Hi everyone, sorry for neglecting the blog. I blame glycine: I'm the descendant of a long line of night-owls, but I'm able to sleep early now for the first time ever. Alas I've always been a late-night writer, and my healthy lifestyle was getting in the way of my blogging. Trade-offs. I should think of something.
Also apologies to my commenters: the comment notification system was broken so I had a backlog of unapproved comments: they're all online now.
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Years ago, back in the times before Bioleninism and all that, I made a name for myself in the intellectual parts of the right-wing blogosphere (≈neoreaction) in a large part because I was the best at categorizing the different strands of dissident thought. Back then I said there was by and large three different factions, the religious, the nationalist and the technological, what then Nick Land rebranded as the trichotomy of theonomist, ethno-nationalist and techno-commercialist.
That was 2013 though, and a lot has happened since. Most of it bad. Some good things too: Russia grew a spine, annexed Crimea and kicked USG out of Syria. China grew two spines, destroyed their liberal fifth-column, is forcibly assimilating their native muslims and is fast approaching military parity with USG.
And yes, Trump happened. That was fun. It unleashed a renaissance of right-wing memery. But Trump also failed to get anything done, he's likely to lose the next election, and now not even the memes are safe, as the CIA has co-opted 4chan talent for export, as seen in Pepe frogs in Hong Kong and Joker thots in Lebanon. Not cool.
https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1188656046220267520
I won't say that Trump killed neoreaction. It wasn't him. It was just time. 12 years have passed since Moldbug started blogging. Hell, 8 years have passed since I started this blog. Have things got any better? No, they're getting steadily worse. Politics is getting more toxic, with the NYT feeling so cocky they outright admitted the Deep State rules and there's nothing mere electoral politics can do about it. The culture is getting ever more toxic, with now even (ostensibly) straight males declaring their pronouns before talking. And most importantly, Demographics are getting worse, both in macro-HBD (race replacement) and micro-HBD (dysgenics within each race) terms.
https://twitter.com/Cicerone973/status/1144622840584572929
Follow this guy, by the way. If you ever have a good mood and feel optimistic he'll solve that for you fast. All he does is show birth rate data across the world. And it's not looking good. Not good at all.
Yes, I'm a demographic pessimist. I see the above figures and see how the Western world is slowly becoming Brazil, half white, half black. But Brazil itself is not stable; white people are having less babies than black people there. Brazil is slowly becoming something like South Africa, 10% white, 90% black. But again, South Africa is not stable itself, is it? Birth rates are different, and if that didn't suffice, blacks there are outright murdering white people and chasing them off the land. The actual endgame is actually worse than South Africa, which still has (people tell me) some very fine spots, such as Cape Town.
The end game is Haiti. 100% black, and arguably the nastiest, poorest, worst shithole on the face of earth. That's what we're facing if demographic trends keep worsening as they are.
"Oh come on", you may say. It's never going to get that bad. At some point demographic trends self-correct, right? Evolution will run its course. Leftists aren't having children, eventually the differential fertility of conservative people will make sure everyone is based and redpilled.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd be the pope. Yes, Catholics love this argument. Christians, more widely. They have sacrificed a lot to have children and stable families in this society which does everything it can to promote unhappiness and dysfunctional lifestyles. If there is a God, surely at least their sacrifices will win them the future of the species? History will talk about them as ancestors of the next stage of humanity. Right??
Wrong. I'm sorry guys, but evolution doesn't work like that. Yes, sure, evolution is about differential reproduction. Whatever genes make you have more babies in a given environment, spread in the genepool. And whatever genes do the opposite, make it marginally harder for you to reproduce, disappear from the genepool. So yes, on the face of it, "genes that make you want children" are by definition being promoted by natural selection. The argument, as explained by promoters such as Anatoly Karlin, is that humans until now have been fruitful and multiplied perfectly well through a basic motivation: seeking sexual pleasure. But that motivation doesn't work anymore in an environment with easy contraception, so the future belongs to people with psychological traits that make them enjoy family life.
Does it work like that, though? Are there any genes that "make you want children"? Does the brain work like that? The human brain is complicated, you see, but it is also an evolution of the more basic mammal brain, and its circuitry must follow roughly the same pathways. And last time I checked all mammals reproduce exactly the same way. The male produce quadrillions of sperm every minute, and are at the hunt of every ovulating female. The moment they find one they jump onto her, copulate semi-forcibly, and babies ensue. Yeah, this pretty much includes humans.
The idea that humans are going to single-handedly evolve, over single-digit generations, a completely different pattern of reproduction to replace one which has been functional for 60 million years strikes me as pretty wild wishful thinking. Not that it's not an interesting thought. Karlin himself recently linked to a post by a guy called Alexander Turok. The post is titled "The Age of Malthusian Industrialism", and man, that was interesting. I'm a fan of this sort of down-to-earth sci-fi. And while Turok's Malthdustrial world isn't very exciting, it surely is a productive line of speculation.
So Turok's idea is that if this idea of natural selection fixing the demographic problem by itself ends up working, eventually birth rates will rise above replacement, and so we will hit the carrying capacity of the planet at some point. So, Malthusianism. Too many people, the same amount of land, so people keep getting poorer and poorer. Go read Turok's post, he makes some interesting claims about how the economy and society would evolve. He puts very well how this future society will be made of dumber people than today.
