Breeding Leftism. By Jef Costello at American Renaissance.

Rarely a book comes along that significantly changes how I view the world. …

The heart of Breeding the Human Herd is a demonstration of the power of eugenic theory to explain the decline of the West. Drawing upon a vast number of studies in the social sciences, Prof. Dutton argues that what we have witnessed since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is a dysgenic collapse, resulting in a steep decline in mental and physical health, as well as the decline of vital social institutions and social cohesion. …

Genetics matters:

Until around 1800, Westerners were subject to harsh Darwinian conditions that selected for robust genetic health. Infant mortality was at about 50 percent, and those born with disadvantageous mutations (and virtually all mutations are disadvantageous) simply did not survive long enough to pass along their genes. Those who did survive were ideally adapted to their environment. They tended to be intelligent, mentally and physically healthy, and to possess “pro-social” personality traits (a concept we will explore later).

The Industrial Revolution resulted in substantially improved standards of living, as well as important medical breakthroughs. In turn, this caused the rate of child mortality to plummet (today it is only about 1 percent in the West) and the population to increase substantially. There were not just more people, but people with higher mutational loads.

Under Darwinian conditions, most of these newcomers — Prof. Dutton estimates about 90 percent — would have been purged every generation. But now they were surviving long enough, in many cases, to reproduce. …

Why mutational defects show up mostly in the brain:

We tend to think of genes as having very localized effects in the body. However, genes may affect more than one trait or indirectly impact others (a phenomenon known as pleiotropy). Thus, we tend to find that mutations that have a deleterious effect on physical characteristics may also have an impact on cognitive capacities or mental health — and vice versa. Physical and mental mutations therefore tend to parallel each other.

As Prof. Dutton notes, the genetically unfit populations that arose in the post-industrial West “would be expected to deviate in all directions from the population of 1800 due to their greater genetic diversity, this diversity being specifically caused by damaging low frequency genetic variants that arose recently as new mutations and didn’t get removed by Darwinian selection pressures. This would be especially obvious in terms of intelligence, average personality and related inclinations, and physical and mental health. [These] would be inter-related due to pleiotropy and the brain would be a huge mutational target [given that 84 percent of our genes are expressed in the brain].”

To make matters worse, in advanced societies, the genetically healthy are now less likely to pass along their genes, while the genetically unhealthy are, so far as they are able, more likely. We are thus witnessing the decline of adaptive traits of all kinds, and a rise in maladaptive ones. Intelligence is declining, as well as pro-social personality, religiousness (which neo-Darwinians argue is adaptive), mental health generally, and physical health. The weakening of selection pressures means that not only are certain positive traits disappearing, but the opposite traits are being selected for. This process of the “crumbling genome” is essentially what is meant by “dysgenics.” …

IQ has been declining in the West:

Studies of identical twins have confirmed that IQ is in the region of 0.8 heritable, which means that 80 percent of differences in individual intelligence are the result of genetics. …

IQ is correlated with wealth: wealthy people tend to be smarter, because intelligence is needed to create wealth. Even in the case of inherited wealth, intelligence is needed to maintain it or cause it to increase. The flipside of this is that poverty is correlated with low intelligence.

In pre-industrial England, wealthy people had more children, as they were better able to care for them, whereas the poor were most impacted by child mortality. …

This pattern has now been completely reversed … Today, the lower one’s IQ and socio-economic status, the more likely one is to have children. And most of these children survive, given that even indigent mothers can avail themselves of modern medical advances and social welfare programs. By contrast, affluent people with high IQs have few children or none at all. This means people with low IQ are proliferating. …

• Since the use of contraception is associated with impulse control and the ability to plan for the future, more intelligent people tend to use it …
• Feminism has encouraged intelligent women to devote their most fertile years to education and career, which means they have few children or none.
• The rise of the welfare state removed any incentive for low-IQ, low-income individuals to limit their number of offspring. …

Using proxies for intelligence (such as reaction-time studies conducted in the 19th century) as well as the results of modern IQ testing (which has been used since 1904), researchers have estimated that intelligence has been declining in the post-industrial West by about one IQ point per decade.

