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The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution
Since the 1960s, the West has moved ever-leftwards. 'Equality' and ‘feelings’ are central to the New Religion that rejects all traditional values. Yet beneath the institutionally dominant ‘Left’ stews a growing and restless ‘Right’. How has this fractured situation come about? What will the future hold? In The Past is a Future Country , the authors trace it back to the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection massively weakened, meaning that, for the first time in history, the selfish, sick and stupid could survive and reproduce, undermining our religious, group-oriented culture. Now the West is scourged by an epidemic of narcissists, competing to signal their individuality and moral superiority. But their ‘fight for equality’ is really a fight for self-promotion. Reflecting this runaway individualism, Westerners increasingly don’t have children, save for those who are genetically resistant to this onslaught ― the staunchly conservative and the eventual inheritors of the earth. But there is a dark storm brewing in the demographic data that the authors have analysed. There is a burgeoning growth in the population of exceptionally unintelligent and antisocial people that social welfare systems cannot sustain for much longer. The developed world will pass away, and the global population that depends on it will crash, in the greatest Malthusian Collapse of all time. Yet all is not lost. The authors show how a resistant class of intelligent, religious conservatives will band together to preserve enclaves of civilization that may survive most of the coming apocalypse, and from its ashes rebuild a new A Neo-Byzantium.
250 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2022
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December 22, 2022
Superb Summary of Cutting Edge Research
This is a wonderful and important book that condenses and summaries a vast amount of research within the field of evolutionary biology/psychology about where we are culturally, how we got here, and where we’re headed.
- Like that we’re at the peak of a long cycle of inevitably, inexorably increasing leftist cultural/political dominance based on valuing an individual’s ‘equity” and right to “safe space” at the expense of more balanced and sustainable traditional cultural values (within which have been the occasional short lived and largely ineffectual conservative corrections) which will eventually (likely sooner than later) crest and fall back into a Dark Age when a more lasting conservatism will emerge to salvage what can be of civilization. If this sounds farfetched consider checking your woke privilege and Judeo/Christian based assumptions of linear progress and just imagine life without electricity and computers (as we become too stupid to even maintain what we now have let alone innovate more) with 90% of humanity eventually dying off (after ballooning beyond sustainability) with the survivors forced to embrace the kind of lifestyle Quakers and Amish have been enjoying for centuries. -
The writing is lively and engaging and the result is often surprisingly refreshing (and counter intuitive). It’s unfortunate that it will appeal more to the right (pragmatic group-oriented ethnocentric crowd) than the left (idealistically woke self-centered individualists - which it is overtly critical of), because both sides need to hear it. That being said, while the content may appear controversial it should powerfully stimulate anyone who thinks about these things…
Beginning with an analysis of the basic differences between the cultural Left and Right – that the Left is basically self-centered while the Right is group-oriented, and that of the 5 moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty to the in-group, authority and sanctity or purity) leftists score highly in the first two to the exclusion of the others, while rightists tend to score evenly in all five (which to leftists is proof the rightists are uncaring and totalitarian…), the authors then go on to outline how due to harsh evolutionary pressures (and softness in the absence of such pressures) civilizations progress through various stages of growth and decline which are thus natural and beyond the control of us mere mortals.
I’ve read a lot of Dutton’s books and I’d have to say this is perhaps my favorite (for a clear summation of his favorite themes), and a great place to begin.
“Consistent with the interpretation that there are fundamental differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, it has been found that when conservatives feel cheated of a reward they feel that they deserve, then this elevates their feelings of hostility to other ethnic groups. They are group-oriented, so cheating them is cheating their group and that is what they care about. When liberals feel cheated in the same way, it elevates their feelings of hostility to members of their own group. Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in constant competition with other ethnic groups (Amd, 2020).” (p. 28)
“The collapse in child mortality, and relaxation of selection pressures generally speaking, permitted even greater genetic diversity to arise, something that further exacerbated declining trust. Declining religiousness also led to the rise in influence of females, and thus a greater emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance’ over systematizing and truth, a coddling moral psychology that goes far in justifying restrictions on free speech in the name of protection from hurt feelings and grim realities. The entire situation led to an increasing evolutionary mismatch, higher levels of mental illness, greater paranoia, and thus, further overall declining trust, feeding into desires to restrict free speech in order to promote ‘safe-spaces’. Declining intelligence itself meant decreasing belief in democracy, declining trust, and increased dogmatism. Genetic diversity also permitted more and more depressed and individualistic people, who would be low on trust, and black-and-white in their thinking; pushing society away from beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy. With no group-selection pressure to keep society united, and with traditional religiousness being weak, these people could hijack the culture – due to the way in which group-oriented people sympathize with individualists – pushing it in an ever-more extreme individualistic direction, and so challenging democracy and freedom of speech, because individualistic values would need to be placed ahead of even truth.” (p.112)
“…. But unless our predictions should all sound rather “white-pilled”, remember: the coming ‘Silver Age’ in politics is to coincide with a monumental collapse, not seen since the Bronze Age three thousand years ago. The world will drift into an over-populated crisis of the very stupid and the very anti-social.
“This book will be a story of exile and abandonment in that context, not triumph and rejuvenation. There will be a ‘Great Escape’, whereby intelligent, conservative people flee apocalyptic chaos to establish refuges of civilization in which they weather the storm of the Dark Age. Those exiled will be conservative, middle class, and white (defined very broadly), set against ‘post-liberal’ areas of mixed ethnic minorities, with some white admixture. Today, the Woke will continue to induce guilt in the white or otherwise ‘privileged’ middle-class population, but tomorrow the underclass will be the frightening majority of the Western population, and too vast in size, and offensive in character, to sustain further sympathy. Lower IQ whites, reluctant or unable to move due to the associations between low IQ and conservatism and between high IQ and migration, will simply merge into the majority non-white populations; dissolving away into extinction like the Neanderthals.” (p. 14)
This is a wonderful and important book that condenses and summaries a vast amount of research within the field of evolutionary biology/psychology about where we are culturally, how we got here, and where we’re headed.