If the primary reason fertility is low despite an abundance of resources is because people are trying to climb the latter of social status, trying to get more money and live in a better neighborhood, trying to attract the highest quality of mate, (or quantity of mates) then natural selection will act against those who play this game, promoting the genes of those who do not care about it or those too incompetent to play it well. Though the particularities of “the game” differ by culture, it can be recognizably found in many different cultures, and accounts for the fact that the correlation between fertility and intelligence is negative everywhere.
Supposedly though, at some point of impoverishment, the downward drift of average IQ would stop, as intelligence would begin to pay again. Without welfare and Bioleninist political machines with an incentive to bring ever stupider people into a country in order to lower the cost of clientelism, at some point the drift into Global Haiti ceases to function, and you get some sort of stable equilibrium of, say, 90-95 IQ people. Living in more or less permanent starvation wages and some sort of low-level medieval warfare.
Quite depressing, huh? Well remember, that's a best-case scenario. That's what happens if that Conservatives-inherit-the-earth mantra actually succeeds. Remember the trichotomy I mentioned at the beginning? Well the above scenario is what theonomists are for. They won't say it, they probably never thought it through that much. But that's undoubtedly what a Theonomist Revolution against progressivism would entail.
But again, this is a somewhat depressing but still acceptable scenario. This assumes most populations in the First World remain a less intelligent but still recognizable version of what they are today. History will go on, and perhaps with a downward IQ correction men will be men, women will be women, children will be children, and if you're into that, people will be more religious than today. Global Mexico, in a way. Well, what Mexico was before the Narcos took over. Theonomists would enjoy that world. Eth-nats... hey, they can secure a future for white children.
But again, I just don't see it. The Kuwaitis aren't very smart; their birth rate is in 1.6. The Arabs across Europe aren't replacing themselves. The Mexicans in the US are also below replacement! Even if, and this is a big if, there was some easily assemblable collection of genes by which people would love having children far above their love for playing status games in a modern society with Tinder and cheap contraception, odds are by the time those genes have starting to spread, in a few generations time, 90% of humanity is already African. And so, again, Global Haiti.
"But wait", you may also say. "Africans in the US aren't having that many babies either. Maybe the high-speed train of African fertility is stopped during this century, and after that evolution does have enough time, even if it takes thousands of years, for Malthdustrianism to happen". Well sure, that's a possibility. But why are so sure that those Malthdustrian genes will evolve at the same speed among all human populations? What if it's Africans the first to evolve the pattern of "reproducing by liking babies"? Which by the way sounds perfectly likely, if the arrow of natural selection is towards promoting "people too incompetent to play status games".
So that's it? Either Global Haiti or Global Mexico?
Well not quite. Tech-comms have something to say too. Humans aren't all dumb, not yet. What if there's a technological way out of the demographic crisis? Well, there kinda is. And it's a year old actually. Has everyone forgot about He Jiankui?
He’s still missing, by the way. Not arrested. Not detained. Not on trail. Just… disappeared. Somehow I don’t think he’s sitting idle in a room. China is not known for wasting scientific talent.
Genetic sequencing is advancing fast these years. Perhaps the only thing which is still progressing fast after computing’s Moore’s Law stopped working 10 years ago. We already know dozens of genes involved in increasing IQ, and we’ll sure know of hundreds, maybe thousands. It seems likely that within our lifetimes we’ll have the capability of safely increasing the IQ of IVF embryos by 10-20 points. Would you take that? Perhaps not. Would that Chinese Tiger Mom-in-becoming living across the street take the chance? Of course she will. Do you want your own kids to be the dumbest at class? I thought so.
The bottleneck here would be IVF, which is still a rather slow and ineffective process, although perhaps with some room for improvement. That bottleneck could be solved, though, with a technology which is still quite far away. Strangely so, given the obvious incentives to develop it in what is effectively a feminist world. Ectogenesis, i.e. artificial wombs. Don’t women complain about how unfair it is they get pregnant and lose all that time to build their careers, while men only bust a nut and keep climbing that dear corporate ladder? Fear no more, ladies. Just put your eggs in this machine, and 9 months later you’ll get your baby delivered to your home. Free delivery if you sign up for Amazon Prime.
If this is sounds like Brave New World, well yes, that’s pretty much what that was about. Aldous Huxley came from a long line of distinguished biologists and couldn’t see things like TV and computers coming. Eventually he got into drugs, but I’m sure he died still puzzled by why ectogenesis didn’t become a thing during his lifetime. It stands to reason that eventually it will. And once artificial wombs are reliable and affordable, in a world with CRISPR, you don’t really need families anymore. Anybody can ‘produce’ children, raise them in ‘villages’ (because it takes a village!) and just be done with the whole problem. Progressivism taken to its logical conclusion. It’s better conclusion, the way that progressives of the 1900s saw it, the production of a race of ever more rational and free humans. Yes, it's kinda messed up, but it has its logic. The twisted mechanics that led to our present Biological Leninist politics were, in the end, just the result of a lack of state authority. That may resolve itself quite soon. Again, with modern technology.
So yep, let me offer you a new Trichotomy. Global Haiti. Global Mexico. Or Brave New World. Pick your poison. I know mine.
