Clown World Chronicles: What Is 'Hypergamy'?

Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Hypergamy’?

Perhaps the most salient feature of Clown World is the disintegration of relations between the sexes. Dave Chappelle said years ago that “men and women don’t get along anymore”, and things have only become worse since then. Mistrust and communication difficulties have increased to the point where genuine animosity is often present. This article describes one of the causal factors.

Hypergamy is a biological term that refers to mating strategies, particularly the strategy of females, who serve as the gatekeepers of reproduction in most species.

Evolutionary psychology teaches that females have evolved to “marry up” by the workings of natural biological laws. The higher the quality of the mate they can attract, the more likely their offspring will survive to reproduce. Over the course of the biological past, the offspring of females that specifically sought out high-quality breeding partners have outcompeted the offspring of those who were not as selective. The end result: hypergamous females.

Social science has adopted the term for human behaviour. In this context, hypergamy still refers to sexual selection, but specifically to the female tendency to prefer men who are wealthy, educated and ambitious (i.e. males who have demonstrated the greatest capacity for resource acquisition). In societies all over the world, free women try to attract high-status men if they can.

Described thus far is the scientific background of the term ‘hypergamy’. When people talk about hypergamy in the context of Clown World, they’re referring to two related, undesired phenomena.

Thanks to the advent of dating apps such as Tinder, women have a greater choice of mating partners than ever. Before social media, the choice was mostly restricted to who they knew in physical space: friends of friends, studymates, workmates, men at the pub. After social media, the choice has expanded to every available male in the entire city.

Before social media, unattractive men could go to a pub and rely on the fact that, sooner or later, a woman would choose to sleep with them on account of that her other options were limited. After social media, unattractive men have to compete with every spare Chad within 50 kilometres. This has led to a great number of them simply giving up hope of finding a sexual partner.

Today, even moderately attractive men are uncertain of being able to attract a decent woman. Because women inevitably choose from among the highest quality of the men available to them, and because the majority of men are now available to them, getting laid sometimes comes down to being in the top 10 or 20 percent. This has led to a record number of young men not getting laid.

The second phenomenon relates to women discarding the men they are already with in the hope of trading up.

A commonly held maxim states that “women are only as loyal as their options”, and today, thanks to social media, they have an abundance of options. The Internet is capable of connecting every woman with a near-unlimited stream of tall, muscular, good-looking men. Some women think that some of those men look a lot better than their current partners.

Many men today feel – whether justified or not – that the women of today are likely to abandon any relationship they are in as soon as a more attractive male comes along. These men feel that long-term relationships are much less secure that they used to be, owing to the fact that hypergamy is out of control.

Clown World is more cut-throat than normal life in many ways. Because the basic spiritual connection to other sentient life has been broken, people don’t care so much about other people’s suffering. As such, relationships are a lot more exploitative and shallow than they used to be. This is as true of sexual relationships as business ones.

The existence of hypergamy has led to one extremely thorny political question: to what degree, if any, should female sexual nature be controlled?

Marriage was invented to control hypergamy. The idea was that if every man got exactly one woman – no more, no less – that fighting for the highest quality mates would no longer happen. As long as men could be convinced to be faithful to one woman, the resentment that arises from men not being able to get laid would be minimised.

The problem is that no-one wants to get married in Clown World. Not only are people mostly incapable of making a long-term commitment to anything nowadays, but the law also makes it a dangerous proposition. The rise of “divorce rape” has meant that men who marry are in danger of the woman getting bored, divorcing them, and then claiming alimony on the grounds that she is accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

This has led to a return of the social outcomes that marriage was designed to prevent. The few Chads at the top of the dominance hierarchy get laid all the time, the many at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy never get laid, those in the middle live in fear of losing their position, and misery abounds. The inevitable outcome is a large number of men dropping out of society entirely.

It’s hard to predict where the hypergamy phenomenon will end. But some clues might come from the disconcerting increase in men who no longer believe in women’s emancipation. A return to what Jordan Peterson calls “forced monogamy” is entirely possible, as unlikely as it might seem right now.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Political Implications Of Kinship Intensity

The phrase “kinship intensity” is rare in the behavioural science literature, but it’s making a resurgence thanks to new understandings of genetics. Although the concept of kinship intensity has been thoroughly elaborated upon with regards to mate selection, its inevitable profound impact on our political philosophy has yet to occur. This essay gives a foretaste.

