the human condition – Page 56

The Government Religion

God was dead, but God has returned to life in the form of government. This essay examines a terrifying proposition: taken together, the number of people who are willing to do violence to others on behalf of their government greatly exceeds the number of people willing to do violence to others on behalf on any other mentality or ideology. Worship of government is its own religion.

For those who follow the Government religion, any pronouncement from the government is the same as if the clouds have parted and the voice of God had boomed from the heavens. The government simply cannot lie – its size and power makes it both omnipresent and omnibenevolent. Therefore, every law and decree passed by government is regarded by its followers as if it was written in holy scripture.

If all the available scientific and medical evidence says, for example, that cannabis is medicinal and can be used to treat nausea and insomnia, but the government says that cannabis is not medicinal, then the followers of the Government religion will say that cannabis is not medicinal. The scientific literature and all the evidence be damned – the government says it’s not medicinal, therefore it isn’t.

Before any decision can be made, the question has to be asked: does the government approve of this? This is the government-worshipper’s equivalent of the Christian question “What would Jesus do?”. All actions must be viewed through the prism of whether they serve government objectives. If not, those actions are sinful and must be discouraged.

Police officers are usually fanatical followers of the Government religion, which offers a ready excuse for them to discharge their baser, sadistic instincts on members of the public. Without the Government religion, Police officers would not have the authority to physically abuse people without punishment. The Government religion raises these people, who would otherwise mostly be criminals, into a position of prestige, and they return the favour with obedience.

Mental health workers are another. The job of a mental health worker is to determine when a person has lost touch with reality and to guide them back to it. The problem with this is that they have no natural or philosophical explanation of the nature of reality and so they rely on the government to provide one. This means that the government literally decides what reality is for mental health workers. They are consequently hopelessly mired in the religion.

Bureaucrats are a third, and arguably the worst of all three. Bureaucrats are to the Government religion what the cardinals are to Catholicism. They are the ones that seek to organise the world so that their religion might be dominant. In the case of the bureaucrat, the objective is to use Police officers and mental health workers to destroy those who oppose the religion.

If one reasons by analogy to dogs, we can see why government workers behave the way they do. Dogs are completely loyal to the people that feed them, on account of the gratitude created from that dog no longer having to worry about where its daily food comes from. In a state of Nature, the majority of creatures must live in a state of extreme anxiety on account of the pressure to acquire sufficient food resources to live. Anyone feeding a dog takes all that anxiety away, and the resulting gratitude leads to loyalty.

By the same token, the natural stress of finding enough money to live on has been alleviated, in the life of the government worker, by the government. Therefore, the government worker regards the government with the same undying, arse-licking loyalty that a dog regards its owner with. The government provides food and shelter like God provides manna from Heaven, and in exchange the government worker obeys the orders they are given.

Because Government-worshippers treat the desire of their government as if it was the Will of God, they are capable of causing immense destruction and human suffering. All of the death camp guards on both the Nazi and Soviet side were Government-worshippers, as were the Chinese mandarins responsible for the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. Those responsible for destroying their own young people through conducting the War on Drugs on them also commit their crimes out of a sense of the holiness of government directives.

Because Government-worshippers are responsible for most of the crimes against humanity committed throughout history, the rest of us need to oppose the spread of the cult and the fanaticism of its followers, for our own good. The best way to do this is to cause the Government-worshipper to realise that the authority they worship is fallible. This is why they are extremely reluctant to consider the possibility, much like any religious person.

The discovery that the government may have actually been wrong about something is enough to shatter the life of the government-worshipper. This will cause them to have a crisis of faith, which, like the crises of faith suffered by followers of other religions, can lead to the complete rejection of the Government religion.

The more doubt a government worker has in the infallibility of their paymaster, the less likely it is that that worker will commit a human rights abuse. Therefore, causing people to lose faith in their government is essential to keeping the rest of us safe. Making Government-worshippers realise that the authority they worship is fallible is the key to undermining the Government religion.

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The True Eternal Struggle

Elephants have traditionally been seen as noble animals

Most people intuitively feel that life is a never-ending struggle between two opposing forces. Some call them good and evil, some call them darkness and light, some have even called them Aryan and Jew. As this essay will examine, the true eternal struggle is none of those things, but rather the struggle between the K and r-selected.

R/K selection theory is a theory within the biological sciences that seeks to explain the various reproductive strategies of different species and subspecies. According to this theory, the selective pressures of the environment drive organisms towards either an r strategy of producing as many offspring as possible in the hope that some survive, or a K strategy of producing few offspring but investing heavily in them so that they have the best chance of survival.