- Like that we’re at the peak of a long cycle of inevitably, inexorably increasing leftist cultural/political dominance based on valuing an individual’s ‘equity” and right to “safe space” at the expense of more balanced and sustainable traditional cultural values (within which have been the occasional short lived and largely ineffectual conservative corrections) which will eventually (likely sooner than later) crest and fall back into a Dark Age when a more lasting conservatism will emerge to salvage what can be of civilization. If this sounds farfetched consider checking your woke privilege and Judeo/Christian based assumptions of linear progress and just imagine life without electricity and computers (as we become too stupid to even maintain what we now have let alone innovate more) with 90% of humanity eventually dying off (after ballooning beyond sustainability) with the survivors forced to embrace the kind of lifestyle Quakers and Amish have been enjoying for centuries. -
The writing is lively and engaging and the result is often surprisingly refreshing (and counter intuitive). It’s unfortunate that it will appeal more to the right (pragmatic group-oriented ethnocentric crowd) than the left (idealistically woke self-centered individualists - which it is overtly critical of), because both sides need to hear it. That being said, while the content may appear controversial it should powerfully stimulate anyone who thinks about these things…
Beginning with an analysis of the basic differences between the cultural Left and Right – that the Left is basically self-centered while the Right is group-oriented, and that of the 5 moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty to the in-group, authority and sanctity or purity) leftists score highly in the first two to the exclusion of the others, while rightists tend to score evenly in all five (which to leftists is proof the rightists are uncaring and totalitarian…), the authors then go on to outline how due to harsh evolutionary pressures (and softness in the absence of such pressures) civilizations progress through various stages of growth and decline which are thus natural and beyond the control of us mere mortals.
I’ve read a lot of Dutton’s books and I’d have to say this is perhaps my favorite (for a clear summation of his favorite themes), and a great place to begin.
“Consistent with the interpretation that there are fundamental differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, it has been found that when conservatives feel cheated of a reward they feel that they deserve, then this elevates their feelings of hostility to other ethnic groups. They are group-oriented, so cheating them is cheating their group and that is what they care about. When liberals feel cheated in the same way, it elevates their feelings of hostility to members of their own group. Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in constant competition with other ethnic groups (Amd, 2020).” (p. 28)
“The collapse in child mortality, and relaxation of selection pressures generally speaking, permitted even greater genetic diversity to arise, something that further exacerbated declining trust. Declining religiousness also led to the rise in influence of females, and thus a greater emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance’ over systematizing and truth, a coddling moral psychology that goes far in justifying restrictions on free speech in the name of protection from hurt feelings and grim realities. The entire situation led to an increasing evolutionary mismatch, higher levels of mental illness, greater paranoia, and thus, further overall declining trust, feeding into desires to restrict free speech in order to promote ‘safe-spaces’. Declining intelligence itself meant decreasing belief in democracy, declining trust, and increased dogmatism. Genetic diversity also permitted more and more depressed and individualistic people, who would be low on trust, and black-and-white in their thinking; pushing society away from beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy. With no group-selection pressure to keep society united, and with traditional religiousness being weak, these people could hijack the culture – due to the way in which group-oriented people sympathize with individualists – pushing it in an ever-more extreme individualistic direction, and so challenging democracy and freedom of speech, because individualistic values would need to be placed ahead of even truth.” (p.112)
“…. But unless our predictions should all sound rather “white-pilled”, remember: the coming ‘Silver Age’ in politics is to coincide with a monumental collapse, not seen since the Bronze Age three thousand years ago. The world will drift into an over-populated crisis of the very stupid and the very anti-social.
“This book will be a story of exile and abandonment in that context, not triumph and rejuvenation. There will be a ‘Great Escape’, whereby intelligent, conservative people flee apocalyptic chaos to establish refuges of civilization in which they weather the storm of the Dark Age. Those exiled will be conservative, middle class, and white (defined very broadly), set against ‘post-liberal’ areas of mixed ethnic minorities, with some white admixture. Today, the Woke will continue to induce guilt in the white or otherwise ‘privileged’ middle-class population, but tomorrow the underclass will be the frightening majority of the Western population, and too vast in size, and offensive in character, to sustain further sympathy. Lower IQ whites, reluctant or unable to move due to the associations between low IQ and conservatism and between high IQ and migration, will simply merge into the majority non-white populations; dissolving away into extinction like the Neanderthals.” (p. 14)
February 16, 2026
Unflinching look over the horizon at the future awaiting our children. If any.
This is an important book by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles. Dutton is always highly quotable. One of his central points: “Wokeness is the new child mortality; the new crucible of evolution.” In other words, the woke will not inherit the earth. They don’t breed.
Another term to like is “clever-silly,” applied to Nobel prize winning economists (viz Bernanke, Krugman) embracing Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. Also call “Magic Money Tree.” He uses the term mid-wit, which he has defined elsewhere thus:
"Mid-wits increasingly dominate by their numbers, shouting down opponents. They are now more confident than ever, because some of them have earned newly-dumbed-down credentials at universities.
The big thing about mid-wits is that they are clever enough to know that it is “smart” to follow and propagate the politically dominant ideology. This licenses them to sneer and abuse those who are more interested in the truth, and are pointing out the problems in the narrative. Hence political correctness.
But mid-wits aren’t clever and confident enough to reach their own opinions, and to value truth over social status.
Increasingly, mid-wits and mid-wittery are driving the more talented people and those who think for themselves out of universities.
Mid-wits thrive in areas where disputes cannot be settled by experiment or empirical means. Opinion-driven areas such as humanities are the favorites of mid-wits. Be a mid-wit in say chemistry or electronics, and you will quickly be exposed. But be a mid-wit espousing critical race theory and alleging systematic oppression, and you can impress all your friends and get a well-paying career as an academic or journalist before you are disproved."
Matthew Crawford elaborates that A halfwit is somebody who sacrifices academic disciplines and rigor, establishing a mild to severe messianic complex that is difficult to penetrate with facts and somebody is witless if they lack both instincts and education.