Kinship is the primary organising principle of human societies. The reasons for this have been described at length by evolutionary psychologists and by biologists in works such as The Selfish Gene. In short, kinship organises societies because organisms that co-operate socially are more likely to survive and to reproduce than ones who don’t.

The great political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Chanakya, Machiavelli and Hobbes didn’t know about genes, and so they had no concept of kinship intensity. Aristotle was aware that families organised into villages, and villages into provinces, and provinces into nations, but he didn’t know that it was kin selection on the basis of shared genes that drove all of that.

Back in the old days, before the Age of Exploration and mass transit, almost everyone lived in a state of high kinship intensity. Most people only knew a couple of hundred other people from their village and a few regional luminaries like the local sheriff or priest. Virtually everyone was related to each other in some way. They celebrated each others’ weddings and birthdays all the time.

In the modern world, most people live in a low state of kinship intensity. Living in big cities, many people encounter strangers all day – not only people from other tribes but from other countries and continents. In big cities, one comes into contact with people whose natural behaviour is so different to one’s own that it seems alien.

This change – from medieval to modern – has had profound effects on our political attitudes.

When a society has a high degree of kinship intensity, people are much more generous and co-operative. It’s logical to be, because any given act of kindness is more likely to benefit someone like you. If many of your kin live in the same society, it makes sense to work towards the betterment of that society, perhaps even making sacrifices for it. Your kin will benefit, and will reciprocate.

When a society has a low degree of kinship intensity, people are much less generous and co-operative. This is also logical, because acts of kindness cost the same amount to perform but will benefit someone unlike you, who is unlikely to reciprocate it. If you’re the only one of your kin in a society, there’s very little reason to work hard to better that society.

The West has always been split into a high kinship intensity Old World and a low kinship intensity New World. As mass immigration continues, the kinship intensity of all societies in the West will continue to fall: the Old World will become like the New and the New World will become like Brazil. This will have predictable consequences for human political behaviour.

As the degree of kinship intensity in Western countries continues to fall, people will care less and less about the people on the bottom of society. Once rich people no longer have much in common with poor people, those rich people will stop wanting to pay taxes or donate to charities that help. Decreasing kinship intensity will inevitably lead to both lower taxes and a corporate mentality where other people are viewed as tools to generate profit, and not as human beings.

If the people you’re exploiting aren’t related to you, then who cares?

The more diversity there is in a society, the more willing people in that society are to exploit others. People tend to enslave outsiders if they can, rather than their neighbours. The Barbary Coast slave traders raided Europe for slaves; the plantation owners of the American South bought theirs from Africa. African slaves constitute the largest proportion of slaves traded today, mostly by Arabs.

By contrast, the societies with the least amount of exploitation are the homogenous ones. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are characterised by being high-trust, low-crime societies where people habitually contribute to the common good. Societies like these, with high degrees of kinship intensity, are like large families.

We can see from this that kinship intensity predicts a number of outcomes. The higher it is, the less within-group exploitation there is. The lower it is, the greater within-group exploitation there is.

Kinship intensity predicts outcomes such as weight of taxation. In societies with high kinship intensity (like Scandinavia), people are generally happy to pay high taxes, knowing that the tax money will benefit their kin. In societies with low kinship intensity (like America), people don’t want to pay any taxes, because they feel that the tax money will benefit those who aren’t their kin.

It follows logically, therefore, that lowering the kinship intensity of a society through means such as mass immigration will make people less willing to contribute to the greater good. This apparent selfishness makes perfect sense from a kin selection perspective, and will obtain until intermarriage makes the newcomers the same kin as everyone else (or until there is civil war).

So anyone who wants to have a culture in which people contribute to the greater good, instead of exploiting it, better support policies that maintain a high level of kinship intensity. Crucial to this objective is limiting immigration to a level at which the newcomers can be absorbed into the kin networks of the existing population, rather than forming their own parallel networks.

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Debunking The “Structural Racism” Conspiracy Theory

The most prevalent conspiracy theory of our time is so prevalent that it’s accepted as truth by most media entities. This theory has it that black and brown academic and economic underachievement can best be explained by structural racism and white supremacy. The truth is that, like most conspiracy theories, this theory goes directly against the relevant science, and can be disproven by it.

When 9/11 happened, a popular conspiracy theory said it was an inside job. One particular version claimed that, as the melting point of steel is higher than the burning point of jet fuel, the twin towers could not have collapsed on account of being struck by aeroplanes (the official explanation). They had to have been taken down by explosives placed within the structure of the buildings.

