“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist
Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?
I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.
Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:
The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.
The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations. It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were? In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.
I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.
Do these genes make me look fat?
How do I know this? The book in question is A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?
- Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results. (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me) After a bit, I finally found it.
- On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .
Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:
Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor. Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all? Guess you’d better start picking favorites. In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.
But this man clearly plays bass.
Why? The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever. Houses (if they even had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.
I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.” The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler: “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”
Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor. Great Britain was no exception. There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor. The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.
The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.
If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.
So, the poor don’t have as many kids. But the poor kids also die more often. This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy: the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up. Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.
While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close. It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows. Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life. And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless: marshmallows.
Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft. Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft. And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.
If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.
Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors. It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.
The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.
As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down. It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK). To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy. So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!
Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.
Here’s the 1994 US version of John’s UK thesis above. Download and read it before it’s excoriated as misinformation.
https://lesacreduprintemps19.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf
Oh, wait, it already is…
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong
IQ and the bell curve are proxies for proxies. Real proxies in both cases not same-gender-lovin’-fraudulent ones.
They’re the managerial caste cope for the gods of the copybook headings
Murray has a lot of important things to say, still.
“Those were his axe wives”.
I guess that gives a whole new meaning to the “Axe body spray” advertised on tv. The girls seemed to love it in the commercials and I always thought it was because of the great smell. But maybe it just got the excited because it signaled there was a new opening for the job of “queen”.
I think the most remarkable thing about John’s posts is that he has time to come up with all these puns whioe covering serious and deep topics regularly.
I do miss some sleep.
Ha! Love it!
I believe you are correct in that we are becoming dumber as our society has become easier. I read “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene and one thing that stood out for me was the advancements made prior to the 20th century and how young the scientists were that devised the theories that formed modern science. Along with that was how young the founding fathers were and how educated they were. Somewhere along the line we have given up curiosity and scientific drive for beer and bikinis. It’s probably more fun now but truly groundbreaking advancements are probably fewer and farther between.
And we ended up with a Washington, a Franklin, and a Jefferson all in a country of two million people or so.
“given up curiosity and scientific drive for beer and bikinis”
If only. We’re not allowed to enjoy either beer or bikinis. We gave up creativity and drive and excellence in the name of “fairness” and “equity” and “sensitivity”. Only the world is now actually less fair, equitable, and sensitive. Because those words were abused as stalking horses to create today’s world, which is focused on what really motivates Our Betters: resentment, paranoia, neuroticism, and envy.
Well God never wanted people to live in cities, or even towns.
After a while the first city (w/suburbs) was built, whose purpose was to globalize humanity and overthrow heaven. Globalize turned out to mean enslave and heaven turned out to be unamused.
That is an interesting claim. Which God was it? How did he/she/it define city and town? Why did said God forbid it?
Links to archive.org are fine. Not asking you to write an essay.
Go away junior.
Back to monkee? Perhaps.
What’s that line about, “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it?”
I’ve been saying we’re facing another dark ages for quite some time, and it’s depressing to see it happening. Post-modernists push for equality rather than excellence, and in the end that drives the market for Brawndo.
Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it.
EXACTLY. :-/
Yup, and I’ve been surprised at just how quickly Idiocracy started being a documentary . . . .
The Disenlightenment
All one has to do is to look at Gen Z. Boyd Cathey’s new article (“Purple Haired…”) at abbevilleinstitute.org is spot on. And sad.
The death spiral of diminishing IQ is the end of the West and is driven mostly by demographic change but also as noted by the dysgenic breeding of the dumb creating dumb offspring, not just the dumbest among Whites but also the added bonus of children from sharks of the muddy variety to accelerate the collapse.
Have you seen most mudsharks? Looks like removing their genes from our pool was a benefit to us.
I’m pretty sure a population bottleneck is coming soon, one way or another. Pretty sure it’s going to clean up a lot of the damage, but what comes out the other side is hard to guess.
Dollars to donuts you are wrong. Unfortunately this is an experience vs. theory phenomenon and the only text I know that crosses both is Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom.
In a better ordered world we’d be able to hash this out openly, but eh… Enemy occupied territory.
Give it a go. Dalrymple (Pray for him, I keep forgetting) is a brilliant writer. Very fun to read.
Demographic change is certainly part of it, but all the numbers are going down.
TL;DR answer:
Of course the quote was true.
Stupid used to hurt.
And some mistakes in life you didn’t get to make twice.
Because once upon a time (no, really, we’re not making this up) they used to execute thieves and punish the criminally stupid, rather than subsidizing them and their endless welfare-spawn families.
And… SHAZAAM!…less stupid people, over time, trending towards zero.
Especially 2-5 generations later.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Ah, for the Goode Olde Days.
https://i.imgur.com/ZUSCOQa.png
Not stupid. Unwise. As you know from the #clotshot people.
Ha! Perfect meme!
Theres even more to it than just the industrial revolution removing evolutionary pressures from the subtraction side of the equation. The industrial economy , ever more as technology ‘advanced’ , demanded more and more narrowly specialized obedient drones and fewer and fewer generalists capable of independent, rational, critical thought. Even beyond the cog-in-a-machine requirements of the production system, the pervasive conquest of every aspect of life by the machine demanded that kind of autistic-like specialized idiot behavior to just get along with the micromanaged existence inside machine civilization in general. And the machine, demanding this new kind of human, paid for and got it – a century of mandatory public ‘education’ ever more directed by those forces has now run five or six generations through the meat grinder. Even the lower-level elites get run through the meat grinder, like huxley’s betas and gammas or orwell’s outer party. the elites themselves have been so largely outsourced that they themselves also fell apart from lack of any pruning of the tree from fuckup or failure, as their specialized army of droids just kept the show rolling along. All of _this_ was made possible by the stupendous one-time bonanza of dirt cheap energy in the form of coal and oil which made it almost physically impossible to actually fuck up without deliberately jumping into an erupting volcano or something.