If this trend continues, the average IQ of white Westerners, currently 100, will be around 85 by the middle of the next century, which is the current average IQ of American blacks …

Pro-social personalities have been declining for the same reasons:

There is also a measurable decline in “pro-social” personality, which is exactly what it sounds like: the sort of personality that is conducive to peaceful, cooperative relations with others in a social group. Pro-social personality overlaps with what has generally been considered to be “good character.” … These traits are substantially independent of intelligence … and they predict important life outcomes. …

A number of mental illnesses have certainly been proven to be heritable: these include depression, psychopathy, schizophrenia, and ADHD. There has, in fact, been a significant increase in the incidence of these disorders — and others — over the last 100 years, consistent with what we would expect if mutational load is rising. In 1938, between 1 and 5 percent of American university students scored above the cutoff point for various measurable psychopathologies. By 2007, this had increased to an astonishing 40 percent. …

Why the left hate talk about eugenics:

If you think that all the blame can be laid at Hitler’s door, think again. The real story is more complicated….

Prof. Dutton argues that the weakening of Darwinian selection pressures would be expected to result in a rise in leftism, along with the rise in mental disorders. …

Readers are doubtless familiar with attempts by leftists to label “racism” or conservatism in general as a mental disorder. Prof. Dutton is not engaging in this sort of tactic, however. Instead, he appeals to recent studies showing a high correlation between far-left views and psychopathology.

In contrast, holding conservative views is associated with a lower incidence of heritable psychopathologies — as well as a lower incidence of congenital abnormalities of all kinds.

Ultimately, Prof. Dutton’s conclusion is that the rise in mutational load results in the rise of the looney Left and accounts for the androgynous, effeminate men and shapeless, unfeminine women one often sees marching for “social justice.”

Antifa

High mutational load usually entails, as noted earlier, physiological weaknesses of various sorts and often an unattractive appearance. Interestingly, test subjects in psychological experiments tend to rate the faces of anonymous, self-identified conservatives as more attractive. Such characteristics as having a symmetrical face and body and (in men) significant height and strength are considered attractive and are associated with genetic health (i.e., low mutational load).

Studies have shown that being left-wing correlates with low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, and high neuroticism. More than 50 percent of females under the age of 30 who identify as far-left have been diagnosed with a mental illness, most often depression.

Depression is significantly less prevalent on the political right. Being far-left has also been found to correlate with the so-called “dark triad” personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The most conspicuous of these traits is narcissism — something we have all noticed in SJW-types. These are highly insecure individuals with a fragile sense of identity who crave approval and adoration from others. They attempt to achieve these by signaling their adherence to the values and beliefs that prominent authority figures have declared to be morally correct. They expect, in return, approval and “likes,” from which they derive a sense of self-worth. But this situation is highly unstable. If those beliefs are questioned — or, worse yet, if their signaling is met with skepticism or ridicule — they fly into fits of narcissistic rage. Interestingly, transsexualism strongly correlates with borderline personality disorder and narcissism. …

Clever-silly ideas of the poisoned left:

Prof. Dutton describes leftist theories as “clever-silly,” meaning that they are the sort of silly ideas that intelligent people often manage to convince themselves of. For example, arguments supporting the idea that sex and race are “social constructs” are impressively sophisticated — in the literal sense that they exhibit sophistry. The ancient sophists were adept at devising clever arguments for falsehoods. The trouble is that most people are not trained in logic and so are intimidated by the pretentious jargon and casuistry of these arguments.

Most people usually encounter these arguments in universities, where clever-silly ideas are produced nearly in assembly-line fashion. Students are actively discouraged from asking critical questions about such ideas. But declining intelligence means that fewer and fewer are able even to formulate the questions.

Prof. Dutton argues that one of the most dangerous things about spiteful mutants is their ability to corrupt the healthy. Individuals who would not otherwise be drawn to maladaptive beliefs or practices such as atheism, anti-natalism, white self-hatred, or deviant sexuality are frequently influenced at least to dally with them by the spiteful mutants who dominate education and social media. …

Yet we are not entirely doomed.

Native Westerners now produce far fewer children. In addition, rising mutational load means a rise in maladaptive beliefs or practices, which diminish the likelihood that “mutants” will reproduce.

As Prof. Dutton puts it, “rising mutational load results in a growing percentage of mentally unstable people with maladaptive inclinations but where these lead to them not desiring to breed then the relatively high presence of such people can only be transient.”

Those who do want to have children tend, as we have seen, to be conservative and traditionally religious. Thus, we can expect that this population — which Prof. Dutton treats as effectively “a remnant population from pre-industrial times” — will gradually grow, while the number of spiteful mutants will decline.

Unfortunately, given current trends, we should not expect the victors in the competition for reproduction to be particularly bright. Nevertheless, there will always be outliers, including those with unusually high IQ. Here lies the hope.