It would be a great improvement to our understanding of social dynamics if people stopped using the terms capitalism and capitalist. Given how ubiquitous these terms are, this may seem a strong claim, but it is one that is easy to sustain.

The Marxist definition of capitalism is:

The socio-economic system where social relations are based on commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.

According to Wikipedia:

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.

The first problem is the ism. There is no role for the state here. The state becomes, implicitly or explicitly, a “reflection” of the economic system, despite the fact that people do not describe non-state societies as “capitalist” even though such societies can have lots of private ownership used for the purposes of gaining income.

Non-state societies cannot manage the scale of economic activity so as to have, for example, firms. Their economic production is overwhelmingly centred on households.

Sedentism—living in dwellings—created households that then became, for millennia, the centre of most economic activity. Even states were governed out of royal or imperial households. It is factories, and offices, that move economic activity out of households.

The mass energy-use take-off we call the Industrial Revolution has brought the arc of economic history that began with sedentism to an end. When economist Robin Hanson writes about the shift from farmer “back” to forager patterns, it is the effects of the supplanting of households from the centre of economic activity that he is pointing to (without fully grasping that).

Note that this shift away from households being central to economic activity is very much about energy use: it applies to both commerce and to state activity (including state production). It is not inherently “capitalist”.

State production also produces commodities: calling such “state capitalism” just shows how much capitalism is a ridiculously protean term.

Eliding the state

The exclusion of the state in defining capitalism is not analytically benign. A classic and continuing use of the term capitalism is to romanticise the state. By viewing the state as a “reflection” of the economic system, all bad things, all disliked features, can be based on the malign influence of “capitalists”, of the dynamics of “capitalism”, with the state reduced to an instrument or reflection of such dynamics. (The same thing can be done in reverse, blaming all bad things on the state—see anarcho-capitalism—but that is much less common.)

The natural—and used—implication of blaming private commerce for all bad things is that, if good people, with good intentions, and proper understanding, run the state, it can do anything needed for their program to be achieved. This is very obvious if one, for example, reads the program of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The term capitalism thereby becomes a vehicle for getting the state profoundly wrong; for not understanding that the state is a fundamental structuring feature of any state society; for not understanding that, across history, states have been the dominant extractor and creator of surplus, and so of class structures. That, when it comes to state societies, the state itself is fundamental.

To see how much that is true, contemplate the monumental constructions of past civilisations. State cultures build far more, and are more socially complex, than stateless cultures. In pre-industrial polities, the state itself—the ruler and the ruler’s agents—dominated what is built.

The state dominates the extraction and creation of surplus even in the most mercantile of societies. Suppress commerce and you elevate the state.

The state’s extraction of taxes creates surplus by taking resources before they can be turned to supporting more babies. Relationship to the means of coercion thus turns out to be a key feature of class in its own right, as one can also see by contemplating all the warrior elites of history.

There is no greater example of how the state dominates the creation and maintenance of class structures than Marxist regimes, than Communism.

Revolutionary Marxism operationally is a Party elite seizing control of the state, pulverising society, and setting up a class structure based on its ideological and regime convenience. Revolutionary Marxism—Communism—is thus the most thorough modern iteration of the general pattern that the state itself is the dominant creator of class structure, due to being the dominant creator, extractor and distributor of surplus.

We view the hereditary rule of the Kim dynasty in the Kimdom (North Korea) as some weird aberration but such “socialism in one family” was created because Kim il-Sung (1912-1994) grasped the operational logic of Communism more thoroughly than any other Communist leader. All forms of left-progressivism operate to elevate left-progressives to positions of authority: Communism just takes it to the nth degree.

It is entirely—and demonstrably—possible to set up inheritance as the apex succession mechanism on top of a state apparatus, including a Party-state apparatus. After all, there have been plenty of states where the hereditary principle operated at the top of a system of hierarchical, even bureaucratic, control: from the Inca Empire (1438-1533) through to the Roman Empire under various dynasties such as the Constantinian (305-363) or Valentinian (364-455) dynasties, the Khmer Empire (802-1431), and the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) imperial Chinese dynasties—though the pattern in China goes back to the Warring States period (c. 475 –221 BC).

This is even more so when one can harness, one can mobilise, the other basis for class power, for class authority, that Marx’s economism does not cope with: the role of managing the burdens of self-consciousness through rituals and patterns of public meaning and legitimacy which is undertaken by shamans, priests and clerisies down the ages. This is the social realm that all Marxist regimes and movements very much mobilise, and pay so much attention to, via ideology and which is part of it being a political religion—a religion where Communism/Socialism never fails, people fail Communism/Socialism.

Kim il-Sung created Juche ideology that elevated him and his lineage—the Mount Paektu Bloodline—to messianic status. The status granted to a Stalin or a Mao became hereditary in the Kimdom. The role of the cult of personality in signalling loyalty in a situation where loyalty is compulsory harks back to the long history of deified rulers.

In many ways, the Kimdom represents the other end of an historical arc that starts with the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster. So much of left-progressivism is prefigured in Anabaptist Munster: 

• the rigid exclusion of believer from non-believer based on what Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) would later call the friend/enemy distinction; 

• the intense moralising of disagreement by an owning-morality “knowing” elite deciding who is or is not a legitimate participant in the discourse and decisions; 

• the doubling-down on the ideology regardless of failures; 

• believing that they know the proper arc of history; 

• holding that past and present society are dominated by processes of sin and corruption; the imposition of rigid, pervasive social control; 

• the anointing of a personified Messiah-Ruler; 

• the creation of an intensely moralised hierarchy; 

• the abolition of private property.

Those cases where left-progressives achieve control of the state showing the most similarities.

In contemporary Western democracies, the state spends around 30-50 per cent of GDP and regulates the rest. Treating what it does as “capitalism”—as a mere reflection of its society, of private commerce—is analytically childish. It is a worse-than-childish in its mis-construal of basic social dynamics—that the state is a fundamental structuring element of any state society—that is disastrous for human flourishing because it thereby dismisses centuries of struggle to impose accountability on the state. This then ends up justifying monstrously unaccountable Party-States.

Not that the liberal democratic West should be too smug. Liberal Theory also suffers the delusion that states just “reflect” their society and so systematically underestimates how hard it is to impose accountability on the state apparatus. Sticking a bunch of elected politicians on top of the state apparatus does not solve the problem of ensuring systematic accountability. This is especially so as the expansion in the size and reach of the state apparat increases the scale of the networks and resources who benefit from frustrating such accountability—indeed, who benefit from turning elections as much as possible into rituals of legitimacy that don’t change things in ways inconvenient to the unaccountable classes and their status and authority games.

In Britain, PM Tony Blair debauched the UK’s constitutional order through expanding quangoes, instituting human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers and devolving decision-making to the EU, thereby massively increasing the degree to which British elections became legitimating rituals that changed remarkably little. This is, however, just an extreme case of a more general problem across Western democracies.

The way welfare-state apparats have created ever-larger numbers of people insulated from the consequences of their ideas—but who benefit from status plays that moralise disagreement that then generate purity spirals—has a huge amount to do with modern madnesses.

Historian Orlando Figes analysed the Russian Revolution as the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Western societies are suffering the corrosive effects of evolution networks within bureaucracy—whether government, non-profit or corporate bureaucracy—and elsewhere (notably academe) of people insulated from the consequences of their ideas, insulated from making things work. The, at times, startling lack of attention to the problems of social order that has become such a feature of contemporary left-progressivism comes from this.

The ongoing refusal to confront what is revealed in the Fauci diaries also reveals how much of Western elite/progressive politics has become about frustrating accountability to the wider citizenry. There are a great many people who do not want to confront that larger the tax-paid state and quasi-state apparatus become, then the larger and better resourced the anti-accountability networks become, because they benefit from those apparatuses having as little accountability as possible. Even if that is not so, they often cannot bear the thought that people like them are the problem, or that the moralised status games that give them such comfort—or even a sense of identity—might be the problem.

The negative idealism of Critical Theory and its derivatives, where one gets to criticise any constraint one doesn’t like, call it oppression, but take no responsibility for making things work—other than handing resources and moral authority to people like themselves—is status-play catnip to such people.

The notion of capitalism obscures all this. It particularly obscures grappling with how much welfare state apparatuses colonise their societies, and colonise them through social pathologies. Public health, for example, gets more authority and resources the metabolically sicker its polity populations become. Not exactly a positive incentive structure. Moreover, the welfare state not only colonises social pathologies, it increasingly generates pathological politics and status plays precisely because of its funding of ever-wider networks of people insulated from the consequences of their ideas.

Truth on the Streets

This is Why I Call It the Homeless Industrial Complex

The homeless industrial complex is a multi-billion-dollar system that thrives on homelessness. Governments, nonprofits, and contractors all get paid as the problem grows. Programs are measured by how many people they serve, not by how many actually exit homelessness. The result is a system that manages people instead of solving anything. Good intentions…

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8 months ago · 167 likes · 54 comments · Kevin Dahlgren

The next post in the series examines how capitalism and capitalist mislead about the dynamics of commerce.

References

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

F. A. Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ American Economic Review, Sep. 1945, XXXV, No. 4, 519-30. https://statisticaleconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the_use_of_knowledge_in_society_-_hayek.pdf

Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work, Encounter Books, [2009] 2011.

Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021). https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2021/alternative-theoretical-framework-economics

Xavier Marquez, ‘A Model of Cults of Personality,’ APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, Last revised: 26 Aug 2013. https://www.academia.edu/4205457/A_Model_of_Cults_of_Personality

Xavier Marquez, ‘Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual,’ Politics, Religion, & Ideology, Volume 19, Issue 3, 2018, 265-285. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3208495

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions,’ American Political Science Review, June 2017, 111, 3. 622-636. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2016/twerp_1129_moav.pdf

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356707920_The_Origin_of_the_State_Land_Productivity_or_Appropriability

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998.

James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, 2017.

Interacting with these pressures, are creeping institutional dysfunctions. Much of this is from toxic sociotropy—emotional safety through conformity—by people whose ideas are not subject to reality-tests. When people complain about progressive white women (aka Affluent White Female Urban Liberals), they are complaining about those who are most susceptible to moralised sociotropy while also being insulated from the consequences of their ideas. In my previous post, I discussed the evolutionary reasons for this moralised conformity, and its dysfunctional tendencies.

We are also experiencing political turmoil. Across the Western—particularly Anglosphere—politics, we are seeing the collapse of conventional centre-right politics. The latest manifestation of this is the Australian national populist Party—One Nation—has just won a thumping by-election victory in Western Australia.

This win was remarkable for several reasons. First, One Nation won a “safe” Labor seat in a State with a popular Labor Government—in 2025 it won a second landslide, and third successive, election victory. Previously, One Nation had seemed mainly a threat to the centre-right Coalition Parties. Secondly, despite this being the latest in the continuing One Nation surge since the 2025 Australian Federal election, there is still a remarkable amount of dismissive cope in commentary.

Thirdly, despite Australia being widely seen as having handled mass immigration notably better than other Anglosphere countries—both in having effective border control and in being selective in who it lets in—Australia is also reaching the limits of electoral tolerance of mass immigration. This should be a lot less surprising than it is, but—due to the systematic analytical incompetence of mainstream Economics on immigration, with its ludicrously simple “but more transactions, so GDP goes up” analysis—it is clearly much more of a shock to policy makers, politicians and many commentators than it would be if they were not quite so historically illiterate.

This is part of so-called “social sciences” not being sciences due to not accepting consilience with more fundamental causal structures—that everything social is emergent from the biological—by not being grounded in what we know from evolutionary biology and anthropology.

Fourthly, despite broadly “cultural” politics becoming more salient, economic management still matters. Veteran Australian political journalist Michelle Grattan produced one of the better analyses of the result. She noted that:

The fundamental issue now is that for many people their material circumstances (represented by real wages) have been going backwards, their aspirations (buying a house) have been thwarted, and much of life in general has become more difficult.

On the last point, including by mass immigration creating ever more congestion.

General patterns

Looking more specifically at the current dynamics—particularly political dynamics—across the Western democracies, if we put together the insights of various analysts of contemporary societies, we can understand where we are and how we got here.

Start with political economist Thomas Piketty. In looking at the patterns of postwar politics across Western democracies, he identified a retreat of working-class-oriented politics and the advance of the politics of the possessors of human capital. He called the resulting contest between the holders of human and of commercial capital the contention between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right.

Social analyst David Goodhart adds another dimension to this, with his distinction between the Anywheres—those whose networks, whose social connections, are not based on a locality, they extend across localities, including across international borders—and the Somewheres: those whose networks are very much based on the locality they live in. Anywheres tend to overwhelmingly dominate our institutions, including mainstream media.

As communication and transport costs have fallen, the networks of Anywheres have become more and more international; to the extent that they increasingly identify much more with folk like themselves across national borders than they do their own working classes. This generates globalist politics.

Both the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right tend to be Anywheres, further dividing what conventional politics has become from the working class and its concerns. This Anywhere domination of conventional politics is much of what drives what has become known as the UniParty dynamic.

Looking at the Secret Harbour by-election, the winning One Nation candidate was a local gym owner—so, a classic rooted-in-locality Somewhere. The ALP candidate was a former staffer who had worked for a large mining company: a classic Anywhere.

UniParty dynamics apply to policy areas where Somewhere perspectives differ noticeably from Anywhere perspectives and do not get much purchase within conventional politics due to Anywhere dominance of institutions. The most extreme example of this is the way British voters have regularly voted for less immigration and continually get much more. But there is a general tendency for the cultural politics of elected politicians in Western countries to systematically differ from the preferences of voters in a way that is, for example, not true of economic policy.

Countries whose elites do not network in such ways—Japan most obviously—generate much more internal, particularly cultural, solidarity.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi examines the elite status games that have arisen to further differentiate Anywhere elites from the Somewheres. Social psychologist Rob Henderson’s concept of Luxury Beliefs is congruent with this analysis. The massive increase in the use of moral abuse terms in media and academic articles tracks the Great Awokening.

This differentiation by status games, linguistic taboos and moral abuse has particular intensity for the Brahmin Left as complexity scientist Peter Turchin’s concept of elite over-production (and counter-elite formation) comes into play. Musa al-Gharbi’s analysis is in a similar vein to sociologist Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites thesis.

Musa al-Gharbi argues that the contemporary Great Awokening is only the most recent version of periodic surges of elite over-production generating intensified moral claims to both supplant current placeholders and to expand moral projects for aspiring elites, increasing their employment prospects and claims on resources. Moral abuse is central to such Brahmin Left Anywhere politics as it gives them social leverage and delegitimises dissent or pushback.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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9 months ago · 68 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

To all this, we can add journalist Richard Miniter’s concept of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up rather than for their performance—who therefore do not have to make things work. They can thus concentrate on status politics—including seeking to control legitimacy and de-legitimise dissent—to give themselves moral authority and claims over resources.

That the unaccountable classes do not have to make things work is bad enough. What is worse is that a considerable section of the unaccountable classes rely on social pathologies for their income; even to the extent of getting more access to resources if social pathologies get worse, or if more things are labelled as social pathologies and moral failures.

So, public health gets more resources the worse our collective metabolic health becomes. Indigenous policy gets more resources the worse indigenous folk do. Disabled policy gets more resources more people count as disabled. Human rights commissions get more authority the more things are defined as racist. The homeless-industrial complex gets more funds if homelessness gets worse, and so on. In such circumstances, not only do the unaccountable classes do not have to make things work, many of them get rewarded for social dysfunction.

This all culminates in what political historian Steven Davies analyses as the politics of realignment. He gives the most comprehensive view of the political re-alignment, delving into the history, economics, technology and geopolitics.

In the later C19th and early C20th, politics moved away from liberals (centred on mercantile interests) versus conservatives (centred on landed interests) as the working class pushed its concerns into electoral politics, much to the horror of the great and good, who thought the issues the working class was raising should not be part of politics and public policy. The liberals found themselves displaced and either forced into alliance with conservatives or reduced to third Party status. That generated the Labour v Capital politics that was such a prominent feature of Western democratic politics up until the shifts documented by Thomas Piketty and his colleagues.

We are now in another period of realignment, where once again the working class is pushing its concerns into politics, much to the horror of the great and the good.

The dynamics of post-Cold War politics

The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that Western elites stopped worrying that their working classes might defect to a rival ideology or concerning themselves that they might have to mobilise their working classes for some future existential struggle. This—combined with the expanding strength of transnational networking, so of globalist politics—has led to a multi-level assault on the interests of Western working classes, coupled with striking levels of implicit or explicit contempt for the same, which mass immigration has been both a manifestation of and an excuse for.

That assault includes trade policies that off-shored manufacturing; technology that hollowed out local manufacturing employment; mass immigration that broke up working-class communities, and so their locality-based social networks, while generating a fractured demos; denigration of the local majority’s cultural heritage, often using immigration as an excuse to do so; morally grandstanding debauching of beloved entertainment franchises; housing policies that drove up rents and house prices by restricting housing supply by zoning and other regulatory restrictions while driving up demand through mass immigration; education, policing and prosecution policies that put the local working class as the lowest priority; using metastasising linguistic taboos to—via moral abuse, cancel culture and outright censorship—block and de-legitimise working class speech as unacceptably morally vulgar; plus a general shift to non-electoral—often transnational—institutional policy-making that by-passes working class votes.

When working class voters—in reaction to all this—start voting national populist, this becomes the excuse for another wave of moral abuse and de-legitimisation. For one thing that our increasingly feckless Anywhere elites in Western countries can agree on—none of this is their fault. [Added graph.]

Where now?

The question now becomes, how successful can this national populist pushback be? We have reasons to be pessimistic.

The first concern is whether the national populists can put together the intellectual firepower to generate and implement effective policies, particularly given the level of institutional resistance, and outright sabotage from within institutions, one can expect. This is especially so given the effort put in to morally and cognitively delegitimise voting national populist.

The second is the magnitude of the problem. To successfully balance the risk management concerns of working class voters with fiscal recovery and economic growth is a big ask. There is also in the sheer scale of institutional reform required.

The third concern is the nature and source of the status games that have been selected for within Brahmin Left Anywhere progressivism. These are very much morally absolutist status games, regarding all dissent from their politics as morally illegitimate. Generated by Critical Social Justice—which itself is derivative of meditations on Marxism—those status games, and their associated politics, have resulted in the development of networked versions of the mechanisms of social control one sees in outright Marxist polities.

Thus DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) generates what are, in effect, commissars, even if they are called DEI officers, intimacy consultants, diversity readers, bias response teams, or whatever. They operate on the principle of the medieval inquisitor: error has no rights and they can determine error. DEI training can be not much more than struggle sessions.

DEI creates a moral caste system—female is better than male; coloured is better than “white”; queer is better than straight; disabled is better than able-bodied; immigrant is better than native; trans is better than cis—based on Theory, not serious evidence. Which appointments are, and are not, celebrated by the identity characteristics of those hired displays the DEI moral caste system in operation.

The intense ideological conformity within literary and cultural circles are forms of networked Zhdanovism. Given the way genderwoo in particular, and Critical Social Justice in general, has invaded science and medical publishing, licensing bodies, universities, school systems, and so on, we have networked Lysenkoism.

All this is justified by an intolerant moral absolutism that defines dissenting politics as a profoundly illegitimate threat to Our Democracy and who not only do not identify with their own working class or cultural heritage, they open and avidly despise both. Such politics seeks to turn elections into legitimating rituals that are not allowed to change anything that Anywheres care about.

Anywheres—especially left-progressivist Anywheres—increasingly do not share a common, overarching, normative framework with their working class, or the national populists. This is very different from the situation in the late C19th and early C20th. The notion that the West no longer has a “true left” is nonsense: what we are seeing is left-progressivist politics that no longer has to pretend to care about, or socially engage with, working class (Somewhere) concerns.

There are two great dangers. (1) The national populists will fail, and the processes of social corrosion, institutional decay and alienation will continue, with the conditions for violent internal instability continuing to build. (2) The national populists will begin to succeed, in which case there are enough motivated moral zealots that we could see serious institutional, even violent, revolts.

We have gone through such an analogous political realignment in the late C19th and early C20th remarkably peacefully—in the Anglsophere: elsewhere, not so much. That past success provides no guarantee that it will be repeated.

ADDENDUM: A shift in the debate: the Australian Financial Review publishes an opinion piece arguing for net emigration. Meanwhile, per capita GDP growth figures show, the triumph of the Hawke-Keating-Howard neoliberal policy era, the neoliberal policy regime “running out of puff” as I discuss here and here, and why even Australia is reaching the end of electoral tolerance of mass immigration.

The obviously contradictory combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is producing political turmoil wherever it has been imposed. Our fecklessly incompetent Anywhere elites in operation.

ADDENDUM SECUNDUS: Helen Andrews’ essay on how mass immigration has made the US civil rights social compact unworkable is another case of fecklessly incompetent Anywhere elites in operation, plus how utterly inadequate mainstream Economics analysis of immigration has been. That compact was based on the nonsense claim that social outcomes can be expected to be evenly distributed across all social groups. This is utter nonsense, given that neither genetic nor cultural traits are equally distributed among human populations.

The cultural implications of mass immigration is not working out the way it was supposed to for left-progressives, despite being very useful for various forms of social and cultural corrosion (which core sections of left-progressivism have been openly in favour of for about a century).

It is striking how some countries are making themselves stupider, and others smarter, through immigration.

References

Stephen Davies, The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay, Polity Press, 2026.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/Social/f15/wrap/readings/Granovetter-revisited.pdf

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

In this sixth and concluding post, I draw some implications from propositions in the previous posts.

When men and women started working together far more in offices and professional capacities, we had to have a public conversation about bad male behaviour. No, you cannot pinch female bottoms, nor leer at female colleagues. Yes, you do have to keep your dick in your pants.

Laws were changed, some men were charged, some men went to gaol. We now need to have more such public conversations, but this time about bad or dysfunctional female behaviour. Doing so runs up against the apparently endless war on noticing that left-progressives have been waging for decades; a war that has been incorporated into various elite status games disseminated from our deeply dysfunctional universities.

The core claim that so much of the war-on-noticing exists to protect is that either (1) there are no differences in the distribution of genetic and other traits between human groups or (2) any such differences have no causal role in differences in social outcomes. This includes the claim that there are no innate differences, or different tendencies, between men and women that might generate significant differences in social outcomes. In fact, people’s stereotypes about differences between men and women tend to be highly accurate: unsurprising, in that we have a lot of experience with each other. In the words of a recent review study:

By an overwhelming margin (85% of 673 comparisons), judges across the studies providing direct comparisons were correct about the direction of gender differences. Furthermore, three distinct kinds of sensitivity correlations, which correlated estimates with criteria, were positive, indicating an impressive degree of accuracy.

