Modern politics is largely about trying to avoid the embarrassment of human biology. By David Archibald.
I know of three instances in my circle of acquaintances. A single woman turning 30-odd years old will marry a bloke, have three kids with him, then in her mid-40s announce to her husband that he isn’t her type and end the marriage. This damaged her own kids, but for some reason she thought it was worthwhile.
It was all a puzzle until this video in which Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson talks of research which details the types of male protagonists women like to see in the porn they watched.
Women watching porn are attracted to five types: vampire, werewolf, billionaire, pirate and surgeon. So it seems that these women upon turning 30-odd were aware that their biological clock was ticking, married whoever was available to have children.Then, when that was done, they went back to the search for the elusive pirate or werewolf.
What’s new is that we’ve (temporarily) conquered scarcity for the last few decades:
This goes against millions of years of the biological and cultural evolution of our species. Modern society, having conquered scarcity for the moment, has been running on cultural inertia.
We have cultural norms that evolved to maximize productivity in our society, and that culture interacted with our genome. For example, one thousand years ago the Western judicial system started rinsing out the genes for violence in a positive feedback loop.
But we aren’t really aware of why we have those cultural norms. And to a large extent modern politics is about trying to avoid the embarrassment of human biology.
It is now thought that just because some single women are too lazy, ugly, or stupid to attract a mate, they shouldn’t miss out on having babies. So the community is taxed to pay for their chosen lifestyle. And because the children themselves are quite labour-intensive to look after, government-funded childcare is expanded and the demand for that is infinite.
The people now being taxed to pay for the chosen lifestyles of others are themselves so well fed that they are complacent about it all. That is compounded by a problem in Western democracies that single women tend to vote for leftwing candidates and policies.
If they get married and have children they start voting conservative, instinctively realizing perhaps that taxes to pay for the fatherless children of others is taking food out of the mouths of their own children. But, if never married, they vote for redistributive policies that suppress individual productivity. They are a scourge on society.
Read it all for how our ancient biology predisposes people towards communism. But since the agricultural revolution, we’ve found that capitalism makes us much more productive and inventive.