The strength of this book is Dutton’s writing and his absolute lack of fear of calling things as he sees them. He is one of the few writers willing to put all of the factors into the equation. As always, he taunts the demons of political correctness in every conceivable way: sex and gender, race, intelligence, virtue signaling and political correctness itself, the sanctity of institutions such as government and academia, and hobby horses such as global warming. The graphs projecting the future of society, compiled with his co-author Rayner-Hilles, are a little bit raw, having been taken directly from the computer without editing in more comprehensible chart and axis labels. The text that supports them is more useful.
This review consists primarily of quotes from the book, taken chapter by chapter. The authors’ conclusion is that civilization throughout the world is headed toward a reprise of the Bronze Age collapse of 1200 BC. It will be due to factors that Dutton has explored repeatedly since At Our Wits End - Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future. The mid-wits have taken over, crowding out the genius that would be required to keep things going. To the extent that we are having children, they are born into the stupid strata of society. They will not have the ability to keep things going, or even to sustain themselves in a general collapse.
The mid-wits have meanwhile totally bungled the financial management of society, mindlessly printing money. Women have ascended to positions of power for which they are temperamentally unsuited, being on the average more sentimental, less analytical than men. They support policies that are detrimental to people like themselves: open borders, transsexuality, Black Lives Matter and defunding the police.
The authors’ best guess as to where things are headed is toward a multistage collapse in which the talented few successively escape mismanaged polities until only a fraction remain, most likely small, homogeneous and traditional, often religious redoubts. This review is written from Eastern Europe for precisely the reasons the authors give in Chapter 5.
Here follow the points worth quoting in each of the chapters. Paragraphs opening with a quote are lifted directly from the text.
Chapter 1. - The Paradox of Left-Wing Hegemon. The right wing has a fertility advantage. Even though left-wing agenda seems to be taking over – people are individualistic, homosexuality is approved, all sex outside marriage is approved, those with traditional conservative values are the people that are having children.
A prime reason intelligence is low among the fertile is that social programs encourage low intelligence people to have children. The average IQ of English on welfare is 85. Nonetheless, there is a segment of the more fertile population that is quite intelligent.
Virtue signaling is more prevalent among intelligent people because intelligence predicts absorbing the dominant ideology and persuading yourself that you believe it to the social gains associated with it. The virtue previously signaled was religiosity. Today’s virtues are equality and harm avoidance.
“Such a society becomes highly individualistic and materialistic and, whether it is in Athens, Rome or Baghdad, you see the rise of feminism and women in positions of power. In declining Baghdad there were even female lawyers and imams.” There is a cycle. Civilizations get rich, become decadent and collapse, after which there is a return to the countryside and the simpler life. At that point it begins again, with selection for intelligence.
The authors doubt that China or a confederacy of the elites in Western society will manage to control the destiny of humanity. They, like the rest of us, are getting stupider. They simply will not have the means. They are not replacing themselves any more than the rest of us. Per James Flynn in [[ASIN:1316604462 Does your family make you smarter?]] their kids on average are much more … average than they.
The book anticipates a hypothetical pandemic, “The consequence of which will be a massive population collapse; mass death, in which possibly as much as 90% of the world population will die off a relatively short period of time. This will be global, in a way that earlier collapses were not to the same extent, because of the globalized, interconnected nature of the modern world." Perhaps Covid and the biological products that have been injected into 70% of the world’s population fit his description. Even at this early date they have measurably increased mortality and decreased fertility.
Chapter 2 - The Psychology of Conservatives and Liberals. Conservatives are group oriented, more focused on society whereas liberals are focused on the individual. The woke philosophy is all about championing individuals. Liberals, following Rousseau, see people as having been created equal. The believe that the observed inequalities are the result of evils perpetrated upon the weak. Conservatives see inequality as the evolved, natural state of man.
Chapter 3 - “Why does culture always seem to move to the left?” The authors cite Jonathan Haidt’s five moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty to the group, authority and sanctity or purity. Liberals tend to see only the first two, the individualizing moral foundations. Conservatives see as well the last three, called binding moral foundations, and weight all five equally. The fact that conservatives can see the liberal point of view, but not vice-versa, pushes society ever leftward.
More intelligent people better discern the prevailing worldview. They see the social benefits of conforming to that dominant worldview. They are better at forcing themselves to believe it by coming up with superficially convincing arguments for doing so, thus gaining social status.
Women, and female thinking, are becoming dominant. “We are increasingly seeing a trend among the woke left, ready and willing to sacrifice not just large swaths of the life sciences, but even the scientific method itself, under the umbrella accusation that it is a conspiratorial factory of sexist and racist ideas."
Chapter 4 – The Weakening of Group Selection. For a group to thrive it must monitor and remove selfish, antisocial, free riding, or parasitic individuals. Those kinds of people will tend to be selected out by social selection. Those traits will die out as their possessors do not successfully raise children.
Group selected humans followed what biologists call a slow life history: stable pair bonds, fidelity, investment in children, strong commitment to society. As Dutton wrote in At Our Wits End, we are becoming less intelligent. The dialog is dominated by mid-wits, a characteristic of which is clever-silly ideas.
To paraphrase the authors’ examples of clever-silly ideas, multiculturalism induces an elevated state of anxiety – we evolved to be comfortable associating with people like ourselves. Temperament is heritable – we understand how people in our tribe think and behave. Extreme environmentalism is causing many people to reduce their fertility or even abandon it. Only those highly prone to wanting children by hardcoded genetic impulses, making them resistant to this dysphoria, end up doing so. Feminism encourages women to become highly educated and put status above children, limiting or eliminating their fertility.
The authors reiterate a core thesis: "In a sense, the ability to resist leftist-induced dysphoria is the new crucible of evolution. Where once the crucible of evolution was child mortality, it is now woke morality."
“…patriarchy can be regarded as adaptive, because if female sexuality is controlled, males are less worried about being cuckolded, so they are less likely to jealously fight each other, and more likely to cooperate, and their children enjoy confidence in who their father is, their full siblings and the rest of their extended family on their father’s side. All of this elevates kin-cooperation and positive tribal ethnocentrism, thus aiding group selection. Accordingly, the acceptance, and promotion, of patriarchy becomes part of the religion with both males and females being selected to live in a patriarchal environment. Females who were submissive to the patriarchy were more likely to be invested in by males, and less likely to be cast out. Indeed, in this context, females will compete with each other to signal their patriarchal values, in order to attract the best quality men, and distrust men who do not appreciate these efforts.”
