross-racial fertility and don't get partly rescued by regression-to-the-mean effects, and (4) the effects will be most concentrated in the youngest age groups we most rely on for labour and innovation.
You add all that together and I'd rank dysgenics somewhat higher than something like anthropogenic climate change/fossil fuel dependency in terms of civilisational impact.
That all makes sense. What I didn't get was why regression to the mean in cross-racial relationships might rescue us a little. Do you mean regression to our mean (white), their mean (black/brown) or both? Isn't that assuming that the mean in the population at large is higher than that of the couple. Why would that be the case?
Yeah, I wasn't terribly clear there- what I meant is that since racial groups regress to different means for IQ (and possibly other consequential traits), the impact of low-IQ white individuals having high fertility is less severe than, e.g, low-IQ black individuals having high fertility. The kids of 85-IQ white parents will regress about halfway to the white mean of 100 (i.e, average 92), whereas the kids of 85-IQ blacks stay at 85, on average, since that's the norm for their genetic lineage (or at least it's observably compatible with HBD.) So if dysgenic fertility WRT intelligence is occurring in part due to racial differences in fertility, you can expect the intelligence decline to be both more rapid and harder to reverse.
Yep, I get it now.
I think Cofnas is right that mind virus theory is lacking and blank slatist, but I'm not sure about his strategy. In my opinion there's another sociobiological factor and that's the increase of female leadership - combined with personality and behavior differences between the sexes. It explains a lot about what Rufo and other think is a mind virus but is talked about the least comparatively.
This sounds like a Western phenomenon, for surely its not wokism or leftism that is endemic to the middle east.
i guess maybe thats because they were not subjected to the relaxed selection pressures induced by the industrial revolution as long as we westerners were
Not yet. All evidence suggests woke and leftism will have a harsher effect on Muslim populations. They have no immunity. We seem to have a hardcore of about 30 percent who don't succumb.
I see others discussing this online. Female Muslims have most to gain from feminism for example, even though it will more or less end their culture.
Here in the UK I know Muslim men under pressure to put their wife's name on title deeds for their house. Not done in Islam but common here. A tiny thing but I do wonder how the third worlders will survive contact with the insane west.
Birthrates have actually been dropping prodigiously across much of the MENA region, even in countries we consider bastions of Islamic conservatism, such as Iran (TFR 1.7). Whether that's entirely due to feminism or urbanisation or something else is up for debate, but yes, it does seem that a lot of western insanity has been transmitted in their direction.
I wonder if Bronski would explain this as a function of mutation rates.
I am aware of this too. One to watch it the Taliban have rewarded their loyal men with Western smartphones. If we consider current western liberal values to be a virus how long can the Taliban last? All that porn. Plus western degeneracy is slick in its presentation.
It is also another reason mass immigration is a farce. Most areas are seeing declining birthrates.
I agree that mass migration appears to be a global demographic Ponzi scheme, even if you discount HBD entirely.
It is certainly possible that those who control the United States are using propaganda to promote leftism to disrupt our society.
Liberalism is the new religion. Christianity without Christ. That's why they fly rainbow flags on embassies. This is their belief system.
Everyone is the same, all disparities are sexism, racism, hate etc. These just be actively fixed. Everyone must be controlled through surveillance. Finally disinformation must be stopped.
This will be our future if we don't wake up.
"This will be our future if we don't wake up."
I am not a religious person, but I agree.
Is this "mutation load" de novo mutations that are leading to low fitness phenotypes?
...or are these hereditary mutations that are being selected for?
If the latter... then why wouldnt this change just be considered normal evolution?
I can also see conservative men delaying children to accumulate resources to gain better mate options. Not everyone is giddy and stupid about women.
Indeed this is now standard red pill advice for young men. In your 20s you'll struggle with women because you lack the things women like. Resources, status, confidence. So spend your 20s working on your body, career and maturity. Men can pick younger brides etc.
This is good advice and quite consistent with conservative thought.
It does seem rather hard to distinguish higher paternal age from lower time preference, which would be considered broadly adaptive/pro-civilisation in any other context. I personally don't think the mutational headwind could be this strong and still allow purifying selection to make much headway.
It all seems suspect to me. Low preference men would stand a chance of attracting better mates because women notice accumulated resources and value them.
I believe the studies that Bronksi is linking to are discussing de-novo mutations that increase with paternal age, not inherited genetic variation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5056704/
Aren't there like 6 base pair denovo mutations (even in high paternal age parents)?
Seems like that would not result in complex behavioral changes.
...I think the explanation for this phenomenon has more to do with "an environment of prosperity"
Left Wing genes proliferate in an an environment of abundance....Right Wing genes proliferate in an environment of scarcity.
What we are experiencing is downstream consequences of post WW2 prosperity in the US....this is selecting for left wing phenotypes.
Makes no difference how the mutations arrise...the genotype is always mutating. What matters is why the environment is favoring left wing mutants of right wing mutants.
I think the average is something like 7 germline mutations per generation in protein-coding regions of the genome, yes, and it does seem unlikely this could have large dysgenic effects. I've been trying to find good study estimates for the fitness impact of deleterious mutations in complex organisms but really I haven't found anything persuasive so far.
what are the conditions A to H?