These are other factors involved, such as gestation time and overall life length, but the essential division is a matter of parental investment. Among r-selected species are insects, fish, crocodiles and rodents, who are known for spawning huge numbers of offspring who are mostly left to their own fate. Among K-selected species are whales, horses, elephants and humans, who are known for long gestation times.

R/K selection theory can tell us a lot about the different strategies used by various subspecies. Crucially, they can help explain some of the behaviour of different human subspecies. For instance, a human group that is more K-selected will have fewer children and will invest more time and resources in them while growing up. Among this group, rates of paternal abandonment and child abuse will be lower than among the r-selected.

Developmental psychology tells us a few things about how children will turn out based on differing levels of parental investment in their upbringing. R-selected groups of humans, like their biological analogues, will produce larger numbers of offspring without a great concern for whether they live or die, a strategy which the K-selected groups eschew in favour of heavy parental investment.

If one takes the extreme example of being orphaned, one can observe the deleterious effects of parental neglect on the psychology of the child. Orphans are often hard, cruel people. They are often angry, bitter and resentful. These personal qualities bode extremely poorly for success in the modern industrial world, where people need to work together prosocially to solve complicated goals.

Conversely, it’s apparent from looking at people from stable, happy family environments that they themselves are much more stable and happy. For them, stability and happiness have been normalised; they expect people to treat them well, and they usually treat other people well. These people naturally have a much easier time meeting the challenges of the workforce.

One thing is immediately apparent from following this reasoning – the economic outcomes of the r-selected must necessarily be worse. All other factors being equal, children whose parents were following a strategy of r-selection will produce offspring with less human capital, and they will consequently be less able to lever it into financial capital. These children will find it harder to get jobs, and to keep them, than the children of the K-selected.

A curiosity that becomes evident after a bit more thinking is that these differing reproductive strategies must necessarily lead to differing political outcomes. K-selected people don’t tend to use much in the way of government resources, because their parents tend to invest a lot in them and this tends to lead to economic independence. This naturally tends towards a kind of right-wing, frontiersman’s thinking because economically independent people lose out from greater resource distribution.

By contrast, r-selected people will naturally tend towards the left. Because they have had less investment made in them on average, they are less able to achieve financial independence, and therefore win from greater resource distribution. As far as the interests of the r-selected are concerned, voting for a political ideology that taxes the K-selected then seems like an obvious move.

Evolutionary game theory tells us that this situation cannot last indefinitely. If one thinks about the mathematics of resource distribution, it can be seen immediately that a society cannot function if it contains only r-selected people: if everyone is r-selected, they will keep breeding to the point of ecological collapse. There must be at least some K-selected people for a society to be viable, otherwise there is no-one making an investment in the future.

However, an oversupply of r-selected groups is the inevitable result of a political system that distributes wealth from the K-selected to the r-selected. There comes a level of taxation that will cause K-selected people to abstain from reproducing on account of not being able to provide a sufficiently decent life for their offspring. R-selected people have no such qualms, and will continue to breed under any circumstances. So high taxation, within a society, shifts the reproductive advantage to the r-selected.

It’s impossible to maintain a society where the K-selected are taxed so heavily to pay for the offspring of the r-selected that they cannot afford to have children themselves. Such an arrangement is essentially a form of biological parasitism, and can only lead to an increase in the numbers of r-selected at the expense of the K-selected. Sooner or later, the K-selected will either rebel or become subsumed in the teeming masses of the r-selected.

The fact that such a society is what we have right now means simply that the current situation cannot continue to exist for long. The K-selected, being more capable of long-term thought, are becoming aware that they have essentially been enslaved through the tax-welfare system to subsidise the breeding of r-selected individuals. This can only continue up to a point, because beyond that point society starts losing cohesion, and then the r-selected and K-selected must fight each other for territory.

This is the true eternal struggle, which will run as long as humanity itself does.

The Incel Problem is Older Than the Human Species

People are afraid of a dark shadow looming on the horizon of our culture: a spate of angry men who can never get laid, and who take their frustration out on others violently. Names like Elliot Rodger are now synonymous with explosive acts of vengeful mass homicide. They are otherwise known as the involuntarily celibate – incels – and this essay looks at how to deal with them.

The incel problem is fundamentally a question of biology. The reason why the problem is so hard to solve is that the problem itself is a byproduct of a greater, more fundamental problem within animal species. This is why we can observe behaviour analogous to the violent human incel in other primates.

The essential challenge for females of sexually reproducing species is to find a breeding partner that is going to give the offspring the highest possible chance of success. Because the female investment in the production of offspring is heavy (compared to the male), the female is very choosy about who she breeds with. Because the male investment in the production of offspring is light (in a state of Nature), the male tends towards promiscuity.