This core claim of no difference in the distribution of genetic and other traits between human groups then allows the not-noticers to morally judge differences in social outcomes between human groups as reliable indicators of intentional or structural maleficent disadvantage if groups do better and advantage if groups do well. This is the always-looking-for-kulaks principle.

The factual claim is false and so, therefore, is the moral conclusion inferred from it. But it is a very simple moral system to operate and—even better—to use to make claims to moral authority and on resources to “fix” the problem. The alleged goal can never be achieved—as it is a false picture of human and social reality—but that very falsity is an advantage, for its impossibility of achievement means that its claims on resources can go on indefinitely.

This structure of not-noticing requires systematic processes of moral intimidation to be successfully spread through institutions. Such social imperialism is made so much more effective by shunning and shaming tactics being mobilised to enforce the required moral intimidation.

The status games involved use network effects—there is more benefit to belonging, the larger the network playing correct-belief-makes-you-a-sound-person status games and the larger the network, the cheaper it is to add an extra person. The more people committed to believing X makes you a good person, the more people are committed to believing not-X makes you a bad one. You then get shunning and shaming behaviour in order to signal commitment to the shared status game and to protect the sense of being a good person by believing X. This is a key social dynamic of the “long march through the institutions”.

Social media provides the technology to strongly increase the social signalling and the shunning and shaming that moralises disagreement in service of shared status games. To put it another way, social media upscales social/relational aggression that attacks people’s social standing on the basis of ostentatious moral or social concern.

Because believing X is such performative way of grading people, believing-X makes you a good person creates purity-spirals as people up-the-ante to make their signal—their moral piety display—more salient and reduce competition for positions. It also attracts and empowers the personality disordered—specifically Cluster B’s—as believing-X makes you a good person requires so little to join the status game and advantages those who are manipulatively unrestrained. In other words, it acts as a negative character test, that selects for people of bad moral character.

The inability to admit ever being wrong goes with the moralising of disagreement and identity-through-belief.

Social media does not enable the up-scaling of physical aggression, although it does enable the transmission of threats of such. By contrast, social media—with its electronic mobbing—is a very effective medium for emotional or relational aggression. As women, the physically weaker sex, are particularly inclined to be quite protectively self-deceptive about their own aggression—it is “just” moral or social concern—that leads to both intense aggression and denial of its existence: “there is no such thing as cancel culture”/“it is just a shift in moral, in social, concern”.

Social media can be particularly toxic for adolescent girls. Adolescents often lack a settled or robust sense of self, tend to be very wrapped up in how other people see them, and have a weak sense of their effect on others. All this is even more so for people-focused adolescent girls, who are both particularly prone to engage in—and be vulnerable to—emotional or relational aggression and to seek socially-protective identities. It is plausible that growing up with the excesses of social media increases support for control of speech, including making hate speech a live issue.

More things-focused boys are much more likely to retreat into playing games (both online or physical games) or some other physical activity. The greater female focus on people makes adolescent girls more vulnerable to social media-generated aggression, identity confusion and comforting cognitive refuges and conformism; the greater male focus on things creates a divergence between young male and female perspectives, aggravated by the strong female social preference for other females.

Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities—lesbians and tomboys—who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.

The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. Hence, for example, women and girls are more likely to be aggressive towards fellow team members during a game than are men and boys. Hence also—as we will see—male-dominated institutions have been better at catering for women and girls than female-dominated institutions have been at catering for men and boys.

It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.

Institutions—to be functional—generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality. For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.

The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.

One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional—and so moral—cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. An emotionally-comforting retreat from enforcing standards then aids the entrenchment of emotionally-comforting opinion conformities.

That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression—passing it off as moral or social concern—can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.

Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing—as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. Given the biological expense of human children, focusing on getting a good social return for one’s emotional investment was a successful reproductive advantage. For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.

Feminisation—that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns—thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.

Britain provides an extreme example of this lack of social solidarity, in how little public outrage or concern the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of mainly working class girls by Muslim (mainly Pakistani) gangs has generated among female university graduates, who otherwise can go from zero to outrage in 280 characters. The willingness of such women to allow men who declare themselves to be women into women’s prisons, shelters and other spaces, is another example of women not being the social solidarity sex.

As men are far less likely to find women threatening than women are to find men threatening, and men focus more on things and performance of roles, women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men. It also means that, because women are typically more alert to other people’s emotions and see relationships in terms of emotional investment, that women tend to be systematically better at networking than men. This aids the feminisation of organisations, especially if male-only spaces are eliminated.

Men thus tend to be more socially inclusive, both across the sexes and across social levels, than do women. Conversely, an ostentatious commitment to “inclusivity” can be an excellent mechanism for not enforcing standards while insisting on opinion conformity. In other words, to greatly reduce actual social inclusiveness.

As previously noted in this series, this has led female-dominated organisations to be much worse at catering to what interests and engages men than male-dominated organisations have been a catering to what interests and engages women. We can see this in how female-dominating publishing has largely lost male readers of fiction; female-dominated Hollywood writers’ rooms have regularly lost male watchers of cinema and television; and female-dominated schooling and education has been catering worse and worse for male students.

Similarly, increasing domination of discourse (including media) and management by female university graduates—people who can now go from zero to outrage in 280 characters—coincided with the British state’s effective abandonment of working class boys in education and working class girls to so-called “grooming” gangs. The contrast with the public horror of Victorian Britain over the forced prostitution of poor girls is stark.

Conformist propriety enforced by patterns of stigmatisation lead to a situation where only approved empathy sends the correct social signals. Preserving the capacity to stigmatise inconvenient speech via moral abuse (racist! Islamophobe! transphobe!) is, by clear revealed preference, more a public concern for university-graduate career women as a group in Britain than mass rape and sexual exploitation of working class girls and women in their own society. Given this social and sexual exclusiveness, it is perhaps not so surprising that a 2015 survey found that only nine per cent of British women identified as feminist.

It is important not to romanticise either sex. The Mongols under Genghis Khan and the Waffen SS were excellent at creating effective teams. Bad male behaviour is often criminal and men overwhelmingly dominate violent crime (except against children) and male sexuality can get very dark. But both sexes are capable of toxic behaviour. With women, there are much more likely to be toxic cliques and networking, as we see in contemporary publishing. With men, you are much more likely to get toxic teams, as when police go bad and in criminal gangs.

Shifting constraints

Feminism is prone to misrepresenting history. What do all the legal advances women have achieved since the mid C19th have in common? Men voted for them. What do all the arguments about such advances have in common? There were men and women on both sides of each argument. The legislative and other efforts to restrain bad male behaviour as women moved into organisations occurred when Parliaments, legislatures and those organisations were still male-dominated.

The feminist claim or implication that this was somehow a men-versus-women story—that men were the oppressor class and women the oppressed class—is brain-rot pseudo-history. British Tommies going “over the top” into German machine-gun fire in the trench warfare on the 1914-1918 Western Front were being what young men have been across human history—the disposable sex. Human societies are complex interactions of cooperation and conflict and that very much includes relations and interactions between men and women.

The key element in the shifting cultural and legal status of women was that social constraints and opportunities massively shifted due to technological and organisational change. This absolutely led to a shift in bargaining power, but it also led to a shift in what social/life strategies made sense and both law and culture changed to reflect that. The fundamental pattern of human societies—the transfer of risks away from child-rearing and of resources to child-rearing—did not go away, it became expressed differently precisely because the constraints and opportunities changed so dramatically.

As economic historian Joel Mokyr points out, changes in constraints and opportunities lead to changes in culture through processes of social selection:

These three characteristics—variation, inheritability, and superfecundity—as Darwin showed, are sufficient to ensure that selection is adaptive: when there is a change in the environment, cultural traits tend to change through the retention of some and the elimination of other elements.

Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton University Press, 2017, p.25.

Cultural and legal change are interactive processes.

The gap in years between full adult male suffrage and female suffrage was remarkably short. In the case of the UK, the Act that finally brought in universal adult male suffrage was the same Act that introduced female suffrage.

The peeling away of legal and cultural limitations on women was very much part of the Emancipation Sequence where—in the Anglosphere—free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians voted to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants voted to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites voted to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men voted to get rid of exclusions on women, straights voted to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. This was the politics of bargaining and persuasion creating an ever-more expansive and egalitarian notion of citizenship.

While the “men oppressing women” caricature of history is feminist brain-rot, it is very useful feminist brain-rot. Everything can be blamed on “patriarchy”, according to the contemporary conception of “oppression” as “any constraint I don’t like”, so that women can never be responsible for anything bad. On the contrary, they must be endlessly “empowered” because, patriarchy.

This is a bullshit characterisation of contemporary Western societies, but that is irrelevant to the core uses of the concept. Acceptance of the demiurgic power of this mythical patriarchy that socially imprisons women both signals one’s soundness—that you are player of the shared status game in good standing—and justifies endless DEI income and authority, “empowering women” benefits, plus control of legitimacy in discourse, while shielding such moral paragons from responsibility for any failures or dysfunctions.

One feature of the way welfare states colonise their societies, is that the pattern of transferring resources to childrearing is now significantly parsed through the state: hence observations about welfare enabling women to “marry” the (welfare) state. As women are more likely to be employed in the public sector or on welfare than men, there are considerable transfers from tax-paying men to tax-paid women. This is done, however, without men gaining any acknowledgment or status from this.

What Substacker Anuradha Pandey nicely refers to as managerial class feminism is not at all keen on motherhood as an identity but tends to be very keen on undermining the status of fatherhood while working against men being able to signal fitness to be a father plus elevating female requirements for such fitness.

Left-progressive attacks on both the status of fatherhood and on the ability of men to signal fitness for fatherhood likely helps explain why fertility rates in the US are remarkably differentiated by politics.

A sexually dimorphic species

The big difference between the shifting status of women and the other stages in the Emancipation Sequence is that there are profound biological differences between men and women that had no equivalent across the other categories of legal and political exclusion. Along with men and women’s dramatic differences in reproductive roles, we are a size, shape, strength and cognitively dimorphic species. Of these four, size is the dimension on which we are least dimorphic.

The more maximalist feminist claims and aspirations became, the more committed to denying or belittling those differences between the sexes many feminists became. Hence the famous statement by Simone de Beauvoir:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.)

Feminist biological denialism led directly to the profoundly biological-denialist politics of Transactivism.

Ironically, it was precisely the feminists most likely to draw profound moral distinctions between men and women—the radical feminists—who reacted most strongly against having men invade female spaces and identities via Trans “gender identity” turning being a woman into a purely cognitive identity, to which any biological markers were utterly subordinated. Visible biological markers were so subordinated to alleged cognitive identity that those markers were literally sacrificed by hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation: including, in an utterly appalling evil, having children be so mutilated and sterilised.

It was also striking how many self-declared feminists were happy, even eager, to shame, to shun, to destroy the careers of, those—including women, including feminists—who stood up for biological realism. Alas, such vitriolic shaming and shunning was not in itself new, as it replicated patterns within the women’s movement going back decades.

Feminism—which largely operates as a coordinating mechanism for university-graduate career women—is prone to some revealing patterns. These include: writing violence against children out of the category of domestic violence; treating difficulties for women and girls, and for men and boys, as both being the fault of men and boys; assuming women are accurate about men but men are not accurate about women; being adverse to the notion of male wisdom; focusing on control of the legitimacy of discourse rather than problems affecting folk—even women and girls—further down the social scale; treating female-domination of areas of life (e.g. publishing) as unproblematic but male-domination areas (e.g. STEM) as deeply so; treating motherhood as subordinate to career and being hostile to female choices that do not prioritise career, thereby downgrading the archetypal female social role and functionally setting what men do as the benchmark for women; underestimating the significance of broad social dynamics (e.g. shifts in social bargaining power due to technological change); over-moralising social patterns and changes (e.g. blaming men for unequal bargaining power while refusing to acknowledge that all legal advances for women were voted for by men and that there women and men on both sides of each argument); and taking media effects theory way more seriously than evidence supports.

Feminist intolerance of inconvenient choices by other women could be very bluntly stated.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

‘A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir,’ in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p.397.

This intolerance also showed up in the intensely patronising and condescending take on why many women do not identify as feminist: “they do not understand their own interests”. Given the performance of so many British self-proclaimed feminists, perhaps the vast majority of British women who do not identify as feminist are making sound moral and social judgements.

Operationally, careerist or managerial feminism is clearly all about giving highly credentialed career women trumping moral and cognitive authority, and the claim on social niches and resources that flowed from such: to turn educational credentials into moral and cognitive credentials via a melding of doctrine and identity. It is a specific manifestation of the wider curse of managerialism.

Folk are noticing. A particularly brutal comment is:

Feminism is the belief that women should have authority without accountability while men should have accountability without authority.

Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying notes demands to take, yet not give, among women.

In a similar vein:

While journalist and commentator Helen Andrews made quite a splash with her NatCon 5 presentation and Compact article, various folk are noticing and analysing the effect of feminisation on Western institutions. For example, here. The analytical metaphor of the longhouse has been around for quite some time.

The Karen memes (upper middle class women being entitled scolds); acronyms such as AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberals); and critical commentary on progressive white women is, at least in part, this lack of social solidarity—yet willingness to publicly scold others—being noted and rebounding.

By seeking to retrospectively hijack the Emancipation Sequence of inclusion-through-persuasion by profoundly mis-characterising it as an oppressor/oppression, Conflict Theory narrative, left-progressivism does what it has a long history of doing: replace an encompassing citizenship with a moral caste system—so female is better than male; coloured is better than “white”; queer is better than straight; disabled is better than able-bodied; migrant is better than native; trans is better than cis. A moral caste system where left-progressives get to decide who does, and does not, have moral authority.

This very much goes with replacing the politics of bargaining and persuasion with the politics of error-has-no-rights and they can determine error.

The combination of replacing emotionally confronting-to-enforce standards and boundaries with emotionally-easy “inclusion” (what consumer psychologist Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy) and emotionally-confronting dissent with emotionally-comforting conformities—all enforced by networked social aggression passed off as moral and social concern—clearly disproportionately appeals to women. It gains strength through the feminisation of organisations, institutions and public discourse and the technology of social media.

Emotions and roles

The best way to summarise all this is via two strong general tendencies: among women, emotion trumps role; among men, role trumps emotion. These patterns apply neither to all women nor all men, but it is very much the way to bet. Hence men are systematically better at teams; systematically better at running institutions; systematically better at social solidarity; at enforcing boundaries and standards; at coping with dissent and disagreement; at managing feedback.

When men ran Western institutions we got all the standard downsides of state societies: exploitation, oppression, imperialism, etc. But we also got Parliamentarianism, the Scientific Revolution, mass prosperity, and a steadily more egalitarian and expansive view of citizenship, including Parliamentarianism morphing into democracy. In our increasingly feminised institutional present, we can see all those achievements being corroded away in decaying standards and toxic conformities.

The systematic tendency of women and girls having emotion trump roles and men and boys having roles trump emotions turns up again and again. For instance, girls put themselves into Lego; they create domestic spaces where they focus on the interiors to express and explore their own emotions. Girls play inward. Boys play outward. Boys use Lego to build such things as castles for exterior-directed exploring of roles.

We can see the shift from roles trumping emotions to emotions trumping roles operating in contemporary Hollywood. The girl-boss character—who is naturally good at everything as great-because-girl—is emotions-dominating-role. This systematically replaced the hero’s journey of role-tempering-emotions.

Thus did Hollywood embark on the politics of cultural contempt, because that was the status play. For the corollary of great-because-girl was bad-because-boy.

Apart from feminism, and feminisation, you also have hormonally-challenged male feminists—aka soy boys—pandering to such self-righteous feminist narcissism in the hopes of getting laid.

The status play is to critique everything, to strike a pose of “subverting”. That means treating all previous human striving—including the past works one is allegedly adapting in various films and TV series—with implicit or explicit contempt because that inheritance has not achieved the moral splendour worthy of such grand intellects. For example, because there are too many prominent males and not enough women in past histories and stories. What it does not mean is seeing the human past—especially not one’s own society and civilisation—as a rich and complex record of achievement to be built upon.

There is no more colonial exercise than decolonising the curriculum: a self-righteous elite tells the resident majority that their cultural heritage is appalling and they need to abandon it and replace with what their moral and cognitive betters have decided. The Iron Law of “Woke” Projection in operation.

This contempt for heritage, for past strivings, is why feminised progressivism creates such literary and cultural slop. Feminist progressivism kills the wellsprings of creativity—of engaged communication with audiences and a shared culture and heritage—and replace it with the self-serving posturings of wilfully intellectually and culturally impoverished intellects.

Male striving is a very important driver of cultural change and development. Cultural commentator Camille Paglia notoriously commented that if progress had been up to women, we would still be living in grass huts. The evolutionary pressures of males producing the small and motile (i.e. “cheap”) gametes operating within a species that has the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere predictably leads to male striving, including signalling the capacity to protect and provide. A poetic way to put this is that, as human males do not create life, so they externalise the search for meaning.

The toxic pattern of censorious status games moralising disagreement went along with the standard DEI moral caste system and its mix-and-match, tick-the-box, diversity displays. Such markers of “success” fit in well with HR managerialism while leaching out creativity and audience appeal. They manifested the elite status games that had emerged with ever greater strength since the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated the concerned that the working classes might need to be mobilised against an existential threat.

Such status games grade people by their beliefs, so that wrongthink has to be “confronted” and replaced (especially, working class wrongthink). Hence blaming audiences for not appreciating what their moral and cognitive betters were serving up to them. Grandstanding conformities thus trump competence and creativity. It turns out that expecting audiences to applaud your preachy, emotionally-comforting, sense of your own moral greatness is not good box office.

As the author of the above YouTube video says:

10:57 Every single one of these ran the identical play. Step one, take something people already love. Step two, decide the audience is a problem to be corrected instead of a customer to be served. Step three, put the message ahead of the movie, the lecture ahead of the laughs, the sermon ahead of the story. Step four, when the audience politely declines, don’t look in the mirror. Call them bigots, idiots, misogynists, chuds. And step five, do it all again next year with more money.

11:35 Why do they keep doing it when the graveyard is this full? Because for a certain kind of Hollywood, the applause they’re chasing isn’t yours. It’s each other’s. The box office is almost secondary to being seen making the brave choice at the party. They would genuinely rather lose $300 million and be praised by the right people than make a movie you’d actually love and be called simple for it. That’s not a business strategy. That’s a religion.

And a toxic elite status game. Feminisation is not the only thing going on, but it is a big part of it. As Anuradha Pandey puts it:

Women’s resistance to sharpening our ideas through debate is a root cause of our political malaise. Longtime readers know that theories from women’s studies departments are the foundation of what we call ‘wokeness’ today, and women are the primary enforcers of the identitarian leftist ideologies that have replaced classical liberalism among the educated class. And these irrational beliefs about sacred victims and the holiness of identity are born in exactly the social context I describe: spaces unable to tolerate debate and rational exchange, ruled by status games and emotional vulnerability theater.

A sense of identity—and shared status games—based on affirmed beliefs that moralise disagreement, that are organised through cognitive framings that curate one’s receipt and use of information, create powerfully motivating blocks to admitting getting anything wrong. Updating one’s priors, in a Bayesian or any other sense, is very much not a thing.

From the grotesque refusal to enforce standards; the ostentatious DEI moral conformism; and the utter failure to admit wrongness or take responsibility, the tragic Jason Arday debacle at the University of Cambridge is a horrible distillation of all these trends in institutional dysfunction. Institutions that used to be very capable of running themselves clearly no longer are.

Yes, we are biological beings

Societies can change and develop in all sorts of ways. Nevertheless, everything social emerges from the biological and we remain biological beings, hence the various ways we are a dimorphic species, including being a cognitively dimorphic species. Everything social is mediated by the genetic, just as everything genetic in humans is mediated by the social.

Fashions in indignation change: the facts stay the same.

Robin Fox, Kinship & Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge University Press [1967] 1983, p.5.

Having increasingly female-dominated public organisations and institutions is an unparalleled social experiment. There is no reason to think that it will proceed smoothly and without any problems. On the contrary, the presumption should be the other way. As psychologist Roy Baumeister puts it:

If our society does succeed in eliminating both the privileges and the obligations of manhood, it will be embarking on a remarkable social experiment. Possibly it will work out fine. But don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose.

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men, Oxford University Press, 2010, loc 3300.

In a situation where female tone-policing and moralised aggression sufficiently dominates discourse that, if you criticise men it is feminism, and if you criticise women it is misogyny—so that bad or dysfunctional female-typical behaviour cannot be identified, called out, and discouraged—then such institutionally dysfunctional behaviour will continue, or even multiply. That is a recipe for various forms of institutional decline, even collapse.

As such collapses are like bankruptcy—they happen slowly, then all of a sudden, especially as a general pattern of increasing dysfunction across institutions can have a cascading effect—this could all end very badly.

Perhaps we should—just perhaps—talk about it? Like we have about bad male behaviour in the workplace.

References

Books

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, Yale University Press, 1998.

Bryan Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity, Cambridge University Press, [2018] 2020.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, [2002] 2003.

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

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Yossef Rapoport, Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East, Princeton University Press, 2025.

Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Fourth Estate, 2014.

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Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

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Articles, essays, blogposts, etc

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Menelaos Apostolou, ‘Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 28 (2007) 403–409. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237929517_Sexual_Selection_Under_Parental_Choice_The_Role_of_Parents_in_the_Evolution_of_Human_Mating

Joyce F. Benenson, Henry Markovits, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Diana Geoffroy, Julianne Flemming, Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Males’ Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers,’ Psychological Science 2009 20: 184-190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40065052

Paul M. Bingham, ‘Human Uniqueness: A General Theory,’ The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), 133-169. https://www.academia.edu/83860282/Human_Uniqueness_A_General_Theory

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Barry Bogin, Jared Bragg, Christopher Kuzawa, ‘Humans are not cooperative breeders but practice biocultural reproduction,’ Annals of Human Biology, 2014 Jul-Aug; 41(4): 368-80. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263130566_Humans_are_not_cooperative_breeders_but_practice_biocultural_reproduction

Judith K. Brown, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,’ American Anthropologist, Vol.72, Issue 5, October 1970, 1073-1078. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1970.72.5.02a00070

William Buckner, ‘On secret cults and male dominance,’ Traditions of Conflict blog, January 31, 2018. https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance

William Buckner, ‘Where are the matriarchies?’ Traditions of Conflict blog, March 18, 2018. https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/17/where-are-the-matriarchies

Michael L. Burton, Lilyan A. Brudner, and Douglas R. White, ‘A model of the sexual division of labor,’ American Ethnologist, (1977) 4: 227-252. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227823427_A_Model_of_the_Sexual_Division_of_Labor

R. Calsbeek, ‘Ecological rules for global species distribution also predict performance variation in Ironman triathletes,’ PLoS ONE, 2023, 18(5): e0283282. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283282

Alice H. Eagly, Judith A. Hall, ‘The kernel of truth in gender stereotypes: Consider the avocado, not the apple,’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 118, 2025, 104713. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103124001264

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00127-013-0783-y.pdf

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This post examines how the failure to accept the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological means that much of social “science” is not, in fact, science.