“…Being adapted to patriarchy, females are adapted, to a greater extent than males, to a situation in which choices are made for them, usually by their parents, and particularly by their fathers. Left to their own devices, they are, accordingly, more likely to make maladaptive choices. These choices would be rendered even more maladaptive by a runaway individualistic society positively encouraging them to make maladaptive choices. This would be in line with evidence that being wealthy is far more damaging to the fertility of females than to the fertility of males. “
“It also appears that Eastern Europe is following a very different political trajectory from that of the West. It is much higher in binding values, as expressed in relatively strong ethnocentric attitudes, religiosity (in some Eastern European countries, at least), and intolerance of homosexuality….
“… as intelligence declines—holding everything else con¬stant—we would predict that people would become higher in negative ethnocentrism. Intelligence is also negatively associated with religiousness, meaning that, as intelligence declines, we might expect people to become more religious, and, potentially, more ethnocentric as a result. Furthermore, as intelligence continues to decline, we would predict that, ultimately, living standards will get worse, and, therefore, mortal¬ity salience and general stress will increase. This can be predicted to elevate both religiousness and ethnocen¬trism as we have already argued.
“As far as we can see, the Black Lives Matter movement—and the religious fervour, violence, iconoclasm, and polarization that it represents —is a significant landmark on the road to the future down which we are now walking.”
Chapter 6 - Modelling the Future
The authors generate a large number of computer models. Models produce predictive numbers, which as the “population bomb,” “peak oil,” “climate catastrophe,” and recent Imperial College, London Covid projections tell us can be very wide of the mark. However, the accompanying text is very insightful.
“Having children is connected with the idea that life has eternal significance.”
“…liberalism is now dying—everywhere. It is dying among the more intelligent; it is dying among the less intelligent. It is dying among blacks; it is dying among whites. It is dying among men; it is dying among women. Only, it hasn’t been dying up till now of course; liberalism has been thriving. It is liberal genes that have been dying.”
“As we’ve said, left-wing identification, or viewpoint, peaks among the Millennial generation and then there is a sudden ‘Generation Z’ reversal. This would be indicative of the notion of the West having reached ‘Peak Woke’ and Generation Z or ‘Zoomers’ reacting strongly against it. And indeed, many indicators illustrate this. Support for the Republican Party takes a sharp dip among Millennials and then sharply rises among Generation Z in the white male sample.”
Chapter 7 - The New Byzantiums.
Black Lives Matter used mob rule and intimidation to get its way. They cowed the major political parties, and most large corporations, into supporting them.
“The female average IQ differs little from the male IQ, except that the male range is wider. But females are higher in Conscientiousness, which is the other crucial predictor of educational The result is the rise The ‘Head Girl’ (who) combines normal range high intelligence with high Conscientiousness, high Agreeableness and the higher social conformity, and concern with empathy over systematizing that, on average, distinguishes stereotypical females from stereotypical males.”
Richard Lynn, an author Dutton frequently cites, writing in [[ASIN:B09NC4ZRH6 Sex Differences in Intelligence]] would not consider the difference “little.” He concludes that European women have an average IQ about four points lower and a narrower distribution of intelligence than men. They would be disproportionately represented among Dutton’s “mid-wits.”
The title “The Past is a Future Place” sets the authors’ theme. We have been living beyond our means for quite a while. We have been spending down the accumulated wealth of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Not just the material wealth, but also the wealth of spirit and character that enabled us to achieve this richness.
We are getting stupider and less agreeable. We are getting becoming more individualistic and less group oriented. Civilization is falling apart.
The great majority of mankind are not prepared for the fall. They will not be physically healthy enough to take care of themselves. They will not be intelligent enough to figure out how to cope. They will not have been educated enough as to how things work – electrical grids, water and systems, auto maintenance. Most don't have talent enough to live on their own.
We are all familiar with the fall of Rome. Most historians peg it at 410 A.D. The Roman Empire, however, survived until the 15th century as the Byzantine Empire, when it succumbed to the Ottoman Turks.
The late Bronze Age collapse of about 1200 B.C. was much more complete. Not coincidentally, it happened at a time when men ceased to be manly, women started to run things, and people stopped having families.
Chapter 8 – The Long Slide.
“There is an extent to which, if you want to have children, you need to think about something beyond the self. You need to have a desire to nurture somebody else, and to sacrifice your own selfish desires for the good of somebody else. And what is 'the good' of somebody else? It is often assumed to mean raising them such that they can become successful and contented members of society, which means that they have to learn to be coop¬erative with other people and, sometimes, to sacrifice their own selfish desires for the collective good.”
“Once the society switched towards individualizing values, more and more people became individualists, and, eventually, these people were encouraged into, or depressed into, not wanting children, or, at least, they did not want large families. This occurred due to never-before seen conditions of luxury, permitting runaway individualism.“
Reviewer’s conclusion
The authors apply an evolutionary paradigm in explaining the chaos in the modern world. Increasing stupidity is a product of evolution. It is revealed by falling IQ tests, standardized test scores, vocabularies and other measurable artifacts of societies.
It would be harder to measure the increasing level of deleterious mutations in the human genome, but the evidence is all around us. Though the measurements are somewhat time-bound and subjective, the number of recorded instances of mental disease has gone up dramatically. Most of us who have led long lives would agree that people are crazier than they were in our youth.
The autism spectrum is one of Dutton’s recurrent themes. Though he does not go deeply into the causes, the evidence that it is caused by environmental factors, primarily the childhood vaccination schedule. See [[ASIN:9655981045 Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth]].
The authors’ major conclusion is that our present civilization is in the state of collapse. Countries will fall apart. Russia may be the first to collapse. Just as the Soviet Union was an artificial conglomeration of unwilling participants, the rump Russian Federation is likewise artificial. When it loses its present disastrously ill-advised war, the Federation may spin apart.