That seemingly limitless cheap energy (as well as other mineral resources, look at the ore qualities and mining/extraction/refining costs of metals over the past 200 years even _with_ improvements in mechanization) has been drying up and weve been going after lower and lower quality resources. The endless horizon is closing in and the ruling class has gone absolutely apeshit scrambling to pin down and grab anything they can as they have begun to develop a still dim and foggy understanding of the shit sandwich theyve gotten us all into. their psychopathy, inbred weakness of will and character, narcisissm, and so on, pretty much guarantee a maximally psychotic finale to this show. I honestly didnt think it would last this long but now seeing how it’s going, i fear it will take maybe even the better part of another generation to really crash and in the mean time we are already seeing horrors difficult to imagine for most anyone over 30.
the process is an accelerating one though, as more shit spins further out of control. so, being off by a decade or two in the ‘when’ doesnt really make a big difference, the crash has already been building for 50 years.
even a lot of psychopaths (including the ones who ruled the industrial empire since they climbed into the drivers seat by the first half of the 19th cent) will go for the easier path of just getting filthy rich by running the machine at full blast, instead of deliberately turning everything upside down just to throw a tantrum against god himself and his iron laws of physics.
At one time, those facing destruction from poverty, crime, crooked politics and disease had an escape in the United States. They moved west, took their chances, and decided death when trying to prosper was much better than death from living in the cesspools of society created in major communities. It created stronger people, and
their genes are slowly being diluted by decades of accepting a society that allows the powerful to subjugate the poor.
Ta-da! That’s how you get Brawndo.
If you do anyhing technical that is not software, you will know smart people are rare..two dei’s and an almost are running a lot of manufacturing programs
They are rare, and becoming rarer.
About that “marshmallow test”. Some people claim that it’s about having self-control and waiting for a greater reward. Other people see it as whether the child has developed enough trust in adults that they’re willing to wait, and not be humiliated when the adult comes back in, grabs the marshmallow, eats it, and say “Ha! What a chump!” Or, the adult comes back in with another child, and says “Now, we need to share this marshmallow. What about the other marshmallow? What other marshmallow?”
Lathechuck
Or it’s about really, really liking marshmallows?
A very similar book is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion
The wikipedia test for accuracy:
“Some reviewers considered that the book raised valuable questions but relied on discredited views. Others criticized it for oversimplifying history and reifying the concept of race.”
Yep, it passes.
Instead of being about cities, it was about farming. Basically, hunting/gathering doesn’t result in much population pressure for various reasons. But once farming kicks in, people reproduce far more yet the amount of land remains finite. Therefore those who are smarter and/or lower time preference tend to end up with land. I think this is the book that said the top 1/3 contributed about 2/3 of the next generation, which would lead over time to the poorest genetics disappearing.
It also pointed out the heresy that this would lead to races having different average IQs based upon how long ago they invented agriculture.
That 1/3:2/3 paradigm only lasts about two generations, then the poorest 2/3 get subsidized (due largely to soft-headed stupid people getting a vote), and the untermenschen start rapidly out-producing offspring compared to the upper 1/3. Two generations after that, the top 1/3 contribute almost no one to the next generation, while the bottom 2/3s have multiplied like rabbits without predators, leading to exactly the problems we have now.
This is the societal equivalent of taxing cats, and subsidizing rats.
As always, when Reality departs from the Model, it isn’t Reality that’s wrong.
The solution is to require that anyone voting for subsidies should be required by law to take in the objects of their pity for a minimum of 18 years, under their own roof, and within their own households.
This sufficiently wipes out the soft-headed stupid people in less than half that time, most people run from voting for subsidies like scalded cats once their actions have immediate consequences, subsidies go away in about 2 years, and civilization returns to a self-cleansing balance, with a harsh but necessary anti-stupidity feedback loop.
The other part of the solution is to stipulate that anyone receiving governmental largesse of any type forfeits any right to voting until they have been financially entirely self-sufficient for a minimum of 3 years.
Otherwise, the politician who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on getting Paul’s vote, i.e. the standard m.o. of the Dumbocrat Party for 150 years.
I do love the voting concept. Should be in the Constitution.
I bought that one and lost it somewhere in the house. I have kids, so it might be on Mars. I’ll give it another look.
That high time preference is the clue.
Replace smarts with wisdom and you’ve nailed it.
Different . . . but related. Wisdom needs cooking time.
I swear none of you understand what the Fox/dog Intelligent design programme revealed about evolution and what you are fondly calling “genes”.
Culture is harder to steer than genes. Genes are the easy part. We are both the fox/dogs and the Siberian exiles. Christ have mercy.
It’s funny to see you speak of Pa Wilder who apparently fought Nazis, in light of your endorsement of race-based theories of intelligence and culture.
And for anyone who likes Western Rifle Shooters, doesn’t it make you feel bad inside when he tells you that joooos dominate him and he’s helpless to do anything except post memes?
These easy times have eliminated the actual men from our society.