The thing that made the modern world was the breakout into mass prosperity from developing the technology, and the institutions, that enabled ever more access to ever cheaper energy.

The existence of the technology is not enough, you have to have the institutions to successfully adopt and use the technology. This, in turn, requires a highly functional institution-culture interaction, as culture—our normative and cognitive framings—profoundly affects how institutions operate.

From about 400BC to about 1300, China dominated human invention because it had the combination of numbers of people, a common script, and enough commercial and institutional vitality, to be first and foremost in learning-by-experience.

Competitive jurisdictions plus development of learning-by-experiment meant that Europe became the centre of institutional and technological dynamism from about 1300 onwards. The early modern Scientific Revolution built on earlier medieval patterns. The true take-off, however, was when Britain became the first country to adopt learning-by-experiment at scale while not having any elite coalition veto the resultant cheap energy take-off.

Our expanding technology now threatens to overwhelm our evolutionary adaptations. This problem is aggravated by too many people using pre-Darwinian analytical approaches to analyse and discuss social and human dynamics.

Mass prosperity—including the collapse in infant and child mortality—removes many of the selection filters that used to operate on the human genome. This means that people who would not have previously survived do so and have children, many of whom would also not have previously survived. The potential dysgenic effects of demographic booms—particularly when coupled with increased insulation from selection pressures due to medical and other interventions—is clearly something that should be seriously examined, especially as there is already evidence for the populations in developed countries becoming, in effect, sicker and stupider.

As a 2016 paper points out:

without any compelling counterarguments at this time, it remains difficult to escape the conclusion that numerous physical and psychological attributes are likely to slowly deteriorate in technologically advanced societies, with notable changes in average preintervention phenotypes expected on a timescale of a few generations, i.e., 100 years, in societies where medical care is widely applied.

Moreover:

The key point here is that the one truly exceptional human attribute, brain function, may be particularly responsive to mutation accumulation …

As regularity of features is an indicator of genetic fitness, there may be a genetic element to “the revenge of the uglies”, hence the spiteful mutants thesis.

Physical attractiveness is associated with more conservative political views, though one can see how a lack of physical attractiveness would encourage feelings of alienation from society. Note, however, such alienation is not grounded in how positive (or not) one’s society is for human flourishing. On the contrary, the more people are insulated—due to mass prosperity—from the consequences of their ideas, or from making things work, the more salient such alienation is likely to be.

In other words, increased prosperity and social complexity leads to more dysfunctional alienation, increasing tendencies to civilisational suicide. An implication is that (for instance) academe—who don’t have to make things work and are highly insulated from the consequences of their ideas—becomes increasingly the domain of the dysfunctionally weird.

Outside relatively small numbers of heretics, the possibility of dysgenic effects from the relaxation of selection pressures on us humans are either not even considered or regarded as violation of analytical taboos due to the fetishisation of equality that has come to dominate Western public discourse.

Some pre-Darwinian approaches are so in that the key ideas were developed before the publication of On The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Many are pre-Darwinian because they have failed—or even refused—to grapple with humans being the products of biological evolution, with the social emerging from the biological, with the social being mediated by the genetic. This refusal has become more virulent in recent years, as morally grading people by their (actual or alleged) belief has been used to attack the scientific enterprise itself, through mobilising various fashionable terms of moral abuse, leading to genderwoo Lysenkoism.

The methodology of science is built on testing the accuracy of claims against reality. It marshals our diversity of traits and experience, generating claims and counter-claims fed into a methodology that tests claims against reality. If your structure of analysis is not consilient with more fundamental structures of reality, you have failed to incorporate what previous tests of the nature of reality have established.

Every so-called social science that fails to grapple adequately with everything social being emergent from the biological is not a science. It is, at its core, a pretend-science. It may use various aspects of the methodology of science but it fails the consilience with more fundamental structures of reality that serious science requires.

We thereby end up with social “sciences” that are not sufficiently scientific while diverting attention and intellectual resources away from grappling successfully with our technology threatening to overwhelm our evolutionary adaptations. Worse, Theory that is simply not compatible with the social emerging from our biology is used to drive analysis, commentary and policies, thereby making our societies operationally stupider.

Any study of humans is dealing with very complex phenomena, which is hard to do well. Any area of study that is hard to do well is easy to do to an agenda. This is very much a problem in the field of nutrition, for example, but applies right across the human and social sciences. This is especially so as we have to infer so much of what is going on in human cognition, as we cannot observe it directly. (Even our own introspection is limited.)

The notion that human groups are identical across all relevant factors not only supports a simple equalitarian moralism—any difference in outcomes must be due to some external (and presumptively maleficent) factor—but it defaults studies within the social almost-sciences towards such inferences, as it is so easy to fail to control to for some factor that turns out to be relevant (thereby failing to test against reality).

If we accept the reality-constraints of the social being emergent from the biological, then that human groups are identical in the distribution of traits becomes clearly presumptively false, not presumptively true. (The pervasive moral fetishisation of equality—thereby requiring that all relevant traits be deemed to be equally distributed among all human groups—is a large reason why that reality-constraint is not accepted.)

People vary in distribution of genetic traits both between individuals (so within human groups) and between groups. To grasp this requires thinking statistically, especially as “tail” effects are often crucial in differences between groups.

Fundamental to the out-of-Africa origins of Homo sapiens is that there are strong founder effects due to the very small sizes of the populations exiting Africa. Genetic drift is much stronger in smaller populations, so the notion that all relevant genetic traits are evenly distributed in human populations becomes utter nonsense. A nonsense that becomes even more obvious when the importance of cognitive framings, and thus cultural patterns, generating further differences in patterns of human behaviour, is also considered.

Dramatic cultural flowerings in particular times and places (e.g. Classical Athens) may well be in part due to genetic drift resulting in a local surge in the high-achieving “tail” in the population, given that genetic drift is stronger in smaller populations. Thinking statistically is, however, something a lot of people clearly find difficult to do.

As humans cognitively model significance, rather than facts—and significance that is graspable and sufficiently vivid—one’s cognitive framing drives one’s responses to incentives. Our cognitive plasticity is one of our crucial features as a species.

People vary in cognitive framings—both from culture and other sources—which means their responses to the same incentives will vary because, cognitively, they are not the same incentives. Humans are very much not interchangeable social particles and the wider the range of relevant interactions with our fellow humans, the more causally salient that lack of interchangeability becomes.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

People Unlike Me

If you take a properly designed and normed personality test (either Five Factor or HEXACO), one trait both will assess is your conscientiousness…

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2 years ago · 413 likes · 157 comments · Helen Dale

In particular, we vary significantly in executive functions, something most Libertarian thought fails to grapple seriously with (or, often, at all). Executive functions are highly heritable, which is almost certainly a large part of why social mobility is consistently so low in human societies and so little influenced by social interventions—especially as IQ is also significantly heritable. The complexity of human social orders are such that making human liberty/autonomy the absolutely trumping human value is ridiculous—indeed, potentially disastrous.

The social not-really-sciences fail by (1) not being consilient with evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology; (2) in the absence of accepting the constraints of consilience, using approved-within-the-discipline Theory to decide what evidence to pay attention to and how; and (3) regularly being far more historically illiterate than much more historically-informed past thinkers. In these failures they, again and again, end up making contemporary Western societies stupider.

It is a perennial difficulty even in the “hard” science that accepted Theory can be used to curate what evidence is paid attention to and how. This is especially when we are invested in our cognitive framings: whether for moral, social or expertise reasons. Hence physicist Max Planck’s observation about science advancing one funeral at a time.

The problem is much worse in the “soft” sciences. First, the human and social “sciences” are much more directly relevant to people’s moral and political beliefs. This creates networks of people invested in shared cognitive framings for moral and political reasons as well as being the basis of claimed expertise.

In the absence of strong reality-tests, this can increase—both individually and collectively—the efficient level of self-deception to defend one’s cognitive assets of expertise and moralised identity. The efficient level of self-deception is that which minimises cognitive load—deliberate deception puts heavy demands on memory and adds an extra layer of cognitive concern—for a given level of effectiveness of persuasion and motivation without generating too high costs (such as from being in error that generates negative feedback effects for the self-deceiver).

This is why error detection—the development of effective reality-tests—is so crucial to the success of science. It is also why outlandish doctrines about realms from which there is no reliable information—the supernatural, the future—can be such an effective marker of in-group membership; of “soundness”. Though sufficient in-group enforcement in shared status games of moral “soundness” can make that work even for things about which there is plenty of evidence, such as biological sex. Indeed, the consequent elevated level of not-noticing and rationalisation can be an excellent in-group soundness signal, though it does still require that the cost for pushing false claims be less than the benefits from doing so. The larger the size of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up, not for performance—the more salient such status games will be.

Second, the sheer complexity of the phenomena being confronted with can mean that Theory provides a reassuring simplicity. Alas, refusing to accept the constraints of consilience—and the reality-testing that implies—means that the accepted Theory is both much more likely to be false and is much easier to select for on the basis of moral and political preferences, as well as claimed expertise.

Sociology and Cultural Anthropology fail largely due to falling into what economist Arnold Kling nicely calls the tarpit of Marxism, as Marxism and its derivatives are profoundly pre-, even anti-, Darwinian. Indeed, the “study” of Sociology has deteriorated so badly into activist propagation of toxic nonsense—such that even otherwise admirable analyse are blighted by false framings—that there is a very strong argument for abolishing the discipline.

Nevertheless, one can reasonably argue that the pre-Darwinian nature of mainstream Economics has done more damage, as a discipline, to the contemporary West. Economics’ bias towards treating humans as interchangeable social “particles”—as that makes the maths so much easier—flagrantly violates the observable (and to be evolutionarily expected) diversity of humans, both as individuals and groups.

In particular, mainstream Economic’s elevation of efficiency over resilience; of transactions over connections; its Samuelsonian Physics-envy treating people as “social particles”, as interchangeable widgets; has generated seriously—potentially catastrophically—inadequate analyses of mass immigration.

A more biologically-grounded, and so consilient, Economics would have noticed that, in biological systems, selection is for resilience to dominate efficiency; that a social being operates via connections first and transactions second; that an evolved being generates variation, not only among individuals, but also in the distribution of traits between groups; that a cultural being generates varied cognitive framings that act as information transfer and expectation management mechanisms with behavioural consequences; that normative coherence is necessary for robust (i.e. resilient) institutions.

A historically literate discipline would have grappled with the historical cases of mass immigration leading to civil war. This failure is particularly ridiculous in American commentary on immigration as, of the three civil wars fought on what is now its territory—the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Texas Revolution (1835-1836) and the Civil War (1861-1865)—the latter two were cases of mass immigration stressing existing social fault-lines of a polity to the point of open warfare.

This was another consequence of the energy breakthrough, as the development of steamships and railways in the 1820s made voluntary movement of people so much cheaper. It was a manifestation of Jevon’s Paradox: increased efficiency means more use.

Mainstream Economics has generated analyses of immigration that—with few exceptions—fail to grapple with any of the above. The failure to grapple with stressing-a-polity-to-the-point-of-civil-war is particularly egregious as a Nobel memorial Laureate in Economics—Robert Fogel—published a book precisely on how mass immigration fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery.

The way so much American pro-immigration commentary fails to grapple with, not only their own history, but the contemporary European experience of mass immigration, is another indicator that we are dealing with pretend science, not the real thing. It is Economics being used to manifest what sociologist Christopher Lasch famously called the revolt of the elites via overblown—and ultimately self-serving, especially as status games—claims of expertise to dismiss the concerns of fellow citizens, especially working-class citizens.

Immigration brings out how analytically serious is the failure of mainstream Economics to accept the constraints of consilience, the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological, because immigration imports people, with mass immigration importing people in large numbers. Those people interact across the full spectrum of human interactions, so must be expected to affect the full range of how the receiving society operates—up to, and including, potentially fracturing a polity into civil war. Examples of this include the two mentioned above and Palestinian migrations leading to civil wars in Jordan (1970-1) and Lebanon (1975-1990). The wider the range of human social interactions one is dealing with, the more serious the analytical failure of accepting the constraints of consilience—that everything social is emergent from the biological—can be expected to be.

The risk of mass immigration fracturing polities is likely the most egregious analytical failure in mainstream Economics treating immigration with ridiculous “more transactions, so more gains from trade, so good for GDP” simplicity, but is not remotely the only one.

This ridiculous simplicity may not just be analytical failure. One of the conspicuous patterns in modern Western politics is those who are not having children—or not enough to sustain the local population—are using mass immigration to politically and socially crowd out those who are having enough children. They are pushing what the UN was pleased to call replacement migration—replacing the children folk, particularly they, are not having with newcomers.

Moreover, they are often either actively hostile to any discussion of costs of mass immigration for the cultural and social coherence and heritage of the society receiving the immigrants or actively endorse such effects (see “decolonising the curriculum”, race-swapping characters in films and TV series, etc). Raising any concerns about immigration, or even wanting to control borders, is attacked as showing moral and cognitive failure.

Another way to put this, is that members of terminating human lineages are typically showing a much more hostile attitude towards preservation of the cultural heritage—or even basic functioning—of their societies than are members of continuing lineages. Why should we be surprised that those willing to invest time, effort and care in having and raising children might have systematically different commitments to the preservation of their society than those who are not so willing?

Plenty of human societies did not recognise one as a “full” adult male until one had become a father. It is worth considering what effects restricting the franchise to those with children, who show that basic level of commitment to the continuance of society, might have. Such commitments matter. The “marriage premium”—the extra incentive to provide and signal the ability to provide—continues to operate in our societies.

The failures regarding analysis of immigration are part of a much wider pattern of failure in Economics from elevating transactions that can be measured over connections that are much less so. This not only conflates value with being measurable, it reverses the basis for emotionally rich human flourishing, for which good connections are often much more important than useful transactions.

Yes, transactions allow many human interactions, and our use of resources, to be scaled up, often dramatically. There are many, many ways this has proved to be a boon to human capacities. The problem comes if that then eats into the connections we humans have adapted to flourish within. The rule of thumb is that transactions drive prosperity, connections drive happiness.

Mathematician, journalist, author and defender of sex-based rights Helen Joyce makes the point about the power and dangers of markets well:

But markets are like a universal solvent. Everything that they enter, they dissolve, and they break down into their constituent parts. And so many things have become marketized now that it’s hard to fit people who are close to irreducibly non-marketized transactions or activities. And that’s women much more than men because we make babies. Getting someone else to carry your baby for you or to breastfeed your baby or to look after your baby when the baby is small, it’s not substitutable. The baby loves the mother best. It can be the father. I know fathers can look after babies. But anyway, their primary caregiver, which is usually their mother, is the person they love most. And other people cannot substitute for them. So unless we accept that markets have limits … But setting limits in markets is incredibly difficult, so I think it’s going to be very hard.

…

It’s also just that you don’t have to create markets. One of the extraordinary things about markets is that they create themselves. Nobody’s set out to create a market in dating. Somebody just created a dating app, and everybody came there. And now it’s actually rather difficult to get together with another young person if you’re not both on the app. And the thing is that they ratchet. Once you have a market, this is one of the magic things about markets—and also one of the terrifying things about them—is that it compounds. Whatever it is it does, it just keeps compounding and changing. And so you get to the point where you have 90% of the people—I saw in an article yesterday—on dating apps are men and 10% are women. Men and women have very different ways of making decisions on dating apps. They’re much more similar in real life than they are on dating apps. And this just evolves.

Helen Dale: Yes. And you finish up with a situation where nobody gets what they want.

Helen Joyce: Exactly.

Helen Dale: Everybody’s unhappy.

Helen Joyce: And very hard to reverse. I don’t know how you could reverse that one. Nobody regulated dating apps. Nobody set out to create a world in which that’s how young people overwhelmingly meet each other with the purpose of having intimate relations.

Forcing people—especially young people—to purchase transactional replacements for what used to be provided by the social connections people were embedded in has been profoundly socially impoverishing, even as GDP has gone up. As Substacker Johann Kurtz observed in a recent post:

On the surface it does seem as if the young are fine. Real median incomes are higher than they were for their parents at the same age, unemployment has spent most of the past decade at historic lows, and purchasing power has risen roughly 63 percent since 1973. Televisions, clothing, food, and air travel are cheaper than ever.

And yet this generation is also not marrying, not buying homes, not having children, and seem pretty miserable. I think we’re clearly in the midst of a tremendous measurement failure.

My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.

Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

…

The young are told they are richer, and in the currency of flat-screen televisions they are. But the goods that constitute a life — house, spouse, children, good school, good neighbors — have inflated so far beyond wages that the ordinary life path of 1965 now requires an extraordinary income. It turns out that we do actually need social capital. They are not doing well!

Becoming Noble

Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

A recent article from The Cut received a huge amount of attention: ‘It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling’. The piece includes vignettes of Millenial hardship…

Read more

2 months ago · 1500 likes · 258 comments · Johann Kurtz

This conflation of measurable with valuable has been a classic example of Goodhart’s Law on a society-wide scale—that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. As with the mis-analysis of mass immigration, it has been social “science” making Western societies operationally stupider on a grand scale precisely because of the refusal to accept the constraints of consilience with more basic structures of reality (i.e. biology) that are required to be a science, so not noticing that we Homo sapiens evolved around connections first and transactions a distant second.

If there is Physics envy in Economics, then that misunderstands the nature of economic phenomena relative to the basic structures of the universe. As physicist Richard Feynman noted, the physicist is interested in specific features of this universe, not abstract features across possible universes.

Looking to the example of Physics as a discipline means looking “past” all the layers of structure between the basic structures of the universe that Physics concerns itself with and the social. The economist is not studying abstract social beings. He is studying beings structured by their biology, by their evolution. He is studying the social interactions of a specific species, Homo sapiens.

As with any study of any species, comparisons with other species may well be useful, and there are general patterns in biology. Game Theory, for example, has very general application—even down to the level of genes, as all that is needed for it to operate is feedback and response. But even with Game Theory, the patterns of how humans play strategy games differs systematically from how Pan troglodytes, Chimpanzees, do.

Chimpanzees adhere more closely to Game Theory predictions—so to Homo economicus—than we do. Given we are so much more numerous, able to thrive in a much wider range of ecological conditions, our patterns of divergence from Homo economicus are clearly an evolutionary advantage.

Our ability to transact comes not from our rationality alone, but also from us being far more normative than our primate cousins. Transactions rely on conceptions of property, of rights-to-decide, and property relies not on mine!—any silverback gorilla male can manage that—but on yours! That takes sharing both theory of mind and normative expectations generating broad conventions about rights-to-decide. It is our deviations as a species from Homo economicus that makes us so much more successful than our ape cousins.

We can walk into any bazaar or marketplace in the world and understand the basic underlying conventions of ownership and exchange, of who has the right-to-decide over what. That comes from our shared normative capacity and patterns of thinking generating common conventions. One of the reasons that mainstream Economics has tended to overstate the significance of explicit legal property rights is precisely that it has subsumed our normative nature into a falsely simplifying notion of rationality that is very much not good science.

For another great sin of mainstream Economics is to postulate a biologically impossible level of human rationality. We display bounded rationality as we must as biological beings. Biological systems satisfice rather than maximise as they are constantly dealing with shifting mixes of threats and opportunities.

A living organism uses information and resources to keep itself functioning. In that sense, life is systematically ordering, it is systematically anti-entropic, with a clear tendency to more complexity, not less.

All organisms exist in an multidimensional action-space with shifting information and limited attention and resources. Due to limited capacities and shifting salience, gains/benefits will show decreasing marginal utility (i.e. patterns of satiation). Due to threshold effects—particularly death—losses/costs will show increasing marginal disutility (i.e. increased damage and risk of catastrophic failure).

We can put that satisficing is optimising for biological beings somewhat formally:

If X and Y are actions with marginal utility X(mu) and Y(mu),

then the resilient pattern is to satisfice as follows:

Do X when information is X(mu) > any not-X(mu).

As soon as information is Y(mu) > any not-Y(mu), do Y.

For a biological organism, maximising does not optimise. Moreover, efficiency—the thing mainstream Economics typically presumes rationality seeks to maximise—has to serve resilience, the ability to respond to changes in circumstances, for the species to survive: a point that also applies to social systems. Most risk management is about resilience not efficiency.

Attention and cognition are both limited resources, which we economise on the use of. Hence we have habits, routines, rules-of-thumb, etc. Money illusion, for example, is the result of economising on cognitive effort.

The use of an all-encompassing conception of human rationality—understood (falsely) as maximising rather than satisficing—analytically crowds out consideration of the importance of normative orders and the importance of implicit or explicit bargaining in economic—and particularly commercial—outcomes. Thus, the enshittification of tech that we can all observe is the Chicago School attack on anti-trust enforcement by what turned out to be the ludicrously oversimplifying Theory of Consumer Welfare making American policy stupider.

One of its many adverse results was to make regulatory capture worse by allowing the creation of huge tech monopolies and monopsonies. It also made it easier to organise censorship of opinions and information.

A biologically aware Economics would have asked the question: what are the Game Theory implications of allowing so-called “efficient” monopolies? The obvious answer is what we have experienced: they stop being efficient.

An ironic part of the Physics envy of Economics is to too often take action across time out of consideration: specifically, the likely evolution of consequences. The Consumer Welfare approach takes a concept of Theory (allocative efficiency) and treats it as if it is a timeless achievement, that we do not have to consider the likely evolution of corporate concentration. In part, this is because the, biologically ridiculous, maximising notion of—allegedly predictably quantifiable—rationality squeezes out norms and bargaining.

The reality is that allocative efficiency achieved under a particular market structure cannot be expected to persist if that market structure changes. It really cannot be expected to persist if corporate concentration makes coordination to achieve regulatory capture that much easier.

Bad Theory led to worse policy—the older approach to anti-trust was more sensible. The application of Theory that fails consilience made American society functionally stupider, resulting in, among other things, the enshittification of Tech we now suffer under.

Too often, social “sciences” pay attention neither to what is general in biological beings nor what is specific to us as an evolved species.

The failure to respect the constraints that the social is emergent from the biological is the failure to respect the constraints of science, which means one is not really engaged in science, but a pretence thereof. As the above examples show, this matters—especially when the claimed authority of being “scientific” is used to promote ill-conceived policy to unfortunate, even disastrous, effect. So many claims of expertise have turned out to be overblown precisely because of the failure to accept the scientific constraint of consilience.