The authors tell us how same could happen in the United States. The profoundly deep corruption being exposed by the Twitter scandal reinforces the reality of the corruption exposed by the Hunter Biden laptop, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and so many others. Amazing books such as Robert Malone’s [[ASIN:B09R4Y6YKJ Lies my Government Told Me]] and Whitney Webb’s [[ASIN:1634243013 One Nation Under Blackmail]] are spilling hugely damaging revelations one after another.
The rest of the review continued in comments since this has extended past the limit...
This is an important book by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles. Dutton is always highly quotable. One of his central points: “Wokeness is the new child mortality; the new crucible of evolution.” In other words, the woke will not inherit the earth. They don’t breed.
Another term to like is “clever-silly,” applied to Nobel prize winning economists (viz Bernanke, Krugman) embracing Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. Also call “Magic Money Tree.” He uses the term mid-wit, which he has defined elsewhere thus:
"Mid-wits increasingly dominate by their numbers, shouting down opponents. They are now more confident than ever, because some of them have earned newly-dumbed-down credentials at universities.
The big thing about mid-wits is that they are clever enough to know that it is “smart” to follow and propagate the politically dominant ideology. This licenses them to sneer and abuse those who are more interested in the truth, and are pointing out the problems in the narrative. Hence political correctness.
But mid-wits aren’t clever and confident enough to reach their own opinions, and to value truth over social status.
Increasingly, mid-wits and mid-wittery are driving the more talented people and those who think for themselves out of universities.
Mid-wits thrive in areas where disputes cannot be settled by experiment or empirical means. Opinion-driven areas such as humanities are the favorites of mid-wits. Be a mid-wit in say chemistry or electronics, and you will quickly be exposed. But be a mid-wit espousing critical race theory and alleging systematic oppression, and you can impress all your friends and get a well-paying career as an academic or journalist before you are disproved."
Matthew Crawford elaborates that A halfwit is somebody who sacrifices academic disciplines and rigor, establishing a mild to severe messianic complex that is difficult to penetrate with facts and somebody is witless if they lack both instincts and education.
The strength of this book is Dutton’s writing and his absolute lack of fear of calling things as he sees them. He is one of the few writers willing to put all of the factors into the equation. As always, he taunts the demons of political correctness in every conceivable way: sex and gender, race, intelligence, virtue signaling and political correctness itself, the sanctity of institutions such as government and academia, and hobby horses such as global warming. The graphs projecting the future of society, compiled with his co-author Rayner-Hilles, are a little bit raw, having been taken directly from the computer without editing in more comprehensible chart and axis labels. The text that supports them is more useful.
This review consists primarily of quotes from the book, taken chapter by chapter. The authors’ conclusion is that civilization throughout the world is headed toward a reprise of the Bronze Age collapse of 1200 BC. It will be due to factors that Dutton has explored repeatedly since At Our Wits End - Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future. The mid-wits have taken over, crowding out the genius that would be required to keep things going. To the extent that we are having children, they are born into the stupid strata of society. They will not have the ability to keep things going, or even to sustain themselves in a general collapse.
The mid-wits have meanwhile totally bungled the financial management of society, mindlessly printing money. Women have ascended to positions of power for which they are temperamentally unsuited, being on the average more sentimental, less analytical than men. They support policies that are detrimental to people like themselves: open borders, transsexuality, Black Lives Matter and defunding the police.
The authors’ best guess as to where things are headed is toward a multistage collapse in which the talented few successively escape mismanaged polities until only a fraction remain, most likely small, homogeneous and traditional, often religious redoubts. This review is written from Eastern Europe for precisely the reasons the authors give in Chapter 5.
Here follow the points worth quoting in each of the chapters. Paragraphs opening with a quote are lifted directly from the text.
Chapter 1. - The Paradox of Left-Wing Hegemon. The right wing has a fertility advantage. Even though left-wing agenda seems to be taking over – people are individualistic, homosexuality is approved, all sex outside marriage is approved, those with traditional conservative values are the people that are having children.
A prime reason intelligence is low among the fertile is that social programs encourage low intelligence people to have children. The average IQ of English on welfare is 85. Nonetheless, there is a segment of the more fertile population that is quite intelligent.
Virtue signaling is more prevalent among intelligent people because intelligence predicts absorbing the dominant ideology and persuading yourself that you believe it to the social gains associated with it. The virtue previously signaled was religiosity. Today’s virtues are equality and harm avoidance.
“Such a society becomes highly individualistic and materialistic and, whether it is in Athens, Rome or Baghdad, you see the rise of feminism and women in positions of power. In declining Baghdad there were even female lawyers and imams.” There is a cycle. Civilizations get rich, become decadent and collapse, after which there is a return to the countryside and the simpler life. At that point it begins again, with selection for intelligence.
The authors doubt that China or a confederacy of the elites in Western society will manage to control the destiny of humanity. They, like the rest of us, are getting stupider. They simply will not have the means. They are not replacing themselves any more than the rest of us. Per James Flynn in [[ASIN:1316604462 Does your family make you smarter?]] their kids on average are much more … average than they.
The book anticipates a hypothetical pandemic, “The consequence of which will be a massive population collapse; mass death, in which possibly as much as 90% of the world population will die off a relatively short period of time. This will be global, in a way that earlier collapses were not to the same extent, because of the globalized, interconnected nature of the modern world." Perhaps Covid and the biological products that have been injected into 70% of the world’s population fit his description. Even at this early date they have measurably increased mortality and decreased fertility.
Chapter 2 - The Psychology of Conservatives and Liberals. Conservatives are group oriented, more focused on society whereas liberals are focused on the individual. The woke philosophy is all about championing individuals. Liberals, following Rousseau, see people as having been created equal. The believe that the observed inequalities are the result of evils perpetrated upon the weak. Conservatives see inequality as the evolved, natural state of man.
Chapter 3 - “Why does culture always seem to move to the left?” The authors cite Jonathan Haidt’s five moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty to the group, authority and sanctity or purity. Liberals tend to see only the first two, the individualizing moral foundations. Conservatives see as well the last three, called binding moral foundations, and weight all five equally. The fact that conservatives can see the liberal point of view, but not vice-versa, pushes society ever leftward.
