Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West, page 15
How was this state of affairs reached? As pack animals, we have two sets of “moral foundations.” On the one hand, we have to survive as a pack. Thus, we develop the binding moral foundations of in-group loyalty, obedience to authority and a sense that the group is “sacred,” with things that might endanger it evoking “disgust.” But each individual must also ascend the group hierarchy, which, at least in pre-industrial times, gave one the best chance of finding a mate and breeding. Thus, we also have individualizing moral foundations. These put the good of individual above that of the group. The values of this system are “harm avoidance” and “equality,” such that all “individuals” have a fair share. These moral foundations broadly map on to “liberalism” and “conservatism,” though with some nuances. Conservatives, for instance, are higher in generalized “disgust” but liberals are higher specifically in “moral disgust.” Conservatives score about the same in all five moral foundations. Liberals score very high in individualizing moral foundations but very low in binding foundations. The result is that conservatives often sympathize with liberals in a way that is not reciprocated.351 This allows liberals to hijack the culture and push it in an ever-more individualizing direction, until an extreme “evolutionary mismatch” (too many people feel a sense of chaos, for example) is reached, resulting in a “right-wing backlash” or a more catastrophic loss in the battle of group-selection, as the society is conquered or dissolves.
With the collapse of harsh Darwinian selection, including intense group selection, it is possible to have runaway individualism, at least once a critical mass of individualists is accumulated and people start to defected en mass to the up-and-coming way of seeing the world, which probably began in the 1960s. Having previously been selected to be group-oriented, rising mutational load will mean that people are increasing genetically individualistic. This will influence the culture, which will then start to gradually inculcate people into acting in more individualistic ways. With weakened group selection, there will be nothing to stand in the way of this process. Thus, more and more people will be more and more individualistic, until a tipping point is reached in which the whole society flips to being fundamentally concerned with “equality” and “harm avoidance.” Just as people once competed for status by signaling their binding moral foundations, people will now do so by signaling their commitment to “equality” and “harm avoidance.” Doing so is not inherently fitness-damaging, as we will see below. But two processes ensure that it is maladaptive: first, the presence of spiteful mutants, who conceive of toxic ideas and promote them; second, the arms-race of outdoing the neighbors is signaling your individualism. We have an evolved desire for status, and an evolved ability to be inculcated by the group. Such instincts find themselves in an evolutionary mismatch when no longer under harsh Darwinian conditions, in which it is necessary to clamp down on individualism to ensure group cohesion against the enemy at the gates. So, eventually, people start signaling things that are against their group’s genetic interests—and even against their individual genetic interests, such as that it is selfish and wrong to have children because doing so damages the environment, or because White people are inherently evil, or whatever it may be.
In addition, our ability to be inculcated—which, again, was previously adaptive—means that we can be inculcated with fitness-damaging ideas, of the kind espoused by spiteful mutants. Put another way, we are extremely environmentally plastic and evolved to live in a group that pushes towards individual and group-level adaptive behavior. If this breaks down, with spiteful mutants and extreme individualists pushing us towards maladaptive behavior, our adaptive instincts to conform to the group and play for status within it suddenly become our own worst enemy. And only those who are specifically resistant to maladaptive indoctrination—due to strong group-selected and natalist instincts—will survive.
The Middle Class and Maladaptive Ideas
One problem with this model of the spiteful mutant is the apparent prevalence of maladaptive ideas specifically among members of the “middle,” rather than of the “upper” class, as we would expect the upper class to have greater societal influence. In British newspapers, the term “middle class” is generally used to mean “higher professional” or “upper-middle class.” British newspapers report that radical left-wing movements tend to be dominated by these “middle class” people. For example, in Autumn 2019, a group called “Extinction Rebellion” led a series of protests in central London to draw attention to climate change. They occupied Smithfield Market, blockaded vital roads, and even glued themselves to government buildings.352 Extinction Rebellion’s demands include “climate justice.”353 This effectively means that Western nations curb their emissions, and thus massively reduce their living standards; non-Western nations, however, should not do this and should continue developing until Western and non-Western living standards are equalized. In effect, they demand that European people put the genetic interests of others above their own—a policy that is inherently fitness-damaging. The group, according to reports, was conspicuously “middle class.”354 Indeed, one researcher summarized such groups, based on data he collected on then, as “a white middle class ghetto.”355
Why would the “middle class” —rather than the “upper class,” who have been subject to harsh selection for the least time—dominate such movements?