Tradition and normative coherence

One of the problems with our technological dynamism is that it makes it easier to believe the central delusion of modernism—new is always better—and the central delusion of progressivism—that the sinful past cannot teach us anything that constrains our vision of the future. Both claims are nonsense. We remain Homo sapiens and past experience is the vast memory well of what that means and implies.

Tradition is common responses to shared constraints and opportunities plus memory. Yes, technology changes those constraints and opportunities, but not all of them and not all at once. Given the importance of normative cohesion (aka asabiyya) in making polities functional—for institutions are mixtures of norms and rules that require a strong civic culture to be resiliently functional—and the importance of tradition in maintaining such normative cohesion, a dismissive reaction to tradition is not merely infantile, it very readily becomes socially corrosive.

Being socially—even civilisationally—corrosive, alas, is often precisely what is intended. The catastrophically toxic, pseudo-sophisticated nonsense of Critical Theory and its derivatives—that extols complaining about well, everything, so that any disliked constraint gets recast as “oppression” while taking absolutely no responsibility for doing anything practical to make things better—is, in their march through academe, as sign of how toxically irresponsible so much academic “Theorising” is: theorising by people who do not have to make anything actually work, who can push truly disastrous ideas with no effective pushback as long as they play well enough to academic status games. This is the does not know how problem. We end up with ridiculous wish-list politics that no one with a serious understanding of C20th history would believe for a moment pushed by clearly catastrophically mis-educated university graduates.

Such moral grandstanding is regularly based on ludicrously simplifying conspiracy theories of human action whereby various blindnesses—not, of course, shared by the alienated-but-oh-so-enlightened—are somehow universal among all those who are so cognitively and morally deficient as to dissent. As James Lindsay observes:

This is why Critical Theory always has to be a conspiracy theory, because it has to hold that everybody is actually captured at some level by the same set of views, which are independent somehow of reality.

Such moralising of disagreement has proved to be toxic to public discourse and sense-making. It is precisely the genius of science that it can marshal even people’s biases for its methodology of testing claims against reality.

Accepting the constraints of consilience—that everything social is emergent from the biological—would get in the way of the moral grandstanding and pretence of trumping expertise that has become so much of modern academe: especially, of the moralising zealots within it. The demands of science are a constraint they dislike, so have declared “oppressive”—except when they are spuriously invoking its authority to de-legitimise dissent.

It is precisely such failures, however, that show the incentive structures of academe to be disastrous, hence should not have taxpayer funding poured into perpetuating them. This is especially so for social “sciences” that are nothing of the kind.

This series of posts—advancing various propositions about humans and human dynamics—explores what accepting the constraints of consilience implies. It is in service of understanding our past and present while seeking to assist better movement into the future.

The sixth post and final in the series will consider implications of evolutionary reasoning for patterns of female behaviour within organisations.

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1. Human males and females have distinct, but overlapping, patterns of cognitive traits. The distribution of cognitive traits among human males being “flatter” than among human females, plus those distributions having different averages, results in a large majority of both males and females having a pattern of cognitive traits that does not occur in the other sex.

2. Thus, we are a significantly cognitively dimorphic species.

3. As these differences are clearly selected for, it is not an advantage to human lineages to have male and female cognitive patterns converge “too much”.

4. If members of a lineage with a high degree of such cognitive convergence become sexually oriented to their own sex, this impedes continuing such cognitive convergence between the sexes within the lineage. It also generates lineage members able to invest more in cultural and other social-connection goods rather than in their own children, to the internal and external advantage of the lineage. (Gay men are wildly disproportionately likely to work in caring and cultural professions.)

5. If there is a range within which cognitive convergence is conducive to successful human mating, this will strengthen these patterns.

6. The development of productive assets (salmon runs, arable land, animal herds) provided mechanisms for dominance—usually via coalitions—to re-enter human societies.

7. Such productive assets both enabled, and regularly expressed, such dominance, including through much increased capacity for polygyny.

8. The development of productive assets also increased the incentive for women to engage in hypergamy (seeking high-status mates). That human males are primed to value physical signs of fertility made this a practical option.

9. Women tend to show more concern for status than men in mating, given the resource and social-connection advantages of a higher status mate for their children and greater male focus on physicality.

10. This greater female operational concern for status extends to friendship networks: women are far less likely to have lower-status friends than men, as female friendships are based on emotional investment to generate robust support for raising our very biologically expensive children, and lower status women are unlikely to to be “worth” the investment.

11. As men are far less likely to find women threatening than women are to find men threatening, and men focus more on things and performance of roles, women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men.

12. One way religions can promote fertility is by embedding women in strong maternity-promoting social networks. Such plays to greater female social preference for other women and their stronger tendency to normative conformity.

13. Conversely, men are much more likely than women to have lower status friends, as you never know when you might want them on your “team”. This, along with the strong female social preference for other women, makes men more the social solidarity sex than women.

14. Teams as such are morally neutral—the Mongols and the Waffen SS were both excellent at building effective teams. Nevertheless, effective institutions usually operate as expanded teams.

15. As teams are the archetypal non-kin connection for men, male friendships tend to be emotionally thinner, broader, and more flexible in who they include, than female friendships. Men are also more likely to continue to invest in maintaining friendships despite disputes.

16. As the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, women tend to avoid physical aggression among adults, but are more likely to use relational or social aggression. This is both more effective, and safer, if they present it—including to themselves—as “just” social or moral concern, using our considerable capacity for self-deception, as most of our cognition is not conscious.

17. As part of assessing threat and commitment, women tend to be better at reading other people’s emotions than men. Men tend to be more aware of their own aggression than are women.

18. As women are typically more alert to other people’s emotions, and see relationships in terms of emotional investment, women tend to be systematically better at networking than men. The elimination of male same-sex social spaces therefore tends to disadvantage men.

19. As war provides intense stress and emotional connection, conflict can often provide men with an intensity of connection they struggle to find elsewhere.

20. Much of male social interaction is about testing potential team members—if I say outrageous things, will you still support me? if I put you under pressure, will you fold?

21. Women working in male-dominated environments can easily find them emotionally bruising. Conversely, it is hard to build trust if folk are “walking on egg shells” in very tone-policed milieus.

22. Female groups are typically built from the emotional-commitment pattern. Such cliques tend to be more emotionally intense, more conformist, socially narrower and more unstable than male teams.

23. In particular, within female networks, disagreement is more likely to seem either hurtful, or as a threat. The women’s movement has regularly been marked by intense shaming and shunning behaviour (“trashing”). Men working in female-dominated environments can often find them emotionally smothering while cognitive conformity tends to be required for stable female networking.

24. As men tend to focus more on roles and things, they tend to be more comfortable with hierarchies. As women tend to focus more on emotional connections, they tend to be keener on “flattening” social interactions. So, men tend to be more comfortable with overt seeking of status and status differentiation than women, including acknowledging differences in performance/capacity/achievement and identifying failures to reach set standards.

25. Farming and pastoralism enabled dramatically larger populations and created productive assets—arable fields, animal herds—that could be seized. This increased the scale of social predation, thereby encouraging the intensification of kin groups as part of more intense selection for effective warrior teams.

26. The result was the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck, which only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived but did not limit female lineages. Effective male teams killed—or sometimes enslaved—their rivals, took their women and bred with them, intensifying selection among human males for effective teams.

    

27. While in any generation, most men reproduced, over time, there was an intense harrowing of male lineages until the social strategy of taxing losing males, which rewarded enabling them to breed new taxpayers, evolved.

28. It also meant that generations of human females bred with the rapist who had killed their male relatives. This has had lingering effects on patterns of female sexuality—romance novels about the love of a good woman taming a male brute speak to this, as does attraction to “bad boys”.

29. Social defection has also been much more likely to be a successful strategy for women than men.

30. The tax-the-losers social strategy of tribute (chiefdoms) and especially taxation (states) required seasonal crops—for stored food was taxable and non-seasonal crops do not structurally generate significant stores of food.

31. Seasonal crops—requiring the storing of food and the seeds for next year’s crops—also increased the need for protection.

32. The combination of predation and protection was deeply embedded in the creation and evolution of states. Focusing only one of these features of states is seriously misleading.

33. Due to the need for taxable seasonal crops, states originated in fewer locations than did farming. Far more of the Earth’s land area has had states first imposed on them from outside than were origin points for states.

34. Farming does not, in itself, generate significant surplus—food above subsistence—it mainly supports more babies.

35. Tribute and taxation, by taking food before it was used to support more babies, does generate significant surplus.

36. As states have dominated the creation, extraction and distribution of surplus, they are a fundamental structuring element in societies—including of their class structures—they are not “reflections” of them.

37. The socially structuring power of states makes it harder to impose accountability on them.

38. As no mechanism of accountability is infinitely flexible or scaleable, the larger the state apparatus, the greater the incentive—and potential capacity—to frustrate accountability to the wider society.

39. Due to states creating surplus through their extraction efforts, state societies are considerably more complex than stateless societies.

40. As states are built from taxation—coercive extraction of resources, originally in kind—and more taxpayers mean more revenue, as soon as there are states, there are incentives to expand the territory (and subjects) from which one extracts resources.

41. Empire is the result of there being states with the capacity to be imperial.

42. In particular, increases in the level of trade tends to increase the scale of states—including of empires—as trade gives access to resources from outside your territory, enables greater specialisation inside your territory (so Smithian growth in production) and can be fostered by providing protection, other public goods and transport networks.1 For instance, as pastoralists were also traders, the creation of the Scythian tribal confederation—the first substantive steppe polity—led to increases in the size of empires based around the Fertile Crescent, culminating in the first mega-empire—larger than five million square kilometres—the Persian Empire. Similarly, given the need for China to import horses (due to the lack of selenium in it soils) and trading silk to buy them, a unified China generating more trade—and so revenue therefrom—tended to be matched by empires encompassing more of the taxable territory across Eurasia. The Qin-Han (221BC-220) unification coincides with the rise of the Roman, Parthian (247BC-224) and Kushan (c.30-c.375) empires.2 The Sui-Tang (581-902) unification coincides with the rise of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates (632-750).3 The partial—but increasingly commercial—Song unification (960-1127) coincides with the rise of the Seljuk Empire (1037-1194). The Yuan-Ming-Qing (1271-1912) unification coincides with the rise of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922).

    

43. Until the C20th, any economic or social arrangements that fostered the capacity and resources for states to operate at scale led to empire. The more such capacity expanded, the larger empires tended to be. For instance, the dramatic fall in transport and communication costs from the 1820s onwards—with the invention of steamships and railways—led to huge increases in trade and to European maritime empires reaching their peak extent outside the Americas.

44. As empires tend to encourage trade through more extensive provision of protection to increase their revenues, this creates both upward and downward spirals between trade and empire.

45. States come in two basic forms (1) authoritarian, based on ruler and subjects; and (2) associational, based on deliberative assemblies and citizens. Some states have mixes of these forms.

46. Until the development of the representative principle, associational states—which occurred in many civilisations (e.g. ancient India, Mesoamerica)—could not successfully scale up, so tended to be overwhelmed by authoritarian states, that could and did scale up. Rome’s willingness to expand who could be a citizen was, at best, a partial exception to this pattern, given the Roman Republic’s collapse into rule by emperors.

47. We cognitively model not facts but significance to us, so what we can grasp, especially what is vivid.

48. Culture is the social transmission of norms, skills, connections, symbolic markers and rituals, cognitive framings and life-strategies. Such transmission can be down family lines; by the example of other adults; or by the example of peers or other interaction groups.

49. Culture is an emergent phenomena, mobilising various evolved mechanisms.

50. Culture is a “bottom-up”, socially permeable, if persistent and interactive, phenomenon that also involves such things as shared narratives.

51. Culture is not some all-encompassing, top-down, unitary thing despite the power of shared cognitive framings in generating robust, shared expectations.

52. Nevertheless, the persistence of culture generates much of its value, by generating robust, shared patterns of expectations.

53. Myth operates as compressed memory, providing stories helping to

    build and sustain shared expectations, references and cognitive framings.

54. Expressing myths in epic poetry operates as an effective oral transmission mechanism, since poetic metre provides an error correction device: breaking the rhythm and/or the rhyme (depending on how a language works) reveals an error. The Vedas, the Homeric and Vedic epics, could thus be transmitted across centuries orally.

55. Since institutions are structures of rules and norms, a polity needs to have a strong civic culture to have robust institutional norms and so robust institutions. Normative decay or collapse often precedes regime, or even polity, collapse.

56. How many people come into a society, at what rate, in what size groups, with what cognitive framings, inevitably affects the social equilibria that institutions are based on, and so how they operate. Thus, mass immigration can fracture a polity to the point of civil war: examples include the Texas Revolution (1835-6), the American Civil War (1861-5), the Jordanian Civil War (1970-1) and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90).

57. The definition of nation by Regino of Prum (d.915), based on Classical conceptions—Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus (the peoples of various nations differ by origin [ancestry], customs, languages and laws)—became the standard definition in medieval Europe and expresses why ethnicity, as a multi-dimensional structure for human interactions, has been a persistent factor in human affairs:

58. Via culture, ethnicity profoundly affects: (1) how extensive, and robust, shared expectations are; so (2) ease of communication and interaction; and (3) patterns of social connection, including marriage and friendship networks. Religion can operate similarly, especially regarding (3).

59. Modern sub-cultures indicate how much cultural identification can be chosen. The more complex and immersive the culture, the more difficult it can be to adopt. Nevertheless, the permeability of human social groups—including cultural groups—is a major factor in human social selection.

60. Serious adoption of a new culture usually takes time and operates across modes of social interaction, such as religion, kinship arrangements, dress, epic narratives, songs, etc.

61. Different cultures generate different patterns of individual and social calculations, different cognitive framings and so different normative social-scapes, social signals and patterns of expectations.

62. Precisely because we cognitively model significance not fact, people from different cultures, religions, ideologies will behave differently in the same circumstances because the cognitive significance differs, so the operational incentive structures differ.

63. Precisely because we human cognitively model significance to us, we persistently fail to understand how much other people can have very different perspectives. Even when we are so aware, folk often assume the rival perspective is a reverse of their own, which is just another way of imposing our cognitive framing on others. Thus, folk on the left focused on equality, and liberals focused on liberty/autonomy, regularly misread conservative focus on order.

64. Recent scholarship has identified culture, along with institutions, as very important factors in long-term economic growth. In particular, formally similar or identical institutions can operate very differently in different cultures due to differences in cognitive framings, norms and expectations.

65. The way social media has undermined group attention has had a polarising, therefore socially corrosive, effect on modern polities. This is especially as social media is very effective at upscaling relational aggression.

66. Social media has also greatly complicated peer group interactions, as these can become both more invisible to parents, operate in potentially emotionally intense “slivers” of human interaction—so without all the physical cues we have evolved and learnt to notice—and be highly deceptive, since people can present quite false online personas.

67. Online interactions are para-social rather than social. Thus, by not transmitting the signs of emotional commitment and affinity that are important to female sexuality, dating apps greatly increase hypergamous choices by their female users. Like all effects with some genetic base, female hypergamy is very much mediated by social and informational interactions.

68. The dramatic expansion in our access and use of energy (aka the Industrial Revolution aka the Great Enrichment) since the development of steamships and railways in the 1820s has meant falling transport, communication and production costs. It created mass globalisation—that is, markets that extend across polities.

69. Dwellings created households as consumption and production units. Even government became centred on royal and imperial households.

70. Vassalage and fiefs represented government by distributed households.

71. The harnessing of cheaper and cheaper energy for transport and production meant that production moved en masse out of the households, which became consumption units.

72. Mass production—moving production out of households—coupled with falling communication and transport costs, generated mass politics. Thus, while national feeling goes make centuries, even millennia—Old Kingdom Egypt was the first nation-state, with a very clear sense of who was, and was not, Egyptian while from 928 onward the English kings of the Houses of Wessex, Godwin, Normandy, Blois, and the first two Plantagenets proclaimed themselves King of the English (Rex Anglorum) rather than King of England (Rex Anglie)—nationalism as mass politics is largely a product of the energy breakthrough.

73. Urban polities with deliberative assemblies generated precursors to modern mass politics, both because of population concentration and because urban centres have forms of factory production—production outside the household—going back millennia.

74. Mass production made it easier for states to tax economic activity, as factories and firms became tax extraction points. The previous dominance of taxes on land and trade for state revenue became eclipsed by income taxes on labour and capital.

75. Mass production raised the value of production and exchange—so labour and capital—for state revenue while lessening the importance of territory (i.e., land). That shifted the advantage towards the commercial (increase trade) states of the maritime order over the continental anarchy (grab territory) states.

76. Mass production and mass communication increased the importance of shared language for both mass political action and for coordination across ever larger ambits of state action, including discouraging exit of labour to different language (and cultural) groups.

77. The more revenue (and military capacity) relies on labour (including its potential mobilisation), the more creating a sense of shared identity—typically based on shared language and culture—is an advantage to a state, both for internal coordination and for retaining taxpayers.

78. These shifts undermined empire by raising its costs, lessening its benefits and generating increased capacity and motivation to exit empires. As Henry Kissinger commented: It would have occurred to no one in the eighteenth century that the legitimacy of a state depended on linguistic unity. It was inconceivable to the makers of the Versailles settlement that there might be any other basis for legitimate rule. Whereas the C19th naval hegemon—Great Britain—relied on the largest empire in history to support its naval hegemony, the post-1945 naval hegemon—the US—relies on the largest alliance network in history to do so.

79. Regarding imperial calculations, administrative elites came to have far better career prospects from internal colonisation of their own societies—via the expanding welfare states—or “vertical” colonisation—via expanding international bodies—than the “horizontal” territorial colonisation of traditional empires. The EU (and its precursors) has been a mechanism for replacing the administrative opportunities of territorial or maritime empire with those of transnational administration. The “ever closer union” of the EU is a transnational colonising enterprise.

80. As the administrative classes expanded, they become more socially imperial in their own societies, using mass immigration to balkanise the demos and delegitimise local culture and heritage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union decreased fears that the working class might defect to a rival ideology, or that they might be needed to be mobilised to meet an existential threat, a wider pattern of elite contempt within Western countries for the heritage and other attachments of their demos developed. There are few more colonial enterprises than “decolonising the curriculum”, whereby a self-righteous elite condemns the heritage of the “legacy” population and demands it be replaced by its superior offerings.

81. In a world of low and falling communication and transport costs, the interests of capital increasingly favour movement of factors of production—including labour—across borders. Careful comparison of economic performances by different countries show that the alleged wider economic (and even more social) benefits of such movement of labour, and even of capital, are regularly over-sold.

82. Cheap energy, interacting with technological change, to generate falling transport, communication and production costs, means increasingly efficient replacement of what was done within households (individually or via local networks) while raising the cost of children—especially for women, who have a much wider range of possibilities the more education and other social possibilities they have—and increasing urbanisation. This combination increasingly eliminates the large family “tail” needed for positive fertility. This is even more so when the improved educational and income opportunities of women have the effect of reducing the pool of marriageable men.

83. As human niches expand from cheap energy generating mass prosperity, social factors become less constraining, resulting in innate tendencies manifesting more strongly, including cognitive differences between men and women.

84. As transactions generate both commercial and tax revenue, commerce extending the range and size of markets, and state programs and services being provided on a transactional basis, all favour promoting transactions over connections—such as providing public housing on the basis of need that ignores patterns of local social connections.

85. Our capacity for self-deception makes it easier for socially-negative incentives to operate, especially when there are networks of people with a shared interest in the appropriate rationalisations and not-noticings.

86. That much of the welfare state apparat gains increased access to resources if social pathologies increase has a socially corrosive effect. For example, public health gains more resources the more metabolically unhealthy the population becomes; NGOs and government departments paid to service the homeless get more resources the more homeless people there are; those paid to service the disabled get more resources the more people are defined as disabled; those paid to oppose discrimination get more resources the more things are defined as discriminatory; and so on.

87. Moral project public policy is inherently socially imperial, by actively promoting concept and mission creep while using its proclaimed good (moral) intentions to frustrate critical examination and accountability.

88. The replacement of connections with transactions increasingly forces younger generations to purchase benefits that were previously provided by connections and more robust social commons. This has an impoverishing effect across the generations in terms of human flourishing, an effect that is masked by treating the exchange value of transactions being measurable as making them more valuable than benefits from social connections and social commons that do not so register. Hence: The young are told they are richer, and in the currency of flat-screen televisions they are. But the goods that constitute a life — house, spouse, children, good school, good neighbors — have inflated so far beyond wages that the ordinary life path of 1965 now requires an extraordinary income. “GDP goes up” is used to deflect attention from more direct considerations of human flourishing and social resilience.

89. As we humans are adapted to connections first and transactions a distant second, such shifts away from households and connections to transactions increasingly disconnects measurable transactions (e.g. GDP) from human well-being.

90. Various religious communities reject or limit such seductive efficiencies and so can maintain the inter-generational resilience of positive fertility. Congregations in particular provide potentially robust sets of connections.

The next post in this series examines how the failure to accept the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological means that much of social “science” is not, in fact, science.

References

Books

Douglas Allen, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Oxford University Press, [2002] 2004.

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Penguin, 2005.

Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, Yale University Press, 1998.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, Faber & Faber, 2018.

Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, Pimlico, [1976] 1992.

Bryan Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity, Cambridge University Press, [2018] 2020.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, [2002] 2003.

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Cosimo, [1921], 2005.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume I, Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, [2003] 2010.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, [2009] 2013.

Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India, Pen & Sword Military, 2014.

Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy & the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia & Han China, Pen & Sword History, 2016.

William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Harvard University Press, 1996.

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Kenneth M Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Yossef Rapoport, Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East, Princeton University Press, 2025.

Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Fourth Estate, 2014.

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell with Mind And Matter & Autobiographical Sketches, Cambridge University Press, [1944, 1958, 1992] 2013.

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, University of Yale Press, 2009.

Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Michael Strevens, The Knowledge Machine: How an Unreasonable Idea Created Modern Science, Penguin, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Penguin, 2024.