More intelligent people better discern the prevailing worldview. They see the social benefits of conforming to that dominant worldview. They are better at forcing themselves to believe it by coming up with superficially convincing arguments for doing so, thus gaining social status.
Women, and female thinking, are becoming dominant. “We are increasingly seeing a trend among the woke left, ready and willing to sacrifice not just large swaths of the life sciences, but even the scientific method itself, under the umbrella accusation that it is a conspiratorial factory of sexist and racist ideas."
Chapter 4 – The Weakening of Group Selection. For a group to thrive it must monitor and remove selfish, antisocial, free riding, or parasitic individuals. Those kinds of people will tend to be selected out by social selection. Those traits will die out as their possessors do not successfully raise children.
Group selected humans followed what biologists call a slow life history: stable pair bonds, fidelity, investment in children, strong commitment to society. As Dutton wrote in At Our Wits End, we are becoming less intelligent. The dialog is dominated by mid-wits, a characteristic of which is clever-silly ideas.
To paraphrase the authors’ examples of clever-silly ideas, multiculturalism induces an elevated state of anxiety – we evolved to be comfortable associating with people like ourselves. Temperament is heritable – we understand how people in our tribe think and behave. Extreme environmentalism is causing many people to reduce their fertility or even abandon it. Only those highly prone to wanting children by hardcoded genetic impulses, making them resistant to this dysphoria, end up doing so. Feminism encourages women to become highly educated and put status above children, limiting or eliminating their fertility.
The authors reiterate a core thesis: "In a sense, the ability to resist leftist-induced dysphoria is the new crucible of evolution. Where once the crucible of evolution was child mortality, it is now woke morality."
“…patriarchy can be regarded as adaptive, because if female sexuality is controlled, males are less worried about being cuckolded, so they are less likely to jealously fight each other, and more likely to cooperate, and their children enjoy confidence in who their father is, their full siblings and the rest of their extended family on their father’s side. All of this elevates kin-cooperation and positive tribal ethnocentrism, thus aiding group selection. Accordingly, the acceptance, and promotion, of patriarchy becomes part of the religion with both males and females being selected to live in a patriarchal environment. Females who were submissive to the patriarchy were more likely to be invested in by males, and less likely to be cast out. Indeed, in this context, females will compete with each other to signal their patriarchal values, in order to attract the best quality men, and distrust men who do not appreciate these efforts.”
“…Being adapted to patriarchy, females are adapted, to a greater extent than males, to a situation in which choices are made for them, usually by their parents, and particularly by their fathers. Left to their own devices, they are, accordingly, more likely to make maladaptive choices. These choices would be rendered even more maladaptive by a runaway individualistic society positively encouraging them to make maladaptive choices. This would be in line with evidence that being wealthy is far more damaging to the fertility of females than to the fertility of males. “
“It also appears that Eastern Europe is following a very different political trajectory from that of the West. It is much higher in binding values, as expressed in relatively strong ethnocentric attitudes, religiosity (in some Eastern European countries, at least), and intolerance of homosexuality….
“… as intelligence declines—holding everything else con¬stant—we would predict that people would become higher in negative ethnocentrism. Intelligence is also negatively associated with religiousness, meaning that, as intelligence declines, we might expect people to become more religious, and, potentially, more ethnocentric as a result. Furthermore, as intelligence continues to decline, we would predict that, ultimately, living standards will get worse, and, therefore, mortal¬ity salience and general stress will increase. This can be predicted to elevate both religiousness and ethnocen¬trism as we have already argued.
“As far as we can see, the Black Lives Matter movement—and the religious fervour, violence, iconoclasm, and polarization that it represents —is a significant landmark on the road to the future down which we are now walking.”
Chapter 6 - Modelling the Future
The authors generate a large number of computer models. Models produce predictive numbers, which as the “population bomb,” “peak oil,” “climate catastrophe,” and recent Imperial College, London Covid projections tell us can be very wide of the mark. However, the accompanying text is very insightful.
“Having children is connected with the idea that life has eternal significance.”
“…liberalism is now dying—everywhere. It is dying among the more intelligent; it is dying among the less intelligent. It is dying among blacks; it is dying among whites. It is dying among men; it is dying among women. Only, it hasn’t been dying up till now of course; liberalism has been thriving. It is liberal genes that have been dying.”
“As we’ve said, left-wing identification, or viewpoint, peaks among the Millennial generation and then there is a sudden ‘Generation Z’ reversal. This would be indicative of the notion of the West having reached ‘Peak Woke’ and Generation Z or ‘Zoomers’ reacting strongly against it. And indeed, many indicators illustrate this. Support for the Republican Party takes a sharp dip among Millennials and then sharply rises among Generation Z in the white male sample.”
Chapter 7 - The New Byzantiums.
Black Lives Matter used mob rule and intimidation to get its way. They cowed the major political parties, and most large corporations, into supporting them.
“The female average IQ differs little from the male IQ, except that the male range is wider. But females are higher in Conscientiousness, which is the other crucial predictor of educational The result is the rise The ‘Head Girl’ (who) combines normal range high intelligence with high Conscientiousness, high Agreeableness and the higher social conformity, and concern with empathy over systematizing that, on average, distinguishes stereotypical females from stereotypical males.”
Richard Lynn, an author Dutton frequently cites, writing in [[ASIN:B09NC4ZRH6 Sex Differences in Intelligence]] would not consider the difference “little.” He concludes that European women have an average IQ about four points lower and a narrower distribution of intelligence than men. They would be disproportionately represented among Dutton’s “mid-wits.”
The title “The Past is a Future Place” sets the authors’ theme. We have been living beyond our means for quite a while. We have been spending down the accumulated wealth of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Not just the material wealth, but also the wealth of spirit and character that enabled us to achieve this richness.
We are getting stupider and less agreeable. We are getting becoming more individualistic and less group oriented. Civilization is falling apart.