Middle-class dominance in Extinction Rebellion is in line with broader data that are extremely consistent over time in the UK. According to British sociologists Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley:
The professional classes are centrist economically and socially liberal; the managerial and bourgeois classes are right wing economically and socially authoritarian; the working class is left wing economically and socially authoritarian.356
The British upper class is characterized by a combination of general conservatism and noblesse oblige—the belief that they have a duty to serve society, such as in the armed forces.357 Indeed, it is these conservative and militaristic values that the public schools have traditionally instilled in the upper classes.358 Thus, it is the “professional classes” who are the most likely to advocate socially liberal—and thus maladaptive—ideas. Why would this be the case, based on our understanding of the high heritability of social class? A possible answer lies in the very nature of the “middle class,” something we touched upon earlier. They hold a position in society that makes questioning the status quo—either to make it more conservative or liberal—attractive as a means of gaining status. Members of the middle class distinguish themselves from those who are members of the two surrounding classes via their virtue and their intellect, something that has been observed even in analyses of the 16th century “middling sort.”359 They are distinct from the working class because they are, so they believe, wealthier, more educated, more diligent, and more refined.360 Valuing “education” as an inherent good is a particularly middle-class idea. Upper-class people are more inclined to regard university attendance as a means of networking, so that they can “meet the right people who can help influence their future.” For this reason, it is only worth attending “the right schools.”361 Thus, the middle class is also distinct from the upper class. They admire the upper class and, to a certain extent, imitate their culture. This sociological process is known as “Trickle Effect”: fashions tend to emanate from the upper classes and “trickle down” through society.362 However, throughout English history it has been noted that the middle class is the engine of intellectual change. A mutant born into the upper class would, therefore, have less incentive to become “spiteful”—less incentive to play for status by espousing fitness-damaging ideas.
The middle class has long played for status by emphasizing that, although they are not as wealthy and powerful as the upper class, they are morally and intellectually superior and even more godly.363 This is consistent with evidence that feelings of social exclusion elevate religiousness,364 and that social insecurity is often dealt with via compensatory zeal with regard to “opinions, values, goals, groups, and self-worth.”365 The intellectual superiority, and status-playing, of the middle class can be seen in the way in which they question the current dispensation by pushing it in a more extreme direction. In this sense, they are “liberal,” as they tend to promote individualizing values as a means of social signaling. They are prone to signing petitions, going on marches, voting, generally acting to hold those in power to account and in voting for non-mainstream political parties, something predicted by education level.366 As we have already discussed, it was the 16th century “middling sort” who questioned the current intellectual dispensation by adopting Protestantism, a form of extreme religiosity in an already highly religious society. However, this also promoted individualizing, pro-equality ideas, such as the “priesthood of all believers.”367
Once spiteful, individualist ideas become accepted, they are particularly attractive to the middle class as a means of leveraging status. As noted earlier, intelligence is also associated with the ability to correctly perceive the social norm and force oneself to essentially accept it.368 Thus, their intelligence would render the middle class easier to indoctrinate than the working class. Openness to new ideas correlates with IQ at 0.3, and those who are high in Openness are easier to inculcate.369 And as we have seen, the position of the middle class, their modal personality and their intelligence, makes them attracted to supposedly virtuous and anti-traditional ideas. It would follow that the middle class would be attracted to anti-patriarchal ideas and would be good at convincing themselves of their validity, if doing so seemed to be the new “norm” and to their social benefit. By contrast, general conservatism and ethnocentrism are negatively associated with IQ.370 So we can expect the working class to be socially conservative, as has been found, especially in a context in which the dominant way of thinking is “liberal.”371
British linguist Tony McEnery has observed that the middle class adoption of new ideas involving moral superiority has been noted throughout English history in the form of “moral panics” about working-class behavior, panics that have been dominated by middle-class people.372 Thus, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the middle class were dominated by the Puritans, who stressed their religiosity and moral constancy. Their ideological descendants in the 19th century also stressed these factors, leading to a strong sexual taboo and related moral panics. By this stage, however, the middle class had become more flamboyantly “virtuous,” displaying their morality by assisting the working classes and being especially concerned about alcoholism among this group. Their virtue displays can even be seen in their use of language: the working class use strong swear words the most, then the upper class, and then the middle.373 The result is an arms race of norm-questioning and moral virtue-signaling, which explains why it is among the middle class that spiteful ideologies are the most prominent in the modern day.
This would be expected to push society in an ever more anti-traditionalist direction, though this could still make it more religious. For example, Puritan Protestantism was appealing because it questioned the status quo, stressed moral virtue, and emphasized equality before God. In a sense, it involved identifying with the poor, but it also stressed moral purity. Additionally, once everyone was Protestant, Romantic Nationalism was appealing to the middle class in many countries, because it questioned the new “tradition” and it idolized peasant culture. This ideology was strongly related to religiousness and class status, in some respects, pushed in a more religious direction within a broadly religious society. Thus, it can be argued that middle class anti-traditionalism was previously adaptive for them, because it combined a play for status with adaptive desires, fertility, and nationalism.