Articles, essays, blogposts, etc

P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different,’ Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), 393-396. https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf

Menelaos Apostolou, ‘Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 28 (2007) 403–409. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237929517_Sexual_Selection_Under_Parental_Choice_The_Role_of_Parents_in_the_Evolution_of_Human_Mating

Scott Atran, ‘“Devoted Actor” versus “Rational Actor” Models for Understanding World Conflict,’ Briefing to the National Security Council, White House, Washington, DC, September 14, 2006. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6801978.pdf

Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6123217_Sacred_Barriers_to_Conflict_Resolution

Joyce F. Benenson, Henry Markovits, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Diana Geoffroy, Julianne Flemming, Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Males’ Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers,’ Psychological Science 2009 20: 184-190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40065052

Paul M. Bingham, ‘Human Uniqueness: A General Theory,’ The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), 133-169. https://www.academia.edu/83860282/Human_Uniqueness_A_General_Theory

Paul M. Bingham, ‘Human evolution and human history: A complete theory,’ Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, (2000) 9: 248-257. https://www.academia.edu/83860856/Human_evolution_and_human_history_A_complete_theory

Christopher Boehm, ‘Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,’ Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No.3. (Jun., 1993), 227-254 (with Comments by Harold B. Barclay; Robert Knox Dentan; Marie-Claude Dupre; Jonathan D. Hill; Susan Kent; Bruce M. Knauft; Keith F. Otterbein; Steve Rayner and Reply by Christopher Boehm). https://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/_Textual/ChristopherBoehm_EgalitarianBehaviorAndReverseDominanceHierarchy_1993_29pp/ChristopherBoehm_EgalitarianBehaviorAndReverseDominanceHierarchy_1993_29pp.pdf

Barry Bogin, Jared Bragg, Christopher Kuzawa, ‘Humans are not cooperative breeders but practice biocultural reproduction,’ Annals of Human Biology, 2014 Jul-Aug; 41(4): 368-80. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263130566_Humans_are_not_cooperative_breeders_but_practice_biocultural_reproduction

Selina Brace, Yoan Diekmann, Thomas J. Booth, Lucy van Dorp, Zuzana Faltyskova, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Iñigo Olalde, Matthew Ferry, Megan Michel, Jonas Oppenheimer, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Kristin Stewardson, Rui Martiniano, Susan Walsh, Manfred Kayser, Sophy Charlton, Garrett Hellenthal, Ian Armit, Rick Schulting, Oliver E. Craig, Alison Sheridan, Mike Parker Pearson, Chris Stringer, David Reich, Mark G. Thomas, and Ian Barnes, ‘Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain,’ Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019 May;3(5):765-771. Epub 2019 Apr 15. Erratum in: Nature Ecology & Evolution 2019 Jun;3(6):986-987. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6520225/

Judith K. Brown, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,’ American Anthropologist, Vol.72, Issue 5, October 1970, 1073-1078. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1970.72.5.02a00070

William Buckner, ‘On secret cults and male dominance,’ Traditions of Conflict blog, January 31, 2018. https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance

William Buckner, ‘Where are the matriarchies?’ Traditions of Conflict blog, March 18, 2018. https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/17/where-are-the-matriarchies

Michael L. Burton, Lilyan A. Brudner, and Douglas R. White, ‘A model of the sexual division of labor,’ American Ethnologist, (1977) 4: 227-252. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227823427_A_Model_of_the_Sexual_Division_of_Labor

R. Calsbeek, ‘Ecological rules for global species distribution also predict performance variation in Ironman triathletes,’ PLoS ONE, 2023, 18(5): e0283282. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283282

Satyajit Chatterjee, ‘A theory of asset price booms and busts and the uncertain return to innovation’, Business Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2011, issue Q4, pages 1-8. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/economy/articles/business-review/2011/q4/brq411_theory-of-asset-price-booms-and-busts.pdf

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00127-013-0783-y.pdf

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

David Friedman, ‘A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations,’ Journal of Political Economy, Vol.85, No.1, Feb. 1977, 59-77. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24107762_A_Theory_of_the_Size_and_Shape_of_Nations

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3385688/

Zachary H. Garfield, Kristen L. Syme, Edward H. Hagen, ‘Universal and variable leadership dimensions across human societies,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 41, Issue 5, 2020, 397-414. https://tinyurl.com/muykzzpb

David C Geary, Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Mary K Hoard, Jacob Vigil, Chattavee Numtee, ‘Evolution and development of boys’ social behavior,’ Developmental Review, Volume 23, Issue 4, 2003, 444-470. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=453100fc9af781a989a5bedb4eb8f1a298435a07

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of World History, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 2, 323-389. http://culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/goldstone-efflorescences.pdf

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/Social/f15/wrap/readings/Granovetter-revisited.pdf

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980844

Kim Hill, Michael Barton, and A. Magdalena Hurtado, ‘The Emergence of Human Uniqueness: Characters Underlying Behavioral Modernity,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, 2009, 18:187–200. https://tinyurl.com/4xp4csdk

Erik P. Hoel, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi, ‘Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro,’ PNAS, December 3, 2013, vol. 110, no. 49, 19790–19795. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1314922110

Z. Hofmanová, S. Kreutzer, G. Hellenthal, C. Sell, Y. Diekmann, D. Díez-del-Molino, L. van Dorp, S. López, A. Kousathanas, V. Link, K. Kirsanow, L.M. Cassidy, R. Martiniano, M. Strobel, A. Scheu, K. Kotsakis, P. Halstead, S. Triantaphyllou, N. Kyparissi-Apostolika, D. Urem-Kotsou, C. Ziota, F. Adaktylou, S. Gopalan, D.M. Bobo, L. Winkelbach, J. Blöcher, M. Unterländer, C. Leuenberger, Ç. Çilingiroğlu, B. Horejs, F. Gerritsen, S.J. Shennan, D.G. Bradley, M. Currat, K.R. Veeramah, D. Wegmann, M.G. Thomas, C. Papageorgopoulou, & J. Burger, ‘Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesU.S.A., 113 (25) 6886-6891. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1523951113

Meng Hu & Emil O. W. Kirkegaard & John Fuerst, ‘Income and Education Disparities Track Genetic Ancestry,’ OpenPsych. (2023) 10.26775/OP.2023.09.11. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373840894_Income_and_Education_Disparities_Track_Genetic_Ancestry

Emily Hurren, Carleen Thompson, Brian Jenkins, April Chrzanowski, Troy Allard, Anna Stewart, ‘Who are the Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment?,’ Report to the Criminology Research Advisory Council Grant: CRG 18/13-14, May 2018. https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/18-1314-FinalReport.pdf

Henrik Jacobsen, Kleven Claus, Thustrup Kreiner, Emmanuel Saez, ‘Why Can Modern Government’s Tax So Much? An Agency Model Of Firms As Fiscal Intermediaries,’ NBER Working Paper 15218, August 2009. https://www.nber.org/papers/w15218

Ian Janssen, Steven B. Heymsfield, ZiMian Wang, and Robert Ross, ‘Skeletal muscle mass and distribution in 468 men and women aged 18–88 yr,’ Journal of Applied Physiology, 2000 89:1, 81-88. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12415379_Skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution_in_468_men_and_women_aged_18-88_yr

Rachel Jewkes, Emma Fulu, Tim Roselli, Claudia Garcia-Moreno, ‘Prevalence of and factors associated with non-partner rape perpetration: findings from the UN Multi-country Crosssectional Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific,’ Lancet Global Health, Vol.1, October 2013, e208-e218. https://tinyurl.com/3amv4ds6

Ada Johansson, Pekka Santtila, Nicole Harlaar, Bettina von der Pahlen, Katarina Witting, Monica Algars, Katarina Alanko, Patrick Jern, Markus Varjonen, and N. Kenneth Sandnabba, ‘Genetic Effects on Male Sexual Coercion,’ Aggressive Behavior, 2008 Volume 34, 190–202. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6011396_Genetic_effects_on_male_sexual_coercion

Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334279951_Global_Sex_Differences_in_Personality_Replication_with_an_Open_Online_Dataset

Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, A. Magdalena Hurtado, and Jane Lancaster, ‘The embodied capital theory of human evolution,’ in Peter T. Ellison (ed.) Reproductive ecology and human evolution, De Gruyter, (2001), 293-317. https://www.unm.edu/~jlancas/EmbCapTheoryHumEvo2001.pdf

Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, Jane Lancaster, A. Magdalena Hurtado, ‘A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, August 2000, Vol.9, Iss.4, 156-185. https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf

Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster & Arthur Robson, ‘Embodied Capital and the Evolutionary Economics of the Human Life Span’, in Carey, James R. and Shripad Tuljapurkar (eds.), Life Span: Evolutionary, Ecological, and Demographic Perspectives, Supplement to Population and Development Review, vol. 29, 2003. New York: Population Council, 152-182. https://www.unm.edu/~jlancas/EmbCapTheoryHumEvo2001.pdf

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Morgan Kelly, ‘The Dynamics of Smithian Growth,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 112, No. 3 (Aug., 1997), 939-964. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24091590_The_Dynamics_of_Smithian_Growth

Henry A. Kissinger, ‘The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal, World Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), 264-280. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974

Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ Nebraska Anthropologist, 2013, 187, 95-102. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nebanthro/187/

David C. Lahtia, Bret S. Weinstein, ‘The better angels of our nature: group stability and the evolution of moral tension,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 2005, 47–63. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228350694_The_better_angels_of_our_nature_Group_stability_and_the_evolution_of_moral_tension

Lichter, D.T., Price, J.P. and Swigert, J.M. ‘Mismatches in the Marriage Market,’ Journal of Marriage and Family, (2020), 82: 796-809. https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/2019-lichter.pdf

Michael P. Lombardo, Robert O. Deaner, ‘Born to Throw: The Ecological Causes that Shaped the Evolution of Throwing In Humans,’ The Quarterly Review of Biology, March 2018 Vol. 93, No. 1, 1-16. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323411478_Born_to_Throw_The_Ecological_Causes_that_Shaped_the_Evolution_of_Throwing_In_Humans

Debin Ma, ‘Rock, scissors, paper: the problem of incentives and information in traditional Chinese state and the origin of Great Divergence,’ Economic History Working Papers 37569, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, 2011. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2011/WP152.pdf

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

C.F. Martin, R. Bhui, P. Bossaerts, T. Matsuzawa, & C. Camerer, ‘Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions,’ Scientific Reports, 2014, 4, 5182. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262885591_Chimpanzee_choice_rates_in_competitive_games_match_equilibrium_game_theory_predictions

A.E. Miller, J.D. MacDougall, M.A. Tarnopolsky, D.G. Sale, ‘Gender differences in strength and muscle fiber characteristics,’ European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, 1993; 66(3): 254-62. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/22586/1/miller_andrea_1990Dec_masters.pdf.pdf

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

Olalde, I., Brace, S., Allentoft, M. et al., ‘The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe.,’ Nature (2018) 555, 190–196. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323916898_The_Beaker_phenomenon_and_the_genomic_transformation_of_northwest_Europe

C. O’Madagain, M. Tomasello, ‘Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2021, 377: 20200320. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357000359_Shared_intentionality_reason-giving_and_the_evolution_of_human_culture

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M.B, Petersen, M. Osmundsen, & J. Tooby, ‘The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood,’ in (David C. Barker and Elizabeth Suhay eds.) The Politics of Truth in Polarized America: Concepts, Causes and Correctives, Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Petersen-et-al-Evolutionary-Psychology-of-Conflict-and-Functions-of-Falsehood-REVISED-20082020-1.pdf

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Peter J. Richerson, and Robert Boyd, ‘The evolution of human ultra-sociality,’ in Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank K. Salter (eds.), Indoctrinability, ideology, and warfare: Evolutionary perspectives, Berghahn, 1998, 71-95. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2314563_The_Evolution_of_Human_Ultra-sociality

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About niches

Natural selection proceeds by competition between genetic lineages over the available niches members of those lineages can occupy. The more resources available to sustain such niches, the more niches there can be, in number and type. Tropical jungles team with life, deserts don’t.

One of the striking things about humans is our ability to generate new niches, and to move between them, due to our technology and cognitive plasticity. At a dozen or so localities within five or six regions around the world, populations moved from occupying foraging niches to creating and occupying farming niches.

Foragers started the opening up of the steppes for human use by domesticating horses—along with dogs and reindeer, the only animals domesticated by foragers. Adding axles to wheels meant wagons, which enabled animal herders (i.e., pastoralists) to wander, with their herds, across the steppes. It later also meant chariots, which made them very dangerous to other groups.

Later still, the invention of the recurve bow meant that horse archers could shoot as far and with as much power as people on chariots or foot, while being much more effective raiders. Massed horse archers created the basis for steppe empires, starting with the Scythians.

Both farming and pastoralism dramatically increased the number of human niches compared to foraging. But having children does not automatically create niches for them. As in all species, human lineages compete for the available niches.

Males in particular compete for marriage/mating opportunities. One of the things polygyny does is intensify such intra-male competition, as a marriage does not take a male out of the ongoing competition but does remove their wife from the marriage market.

Polygyny tends to distribute women up the social scale, leaving men at the bottom without marriage prospects within the group. Thus, insisting on single-spouse marriage helps social cohesion within a group or society.

Single-spouse marriage also creates partnership marriages, where the wife could—and regularly did—deputise for her husband in his absence. Having a wife deputise for her husband in a polygynous household where wives (and concubines) were competing for the prospects for their children was a recipe for disaster.

Elite polygyny in Chinese society generated a non-breeding male underclass. It also helped generate the outlaws, rebellious sects and peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. In our own time, Gulf state polygyny helps generate recruits for jihadism in poorer Arab countries.

Polygyny plus horse archery, or boats, is a great way to create a raiding culture, on the basis of “those people over there have women, steal theirs” and “wealth raises my status and so my marriage prospects”. Monasticism, by contrast, can be a way of “soaking up” excess males (and corralling the non-normies).

A key feature of Middle Eastern history is that areas of farming and pastoralist niches are geographically interwoven, to the extent that people have regularly moved between the two. There was thus a social selection advantage in being able to unite people across those ecological divides: something monotheism, with its unified moral, ritual and doctrinal framing, did very well. Hence the region is the source for all the major monotheisms.

Since the C7th Arab break-out, the region has been dominated by the monotheism that sanctified the Arabian pastoralist synthesis: polygyny, patrilineal kin-groups, raiding and enslaving non-believing outsiders (including taking their women), law based on revelation and high levels of cousin marriage.

Prior to that, the Iranian plateau had been dominated for over a millennia by the proto-monotheism of Zoroastrianism and the lands westward had been dominated for around three centuries by the monotheism that sanctified the Roman farming synthesis—single-spouse marriage, law as a human creation, no consanguineous marriage, female consent for marriage, individual wills coupled with testamentary freedom, suppression of kin-groups—while also anathematising sex outside marriage.

Rivers provide fertile soil, animal and plant resources, so could support relatively dense human forager populations and even denser farming populations. This meant that early city-building cultures typically arose in river valleys. Plant-eating, river-valley farmers working in irrigated fields full of pathogens and parasites were then periodically conquered by meat-eating pastoralists.

The massive expansion out of the Pontic steppes by the Yamnaya that led to half the world speaking Indo-European languages as their first, or a second, language was a dramatic example, but so were the histories of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges and Yellow river valleys: all of which were in range of pastoralists, whether from North Africa, Arabia, nearby uplands such as the Zagros mountains, or the steppes.

The Mekong did not so suffer—no pastoralists within range. On the contrary, the upland horticulturalists suffered regular slaving raids from the riverine states.

The farmers regarded pastoralists as raiding, thieving, woman-stealing, raping, murderous, human pests. The pastoralists regarded farmers as weaklings who could not defend their own. In accordance with stereotype accuracy, they were both correct.

The demographics of imperial success leading to imperial failure

The Chinese dynastic cycle was also driven by constraints on the number of niches. A founder establishes a dynasty, unifying the Han heartland. This brings peace. Farming production and trade, so resources, increases. The population expands because more niches are generated.

Eventually, the farming population begins to reach the limits of sustainable farming niches, given the existing technology. The farming niches shrink in size, making taxes more onerous. Excess population is squeezed out of farming niches, into banditry.

Putting that in more conventional economic terms, food prices rise as population increases faster than production. The return to labour thus falls, while those to land (rents) and capital (interest) rise. As the costs of land and capital rise—and distress increases—the concentration of ownership of both land and capital is likely to increase, further increasing inequality. Material stress—including the sharpening of status differentiations—makes family formation harder and violence a more attractive strategy.

Given elite polygyny, the aspiring-elite population increases faster than do elite niches. Increased contestation over resources corrodes norms, allowing bureaucratic pathologies to worsen. (This is especially so if there is no character test among the elite, such as the duel of honour.)

Disappointed elite aspirants form a counter-elite and organise the increasingly numerous outlaws and desperate peasants in large-scale revolts, often via religious sects. The Taiping Rebellion is an extreme manifestation of this repeated pattern: one reason Chinese political culture is so obsessed with order and harmony is when order breaks down, millions die.

At some stage, the dynasty is overwhelmed and collapses; war, disorder and disease massively culls the population, and the cycle begins again.

Historical modelling suggests that normative cohesion—what the pioneer of systematic social analysis Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya—was weakest within Chinese polities when population pressure was most intense and strongest when it was least intense. The balance of external threat and internal tensions affecting normative cohesion is a recurring pattern in human affairs.

Norms evolved to generate more robust common expectations, enabling higher levels of cooperation. Of course a decline—or, worse, collapse—in normative cohesion within societies and polities is bad for human cooperation and flourishing (and the polity).

We can see, for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—so the removal of an external threat and of the concern within Western elites that it might be necessary to mobilise their own working class to deal with an existential threat—has been succeeded by increasingly polarised Western politics, including Western elites becoming increasingly hostile to (indeed, contemptuous of) the interests and concerns of their own working classes.

This assault on working class interests and concerns includes trade policies that off-shored manufacturing; technology that hollowed out local manufacturing employment; mass immigration that broke up working-class communities, and so their locality-based social networks, while generating a fractured demos; denigration of the local majority’s cultural heritage, often using immigration as an excuse to do so; morally grandstanding debauching of beloved entertainment franchises; housing policies that drove up rents and house price by restricting supply and driving up demand through mass immigration; education, policing and prosecution policies that put the local working class as the lowest priority; using metastasising linguistic taboos to—via moral abuse, cancel culture and outright censorship—block and de-legitimise working class speech as unacceptable morally vulgar; plus a general shift to non-electoral—often transnational—institutional policy-making that by-passes working class votes. Quantitative easing, by inflating asset prices, increased the experiential and perspective gap between elites and workers.

When working class voters—in reaction to all this—started voting national populist, this became an excuse for another wave of moral abuse and de-legitimisation. Ibn Khaldun was not wrong to note that normative cohesion (aka asabiyya) within a polity waxes and wanes, and this matters.

Versions of the cycle of the creation of domestic order generating population growth that then creates both elite and popular pressures on social order have afflicted polities since states—and especially empires—began. While pre-1820s economic history did generate various economic “efflorescences”—periods of growing living standards—these never lasted because the technological take-off required to break out of the Malthusian constraints did not happen.

Until, of course, it did: in Britain, in what we call the Industrial Revolution. Britain became the first country to adopt learning-by-experimentation at scale. The commercialised technological breakthroughs by jobbing artisans enabled ever greater use of energy to create more, more varied, and larger, human niches.

Crucially, no elite coalition vetoed this take-off.

A classic example of technological/economic take-off being vetoed by an elite coalition is the Ottoman Empire’s ban from the C15th to early C18th of the use of the printing press by Muslims: a ban that was not fully lifted until the C19th. The use that Christian Europe made of the printing press from 1440 to 1830—uses that Islam eschewed—explains much of the very different trajectories in the adjacent civilisations over that time.

‘Net Zero’ and its equivalents—such as denuclearisation—represent contemporary elite coalitions vetoing economic advance, worsening contestation over resources and thereby destabilising the existing political Party system. This is especially so when constraining the supply of housing, while using mass immigration to drive up the demand, thereby increasing rents and house prices, turns into a new way to have increasing population/land ratios put downward pressure on the size of niches.

Cheap energy was the escape from the Malthusian constraints. Turning against it is not a path for human flourishing.

Universities that massively overproduce elite aspirants, while generating elite status games systematically hostile to human flourishing—due to being based on systematically false claims about humans, and human social dynamics, plus dubious ones about our wider environment—are not a good civilisational prospect.

So—having seen why niches matter in human history—the next post resumes the propositions about basic features of humans and human sociality, focusing on the rise of states, culture, cognitive dimorphism, and mass production.

References

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Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

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Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, Daniel Hoyer, Kevin C. Feeney, Enrico Cioni, Rosalind Purcell, Jennifer Larson, John Baines, Barend ter Haar, Alan Covey & Peter Turchin, ‘Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: a review and “retake,”’ Religion, Brain & Behavior, (2022) 13(2), 124–166. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2074085

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Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Targeted conspiratorial killing, human self-domestication and the evolution of groupishness,’ Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2021 Apr 6;3:e26. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10427284/

1. Deliberate control of fire enabled us to socialise at night, develop better tools and, via cooking, partly externalise our digestion, thereby requiring less biological investment in internal digestion and temperature management while enabling (and requiring) more investment in cognition.

2. Control of fire thus greatly expanded our ability to gain nutrition from our environment and the range of environments we could survive in.

3. The interactive combination of being able to punish non-cooperators by throwing stones or weapons to kill or drive them away at a distance (so at lower risk) with mastery of fire may have been the basis of us becoming human.

4. The pay-off from tool-using cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies was so great, that we developed language and the self-consciousness required to assess, assemble, and communicate packages of information.

5. The development of language greatly increased the range and possibilities of cooperation, and so social connections, including the information advantages of both.

6. This enabled beta males to combine to kill alpha males, using proactive—intended, including coordinated—aggression and our ability to kill at a distance.

7. This selected against reactive aggression that alpha males were high in, as proactive and reactive aggression use different brain circuits.

8. Such killing of alpha males systematically selected against dominance behaviour as a status strategy.

9. We remain the most proactively-aggressive primate—along with Pan troglodytes, Chimpanzees—but are the least reactively-aggressive primate.

10. We are the species that murdered its way to niceness, in a form of self-domestication, though the level of selection against reactive aggression has differed between human populations.

11. As dominance as a status-and-resource strategy got in the way of cooperation, its suppression further increased our ability to cooperate.

12. The selection against reactive aggression and the selection for cooperative behaviour tend to work in tandem.

13. This selection against dominance by systematically killing alpha males is a case of how important tail effects can be. Human traits are generally distributed along “Bell” curves and male and female “Bell” curves of traits strongly overlap. Male “Bell” curves tend to be flatter and have different averages than female “Bell” curves of traits.

14. A tiny fraction of (overwhelmingly male) perpetrators—typically high in physical robustness and lower in executive functions, so show less patience and more tendency towards reactive aggression—dominate violent crime.

15. Similarly, the tail of very smart, and highly disagreeable, obsessives—who tend to dominate human hierarchies—is larger among men than women.

16. Given that we are the most gracile (delicate featured) form of Homo—so our facial features are not structured to ward off blows but are structured to express emotions—our greater capacity to cooperate at scale in both aggression and subsistence is likely why we are the only surviving form of Homo.