The great majority of mankind are not prepared for the fall. They will not be physically healthy enough to take care of themselves. They will not be intelligent enough to figure out how to cope. They will not have been educated enough as to how things work – electrical grids, water and systems, auto maintenance. Most don't have talent enough to live on their own.
We are all familiar with the fall of Rome. Most historians peg it at 410 A.D. The Roman Empire, however, survived until the 15th century as the Byzantine Empire, when it succumbed to the Ottoman Turks.
The late Bronze Age collapse of about 1200 B.C. was much more complete. Not coincidentally, it happened at a time when men ceased to be manly, women started to run things, and people stopped having families.
Chapter 8 – The Long Slide.
“There is an extent to which, if you want to have children, you need to think about something beyond the self. You need to have a desire to nurture somebody else, and to sacrifice your own selfish desires for the good of somebody else. And what is 'the good' of somebody else? It is often assumed to mean raising them such that they can become successful and contented members of society, which means that they have to learn to be coop¬erative with other people and, sometimes, to sacrifice their own selfish desires for the collective good.”
“Once the society switched towards individualizing values, more and more people became individualists, and, eventually, these people were encouraged into, or depressed into, not wanting children, or, at least, they did not want large families. This occurred due to never-before seen conditions of luxury, permitting runaway individualism.“
Reviewer’s conclusion
The authors apply an evolutionary paradigm in explaining the chaos in the modern world. Increasing stupidity is a product of evolution. It is revealed by falling IQ tests, standardized test scores, vocabularies and other measurable artifacts of societies.
It would be harder to measure the increasing level of deleterious mutations in the human genome, but the evidence is all around us. Though the measurements are somewhat time-bound and subjective, the number of recorded instances of mental disease has gone up dramatically. Most of us who have led long lives would agree that people are crazier than they were in our youth.
The autism spectrum is one of Dutton’s recurrent themes. Though he does not go deeply into the causes, the evidence that it is caused by environmental factors, primarily the childhood vaccination schedule. See [[ASIN:9655981045 Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth]].
The authors’ major conclusion is that our present civilization is in the state of collapse. Countries will fall apart. Russia may be the first to collapse. Just as the Soviet Union was an artificial conglomeration of unwilling participants, the rump Russian Federation is likewise artificial. When it loses its present disastrously ill-advised war, the Federation may spin apart.
The authors tell us how same could happen in the United States. The profoundly deep corruption being exposed by the Twitter scandal reinforces the reality of the corruption exposed by the Hunter Biden laptop, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and so many others. Amazing books such as Robert Malone’s [[ASIN:B09R4Y6YKJ Lies my Government Told Me]] and Whitney Webb’s [[ASIN:1634243013 One Nation Under Blackmail]] are spilling hugely damaging revelations one after another.
The rest of the review continued in comments since this has extended past the limit...
February 5, 2023
Superb Summary of Cutting Edge Research
This is a wonderful and important book that condenses and summaries a vast amount of research within the field of evolutionary biology/psychology about where we are culturally, how we got here, and where we’re headed.
- Like that we’re at the peak of a long cycle of inevitably, inexorably increasing leftist cultural/political dominance based on valuing an individual’s ‘equity” and right to “safe space” at the expense of more balanced and sustainable traditional cultural values (within which have been the occasional short lived and largely ineffectual conservative corrections) which will eventually (likely sooner than later) crest and fall back into a Dark Age when a more lasting conservatism will emerge to salvage what can be of civilization. If this sounds farfetched consider checking your woke privilege and Judeo/Christian based assumptions of linear progress and just imagine life without electricity and computers (as we become too stupid to even maintain what we now have let alone innovate more) with 90% of humanity eventually dying off (after ballooning beyond sustainability) with the survivors forced to embrace the kind of lifestyle Quakers and Amish have been enjoying for centuries. -
The writing is lively and engaging and the result is often surprisingly refreshing (and counter intuitive). It’s unfortunate that it will appeal more to the right (pragmatic group-oriented ethnocentric crowd) than the left (idealistically woke self-centered individualists - which it is overtly critical of), because both sides need to hear it. That being said, while the content may appear controversial it should powerfully stimulate anyone who thinks about these things…
Beginning with an analysis of the basic differences between the cultural Left and Right – that the Left is basically self-centered while the Right is group-oriented, and that of the 5 moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty to the in-group, authority and sanctity or purity) leftists score highly in the first two to the exclusion of the others, while rightists tend to score evenly in all five (which to leftists is proof the rightists are uncaring and totalitarian…), the authors then go on to outline how due to harsh evolutionary pressures (and softness in the absence of such pressures) civilizations progress through various stages of growth and decline which are thus natural and beyond the control of us mere mortals.
I’ve read a lot of Dutton’s books and I’d have to say this is perhaps my favorite (for a clear summation of his favorite themes), and a great place to begin.
“Consistent with the interpretation that there are fundamental differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, it has been found that when conservatives feel cheated of a reward they feel that they deserve, then this elevates their feelings of hostility to other ethnic groups. They are group-oriented, so cheating them is cheating their group and that is what they care about. When liberals feel cheated in the same way, it elevates their feelings of hostility to members of their own group. Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in constant competition with other ethnic groups (Amd, 2020).” (p. 28)
“The collapse in child mortality, and relaxation of selection pressures generally speaking, permitted even greater genetic diversity to arise, something that further exacerbated declining trust. Declining religiousness also led to the rise in influence of females, and thus a greater emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance’ over systematizing and truth, a coddling moral psychology that goes far in justifying restrictions on free speech in the name of protection from hurt feelings and grim realities. The entire situation led to an increasing evolutionary mismatch, higher levels of mental illness, greater paranoia, and thus, further overall declining trust, feeding into desires to restrict free speech in order to promote ‘safe-spaces’. Declining intelligence itself meant decreasing belief in democracy, declining trust, and increased dogmatism. Genetic diversity also permitted more and more depressed and individualistic people, who would be low on trust, and black-and-white in their thinking; pushing society away from beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy. With no group-selection pressure to keep society united, and with traditional religiousness being weak, these people could hijack the culture – due to the way in which group-oriented people sympathize with individualists – pushing it in an ever-more extreme individualistic direction, and so challenging democracy and freedom of speech, because individualistic values would need to be placed ahead of even truth.” (p.112)
“…. But unless our predictions should all sound rather “white-pilled”, remember: the coming ‘Silver Age’ in politics is to coincide with a monumental collapse, not seen since the Bronze Age three thousand years ago. The world will drift into an over-populated crisis of the very stupid and the very anti-social.
