Civilizational Darwinism

Breed, or Die

It’s remarkable that so many people in the West support the current bureaucratic orthodox values (postmodern feminism being one obvious example) while simultaneously seeming to forget that such values disappear if they’re not reproduced and defended. That project begins with the bearing and raising of children. This is a conversation that most people simply are not having today. In fact, our leaders generally refuse to acknowledge the problem at all. The trends are clear though.

Philosophical Immaturity

Many of the problems of our political discourse have the quality of a kind of philosophical immaturity. People who’ve never gained meaning from doing difficult things dismiss meritocracy and competition and challenge outright. All of the athletes and autodidacts and business owners and builders and soldiers who live their life by that creed celebrate their wins (and remember their past losses) but an increasingly large number of our citizens are born into safety and try to derive meaning from following rules and going to class and wresting some fulfillment from status hierarchies and credentials. They’re confused when the fulfillment isn’t forthcoming, and the next stop is often Pilates or therapy or psychotropic medication. People who’ve always had the luxury of a responsive and honest police force in their neighborhood take this priceless boon for granted, and many imagined that defunding police (a kind of puerile gesture of punishment and disapproval more than a policy recommendation) might improve society overall. People imagine that their ideological prejudices are a priori true, such that no amount of failure or contrary data in the real world can invalidate them. Many policymakers proceed on this assumption.

‘Diversity is our strength’ is the current Orwellian phrasing and so any amount of diversity (aside from viewpoint diversity) in any institution or city or country must be a net benefit, and no amount of sex crimes or apparent social mistrust or educational dysfunction can disabuse the believers of this notion. Diversity is their strength! How do they know this? They were told it, and the lesson was repeated thousands of times, and the believers developed within social/educational/professional environments where any dissenting opinion was so profoundly stigmatized for so long that they shaped their mind in accordance with social pressures. They learned to label any other perspective ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’ and to actively avoid considering or addressing them (preferring, instead of argument, to use ostracism and labelling and passive aggression). What’s worse: to suborn the rape of 1,000 girls… or to be ‘racist’? If we were talking about real racism-malignant and strictly defined-then such a question would never have to be asked, but of course in Great Britain it was answered, and ‘racism’ (really just opposition to modern bureaucratic status signals and political prerogatives) is worse, at least judging by the actions of the people in their institutions.

There’s one issue that’s more fundamental than all of these, though. It’s more important for national survival and cultural health, and it is almost never addressed in elite circles: the birthrate.

We in the West have been ascendant for so long (relative to our very narrow window of focus for regarding historical events) and feel so secure in our citadels of comfort that we forget: all of our values and ideas and institutions and policies will certainly collapse if adults in our society don’t have enough kids, and if those kids aren’t taught to cherish and maintain these things. The widespread attitude today seems to be that feminism (to take a prominent example-probably the cultural anchor point for our institutions, for better or worse) is so obviously righteous and admirable that it will kind of magically become the animating creed of all newcomers and will therefore be secure for generations. How could anyone not be a post-modern feminist? That is truly the attitude of many policymakers, and they hold it because they lack empathy. They can’t even understand the objections of their native-born male and working-class female populations to their ideas (because they never interact with these people). They certainly don’t understand the deeply felt objections to their ideas abroad. They know they exist, of course, but they imagine that educational grants and film awards and public schooling will smooth out to contradictions and dissolve all antagonism. After all, education and status signals worked to instill these ideas in them, didn’t they? The failure of this class is a failure to understand the ideas of others (because they constantly work to deny them and shield themselves from their true forms) and a failure to understand the risks and challenges of reality. Human nature, biology, scarcity, aggression, incentives-there is no social reality which is too fundamental to be denied by these ‘educated’ worker bees. Their entire lives have been lived in a bubble, but bubbles are fragile and impermanent.

Civilizational Darwinism

Kevin Dickinson:

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett famously described the theory [of evolution] as a “universal acid,” an idea so powerful that it “will eat through anything!” such that it cannot be contained. That life could result from a blind, algorithmic process doesn’t just reshape the field of biology. It dissolves those boundaries and seeps into our notions of ethics, creativity, psychology, cosmology, and human culture. It spreads to the very ideas of meaning and purpose. It leaves in its wake, as Dennett put it, “a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

Just as people react to incentives, and militaries rise and fall based upon the conditions of reality, and scarcity must be grappled with, civilizations must struggle constantly which each other to survive. The most important component of this struggle is the creation of new members. Some people will move and join and assimilate and convert, but the future strength of a civilization (any civilization) lies in its young. This is so blindingly obvious and truly undeniable that it seems astounding that it must be said, but aside from the familiar pablum (“the children are our future”) have you ever heard a policymaker, or a mainstream political leader, speak in these terms? People must have children, and those children must be taught the values which are crucial to a culture, so that they can teach them to their children, and so on. Every aspect of this process is now endangered. There are not enough children. They’re often not resilient or self-assured enough to internalize the lessons of the culture. The culture’s lessons are flawed. We’re trying to both teach children that our culture is righteous and proper, which is good, while also in many cases trying to instill doubt and shame in the culture’s history and place in the world. In terms of civilizational Darwinism this is a suicidal strategy, quite apart from the truth or falseness of the lessons. It’s counterproductive and it could only be the project of people who don’t understand the eternal struggle between groups and cultures. Civilizational adversaries are meanwhile celebrated. Their (massive) flaws aren’t advertised and discussed. This is a strategy so popular that it’s nearly universal in most of our socializing institutions.