The way to refute this theory was to ask people qualified in the relevant science. You could say to a civil engineer or a physicist “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” and they would tell you that it doesn’t have to melt the beams, it just has to heat them up enough so that they become too soft to support the weight of the building, at which point it will collapse. This is what happened in the case of the twin towers. Conspiracy theory debunked.

Anyone wanting to test other conspiracy theories can do likewise. If you want to know whether the Earth is flat you could ask an astronomer. If you wanted to know whether the Earth was 6,000 years old you could ask a geologist. If you wanted to know whether humans landed on the Moon you could ask an aeronautical engineer. And if you wanted to test whether the structural racism conspiracy theory was bullshit, you could ask a psychologist.

This is what a psychologist would tell you.

The science of IQ is the most robust and heavily supported of any social science. There is more evidence backing the validity of it than there is backing anything else. Most importantly, IQ also has more predictive power than any single other variable known to Psychology.

If you disagree about its predictive power, consider the following analogy.

You have two 13-year old boys. One is tested to have an IQ of 115, i.e. one standard deviation above average. The other is tested to have an IQ of 85, one standard deviation below average. The two boys are followed up ten years after the test. Without knowing which boy is which, you’re told that one has recently completed an accounting degree, whereas the other dropped out of school and drifted into petty crime.

Can you guess which is which?

Almost everyone would guess that the boy with an IQ of 115 became the accountant. And, in the vast majority of such cases, they’d be right. Accountancy is intellectually challenging: far more accountants have IQs closer to 115 than to 85. Likewise, far more petty criminals have IQs closer to 85 than to 115. Almost everyone knows this, and almost no-one questions it.

The fact is that IQ is so powerfully predictive that we can already get a rough idea of how a person’s life will turn out just from accurately measuring their IQ. The average person with an IQ of 85 will have much greater trouble learning and recalling information than the average person with an IQ of 100. Their impulse control, measured by ability to delay gratification, will be significantly inferior.

Because their intellectual ability and their discipline are poorer than than of the average person, they will be less able to meet the demands of the modern workplace. As such, they will be marginalised into unemployment and underemployment more often. Any population of people with an average IQ of 85 will be much poorer and much more criminal than any population with an IQ of 100 or higher.

85 is also the average IQ of black Americans and Pacific Islanders, with Maoris being slightly higher (around 90). This we know from the research compiled by researchers like Richard Lynn in books like Race Differences in Intelligence.

Psychological science, therefore, can predict on the basis of IQ alone that black Americans and brown Kiwis will be poorer and will be more involved in the criminal justice system than white Americans and white Kiwis. This can be confidently predicted even in the total absence of structural racism or white supremacy.

At this point, a believer in the structural racism conspiracy theory will argue that structural racism not only makes blacks and browns poorer and more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system, but it also makes their IQs lower on account of things like teachers ignoring them more often during class or discouraging them from study. Therefore, even if they do have lower IQs, it’s still white people’s fault.

For one thing, we know that this contention can’t be true because intelligence is mostly genetic and not environmental. Although the environment can have a powerful effect on the intelligence of young people, the effect of environment on IQ is no more than 0.2 by adulthood – a phenomenon known as the Wilson Effect. Therefore, low adult IQ is primarily a genetic phenomenon.

For another thing, we can observe the experience and outcomes of other racial groups who have similar IQs to white people.

105 is the average IQ of Far East Asians. The structural racism conspiracy theory would predict that Far East Asians do worse than white people, on account of that white people deny them opportunities for advancement and discriminate against them in business and politics. After all, white supremacists don’t like Asians any more than they like blacks.

The psychological science theory would predict that Far East Asians do as well or better than white people, on account of that their high IQs lead to successful careers and less criminality. Being high IQ and having good impulse control, they should study hard and get decent jobs.

As it turns out, Asian Americans earn 7% more than whites at the median. They are also significantly less criminal, despite that more of them are from poor families and many are even refugees. This directly refutes the structural racism conspiracy theory and directly supports the psychological science theory.

Ultimately, the main reason why blacks do worse than whites in America, and the main reason why browns do worse than whites in New Zealand, is because of low IQ. This low IQ leads them to make more impulsive decisions, which leads to poverty. This isn’t at all controversial among those who have studied the relevant science.

The conspiracy theory that says blacks and browns do worse because of white racism is bullshit. This means that the poorer outcomes of blacks and browns cannot be explained by white racism, but by factors inherent to the blacks and browns themselves.