“This book will be a story of exile and abandonment in that context, not triumph and rejuvenation. There will be a ‘Great Escape’, whereby intelligent, conservative people flee apocalyptic chaos to establish refuges of civilization in which they weather the storm of the Dark Age. Those exiled will be conservative, middle class, and white (defined very broadly), set against ‘post-liberal’ areas of mixed ethnic minorities, with some white admixture. Today, the Woke will continue to induce guilt in the white or otherwise ‘privileged’ middle-class population, but tomorrow the underclass will be the frightening majority of the Western population, and too vast in size, and offensive in character, to sustain further sympathy. Lower IQ whites, reluctant or unable to move due to the associations between low IQ and conservatism and between high IQ and migration, will simply merge into the majority non-white populations; dissolving away into extinction like the Neanderthals.” (p. 14)
This is a wonderful and important book that condenses and summaries a vast amount of research within the field of evolutionary biology/psychology about where we are culturally, how we got here, and where we’re headed.
- Like that we’re at the peak of a long cycle of inevitably, inexorably increasing leftist cultural/political dominance based on valuing an individual’s ‘equity” and right to “safe space” at the expense of more balanced and sustainable traditional cultural values (within which have been the occasional short lived and largely ineffectual conservative corrections) which will eventually (likely sooner than later) crest and fall back into a Dark Age when a more lasting conservatism will emerge to salvage what can be of civilization. If this sounds farfetched consider checking your woke privilege and Judeo/Christian based assumptions of linear progress and just imagine life without electricity and computers (as we become too stupid to even maintain what we now have let alone innovate more) with 90% of humanity eventually dying off (after ballooning beyond sustainability) with the survivors forced to embrace the kind of lifestyle Quakers and Amish have been enjoying for centuries. -
The writing is lively and engaging and the result is often surprisingly refreshing (and counter intuitive). It’s unfortunate that it will appeal more to the right (pragmatic group-oriented ethnocentric crowd) than the left (idealistically woke self-centered individualists - which it is overtly critical of), because both sides need to hear it. That being said, while the content may appear controversial it should powerfully stimulate anyone who thinks about these things…
Beginning with an analysis of the basic differences between the cultural Left and Right – that the Left is basically self-centered while the Right is group-oriented, and that of the 5 moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty to the in-group, authority and sanctity or purity) leftists score highly in the first two to the exclusion of the others, while rightists tend to score evenly in all five (which to leftists is proof the rightists are uncaring and totalitarian…), the authors then go on to outline how due to harsh evolutionary pressures (and softness in the absence of such pressures) civilizations progress through various stages of growth and decline which are thus natural and beyond the control of us mere mortals.
I’ve read a lot of Dutton’s books and I’d have to say this is perhaps my favorite (for a clear summation of his favorite themes), and a great place to begin.
“Consistent with the interpretation that there are fundamental differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, it has been found that when conservatives feel cheated of a reward they feel that they deserve, then this elevates their feelings of hostility to other ethnic groups. They are group-oriented, so cheating them is cheating their group and that is what they care about. When liberals feel cheated in the same way, it elevates their feelings of hostility to members of their own group. Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in constant competition with other ethnic groups (Amd, 2020).” (p. 28)
“The collapse in child mortality, and relaxation of selection pressures generally speaking, permitted even greater genetic diversity to arise, something that further exacerbated declining trust. Declining religiousness also led to the rise in influence of females, and thus a greater emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance’ over systematizing and truth, a coddling moral psychology that goes far in justifying restrictions on free speech in the name of protection from hurt feelings and grim realities. The entire situation led to an increasing evolutionary mismatch, higher levels of mental illness, greater paranoia, and thus, further overall declining trust, feeding into desires to restrict free speech in order to promote ‘safe-spaces’. Declining intelligence itself meant decreasing belief in democracy, declining trust, and increased dogmatism. Genetic diversity also permitted more and more depressed and individualistic people, who would be low on trust, and black-and-white in their thinking; pushing society away from beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy. With no group-selection pressure to keep society united, and with traditional religiousness being weak, these people could hijack the culture – due to the way in which group-oriented people sympathize with individualists – pushing it in an ever-more extreme individualistic direction, and so challenging democracy and freedom of speech, because individualistic values would need to be placed ahead of even truth.” (p.112)
“…. But unless our predictions should all sound rather “white-pilled”, remember: the coming ‘Silver Age’ in politics is to coincide with a monumental collapse, not seen since the Bronze Age three thousand years ago. The world will drift into an over-populated crisis of the very stupid and the very anti-social.
“This book will be a story of exile and abandonment in that context, not triumph and rejuvenation. There will be a ‘Great Escape’, whereby intelligent, conservative people flee apocalyptic chaos to establish refuges of civilization in which they weather the storm of the Dark Age. Those exiled will be conservative, middle class, and white (defined very broadly), set against ‘post-liberal’ areas of mixed ethnic minorities, with some white admixture. Today, the Woke will continue to induce guilt in the white or otherwise ‘privileged’ middle-class population, but tomorrow the underclass will be the frightening majority of the Western population, and too vast in size, and offensive in character, to sustain further sympathy. Lower IQ whites, reluctant or unable to move due to the associations between low IQ and conservatism and between high IQ and migration, will simply merge into the majority non-white populations; dissolving away into extinction like the Neanderthals.” (p. 14)
October 25, 2024
This is a three-star book (because it is so repetitive) but it gets an extra star for being intellectually brave. (I have to assume this guy is canceled?) Really really really interesting ideas and predictions.
March 12, 2023
Lots of interesting stats and modelling but not much else. A bit too pessimistic for my liking too :0
August 7, 2023
If you've read one Dutton book, you've read them all.
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