It’s almost as if there’s an effort to lose the struggle of civilizations. The mysterious aspect of all this is that the believers in our civilization’s values seem to operate on the assumption that their cherished ideas have a place in a future where their culture has been roundly defeated. Is this what happens when people forget what defeat look like? If it’s just a matter of complacency and ignorance (which I suspect is most of the problem) then that situation will be rectified in time. Reality and nature are reliable teachers, but not gentle ones.

A Hypothetical

The falling birthrate (combined with waves of antisocial migration patterns) have a number of dark economic and social implications, but let’s apply it to our example: feminism. Imagine that Great Britain or Norway or Canada (all Western countries that have codified ‘diversity is strength’ and the faith articles of modern feminism into law and into their soft totalitarian value system, such that opposition is actively suppressed) continue to lose native-born population. The trends are only deepening with time. Where does this leave them in 30 years? 50?

Great Britain’s live births are distorted (for our purposes) by the highly disproportionate birthrate of non-English residents. The choice seems to have been made (secretly) to supplement (and supplant) the English population with migrants and their children. This policy choice has proven to be completely impervious to democratic influence or popular demand. The bureaucracy is pursuing its strategy, and elections are completely irrelevant to its execution.

What will be the implications?

This is an issue which cannot be openly spoken about in schools, agencies, speeches (for the most part) or research bodies, of course. That is the nature of modern managerial government: obvious risks and problems can’t be addressed, and so peripheral issues are exploded and narratives crafted to occupy the energies of policymakers, and to distract enough voters to keep the population divided and squabbling. Recently, a fictional Netflix series (about a white British 13-year old boy stabbing a classmate) became the cause du jour, even though there is no extant social problems of white, British teenage boys stabbing female classmates. The ‘manosphere’ (the clumsy focus of the film) and online ‘misogyny’ is a prominent enemy and target of the bureaucracy (which, again, embraces the mythos of postmodern feminism) and so that is the ‘issue’ that they will focus on. This kind of gleeful detachment from reality and mass participation by politicians, educators, journalists, etc. is surely a new phase in our political simulacrum. Real problems can’t be honestly discussed. Fictional ones are worthy of enormous national energy.

Let’s return to our hypothetical: feminism is the cultural template of the society but too few citizens bear and raise children. How does feminism (or any other foundational cultural value) survive in these conditions?

One might speculate that assimilating the newcomers and educating their children is the gameplan. There are decades to work with, after all, and there are already massive resources devoted to bolstering the feminist narrative and shoring up its institutional weak points (which are myriad) and suppressing its costs and denying its victims. Curiously this doesn’t seem to be the case though. Remember, the Netflix series and its attendant public hubbub wasn’t directed at immigrants or ethnic misogyny or the endemic sexism within the nation’s ghettoes. In fact, one finds again and again that these issues are studiously ignored. As far as the bureaucracy is concerned, they barely exist.

Conclusion

Which brings us full circle. If one wasn’t familiar with the operations of the bureaucracy it might seem almost unbelievable that policymakers might be ignoring declining birthrates and rising populations of anti-feminist alien migrant groups and refusing to try to moderate or reform these groups while proceeding on the belief that the feminist values of the succeeding generations can be taken for granted. But after studying these kinds of situations for years, I can easily believe it. In fact, this is a very familiar operating template for the managerial class: ignoring the obvious problems and avoiding the likely solutions while focusing enormous energies on non-problems and ‘solutions’ which solve nothing (and often make problems worse) is how the creature operates. The reasons for this (bureaucratic inertia, the desire to focus on unmeasurable and familiar issues, diffusion of responsibility and allergy to accountability, a general absence of personal incentives to act rationally or decisively within the system, to start with) are beyond the purview of this essay. There are many problems of this nature. To address crime, you should punish offenders with certain prison sentences. To address adolescent neurosis and psychological symptoms you should restrict their access to smart phones. To address educational failure, you should punish (and, if necessary, eliminate) disruptive students from the classroom. To address chronic illness you should encourage activity and social connection, etc. For more examples of this kind of thing, and a deeper dive into its dynamics, read Leviathan, my analysis of the modern managerial regime type.

Leviathan

To protect a society’s values, you should produce a sufficient number of children, and then teach those children your values, grounded in history and cultural/national identity. This requires a requisite family structure, confident educators, and a certain degree of unity and patriotism. It also requires cultural confidence.

The current regimes are ignoring the slow death of national childhood in their countries and are focusing instead on politically divisive ideas (which are more appealing to young women than to young men, immediately setting a massive share of your future work- and fighting force in opposition). They’re also encouraging a kind of passive cynicism. They are ignoring the ethnic and cultural counterweights to their values inside their borders (which grow every day, due to immigration and natural birth), yet they persist in the blissful certainty that their values will not just exist but be dominant generations hence.

The only explanation I can reasonably find for this childish self-assurance is immaturity-a deep ignorance about the way the world works and the challenges societies face. There are many educated people who imagine that, just because their ideas are currently institutionally fashionable and seem correct and worthy to them, they will flourish into the future. Civilization doesn’t work this way. Ideas are only as strong as the population that carries them, and these populations grow weaker every day.

You don’t have to understand or acknowledge concepts like civilizational Darwinism or cultural competition to be buried by them. They’re inexorable social laws, as certain as arithmetic. Denying reality will only get you so far, and we’re quickly reaching the terminus of this particular road. I wish I could warn the regimes, but of course they wouldn’t listen. They’re buoyed by self-righteousness and restrained by their ideological blinders… for a little while longer, anyway.

Thanks for reading.