17. The more gracile a human population, the smaller is its—overwhelmingly male—“tail” of highly reactively-aggressive individuals. The less gracile, the larger that “tail”.

18. This has no effect on propensity for proactive aggression. Thus, highly gracile East Asians have low rates of violent crime, but a history of horrifying levels of mass violence. The low rates of reactive violence enable, and the mass violence represents, high capacity for cooperation.

19. We also developed normative capacity, as that enabled better cooperation from more robust and congruent mutual expectations via shared norms.

20. With such cooperative subsistence and selection strategies, magnified by the development of language, managing social connections (social capital) became increasingly important. Thus, the common feature of all marriage systems is that marriage creates in-laws, kin connections by marriage.

21. Social connections and acquiring shared cognitive framings—notably culture—precede transacting in human life-cycles. Moreover, transactions are embedded in patterns of connections and cognitive framings.

22. Humans became adept at calculating both individual action and social interactions. Where one is impossible, or inapposite, we give primacy to the other.

23. If individual calculations of loss and gain are not possible, or are repressed, we display strong flocking/herd behaviour using social calculation: seeking safety in the group—in particular, not losing status by doing significantly worse than anyone else—and trying to “piggy-back” on whoever gets information first. You can see this, for example, in how asset markets deal with uncertainty—i.e., insufficient information to calculate probabilities—with the direction of the flocking/herding effect varying depending on whether the uncertainty is read positively (as in tech booms) or negatively (as in financial crises).

24. Part of human social selection is via people and lineages leaving less successful groups and joining more successful groups. The permeability of human groups selects for groupishness rather than there being strong selection at a group level.

25. With the greater ability to manipulate symbols and engage in rituals, cooperation could extend well beyond the foraging band. Both dance and rituals operate as group-connecting-and-binding behaviour that also set group boundaries. The bonding effect of shared rhythmic action was later mobilised by military drill.

26. Rituals in particular mobilise all forms of knowledge—propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory: knowledge that, how, of and in—to provide emotionally and socially binding immersive and cathartic experiences. Ritual centres were regularly the first large-scale human constructions in a region.

27. Non-kin cooperation is the Homo sapien advantage. Societies that maximise non-kin cooperation have generally been advantaged.

28. Human societies include conflicts, but are dominated by cooperative mechanisms, otherwise they would not be able to scale up so dramatically.

29. Theories that claim conflicts dominate human societies are false. When implemented, they are generally hostile to human flourishing, as, in their conflict focus, they destroy or degrade cooperative mechanisms.

30. In suppressing dominance, we developed two other forms of status as currencies of cooperation.

31. One was prestige—status through conspicuous competence. Folk were rewarded for doing things that had benefits to third parties—what economists call positive externalities. Part of the reward was people are more willing to associate with you, including improving mating opportunities. It also provided positively-biased examples for others to copy.

32. Prestige has been disproportionately male, as males can take more risks, and be more obsessive, through not having bubs in tow. Indeed, prestige provides further support for the transfer of risks away from child-rearing.

33. The existence of prestige is why there are no matriarchal human societies. (Matriarchal families exist.) You cannot have authority be presumptively female when there is a male-dominated form of status.

34. Much of the social status of men in human societies comes from prestige and its social utility. This encourages competition between men and sorts men quite strongly. So, much of the social status of men has been conditional on accruing prestige. Young men in particular often operate as the “disposable” sex in the search for prestige.

35. The other form of status is propriety—status through conforming to the local norms. It particularly involves stigma—loss of status, to the extent of shaming, shunning or worse, from going against those norms.

36. Stigmatisation punishes people for engaging in activity harmful to others or group cohesion—what economists call negative externalities.

37. Stigmatisation helps to solve the free-rider problem in the enforcement of norms through reinforcing effects on one’s self-image and social standing without requiring violence. It provides negatively-biased examples for others to avoid.

38. Shaming and shunning could be mobilised against dominance and other uncooperative behaviour.

39. Norms, prestige and propriety all use and reinforce other-regarding emotions, including empathy and admiration. They enabled the development of internalised, potentially emotionally powerful, barriers against social defection from cooperation.

40. Propriety—and especially stigma—tend to be female-dominated, as the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, reliant on the transfer of resources to child-rearing, is particularly invested in the social connections that allow all that to happen and are more likely to see negative emotions—particularly from physically stronger men—as a threat. The November 2014 fuss over a rocket scientist’s shirt shows male prestige—doing the very scientifically clever of landing a probe on a comet—being trumped by female propriety via public stigmatisation enabled by social media.

41. Emotional or relational aggression that attacks people’s social connections via stigmatisation—but can be passed off as just moral or social concern, as concern for propriety—is safer than physical aggression for the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, for it can be paraded as not being aggression.

42. This is not only safer, such moralisation of aggression is more likely to be effective. If the person engaging in the aggression believe that they are just showing moral or social concern, that imposes much less of a cognitive load than lying, so presenting their social aggression to themselves as moral or social concern is less likely to give off the cues of deceit and more likely to be taken at face value.

43. As only a fraction of our cognition is conscious, such self-deceit is surprisingly easy to do. Indeed, being a social and a normative species, we have developed strong capacities to moralise and rationalise our self-interest, particularly when operating via networks of the like-minded.

44. Having emotional or relational aggression habitually cast as moral or social concern also meant that women in particular—but anyone using such aggression—can both be blind to that they are engaging in aggression and not have a good sense of when to stop.

45. As such aggression can undermine trust and social cohesion, most human societies have mechanisms to reign in the nag, the scold and the malicious gossip.

46. If women have relatively high status in society, such mechanisms will tend to be overt, public, even legal, procedures (e.g. the ducking stool or the scold’s bridle). Otherwise, the most common mechanism is to hit the the nag or scold until they stop: to use physical aggression to block emotional/relational aggression. (Islam authorises but regulates such use of physical aggression.)

47. Social media reduces the risks of engaging in social/reputational aggression, and makes it far easier to do so, while—because one is interacting with online slivers of people, not the whole person—increasing the salience of what people focus on (words) and reducing the salience of the consequences for the person being attacked.

48. We can see a massive uptick in the use of moral abuse terms in media and academic articles from 2014 onwards because that both reflected, and enabled, the use of social media for the moralised social/reputational aggression that social media has made so much cheaper and safer to do.

49. Due to the need to have emotional and social support mechanisms, women have tended to be more concerned with the internal operation of the social group. This includes women having advantages in networking.

50. Due to greater strength, not having bubs in tow, and team-focus, men have tended to be more concerned with interactions with external groups.

51. Compared to masculine alternatives, feminised institutions and discourse can be expected to be worse at emotionally-costly enforcement of boundaries (including standards) while also enforcing emotionally-protective conformities. The latter will tend to block inconvenient feedback.

52. Failure to enforce standards is likely to undermine social cohesion, which relies on punishing defections from cooperation and reinforcing the normative pressure to cooperate.

53. Same-sex spaces can compensate men for women tending to be better at networking. They can also operate as team-building venues.

54. In pre-state, small-scale societies, male-only spaces allowed men to plan violence against external groups without “marrying in” wives warning male relatives in rival groups.

55. As men are far less likely to find women threatening than women are to find men threatening, and men focus more on things and performance of roles, women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men. This aids the feminisation of organisations.

56. Men thus tend to be more socially inclusive, both across the sexes and across social levels, than do women.

57. This has led to female-dominated organisations to be much worse at catering to what interests and engages men than male-dominated organisations have been a catering to what interests and engages women. We can see this in how female-dominating publishing has largely lost male readers of fiction; female-dominated Hollywood writers’ rooms have regularly lost male watchers of cinema and television; and female-dominated schooling and education has been catering worse and worse for male students.

58. Similarly, increasing domination of discourse (including media) and management by highly educated women—people who can now go from zero to outrage in 280 characters—coincided with the British state’s effective abandonment of working class boys in education and working class girls to so-called “grooming” gangs. The contrast with the public horror of Victorian Britain over the forced prostitution of poor girls is stark. This lack of social inclusiveness likely helps explain why a 2015 survey found only 9 per cent of British women identified as feminist, given that feminism mainly operates as a coordinating mechanism for highly educated career women.

59. Religion operates via a realm of divine authority not subject to contradictory information, plus socially-ordering structures of the sacred against which trade-offs were not permitted: at least from outside the realm of the sacred.

60. Socialising at night around the fire, surrounded by the threatening dark, created an ideal environment for developing both mythic and spirit-world/religious narratives.

61. Rituals provide both a reinforcing mechanism for divine authority and senses of the sacred as well as a way of expressing (and judging) commitment to the shared sense of divine authority and the sacred.

62. Religion can also provide reinforcement of binding norms and generates devoted agents—those committed to the patterns of the sacred that helped to bind the community.

63. Religion leads to the development of beliefs that are not literally true but adherence to which is adaptive—i.e. is advantageous to a lineage. This is the literally false but metaphorically true phenomenon.

64. Via these mechanisms—the divine as the realm of authority; the sacred as the realm against which trade-offs are not accepted; rituals to mobilise a shared sense of community; supporting belief structures that are advantageous to lineages, including by making norms more robust—religion helps us to deal with being self-conscious beings and with social and environmental complexity.

65. As there is no information from the future, so it provides no contradictory information, politics based on the authority of the imagined future of social transformation—that is social salvation—can pour the spiritual into the social and create secular religions based on social salvation politics. These can also be very effective at coordinating and motivating behaviour, including creating devoted agents aka zealots.

66. Self-consciousness thus generates a concern for meaning and purpose that can be very effective at mobilising shared action, for good and ill.

67. Our (evolved) ability to assess truth and consequences is much better for things we immediately experience than for more removed abstractions. This has proved to be particularly an issue for complex societies, especially when it comes to mobilising a sense of purpose and meaning, hence the role of religion in dealing with complexity.

68. The development of productive assets—fishing runs, arable fields, animal herds—enabled more hierarchical societies.

69. Dwellings—whether via sedentary foragers or farmers or the wagons/tents/yurts/gurs of nomadic pastoralists—led to the creation of households operating as both production and consumption units, replacing more fluid foraging bands.

70. Sufficiently large congregation of dwellings creates peer groups among children as a potential rival source of authority to parents.

71. Farming was almost certainly developed by women, as plant-gathering women interacted with plants much more systematically than did animal-hunting men.

72. Planting food crops also meant women did not have to move around so much with the children; that children became more productive more quickly than forager children; and so women could feed more children, so were less likely to have to abandon/kill an “excess” child.

73. An indicator of this female origin for farming is that farming deities strongly tend to be female.

74. Farming required both plant domestication and further human self-domestication, as it operated on very different attitudes to time and space than foraging. (The modern shifting of production back out of households has led to more “forager” social patterns.)

75. Farming diets were also metabolically unhealthy but this operationally mattered less than farming’s ability to support human niches smaller in key dimensions (land, skills, risks) while also generating (much) more numerous human niches. Hence, for millennia, farmers and farming have been displacing foragers and foraging around the planet.

76. Farmers versus foragers and farmers versus pastoralists have been the two great lines of social conflict across that time, down to the present day.

77. Conflicts with forager groups—whether with other foragers or with farmers—are more likely to be genocidal as foragers have low population numbers and it is relatively easy to knock a forager population below the level it can sustain its physical technology and social cohesion. Examples include the Inuit replacing the Dorset people as the dominant Arctic foragers and the incoming Aegean-origin farmers replacing the Mesolithic foragers of the British Isles. Though those Aegean-origin farmers—who built Stonehenge and Newgrange—seem to have been largely replaced in turn by folk with a high level of steppe ancestry.

78. Various populations have adapted to farming diets; however, those adaptations tend to weaken as we age.

The third post in the series will examine the role of niches in human societies and history.

References

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Natural selection results from nonrandom differential reproduction and has ecological causes and evolutionary consequences.

Two classic criticisms of applying evolutionary reasoning to human behaviour are that evolutionary reasoning is prone to:

1. create just-so stories, and

2. end up justifying whatever is the current social arrangement.

These are reasonable criticisms of what use of evolutionary reasoning needs to avoid.

There is a third criticism, which is that human behaviour is so plastic—evidenced by such behaviour as choosing celibacy—that evolutionary reasoning does not apply.

Yes, we are the blankest slates in the biosphere; cognitive plasticity is the human niche. But that we can display a wide range of behaviour does not mean that our behaviour is not patterned in ways that make sense given our evolutionary history.

We are biologically-embodied strategic actors and that produces identifiable patterns of behaviour. Nor are we blank slates. If, for example, we were not primed to learn, we would not be able to learn as much as we do. We cannot invent emotions, nor basic structures of learning, nor patterns of attention, from scratch.

A way to avoid problem (2) is to read a lot of evolutionary anthropology and social history. Once you have a sense of the sheer breadth of human societies, you are much more likely to grasp the contingency—and especially the path-dependency—of human social arrangements. It also provides a much better basis for working out what are, and are not, genuine human universals.

For instance, courtship marriage—where both bride and groom chose the other—has been a minority form of marriage across human societies. To this day, part of the appeal of Christianity in Africa is precisely that its congregations—and insistence on mutual consent for marriage—provide a refuge from the demands of kin-groups, including about who you will marry, while providing a substitute for kin-group support.

One of the few things that is distinctively human—rather than being an extreme manifestation of patterns also seen in other species—is that Homo sapiens are the only species where it is possible that neither member of a mating (i.e. marriage) pair has chosen the other. There have been plenty of human marriages where bride and groom first met on their wedding day.

So, if you are going to talk about human mating patterns, you better either not just assume the courtship marriage pattern applies or else make it clear when you are specifically talking about courtship marriage.

As for problem (1), the trick is to start from the beginning and work up carefully, using multiple lines of evidence. So, here are a series of propositions about human evolution and the social consequences thereof.

Some propositions

1. We were a technological (i.e. tool-using) species before we were human. Our Australopithecus ancestors picked up rocks and split open skulls and bones of the remains of kills left by predators to get at the highly nutritious—mainly fat, mainly saturated fat—marrow and brains inside.

2. This set us down the path of developing the cognitive capacity to make and use tools. Skills and knowledge (human capital) have been as basic to our subsistence strategy—and to all economic development since—as physical capital (tools). Indeed, creating and using physical capital requires human capital.

3. Our bipedal pelvises limited the size of infant skulls. Human childbirth is unusually risky, showing there was strong selection pressure for brain size.

4. This skull size limitation at birth meant—as we became more and more dependent on learnt skills—more and more brain growth occurred after birth. This led to incredibly helpless babies, who had to learn even to walk, but whose brains were structured to learn.

5. So, we ended up with the most biologically expensive offspring in the biosphere. By the time we became biologically modern humans, it took almost 20 years to train a forager (i.e. hunter-gatherer) child to be a subsistence adult—that is, to be able to forage as much nutrition as they consumed.

6. Humans became the best throwers in the biosphere, with shoulders that evolved to throw—an eight year old Homo sapien can throw better than any member of any other species.

7. We also became one of the better long-distance running species [while being unremarkable sprinters].

8. Both these adaptations—along with skin with hair rather than fur designed [structured] to release and manage heat via sweat—are clearly selections for a tool-using species to be an effective predator by running down exhausted prey in the middle of the day, when other predators were napping.

9. Throwing meant killing at a distance. We are the only species who can kill fellow members of our own species at a distance. That made it easier to build coalitions able to punish at acceptable risk those who defect from cooperation.

10. Collaboration v competition, connection v transaction are not the basic choices for social cooperation. Cooperation v defection is the key choice. You can collaborate to defect. You can compete to cooperate. The better the mechanisms for punishing defection from cooperation, the higher the levels of cooperation we can manage.

11. Lacking tearing teeth or rending claws, so relying on making and using tools, while having increasingly biologically expensive children, and being able to punish defectors, led us to develop highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies.

12. The basic pattern became the transferring of risks away from child-rearing and the transfer of resources to child-rearing, including for their training.

13. Among foraging cultures, men typically do such hunting or gathering that is too risky to do with bubs in tow, women typically do such hunting or gathering that can be done with bubs in tow.

14. So, men generally hunt large animals and gather honey. Women generally gather plants, lizards, shellfish. In forager societies, this tends to be a pragmatic pattern rather than rigid social roles.

15. This pattern—of women doing those activities which can be done with bubs in tow, men do everything else—has dominated the patterns of human sex-roles until the massive, on going, expansion in access to, and use of, energy (aka the industrial revolution) systematically moved production of goods and services out of households,1 including the advent of mass schooling moving child-minding during work hours out of the household.

16. When women hunt animals other than lizards and other small creatures, it has usually been by women who either do not have children; their children are adults; or someone else is looking after the children.

17. Until the development of mass schooling, these continuing constraints greatly restricted which women could work outside the household or do work that required considerable concentration (e.g. being a writer).

18. This generally being about what worked, there were still female warriors in low-density societies where the men might be away (e.g. the steppes).

19. Cooperative, tool-based hunting encourages greater male focus on things. Emotion-based social connections to assist with the rolling multi-child—given high rates of infant and child mortality—project of human child-rearing encourages greater female focus on people.

20. The larger the animals being hunted, the more team work among (overwhelmingly male) hunters was nutritionally productive—and productive of other resources (skins, fur, horn)—and so selected for.

21. Having such biologically expensive children—so requiring more and more male investment in children—meant that human foragers could not be a harem species and maintain a successful reproductive strategy. Human males—despite their systematically greater strength over human females—are not nearly large enough to dominate a group of human females on their own, as a male Gorilla dominates Gorilla females half his size. They certainly could not successfully provide for them as well as cooperative, pair-bonding males could.

22. Given the increasing level of male investment in offspring, nor could human males share human females as a group of male Chimpanzees sexually share female Chimpanzees: human testes are not nearly large enough to produce Chimpanzee and Bonobo levels of semen to squirt out the sperm of the previous male. Human males are structured towards pair-bonding.

23. As foragers, we evolved to be a very mildly polygynous species, since human children took so much care and resources that only relatively robust pair-bonding within a—usually fairly fluid—foraging band could hope to be a successful reproductive strategy.

24. Hence, human societies have perennially supported the long-term mating of the Dad strategy (care for offspring via the social relationship of fatherhood) and the Sticker strategy (staying with husband) against the short-term mating of the sex-without-commitment Cad (spread the sperm) and Slicker (spread the sexual connections) strategies.

25. If a society does not recognise, or often dispenses with, the social relationship of fatherhood, the male provision-and-protection role has been typically replaced by uncles, by a mother’s brothers.

26. Even in societies with strong roles for fathers, a mother’s brother—the adult male you were sure to be biologically related to—was often a particularly important relative, especially for his sister’s sons.

27. Children raised by both biological parents have statistically better outcomes than those who have been adopted, have a step-parent, or are raised by a sole parent. Human societies perennially produce tales (e.g. Cinderella) that warn about step-parents.

28. Because in polygynous households, the wives and concubines compete for prospects for their children, single-spouse partnership marriages raise the status of elite women in particular, as they regularly run things when their husband is away: not a safe option in polygynous households.

29. Steppe societies were an exception to this, as the men were often away, women being armed raised their status, the women owned the dwellings—including a separate dwelling for each wife—and so the senior wife was regularly deputised in the absence of their husband.

30. Especially for human females, sexual strategies not based on pair-bonding commitment tend to be based on signs of “good genes”. (Sometimes described as the “cheat with the alpha, bond with the beta” strategy.) The evidence is that this is very much a minority strategy, though how much varies between human societies.

31. Due to sperm being cheap to produce, men are more sexually oriented to the physicality of human reproduction, to signs of fertility. Though the biological expense of human children has still oriented human males to far greater rates of male investment in their offspring than any other species (even than those bird species where the males nurse the eggs).

32. Due to bearing the costs of pregnancy and nursing infants, women are more sexually oriented to emotional connections and signs of commitment, even though “good genes” and “good protector” signals can also be powerful.

33. Dating apps, designed by men, and based on “slivers” of people rather than interacting with the whole person, are poor at generating emotional connection and commitment signals.

34. As physicality is a weaker sexual trigger for women than men, only a minority of men “pass”. In the absence of signals of emotional connection and commitment, the dating apps massively encourage female hypergamy—aiming for men high in physical attractiveness, status and resources.

35. The length of human child-rearing led to human mothers in foraging societies surviving around 15 years after menopause, maximising the chance of surviving long enough for their last child to make it to subsistence adulthood. We became the longest-lived ape.

36. Women had to have the fat reserves to support at least one other nutrition-hungry human brain. This led to adult human males having twice the upper body lean body mass as adult human females who—on average—have only 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males. We are lot more strength and shape dimorphic than we are size dimorphic.

37. Hence human males dominate physical aggression among adults, being an overwhelming majority of perpetrators of physical violence and (usually) a solid majority of victims of physical violence, as the greatest physical threat to an adult male is another adult male.

38. That this male dominance of violence among human adults is, to a significant degree, a strategic pattern—due to humans being physically-embodied strategic actors and adult human males being systematically stronger than adult human females—is shown by when adult human females deal with a systematically physically weaker set of Homo sapiens—children—they are as likely to use physical aggression against them as are adult human males.

39. Despite the riskiness of human childbirth, and the general principle that the sex taking more risks in reproduction chooses—so physical ornamentalism is higher in the chosen sex (e.g. male peacocks and their visually-spectacular tails being chosen by drab peahens)—the need to attract and hold the support of a human male for the rolling, almost 20-year, projects that is successful human reproduction led to considerable physical ornamentalism in human females: protuberant breasts that signalled fertility, being more neotenous and gracile, so more emotionally expressive, facial features.

40. Humans are more shape-dimorphic than any of our ape relatives because our children involve such high biological investment.

41. Physical ornamentalism in human males includes regular features, height, wide shoulders and large penis. Such male physical ornamentalism indicates mutual choosing between sexes, whether directly or via kin selection of marriage partners. Height helps male teams to sort out hierarchies relatively quickly, which is very useful for effective team work.

42. The more uncertain success in foraging a source of nutrients is, the greater the nutritional return has to be, and the more likely it is to be shared. Such sharing of animal kills helps insulate hunters against failure, injury or sickness. It also provides young male hunters with the opportunity to advertise what good provider-mates they would be. All this reinforces cooperative subsistence strategies.

Part II will cover norms, language and murdering our way to niceness.

References

Books

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, Yale University Press, 1998.

Bryan Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity, Cambridge University Press, [2018] 2020.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, [2002] 2003.

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Harvard University Press, 1996.

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Kenneth M Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Yossef Rapoport, Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East, Princeton University Press, 2025.

Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Fourth Estate, 2014.

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell with Mind And Matter & Autobiographical Sketches, Cambridge University Press, [1944, 1958, 1992] 2013.

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, University of Yale Press, 2009.

Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Articles, essays, blogposts, etc

P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different,’ Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), 393-396. https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf

Menelaos Apostolou, ‘Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 28 (2007) 403–409. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237929517_Sexual_Selection_Under_Parental_Choice_The_Role_of_Parents_in_the_Evolution_of_Human_Mating

Joyce F. Benenson, Henry Markovits, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Diana Geoffroy, Julianne Flemming, Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Males' Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers,’ Psychological Science 2009 20: 184-190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40065052

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Much of the commentary on crime—especially in the US—fails to grapple with the dynamics of violent crime having two conspicuous features:

1. It varies hugely by locality.

2. It is very much a tail/power law effect.

That is, a tiny minority (overwhelmingly male) generates the majority of violent crime and a small minority—also, but not quite as much, overwhelmingly male—generates all the violent crime.

The variation by locality is very well explored in Jens Ludwig’s excellent study Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, which I review here.

The most complete paper I am aware of how much violent crime is a tail effect is: O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

Males dominate violent crime because they are physically stronger and the “Bell” curves of male traits are flatter—in particular, the reactively (physically) aggressive “tail” is much larger among males than females. Reactive aggression is aggression “in the moment” rather than proactive aggression, which is intended aggression: including aggression coordinated in advance.

On the difference between reactive and proactive aggression see: Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Two types of aggression in human evolution,’ PNAS January 9, 2018, Vol.115, No.2, 245–253. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713611115

Reactive aggression dominates violent crime. This includes homicide. Around 75-80% of homicides in the US are not premeditated—i.e., are not proactive aggression—but the result of reactive aggression. This is why the dynamics of locality are so important, because different localities present very different threat profiles. Effective policing can greatly reduce the level of violence by interrupting the spiral of violence and reducing the threat profile of a locality.

As for the nature v. nurture, genes v. environment question for explaining the dynamics of violent crime, the answer is the same as for all social dynamics: yes—i.e., both.

In every jurisdiction (e.g. Scandinavia) where there is an East Asian diaspora and a Sub-Saharan African diaspora, the former have a lower—generally much lower—rate of violent crime than the latter. This cannot be explained by the dynamics of American race relations.

For why East Asians have lower rates of reactive aggression, see David Sun, ‘Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology,’ Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Online First Publication, March 3, 2025. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-88410-001.html

(Note, this is only reactive aggression: East Asian—especially Chinese—history includes periods of horrifying levels of proactive aggression.)

Even so, precisely because causation is both genetic and social, jurisdictions can have wildly different homicide rates because they have different dynamics of locality and different levels of effective policing. For instance, there was surge in urban homicides in the US particularly among African-Americans after 2014 Ferguson and 2020 George Floyd riots: not because racism increased, but because police retreated in the face of anti-police activism.

As fewer spirals of violence were interrupted by police, and as the threat profile of localities therefore worsened, the number of homicides increased—dramatically in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots and BLM anti-police activism. It turned out that black lives mattered a lot less than performative politics, congenial Theory and activist grifting.

Sub-Saharan African ancestry populations have larger highly reactively-aggressive tails due to ancestral selection dynamics. Is this a soluble problem? Yes. It requires much more attention to the social dynamics of locality and effective policing, but it can be mostly dealt with.

A large part of the problem in the US is that the US is dramatically under-policed, as measured by police per homicide.

Unfortunately, the (accurate) stereotype of higher African-American violence is used to excuse the under-provision of policing services—including detectives and forensic services but also just not having enough police on the beat and having appallingly low homicide clearance rates in various localities.

This systematic under-provision of effective policing in African-American communities has been a pattern in the US since the Civil War, though how much so has waxed and waned and varied by State. This is the kernel of truth in “structural racism” analyses, even though—as is typical of so much contemporary academic Theory—mountains of bullshit have been constructed on top of that kernel of truth.

The argument that genetic causes are in play does not rely on identifying specific genetic mechanisms, merely differences in distribution of traits. As violent crime is such a power-law phenomenon (a tiny minority dominates effects), the only causes that can be operative are those that (1) generate a larger—overwhelmingly male—highly physically reactively aggressive “tail” in a population (i.e., genetics) and/or (2) either lead to, or interrupt, spirals of violence (i.e., socio-physical dynamics and level of effective policing). A general phenomenon, such as “racism”, does not explain much unless it feeds into those causal patterns—for example, by an (accurate) stereotype of higher levels of violence providing “cover” for the under-provision of effective policing services.

Any analysis of crime has to grapple with how much it varies by locality and how much it is a tail/power law effect.

Everything social is emergent from the biological. Our genes both constrain and enable us.

So much of the so-called “social sciences” are social pseudo-sciences, for they fail to grapple with our evolved nature; with our genetic variety, including different distributions of traits in various human populations. They are not consilient with what we know from evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology.

For a useful discussion of such failures see: Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

A much more hopeful implication of both genetic and social causes operating is that even disproportionate tendencies to reactive aggression is largely a soluble problem. Public policy is not helpless in the face of there being genetic causes, as they are also social ones. Effective policy does, however, need to be based on an accurate understanding of the causes, not fantasy stories about “racism” explaining all.

It also means that any presumption that all groups will have identical social outcomes is ludicrous, anti-scientific, nonsense. Since it is nonsense, any attempt to judge public policy on the basis of whether groups have identical social outcomes will be dysfunctional.

Alas, this can be a social selection advantage. That guaranteed lack of success can justify claims to moral authority and to resources indefinitely, as the deemed “proper” outcome will never be achieved. Considerable social dysfunction is, however, highly likely to be generated on the way through, with the post-Ferguson and post-George Floyd surges in homicides being particularly grotesque examples of such.

Too often, even the increased social dysfunction can then just be “doubled down” on by social actors insulated from such dysfunction but committed to the animating “adhering to this makes you a Good Person” social narratives. The combination of insulation from consequences with the returns—both personal and institutional—to selling such social narratives is why, for example, public broadcasting has become increasingly dysfunctional and much of academe even more so.

So, yes, there are genetic reasons why African-Americans have higher rates of violent crime, but these still only pertain to a tiny minority of African-Americans: a tiny minority which, for both genetic and social reasons, is much larger than among other groups. Thus, public policy is far from helpless in the face of this reality. Though, of course, policy makers can implicitly or explicitly pretend to be so, providing cover for their own failures.

All political and social philosophies rest, implicitly or explicitly, on some claims or claims about the nature of humans.

Consider the thought of Kong Qiu (c.551 BC – c. 479 BC), known as Kǒngfūzǐ (孔夫子) (Great Master or Wise Teacher Kong), hence Confucius. He held that human nature is naturally good and that it is therefore a reasonable aspiration to create a society of harmony, a society without conflict, if everyone just behaves with the propriety appropriate to their place in society—in particular, according to their placement in the web of social connections. His constant concern for the rites (li 禮) is for people to show the correct forms of, and orientation towards, those socially embedded interactions.

This leads very naturally to a very authoritarian, hierarchical view of politics as enforcing social harmony, particularly as people vary in their willingness and capacity to cultivate such virtuous propriety. The notion that politics is legitimately an arena for bargaining between competing interests—the Western idea of “normal politics”—becomes not a natural way to do politics, but a failure to achieve proper harmony.

Master Kong developed his ideas—that were further developed by disciples and commentators—in a civilisation with no tradition of warrior assemblies, self-governing cities, or deliberative assemblies of any kind. A ruler’s court is a place where officials report, and may even debate, but the ruler decides. You can see this narrow view of politics in comments by Master Kong in the Analects such as:

8.14 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.”

14.26 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.” Master Zeng [Zengzi] commented, “The gentleman does not allow his thoughts to go beyond what his position calls for.”

In such a political culture, judicious quotes based on mastery of a shared literature become a way of communicating to superiors while giving minimum offence. Conversely, political rhetoric has little or no value, because there are not the deliberative assemblies to be swayed by argument. Master Kong deprecated glib persuasiveness, on the grounds that it tended to hide one’s real character (or lack thereof).

Where command-and-control hierarchy is the dominant method of political action, hoping for propriety to pervade the hierarchy has obvious resonance. Putting such propriety as a mechanism for social harmony is a way to, ironically enough, be persuasive—which requires a positive view of human nature. But it also hugely elevates the moral claims of governorship. Hence comments such as:

2.1 The Master said, “To rule by virtue is like the way the North Star rules, standing in its place with all the other stars revolving around it and paying court to it.”

12.17 Ji Kangzi asked about the way of governing [zheng]. Confucius replied, “To govern [zheng] is to correct [zheng]. When you set an example by correcting your mistakes, who will dare not to correct his mistakes?”

This concern for harmonious propriety is not a world away from ibn Khaldun’s concern for asabiyya. Nor is it so far from recognising the importance of a coherent civic culture in order to maintain robust institutions, which rest on norms and rules. This is a factor that much of mainstream Economics fails to seriously grapple with, leading to incompetent analysis of immigration.

The problem is that this cultural and institutional framework turns the thought of Master Kong, his disciples and commentators, into what is, in effect, one-trick moral propriety politics, however sophisticated other aspects of this tradition may be. The choices of governance are narrowed down to punishment and example:

2.3 The Master said, “If you guide the people with ordinances and statutes and keep them in line with [threats of] punishment, they will try to stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. If you guide them with exemplary virtue [de] and keep them in line with the practice of the rites [li], they will have a sense of shame and will know to reform themselves.”

They are reduced to trying to make autocratic command-and-control politics work as a successful long-term project: as the repeated dynastic collapses in Chinese history show, they did not succeed. Indeed, the recurring pattern of Chinese political reformers and reform programs ending badly reflects that such fail to break out of that autocratic command-and-control pattern, so end up being swallowed by its incentive structures—including the long-term pathologies of bureaucracy and the inherent fears of autocrats.

The most thorough attempt to implement ideas based on rú (儒) classicism (“Confucianism”) in Chinese history was the disastrous reign of Wang Meng (r.9-23), who provides an object lesson in overweening Theory leading to disastrous policies. Ironically, Master Kong himself was against such grand theorising:

9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.

The episode is a particularly disastrous example of Etienne Gilson’s principle that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple, thereby all too readily reducing struggles with complexity to a simplifying dogmatism: a trap that scholarly commentary on The Analects often tried to avoid.

The thought of Master Kong also wanders very close to someone is morally better, not only because learned, but because smart and learned. For instance:

5.9 The Master said to Zigong, “Who is the better man, you or Hui [Yan Hui]?” Zigong replied, “How dare I compare myself with Hui? Having learned one thing, he gives play to ten, while I go only as far as two.” The Master said, “You are not as good as he is. Neither of us is as good as he is.”

This arrogance of the appropriately credentialed periodically led to mass outbreaks of infuriated peasants removing educated heads from elite bodies. The most recent manifestations of this were the Cultural Revolution in China and the megacidal Cambodian horrors under Pol Pot but you can see versions of this reaching back into Chinese history—for example, the massacres by Huang Chao’s rebellion (874-884) towards the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the earlier peasant revolts that brought down Wang Meng.

We can also see the same self-righteous exploitive arrogance of those credentialed with “morally proper knowledge” afflicting contemporary Western societies along with bureaucratic pathologies that have also been a feature of Chinese history—remembering that we Westerners copied the Chinese pattern of bureaucratic selection through examination without considering the long-term patterns of Chinese history. Fortunately, national populism generates a less violent outlet for popular frustrations than Chinese peasant revolts.

Within the analytical framework of rú (儒) classicism / Confucianism, the transactions of commerce become inherently suspicious, as commerce seeks gain rather than virtue. It creates winners and losers via outcomes unconnected to (Confucian) virtue. The amoral—in the sense of not driven by virtue—dynamism of commerce is corrosive of stable harmony:

4.16 The Master said, “The gentleman [junzi] understands what is morally right. The petty man [xiaoren] understands what is profitable.”

The rival school of Legalism—fǎjiā (法家) or the School of fa (incl. law, method)—is not any better in supporting what Western thought saw as normal politics. Legalism takes human nature to be bad, so needing strict control. But the underlying notion is that all human action—certainly, all political action—be directed to upholding the power and authority of the state.

Once again, the notion of politics as an arena for bargaining between competing interests is rendered illegitimate, for such undermines the unity of social action required to fully empower the state. Legalism is also suspicious of the dynamism of commerce and its transactional connections outside the state.

China has rich commercial traditions, but in some ways that is despite the Chinese state, not because of it. Commerce in China has been protected in part—and to varying degrees—by the sheer scale of China and the limited reach of command-and-control bureaucracies. The revenue needs of the Song (960-1279) fostered commercial vitality, the security obsessions of Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) rule tended to undermine the same, while CCP rule has oscillated between the two approaches to an extreme degree.

Even Daoism is not much of a barrier to this uniform social harmony thinking, as its notion of putting oneself in accordance with the Dao, the Way, can easily be read as orienting oneself to a single, shared Dao. Daoism did, however, show some tendency to restrain official intrusion into people’s lives.

As an aside, we can see the limited influence of Confucian thought on Japan, as Japanese politics—with its rival power centres—accepted from very early on that bargaining between political actors was a fundamental metier of politics. Conversely, the elevation of consensus within Japanese society and politics is, arguably, quite Confucian in its celebration of social harmony, though that consensus is supposed to arise out of a bargaining process.

Both Confucianism and Legalism rest on notions of human nature as uniform; that human nature is some X which applies to all humans. Master Kong holds that individuals vary in moral character and understanding, but he also sees that as a soluble problem for establishing social harmony, given discerning leadership and inculcation of pervasive propriety. Any blank slate notion of human nature is also a uniform conception of the human: it is a notion of human nature as a tabula rasa.

The obvious implication of this human uniformity is that properly directed social action—by operating on our uniform human nature—can achieve whatever social transformation is required. So, for example, an all-encompassing social equality is possible, precisely because we share, in some deep sense, a common, uniform, human nature.

This is, of course, the underlying claim of communism, including Marxist Communism. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, may look like it accepts the diversity of the human, but it does not really, for it assumes that uniform emotional reactions can be achieved. Specifically, that our profoundly and inherently social “species-being” can be realised if social action goes on the correct path.

CCP Confucians

We can thus see that a contemporary puzzle—why the Marxist-Leninist CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, has taken up pushing a form of Confucian thought, both domestically and externally—becomes much less of a puzzle. Marxism and Confucianism share an underlying notion that overt political bargaining is illegitimate; that pervasive social harmony is the proper goal of political and social action; that the proper hierarchy in charge of morally correcting the populace will achieve this; and that politics should be directed to the welfare of the people. Though the last has so often been legitimating rhetoric rather than actual practice.

The proper hierarchy in this case being accepting the right, authority and need for the CCP to direct—indeed correct—Chinese society at all levels. After all, the claim that Communists who have mastered correct Theory should have a guiding role in the transformation of society is explicitly stated in The Communist Manifesto:

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The notion that the democratic centralism of Leninism is some profound distortion of Marxism is simply not true. It is the operationalisation of Marxism based on claims already in The Communist Manifesto.

Authoritarian politics seeks to control what you do, at least within the realm of politics. Totalitarian politics seeks to control who you are, within all social realms.

Hence totalitarians seek to seize control of the means of production of humanity. Communists seek to seize control of the economic means of production of people; Nazis of the racial means of production of people; Fascists of the means of production of the nation, via the state. The varying conceptions of the means of production of humanity depends on what is taken to be the key to what and how we are.

Legalism—fǎjiā (法家) or the School of fa (incl. law, method)—is clearly resonant with Fascism, though without the overt nationalism, as it in evolved in the Warring States period (c. 475 – 221 BC) whose states were all Chinese.

Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Mao all zeroed in on seizing the means of cultural production of humanity. Though Mao utterly despised Confucianism, this cultural turn has since given the CCP another point of resonance with Confucianism.

This is especially so, given how much the CCP leadership in general—and Xi Jinping in particular—is driven by the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The aim is both to maintain sustaining belief (asabiyya in ibn Khaldun’s analytical framework) within the CCP and, via an adjusted Confucianism, moral resonance with wider Chinese society—including the Chinese diaspora.

From whence conflict?

If human nature is uniform—and the achievement of full social and political harmony is the proper goal—then the question arises: why is there conflict in society? The Confucian answer is a failure to follow propriety. The Legalist answer is because the bad impulses of humans are not being properly controlled and repressed by state action.

The Communist answer is, in the case of Marxism, class conflict. The deeper answer—in all forms of Communism—is private property: an idea that predates Marx. For private property alienates us from our shared, inherently social, nature. It creates divergent interests that create classes that create social conflict. The solution is obvious—get rid of private property.

If human nature is uniform—or can be reasonably moulded to be so—then full social equality is achievable. Put everyone in the same social conditions, they will act in the same way, have the same emotional reactions and we will get profound social equality—at least in the sense of a society without classes and class differentiation.

The “root causes” delusion

The common pattern in these philosophies of uniform human nature is that, if humans have a common, uniform nature, then negative differences cannot come out of our uniform human nature, they must come from social causes. From this you get the search for the “root causes” of social conflicts and social pathologies.

These “root causes” have to be social, they cannot come from inherent disparities and varieties among humans, because a uniform human nature cannot generate such. If human nature is sufficiently uniform, there is no people unlike me problem.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

People Unlike Me

If you take a properly designed and normed personality test (either Five Factor or HEXACO), one trait both will assess is your conscientiousness…

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2 years ago · 408 likes · 157 comments · Helen Dale

Except, of course, there very much is a pervasive people unlike me problem. The thing to understand about these claims of a uniform human nature is that they are profoundly false.

Human nature is not a uniform thing, human nature is a distribution of traits that differ between individuals. Moreover, different human groups will have different distributions of traits. This is an inevitable outcome of us being evolved beings; of all our social capacities resting on our genetic capacities; of different human lineages evolving in different environments for long enough; and us being immersed in varying cultures.

If one finds it difficult, or impossible, to think statistically, then this inherent variety in the distribution of traits, and its implications, become hard to get your head around. Identitarian thinking is, at its base, reassuringly simple thinking, no matter how much verbal prolixity is built on top of its underlying simplicity.

This base idea, this fundamental claim, that human nature is uniform is why left-progressivism is regularly so profoundly hostile to evolutionary science being applied to humans. Because one thing evolution absolutely says is that traits will differ between individuals AND their distribution will differ between human groups.

Any attempt to apply uniform human nature thinking to any area of public policy will therefore quite fundamentally mis-diagnose the human dynamics involved. But if differentiated social outcomes can only have social causes, then all failures to achieve the desired outcomes must themselves have social causes. Hence the doubling-down on failure and the endless search for the wrong-thinkers who are causing the grand social transformation not to work. The demand for a pervasive social harmony—rather than just a workable social order—requires repressing, expelling or just killing those who fail to conform.

In order-versus-chaos moral metaphysics—which you get in farming and pastoralist societies as survival depends on the regular pattern of the seasons sustaining crops and herds—the celebration of order, as in the Egyptian concept of maat, the Mongol concept of tore or the Chinese concept of dao, can lead to a harshness against what are seen as chaotic or disordering persons.

Ramp that up with a strong notion of harmony, and you can get execution of entire families or clans as disordering elements. The most extreme version of that is the nine familial exterminations.

Conversely, peace, order and good government invokes a much less intense notion of social order that goes with a notion of ordinary politics based on bargaining between different interest groups and viewpoints. It is precisely because the status games that have become dominant among Western elites are derived, via Critical Theory, on meditations on Marxism—so invoke a strong notion of social harmony achievable through social action acting on uniform human nature—that we see the attacks on freedom of speech attempting to enforce control of social legitimacy by enforcing what is “acceptable” discourse, “acceptable” social and political concerns, and so “acceptable” voting.

As Western elites have lost authority—through their own incompetence; their multi-level attacks on the interests, concerns and heritage of their working classes; and the opening of the information flood gates—they have attempted to double-down on control. They coordinate via moralised status games whose animating ideas both lead to bad policy and justify that doubling down on control.

Crime realities

We can see this clash between false understanding of inherently varied human traits and “root causes” thinking based on all differences having social causes—due to human nature being uniform—in a recent manifestation of such thinking: the defund-the-police push, which itself rests on abolish-the-police thinking.

The evidence is very clear: violent crime is a power-law phenomenon.

A Swedish population study found that one per cent of people—overwhelmingly, as in 94 per cent, male—generate 63 per cent of violent crimes. Four per cent of people (almost 90 per cent male) generate all the violent crime. Thus, seven per cent of males, and less than one per cent of females, generated all the violent crime. This is a classic manifestation of how human variation can lead to dramatic differences in behaviour due to differences in underlying traits.

Thus, the way to control violent crime is to effectively police a community so as to remove from society—or otherwise effectively deter—that small, highly violence-prone, minority. Such policing includes playing attention to the social architecture and dynamics of localities, given that localities wildly vary in their level of crime precisely because crime is such a power-law phenomenon due to human variation.

Specifically, effective crime policy requires policing effectively the small minority of (overwhelmingly male) humans very prone to reactive aggression, as such aggression dominates violent crime. Given genetic differences in the distribution of traits between human groups, the size of that highly reactively aggressive minority varies between human populations—a factor that can be amplified or reduced by culture. Human populations therefore generate different propensities to violent crime and so different levels of need for effective policing. Thus, the US is, ironically, a severely under-policed society.

The failure to grapple with the—ultimately genetic, though mediated by culture—reality of human variations pops up in lots of places, because so much human political, and even economic, theorising is pre-Darwinian in its roots. That is, its base ideas were developed before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) and/or have not been updated in the light of what evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology tell us.

For example, Libertarianism postulates a sufficiently uniform level of executive function to make its vision of social order work that, in fact, does not exist. Much of mainstream Economics postulates that everyone is a uniform economic agent. In particular, mainstream Economics regularly analyses immigration on the basis of a patently false claim: that immigrants can be treated as undifferentiated—in all the relevant senses—economic agents.

There is the further difficulty that we human cognitively model significance, not facts. Moreover, we spend around two decades immersed in particular social milieus before we become significant economic transactors. The consequence of that is people vary, sometimes dramatically, in their cognitive framings (aka culture). People in the same circumstances will behave differently precisely because they are using different cognitive framings.

Philosophy versus law

Going back to Chinese thought, China shares with India and Classical Greece two features—having highly developed traditions of philosophy while being bad at law and legal reasoning.

Legal reasoning is a very particular, and not very natural, form of reasoning. It requires rigorous application of reasoning through analogy. One has to work out what and how some type of human action or human-connected thing is—or is not—like other types of human actions or human-connected things and what principles apply: including the relevant trade-offs.

Philosophy regularly displays three vices antipathetic to good legal reasoning: too much abstraction; nitpicking beyond the useful; missing one or more key factors.

Abstraction is compression. Not having law’s grounding in concern for specific sets of circumstances, it is very easy for philosophy to abstract in a way that does not work—for example, postulate a uniform human nature.