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The Four Basic Political Subjects

Underneath all the talk about politics today lies a great confusion. People talk about what politics is supposed to achieve, but they have generally forgotten who it’s supposed to achieve it for. For our ancestors, the political subject was obvious, but for us it is not. This essay explains.

The first and original political subject was the tribe. In the biological past, humans had no conception of nations or kingdoms. One was born into a tribe of roughly 50-150 people, and these people were your blood kin. As such, their interests were your interests, in almost every case.

Every member of the tribe was in the ingroup, and everyone not in the tribe was in the outgroup. This made politics very simple. If you encountered a stranger, they were the enemy, and it was acceptable to do anything to that stranger if it furthered the interests of the tribe. This tribal mentality still exists today, only it has become much weaker than it used to be (in most cases).

The second political subject is the state. This came into being when civilisation did. With the advent of civilisation, it was possible to have two strangers share the same space without chimping out and attacking each other. This meant that it was possible to have towns and cities made up of people from different tribes, perhaps even competing ones.

With the advent of towns and cities, it was necessary to have an administrator class that dealt with any disagreements that arose. The bringing together of different tribes meant competing schedules of moral values. These administrators, employed to smooth over differences between tribes, became the state. Their different approaches for settling quarrels became ideologies.

One way of dealing with the tensions created by identification with the tribe was to identify with the state instead. In practice, this is much the same as identifying with an ideology. Thus, a judge who was from a particular tribe would not necessarily rule in favour of his own tribesman. This was a radical new way of thinking when compared to the tribal solidarity model. It required a new political subject.

Thinking in terms of the state provided this new subject. If people were able to abandon their previous allegiances to their tribes, they could band together and build a mighty state that challenged the world, such as Rome or America. The memetic hybrid vigour brought about by multiple tribes all agreeing to work together under a state banner proved to be immensely powerful.

Not every civilisation succeeded in making this transition, however. If a state was not capable of creating an egregore powerful enough to persuade people to abandon their tribal allegiances, the divided loyalties caused by those remaining allegiances would pull the state apart from the inside. Corruption reigns in every state where tribal allegiances continue to hold sway.

The third political subject is the individual. This political subject arose as a way of settling firstly the tensions between those who identified with the tribe and those who identified with the state, and secondly the tensions between those who identified with different states or ideologies. In the world of 2020, the individual is the default political subject.

The logic is that, by identifying with the individual ego, people would no longer be drawn into conflict on account of competing tribal or ideological loyalties. Only caring about oneself might seem selfish and egotistical, but it has the bonus effect of settling tensions between groups. If people only care about the next hit, they will not take collective action.

It is true that what Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self led to a great peace. In recent decades, Hitlers and Stalins have been impossible on account of that no-one would follow them. Collective efforts demand individual sacrifices, and people who identify with the individual ego will not make them. However, this identification brings its own problems.

The fourth political subject is the consciousness itself.

The limitations of identifying with the individual ego are now obvious. Although doing so was a logical move forwards from the horrors of state-worship, the human animal is still fundamentally a social one, and it has social needs. Identifying with the individual ego might make warfare between nations less likely, but it sharply increases the emotional and spiritual suffering of the people, who find that their lives no longer have any meaning.

Some philosophers, like Alexandr Dugin, have suggested a return to Dasein as the basic political subject (Dugin frequently refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in The Fourth Political Theory). This is much the same thing as having consciousness as the basic political subject. In either case, it solves most of the problems of the first three political subjects.

Identifying with the consciousness allows the best of all worlds. Not only can a person meet their social and spiritual needs through connection to other conscious beings, but they can also do so without necessarily getting set against them because of tribal or ideological loyalties. Identifying with consciousness means that one is automatically allied and opposed to every other person.

There’s one problem with this otherwise elegant solution: most people have never learned to distinguish between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. They don’t know the difference between the True Self and the False Self. As such, most people operate either on the level of crude instinct (and thus tend towards tribalism), the level of conditioned responses (and thus tend towards fetishising the state or an ideology) or on both levels at once (and thus tend towards soulless globohomo consumer whoring).

As is so often the case, it appears that our great challenge is primarily a spiritual challenge. Identification with the consciousness might prevent us from getting drawn into tribal or ideological conflicts, and it might prevent us from getting bogged down in mindless anomie. But it will only be an option for those with the spiritual acumen to meditate and perform self-inquiry.

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