This gradually changed, however, as anti-traditionalism started to push in an extreme liberal direction, after society flipped over to being high in individualizing. Runaway individualism eventually led to nihilism, as religiousness started to breakdown as a critical mass of individualists (inspired by spiteful mutants) was reached and people started to migrate, very quickly, over to leftist, maladaptive ideas. Middle-class identity then became a matter of competing to be more “Woke” than the next person. Marxism, which idolized working-class culture internationally, became appealing. This meant you were potentially placing another ethnic group above your own. This could be regarded as the first spiteful ideology, as it questioned religion and nationalism, but it appealed to the middle class desire to seem more virtuous and educated than the next man. This was, therefore, the turning point, where the combination of elevated mutation (leading to atheism), high intelligence (leading to high openness, low instinctiveness, and low traditionalism), the weakening of religious controls, and social-status insecurity resulted in the middle class beginning to push in a fitness-damaging direction by adopting a spiteful ideology. Once Marxism became highly influential, the next marginalized group had to be employed for virtue-signaling purposes: females, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, transsexuals, animals, plants . . . Under Darwinian conditions, especially of strong group selection, this arms race would be held in check by selection for religious, patriarchal, and ethnocentric groups. This selection for traditional religiousness, combined with high mortality salience, making people more religious and ethnocentric, was also holding this process in check, as was the vanishingly small number of spiteful mutants advocating maladaptive ideas. But with the breakdown of Darwinian Selection, these various protection mechanisms would collapse as well. The result, eventually, would be the explosion of a middle class-based anti-traditionalism nuclear bomb, as can be seen in highly spiteful but predominantly “middle class” movements such as Extinction Rebellion, where one signals group loyalty and virtue by espousing childlessness and the destruction of advanced society.
And this, of course, has serious implications for who has children. The strong advocates of these fitness-reducing ideas will tend not to breed. In addition, those who are particularly environmentally sensitive, even if they are not inculcated with these ideas, will increasingly feel despondent, experience a sense of dysphoria, and give up on life as a result.374 Women will be unhappy due to their evolutionary mismatch and will increasingly find that there are not enough potential mates of higher status, leading them to forgo motherhood, as we will see below. Men, too, will suffer from greater depression. Those who can be inculcated with these ideas to any significant extent are, at the very least, likely to limit their fertility. Previously, such people had lived in a religious ecology, in which procreating and childrearing was deemed God’s will; today, they are left adrift. So, all that is left is those who are, for genetic reasons, extremely religious and conservative and, thus, strongly desirous of children;375 those who are simply strongly desirous of children either because they have a strong desire to nurture (being altruistic)376 or because, being Machiavellian, they perceive having children as useful to status or the ability to attain welfare;377 those who have a low IQ (and thus cannot be inculcated properly with the dominant ideology); those who have low impulse control, which correlates with low IQ; and those with high Extraversion, meaning they accidentally have children due to sexual risk taking.378
In this sense, Wokesim has displaced child mortality and warfare as the new “Crucible of Evolution.” Indeed, feminism is itself a “crucible of evolution.” It creates an extreme evolutionary mismatch that makes males, and females, despondent and maladaptive, meaning only those who, for genetic reasons, are able to survive this new “harsh environment,” which defeats most, are able to pass on their genes. And these people, in part, will be those that would have survived under pre-industrial conditions. Thus, ironically, feminism permits a return, in part, to a society dominated by religious, patriarchal anti-feminists. These feminists, however, are “spiteful mutants,” because they push society in a maladaptive direction, just as witches did from the bottom-up. Let us look in more detail at how they do this and at their other points of crossover with witches.
* * *
327: Rachael Grant and V. Tamara Montrose, “It’s a Man’s World: Mate Guarding and the Evolution of Patriarchy,” Mankind Quarterly, 58 (2018): 384-418.
328: “Public schools” are so named because they are attractive to members of the wider public who can afford the costly residential fees; this is in distinction to “local schools” or “state schools.” The term “public school” is specifically used with regard to particularly prestigious examples of these private boarding schools. In the United States, similarly prestigious institutions are known as “private schools,” “boarding schools,” or “prep schools,” in distinction from the “public schools” that are government-funded and open to all in a locality. Hereafter, when I use the term “public school,” I am referring to the British variety.
329: Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Social Class (London: Routledge, 1994), 15-16.
330: Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 76.
