Status Updates From The Past is a Future Countr...

we became more religious across the Middle Ages, during which time Europeans were executing about 2% of young men per generation; something which would be expected to elevate pro-social traits and religiousness, which it appears to have done

these autumnal societies of the past that the people of the higher social classes, and thus those who, on average, were more intelligent, appeared to stop having children. This occurred both in civilizations that had developed effective contraception, as well as in those that had not. This is crucial because all aspects of civilization have been shown to be associated with intelligence

the Democratic Party will ultimately abandon all of its ‘liberal Woke’ policies, as a ‘rich white’ aberration, and double down on racial–class grievances. It will be a traditional Marxist left-wing party, with a leadership composed entirely of patriarchal, homophobic, religious minorities

K-strategists are strongly adapted to their own specific niche, rendering it adaptive—for the offspring—that they marry genetically similar people. They’ll also be averse to risk and, nurture-inclined, people tend to bond more strongly with those who are genetically similar to themselves

the warming of the environment with surplus production of food and universal welfare has relaxed selection pressures on intelligence. The decline in inter-group conflict has also reduced the selection pressure for group intelligence, where more intelligent groups triumph; due to superior planning, better weapons, and better management of resources

there was strong selection pressure for intelligence under harsh Darwinian conditions, and those that were more intelligent were able to sustain higher numbers of surviving offspring due to the relationship between intelligence and the ability to solve complex problems presented by a harsh and competitive environment, and also to accrue wealth

liberal graduates, who cannot find elite positions, turn on their own people, castigating them as ‘racist’ and ‘transphobic’ as a means of shaking the system that has cheated them and so possibly gaining status in the resultant turmoil. Conservative graduates, in the same position, are inclined to purify the group of the foreigners and individualists with whom they are competing

Recall that conservatives tend to be high on both Individualizing and Binding moral foundations. This means that they can be swayed based on appeals to fairness and harm reduction. But it doesn’t work in reverse. Liberals will seldom be swayed by appeals to group authority, purity, or in-group loyalty. This kind of asymmetry creates a dynamic that Lebanese statistician Nassim Taleb has referred to as minority rule

liberals are more likely to dismiss empirical evidence which questions their dogmas, and to stick to their dogmas, than are conservatives. They are more dogmatic. This may be partly because they create coalitions based around shared dogmas, where conservatives seem to create them based around shared tribal membership

‘Big 5’, These traits are Openness (involving openness to new experiences), Conscientiousness (rule-following and impulse control), Extraversion (feeling positive feelings strongly and thus risk-taking in pursuit of them), Agreeableness (altruism and empathy), and Neuroticism (feeling negative feelings strongly, including anxiety and depression)

because paranoia is an aspect of Neuroticism, meaning that liberals will fear conservatives far more than the other way round. Accordingly, liberals will push for power but even when they attain power their self-esteem will be sufficiently low, and their paranoia sufficiently high, that they will still feel that their enemies are the ones with the real power

If you feel negative feelings strongly then you have low self-esteem, you are envious, you perceive yourself as weak, unfairly treated, and under threat, and you identify with others whom you perceive as weak, such as women or ethnic minorities, meaning you promote their interests. Perceiving yourself as weak, you cannot risk overtly playing for status—by signalling your power—as you will fear being harmed.

‘Psychoticism’—a broad personality trait composed of low altruism, low empathy, low rule-following, and low impulse control, and thus a trait which makes you individualistic rather than group-oriented—strongly predicts being ‘liberal’ rather than ‘conservative’.

Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in a constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in a constant competition with other ethnic groups