This combination of high female investment and low male investment creates the possibility of multiple partners for high-quality males. This can be observed in extremis in walruses, but it is also evident in gorillas. Adult male silverback gorillas tend to control a small harem of females, most of whom carry his offspring. What’s more, this is evident in humans, only to lesser degree.

For the most part, the female of every species is happy with this arrangement. As long as she is capable of acquiring enough resources to raise the offspring, she might as well go for the best male genes she can get, even if another female already has done so. Because women have evolved to go for males with good genes and reject those without, given enough free female choice, a certain proportion of the male population must be incels.

Observing how this plays out in other primates, we can see why the presence of incels is a problem in human society as well. In other primates we can observe that young males who never get laid, and who have no chance of it because of the monopolisation of sexual resources by violent alpha males, stop contributing to the overall wellbeing of the tribe. They start to attack the other males in their tribe (the ones who are hoarding the females) and may even refuse to defend the tribe against outside invaders.

We can see, therefore, that the incel problem is older than the entire human species. The problem itself can be stated thusly: what can be done with men who are involuntarily celibate, and who have no incentive to fully participate in society? It’s worthwhile looking at how this problem has been dealt with historically.

Nature has developed a panoply of strategies for dealing with this problem. At the most primitive level, the incel problem has traditionally been solved with violence. The reproductive capacity of the female of the species can be considered a resource and fought over in exactly the same way as territory or bananas. So there was no incel problem – any male wishing to get laid simply had to find a fertile female and then beat the shit out of every other male she attracted.

Abrahamic religion is a particular way of solving the incel problem. The idea is that if all men get together and throw women under the bus, collectively, then every man gets one woman and that’s the end of it. Having more than one woman is a crime (bigamy), having sex with anyone outside of marriage is a crime (adultery) and divorce is not permitted.

This means that the number of incels, and their rage, is minimised by way of stripping all rights and dignities from women. The “Women’s Liberation” movement was a reaction away from this logic. Many intelligent women (correctly) came to perceive themselves as having been sacrificed to further someone else’s political objectives, and through their efforts the Abrahamic solution came to be seen as unsuitable.

Another potential solution might be described as the “Bonobo solution”, which is basically that everyone gets laid, regardless of any sexually unappealing quality they might have. This solution replaced the Abrahamic solution in the West, and is usually encouraged by the liberal consumption of drugs, listening to rhythmic music, and use of the contraceptive pill. One can observe the outcome of the application of this solution in any Western city on a weekend night.

The logic of this solution is that enough men get laid and often enough that there are no incels, because any male wanting to get laid simply has to hang around drunk women long enough and one of them will eventually let him have a crack. As a consequence, there is no incel rage to discharge. This strategy has arguably had a deleterious effect on the structure of the average family, but it has nevertheless persisted until very recently.

Today, the incel problem has taken on new forms. Because of the fact that socialising at a pub or bar is falling out of fashion, and because of Internet dating and apps such as Tinder, it’s never been easier for high-quality men to find willing sexual partners wherever they go. Commensurately, it’s never been easier for women to avoid low-quality men.

In other words, not only are there more incels than ever before but ever more of those are hopelessly incel. This has had manifestations already in the form of men like Rodger, but there are festering forms of it that might yet find dark expression. There are several online communities where young incels gather and where their rage turns to hate. Future political movements might exploit this energy.

It’s not clear how the incel problem is going to be solved in the future. Possibly with the (even) wider promulgation of pornography, perhaps state-funded prostitutes, perhaps teledildonics. The alternative to successfully redirecting this sexual energy might be some kind of orgiastic bloodshed that makes the Eastern Theatre of World War II look friendly.

Cricket Is More of a Global Sport Than Soccer Is

Geographical spread of Soccer World Cup winners

Another Soccer World Cup, another champion from Europe. Everyone is waxing lyrical at the moment about how wonderful the Soccer World Cup is, and how it bring all nations together in harmony with a common goal. The truth, as this essay will demonstrate, is that cricket is more of a global sport than soccer by at least three major measures.

Geographic representation

As can be seen by the quarterfinalists of the recently concluded Soccer World Cup, soccer is still very much a European sport. Six of the eight quarterfinalists came from this one continent that contains less than 10% of the world’s population.

Over the last three FIFA World Cups, 23 of the 24 quarterfinalists have come from either Europe or Latin America. The single exception was Ghana, back in 2010. So only two continents are ever really represented by the finalists in Soccer World Cups. Asia, Africa, Anglo America, Australia and Oceania don’t feature – a group of countries that includes the world’s five most populous.

For the most part, only Europeans and South Americans really play soccer, but they are capable of getting an extremely high level of performance out of Africans that have been integrated into European structures. Sufficient evidence for this comes from the fact that France won the 2018 World Cup just now.

Since World War Two, only one team from outside Europe and Latin America has ever made a Soccer World Cup semifinal: South Korea in 2002, and they only advanced that far thanks to some extremely questionable refereeing decisions. Every single other semifinalist has been from one of two continents. This is hardly befitting of “the world sport”.

The Cricket World Cup, by contrast, brings the entire world together. The last Cricket World Cup, in 2015, featured teams from four different continents at the semifinal stage: Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania. Teams from North America and Europe have previously contested finals, meaning the overall reach of the sport is greater than that of soccer.

Population

Some people object to the statement made in the first section of this essay. Although most are willing to concede that the geographical representation of soccer is not great, many will nevertheless insist that Europe is a great population centre and therefore can’t merely be counted as one continent. This may have been true a century ago, but no longer is.

The population of Europe is 741,000,000. The population of Latin America is 640,000,000. This means that virtually all of the Soccer World Cup quarterfinalists throughout history come from a bloc of 1,381,000,000 people, roughly 20% of the world’s population.

The remaining 80% of the world’s population – comprising China, India, Africa, Indonesia and Pakistan – essentially never get representation among the final eight teams of Soccer World Cups. India and Pakistan have both won Cricket World Cups, by contrast, and are perennial quarterfinalists along with Bangladesh, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

The population of India, where cricket is the only game in town, is 1,325,000,000, essentially the same as the combined populations of Europe and Latin America. This is a fact that needs repeating for those who think that soccer is the global game: the combined populations of the only places capable of competing at the top level of soccer only just equals the population of India alone.

Measuring population properly requires that we add, to the cricket-fanatic side of the ledger, Pakistan (pop. 208,000,000), Bangladesh (pop. 163,000,000), Sri Lanka and Australia (c. 60,000,000), plus several million others in England, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland and the West Indies, where cricket might not be the national sport but is still one of the major ones.

Against this, soccer has much less overall market share in the countries in which it is popular than cricket does. In Europe and Latin America, soccer has to compete with volleyball, basketball, tennis, handball and golf; in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, cricket is completely dominant. Therefore, it must have more total fans in the world than soccer does.

Appeal within nations

Possibly the most crucial of the three difference between the sports is this one. Soccer mostly appeals to a lower socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is an escape from the drudgery of everyday life, akin to a circus. Cricket, by contrast, appeals to a higher socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is the complete test of mental and physical strength and skill and more akin to improvisational theatre.

Soccer players are frequently crude, brutal, thuggish. They cheat so shamelessly that many consider it part of the game. Cricket is a sharp contrast. Men like Rahul Dravid, Ross Taylor and AB de Villiers are complete gentlemen: gracious in victory and defeat, magnanimous, charismatic, serene. Former Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni is literally a prince. He is the upper class of the upper class, an aristocrat by any measure.

If any doubt remains that soccer fans are inherently more base than cricket fans, simply examine the writings of former cricketers like Martin Crowe and Kumar Sangakkara on CricInfo. There is no soccer equivalent.

What soccer is – and this is the cornerstone of its apparent popularity – is the McDonald’s of world sports. It’s a corporatised appeal to the dopamine-deprived brains of society’s lowest common denominator, which is all it can really be on account of its simplistic and luck-based nature. Soccer fans like to tout the ease of understanding the sport as one of its drawcards, but it reality this simply makes it boring to anyone with an IQ over 110 or so.

Over a billion people watched the final of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, according to FIFA themselves. However, more people saw the India vs. Pakistan match during the 2015 Cricket World Cup. The world record for concurrent viewers to a live-streaming platform was set at 10,700,000 earlier this year, not by the final of a European soccer league but by the Indian Premier League of T20 cricket.

What does it mean that more people watch a group match in the Cricket World Cup than the final of the hypefest that is the Soccer World Cup? What does it mean that more people watch the final of an Indian cricket league than the final of any European soccer league? It can only mean that cricket appeals to more human beings than soccer does.

In summary, the delusion that soccer is the “global game”, simply because it’s played in Europe, Latin America and Africa, has to end. Europe is now less than 10% of the world’s population, barely more than half of the population of India alone. If those Indians are to be considered people of equal value to the Europeans, it must be conceded that their passions are of equal value. If so, cricket is a more passionately-followed sport than soccer, measured on a global basis.