Philosophy can get wrapped up in nitpicking way beyond the useful. Law needs enough differentiation and categorisation to apply to the facts and circumstances of the case in question, and no more. Lacking that grounding, philosophy can get lost in nitpicking that turns into useless, even toxic, purity spirals. When you get intellectual “problems” that are purely problems within, or for, some Theoretical framing, you are in the world of useless nitpicking. This is how Analytic Philosophy finished up among the most genderwoo captured of all disciplines, while lawyers just fought among themselves.

The final problem is that philosophy, in its abstracting and nitpicking, can just miss key factors. A key part of law is working out what is relevant in a given situation, all while addressing actual human interactions. In its far less grounded abstracting, philosophy can absolutely miss out one or more key factors. Such as, for example, failing to deal accurately with human variation that we now know is an inevitable consequence of us being evolved beings with varying genes and cultures.

Every philosophy that postulates a uniform human nature displays these failures.

By contrast, the two great legal traditions—Roman (aka Civil) law and common law—come out of a deeply practical civilisation (Rome) and culture (England) that developed their rich legal traditions well before they developed any local philosophical tradition.

Toxic telos

Another consequence of claims about a uniform human nature is this readily becomes the claim that human history has a telos, a proper direction. This is not the same as saying society has a proper form. Confucianism can claim that society should be able to constituted to be fully harmonious; Legalism can claim that society should uphold the authority of the state; without either claiming that history has an inherent direction.

Both Confucianism and Legalism are entirely compatible with a cyclical view of human history. Order-versus-chaos views of human society—which both Confucianism and Legalism arose within—rather naturally take a cyclical view of human history.

Good-versus-evil moral metaphysics, on the other hand, lend themselves to a notion that history has a telos, a direction—specifically, the final triumph of good. This seems to have specifically been injected into the religious history of humanity by Zarathustra (Zoroaster).

A notion that history has a telos, a direction, does not require a notion of a uniform human nature but if you marry the claim of a uniform human nature to a good-versus-evil moral metaphysics, then it becomes very natural to make the claim that history has a telos, a direction. That telos, that direction, being the final manifestation of our uniform human nature—uncorrupted by social pathologies—into a fully harmonious society without class conflict or other such divisions. This becomes the final good to which all proper human action is directed. This is a form of social salvation that generates salvational politics: politics that reproduces the patterns of salvational religions—including heresy hunts, excommunications, and denunciations of blasphemy.

The incorporation of all proper human action includes all proper human political action. Once you conceive of history as having a telos, a direction, that also incorporates political action, various consequences follow.

One consequence is that you have a way of grading human political choices that de-legitimates all “wrong” choices—including “wrong” electoral choices. You have adopted a principle that trumps democratic choice—we can see this operating in the EU with its “ever closer union” principle that is clearly used to grade electoral choices.

Second, the notion that politics is legitimately the process of bargaining between different interests either gets completely over-ridden or very strongly curtailed—being limited only to “right-thinking” folk who act in accord with that telos. You end up with a notion of “our democracy” where right-thinking folk get to grade which political choices are legitimate or not.

Nowhere is this tendency clearer than the de-legitimising of all forms of national populism.

As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi so well analyses, whatever else “woke” is, it has generated, and mainly manifests as, a set of moralised elite status games. This set of elite status games comes out of various derivations of Critical Theory. All those derivations from Critical Theory are based on meditations on Marxism. This means that they claim that history has a proper telos, a proper direction; that human nature is uniform; and that all social pathologies have social causes. They are also conspicuously hostile (in whole or in part) to the application of evolutionary thinking to human affairs. They are especially hostile to the notion that distributions of traits varies among human groups.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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9 months ago · 68 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

This set of moralised elite status games very much grades (other people’s) political and electoral choices as legitimate or not and their contributions to public discourse as legitimate or not. It also very clearly sees political bargaining as only being legitimate among right-thinking people. Those committed to such (highly moralised) status games are deeply hostile to freedom of speech and thought, and to electoral choices as having authority able to be asserted against such right-thinking people.

These elite status games also clearly lead to bad public policy. They lead to bad public policy not only because they are committed to blocking all sorts of inconvenient feedback but also because they are based on claims about human nature—and thus about human social dynamics—that are demonstrably false.

Either these destructively pre-Darwinian ideas are purged out of public policy, and our institutions, or their combination of falsity plus their war against truth (for that is what it is), freedom and feedback—including democratic feedback—will lead to cascading policy and institutional failures and various levels of civil strife.

The claim that we have a uniform human nature is false, and nothing good can be built from it.

References

Mikael S. Adolphson, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan, University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Yale University Press, [1995] 2001.

Confucius, The Analects, (trans. with introduction by D.C. Lau), Penguin, 1979.

Confucius, The Analects (Lunyu), (trans. with introduction and commentary by Annping Chin), Penguin, 2014.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Laura E. Engelhardt, Daniel A. Briley, Frank D. Mann, K. Paige Harden Tucker-Drob, ‘Genes Unite Executive Functions in Childhood,’ Psychological Science, 2015 August, 26(8), 1151–1163. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4530525/

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Ignatius Press, [1937] 1964.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, 2014.

Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Jens Ludwig, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

Emily M. Norman, Devon L. L. Polaschek and Nicola J. Starkey, ‘Executive function in individuals who are compliant and non-compliant with the conditions of a community-based sentence,’ Psychiatry Psychology and Law, 2022 Feb 10;30(2):161-176. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10026818/

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127. https://conference.nber.org/confer/2011/CE11/Sng.pdf

Timothy Snyder, ‘Commemorative causality,’ Eurozine, 6 June 2013. https://www.eurozine.com/commemorative-causality/

Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Two types of aggression in human evolution,’ PNAS January 9, 2018, Vol.115, No.2, 245–253. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713611115

The Empire then broke into four parts, three of which lasted less than a century before either collapsing or breaking up into smaller entities: the Ilkhanate 1256-1335 (79 years); the Chagatai Khanate 1266-1347 (81 years); the Yuan Dynasty 1271-1368 (97 years), though the Northern Yuan rump state continued until 1635. The most successful of the original four was the Golden Horde 1266-1459 (193 years). The Chagatai Khanate and Golden Horde also had surviving rump states, notably the Great Horde (1459-1502). The last remnant of the Chagatai khanate, and of the rule of Genghis Khan’s descendants, was the tributary Kumul Khanate (1696-1930).

Among imperial dynasties of China, there are the brief unification dynasties:

• Qin (221-206 BC, 15 years)

• Jin (280-304, 24 years: though the dynasty lasted from 266 to 420, it only unified China briefly)

• Sui (389-618, 29 years)

There are the long unification dynasties:

• Han (206BC-220, 426 years)

• Tang (618-907, 289 years)

• Ming (1368-1644, 276 years)

• Qing (1644-1912, 268 years)

Technically, the Song (960-1279) are not a unification dynasty, not even the Northern Song (960-1127). Indeed, it is an important feature of the Song dynasty that it was always part of a state system it never militarily dominated.

The Mongol Yuan dynasty is very much the “in-between” dynasty, unifying China longer than the three brief unification dynasties, but considerably less than the long unification dynasties. What is more striking is that it kicks off a period of effectively continuous unification of China, from 1279 until 1912, punctuated by strife during the transition from one dynasty to another.

So, what did not work against the Mongols during their remarkable waves of conquest?

1. Responding to a Mongol invasion by going straight to set-piece battles.

The Mongols would invade: well-supplied, highly mobile, well-informed, using tactics the defenders were not experienced with or prepared for and which the Mongols homed by fighting against an (expanding) range of enemies. Going for such set-piece battles regularly ended disastrously for the defenders. Hence the Mongols creating the largest contiguous empire in history.

It was only well into the Mongol era—when folk had much more experience with how the Mongols operated—that going out and meeting them in set-pieces battles began to work. Examples of that included the victory of the Mamluks of Egypt over the Mongol Ilkhanid forces at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 and the victory of the Sultanate of Delhi over the Chagatai Khanate at the battle of Ravi in 1306. Both of these victories ended Mongol attacks into the regions being defended.

That early Mongol success was part of a larger pattern. Having a range of enemies has regularly proved to be a winning military advantage for states by forcing the development of flexible and resilient military capacity. This was the advantage that the Macedonians had over the Greeks; the Romans against almost everyone; the Spanish Conquistadors against the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas. It was also why China was usually unified by northern frontier dynasties and pharaonic Egypt by southern frontier dynasties.

Conversely, if you fought regularly against one group, you learned their tricks and they learned yours. The Western Roman Empire eventually failed when the Germanic invaders—typically led by people who had fought in the Roman Army or as Roman allies—developed equivalent operational capacity to the Romans. This operational equivalence was demonstrated most dramatically by the crushing Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, even though the Western Empire took almost another century to collapse.

The Battle of Adrianople was less important in its immediate effects than in what it presaged. Tactically, it was a repeat of Cannae (216BC), except with a wagon laager rather than a clever infantry formation.

Much more importantly, the invading Germanics had developed an equivalent operational capacity to the Roman imperial state without the expensive bureaucratic “tail” of the late Roman state. This gave them a systematic advantage that eventually wore the Roman imperial state down.

This process took about a century—partly because it was the field army of the Eastern, not the Western, Empire that was destroyed at Adrianople. But also because the Western Empire still had considerable resources—especially compared to any specific Germanic group—and significant (though declining) institutional resilience, so it took time for the combination of the Germanics having equivalent operational capacity, but the Romans having a more expensive administrative tail, to work through into final Roman collapse.

Once people could generate forces of equivalent operational capacity to the Mongols, and learnt Mongol operational patterns, they could defeat them. This was especially so if they could use advantages of the local terrain. The Mongols also were not successful in sea-going naval operations against Japan (1274, 1281) or Java (1295), so we will leave them aside.

(2) Responding to a Mongol invasion by hiding in cities.

Simply holing up in fortified cities did work at first, but as the Mongols became more adept at siege warfare—partly by acquiring Chinese engineers—it rapidly stopped working. The problem with hiding in cities is that it abandoned the countryside and mobility to the Mongols. They could set up camp, remain supplied, and wear down the defences of a city.

The Southern Song (1127-1279) responded to the Mongol threat by using river fleets and lines of fortified cities and strong points. This took around 45 years for the Mongols to wear down, but as nothing the Song did actively undermined the Mongol capacity to generate military forces, the Mongols did eventually wear the Song defences down, and thereby conquered Southern China, the first set of pastoralists to do so.

As an accessible path into Mongol history, I recommend the Fall of Civilisations podcast’s two-part discussion of the Mongols. (The podcast is excellent in general.)

Wear the Mongols down before counter-attacking

So, what did work against the Mongols? Wearing them down by denying them foraging and supplies and counter-attacking when they had been sufficiently weakened, worked. Both the Vietnamese and the Hungarians managed to do this, though the Hungarians were more unambiguously successful, as, despite winning various battles, Dai Viet accepted a tributary relationship to the Yuan dynasty. The Hungarians had the advantage of not being geographically right next door to a Mongol dynasty ruling a very populous empire.

The original Mongol invasion of Hungary of 1240-41 had been devastating. The Hungarian military system of light cavalry and wooden fortresses failed utterly. Up to a quarter of the population died, from violence, disease and starvation. The only places that successfully held out were a few stone fortresses.

After the Mongols withdrew, King Bela IV of Hungary (r.1235-1270) decided this must never happen again and spend the rest of his reign restructuring Hungary’s military. He built in Hungary the military system of knightly Europe. Wooden fortresses were replaced by stone castles, light cavalry by armoured knights, cities got stone walls, crossbows were adopted in much larger numbers, the Knights of St John (aka Hospitallers) were brought in to provide frontier defences plus expertise in building castles and training and equipping troops.

When the Mongols returned in 1285, during the reign of Bela’s grandson Ladislaus IV (r. 1272-1290) these changes proved very successful. The Mongols had, once again, invaded during Winter, when rivers were frozen, their horses could eat the shoots under the snow and winter food stores could be looted. Once again, there was a northern and a southern force, each of about 20,000 Mongol warriors.

This time, the peasants and their food stores retreated into the castles—not a single stone castle fell to northern Mongol assault and only one to the southern. The problem is that castles were built to be fortresses—C13th European castles were very well designed, building on centuries of experience—and trying to support a besieging force in such a concentrated location in the middle of Winter was hard. The Mongols burned Pest (already abandoned by its inhabitants) but failed to take any of the stone-fortified cities.

If the Mongols set out small foraging parties, the knights ambushed them. If they sent out large foraging parties, they could not gather enough food to sustain themselves. The Mongols slowly starved. Eventually, when the Mongols were weak enough, the Hungarians would force a set-piece battle and smash them (or threaten such a battle and force them to retreat, the sources disagree). This happened first to the northern army and then to the southern.

It appears that of about 40,000 Mongol warriors, around 5,000 made it back. There was never another substantive Mongol invasion of Hungary, though frontier raids continued. The Hungarians had about 30,000 soldiers: so the Hungarians smashed the Mongols while being outnumbered. The contrast with the failure of the Chinese only a few years earlier is striking.

The Hungarians did nothing particularly remarkable. They just set up, and then applied, the bog-standard Western and Central European castles-and-knights, fortified cities-with-militias, system. In 1345, the Hungarians invaded lands under Mongol (“Tatar”) control, smashed a Mongol army and conquered Moldova. What the Hungarians were not running was a highly bureaucratised state which attempted to internally monopolise armed force.

The warrior-franchise (aka fief) systems of Europe were to prove effective in the long run against the pastoralists, though the farthest eastern version (Muscovy) would not clinch this superiority until the development of gunpowder weapons. Once the European farming-polities had gunpowder weapons wielded by sufficiently drilled troops, then the pastoralists were systematically defeated and conquered. By contrast, the Song were the first major state to have gunpowder weapons, but failed to turn this into a winning military advantage.

Ottoman success

The pastoralist-origin dynasty of the Ottomans did, eventually, overwhelm the Hungarian kingdom, but that was from adding effective infantry and artillery to their forces and being able to mobilise much greater resources. The Ottomans mobilised the Islamic jihad into a system. The ghazis, holy warriors—typically operating as akinji light cavalry—would raid across the Ottoman frontier, depopulating and economically degrading the enemy (i.e., Christian) borderlands. Eventually, the main Ottoman army would invade and conquer. The ghazis would then move to the new frontier: rinse and repeat. This pattern took the Ottomans from the Anatolian hinterland, across the Balkans, to the heart of Central Europe.

Pope Adrian VI (r.1522-3) received a report from Spalato (Split) a few years prior to the Hungarian disaster at Mohacs (1526):

We are troubled by daily attacks of the infidel Turks; they harass us incessantly, killing some and leading others into slavery; our goods are pillaged, our cattle are led off, our villages and settlements are burned; the fields from which we drew our livelihood are in part laid waste to and in part deserted, for those once worked them have been carried off; and instead of fruit they bear brambles. We defend our safety with our walls alone, and we are content that our Dalmatian cities are not yet besieged … But only the cities are spared, and all else lies open to pillage and rapine. (Quoted in The Krajina Chronicle.)

Islam sanctified the Arabian pastoralist synthesis. This sanctified synthesis included:

• Law is based on revelation and controlled by the ulama (religious scholars), apart from qanun: rules for the internal operation of states issued by rulers (i.e., where Sharia is silent). The Ottomans—by having each incoming Sultan re-issue the qanun of the previous Sultan—built up a stable body of administrative law.

• Polygyny of up to four wives per husband, apart from “those thy right hand has seized” (ma malakat aymanuhum or milk al-yamin).

  • Such polygyny meant that low-status males had little or no prospects of marriage within the Muslim community, hence the sanctification of the classic polygynous pastoralist solution of “those people over there have women, steal theirs”, via ...

• Sanctification of raiding of non-Muslims who had not submitted to Muslim rule, including enslaving captives and woman-stealing. Thus, an Islamic martyr is someone who dies while fighting for the umma, the Muslim community.

This meant that that Islam could continually generate ghazis. Even today, the polygyny of the oil-rich Gulf states has helped to generate jihadi recruits in the rest of the Muslim Middle East by siphoning off Muslim women and leaving local young men with no marriage prospects. Polygyny is associated with a range of negative outcomes, including increased violence and less investment in the education of children and—in the absence of armed women, such as among the steppe pastoralists—lower status for women. The Muslim grooming gangs of northern England, ISIS’s theology of rape, and the increased rates of rape and sexual assault in Europe are contemporary manifestations of long-standing patterns.

Wielding self-government (or not)

The Habsburgs were able to stymie the Ottoman conquest system by setting up the Military Frontier (Militärgrenze) of fortified villages of free, self-governing, armed-militia peasants able to raid the Ottomans back. This successfully stopped Ottoman advances. After the Ottoman disaster of the Battle of Vienna (1683), the Habsburgs were able to push the Ottomans back.

The Battle of Vienna included what was likely the largest cavalry charge in history (18,000 cavalry led by 3,000 Winged Hussars). The Polish king John III Sobieski (r.1674-1696) replicated Alexander the Great’s classic approach—remembering that Alexander won his set-piece battles leading his Companion heavy cavalry with no bloody stirrups—of using infantry to pin the enemy and then charging through the gap that opened up. History may not repeat, but it rhymes: a lot.

All this was in dramatic contrast to the slow retreat of the medieval Roman state and the failures of ethnically Han Chinese dynasties. Both used militia systems at various times—for example the Chinese fubing militia and its derivatives and the Roman thematic cavalry—but without the sustained success of the Habsburg Military Frontier.

The militarised self-government of the Habsburg Military Frontier villages was antipathetic to the highly bureaucratised nature of both Roman and Chinese government. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Ottoman raid-degrade-conquer pattern was so successful against the medieval Romans (“Byzantines”) was that the medieval Roman state had a long history of accepting the depopulation of frontier districts so as to provide advance notice of incursions without risking too many resources.

The pattern one sees across European Christendom—which the Habsburg Military Frontier was a particularly effective example—of militarised border marches with elevated self-government (such as the County Palatine’s under the English Crown) was simply either not adopted by Rome or China or, if it was, it was then systematically undermined by the central bureaucracy. (The pastoralist Qing dynasty did use tributary allies.)

The bureaucratic states of Rome and China insisted on a state monopoly of organised violence that the warrior-franchise states, and their early modern successors, did not. This distrust of self-governing decision-making meant that both the Roman—from the reign of Diocletian (284-305) onwards—and Chinese bureaucratic states (with the partial exception of the Song) also undermined the commercial vitality of their own societies, and so the revenue (and technological) possibilities of commerce.

Bureaucracy can be excellent at regularising administration. The problem with bureaucracy is that it is also prone to recurring pathologies, as it selects for: complexity and increasing internal resource use; manipulative personalities; evasion of accountability; suppression and/or delegitimisation of alternative sources of information and decisions; elevating process over outcomes. We can see all these pathologies in contemporary Western societies—they were particularly rampant during the response to Covid.

The pattern whereby the Dominate bureaucracy leached away urban self-government inside the Roman Empire is much the same pattern whereby university central administrations have leached university Faculties and Departments of internal support services and decision-making authority. It is this pattern of being both useful and pathological that makes bureaucracy such a conundrum. The more one sees bureaucratic pathologies in operation, the clearer it is that accountability pressures are not strong enough, as such bureaucratic pathologies operate most strongly the weaker effective (rather than notional) accountability pressures are.

From the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907 to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912—a period of a thousand years—only two ethnically Han dynasties ruled northern China: the northern Song (980-1127)—who were not able to unify all of northern China—and the Ming (1389-1644). Meanwhile, across that same period, two pastoralist dynasties ruled (all of) southern China: the Yuan (1271-1389) and the Qing (1644-1912).

The inner Asian peoples regularly proved more adaptable than the bureaucratically-ruled Han. Bureaucratic domination of China clearly had a lot of problems. Bureaucratic government of Rome also failed: catastrophically in the case of the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire had a mixture of lesser catastrophes—the Arab conquests in the C7th, the Seljuk conquests in the C11th, the Fourth Crusade in the C13th—and grinding slow decline.

The Western Roman Empire—an imperial scale bureaucratised autocracy—was the only European state to suffer a collapse on the scale of a Chinese dynastic collapse (also imperial scale bureaucratised autocracies). Bureaucracy has a strong tendency to consume the resilience of its societies. Warrior-franchise, samurai and daimyo Japan also proved better at dealing with the Western challenge than did bureaucratised Qing China.

It is very much a matter of what the feedback mechanisms are, what the accountability mechanisms and incentives are and whether there are any systematic character tests (such as the duel of honour). The bureaucratic responses to the Mongols and other pastoralists failed sooner or later. The far more responsive warrior-franchise systems worked out what worked and did it. Add in gunpowder warfare (which China invented but failed to master) and final success was achieved.

ADDENDUM: In non-Han regions, various Chinese dynasties did recognise hereditary tribal chieftains under the Tusi system. The long-term tendency was to move in Han settlers and replace them with imperial officials.

References

Douglas W. Allen and Clyde Reed, ‘The Duel of Honor: Screening for Unobservable Social Capital,’ American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 81-115, 2006. https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Dueling.pdf

John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204, UCL Press, 1999.

John Haldon, Byzantium at War AD 600-1453, Osprey, 2002.

Yasheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yale University Press, 2023.

Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (History of Imperial China Book 4), Belknap Press, 2011.

Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, [1988] 2014.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997.

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127. https://conference.nber.org/confer/2011/CE11/Sng.pdf

Srdja Trifkovic and Michael M. Stenton, The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 2010.

Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development: 13, Princeton University Press, 2023.

That there is some problem in defining the boundary of species is a bit of clue that defining sets of lineages as species is more complex than it looks. Even so, species look pretty stable things to us.

The fossil record tells us, however, that species come and go. That, and genetics, tells us that lineages “travel through” species. Your genetic lineage has passed through many, many species.

In particular, the fossil record tells us that, after each major extinction event, there is a surge in new species. For example, the most recent major extinction event—the asteroid impact that killed off the terrestrial and marine dinosaurs (birds survived)—led to a massive increase in mammal species.

So, speciation is not a constant process. Not only that, during that period of a surge in new species, lineages spread out among to occupy, and in a sense create, a vast array of new-to-that-organism ecological niches. For example, prior to the arrival of humans, a range of ecological niches in New Zealand were occupied by bird species.

There is clearly a process of opportunity search going on. This can be reasonably seen as the exploration of frontiers.

These resource frontiers can be occupied along terrestrial (new physical spaces) and strategy/technique (new methods) frontiers or by supplanting a less capable occupants (population replacement/resource transfer). Despite birds—with their extra many millions of years of evolution—doing a range of things better than mammals (e.g. vision due to more colour receptors), various New Zealand bird species were not able to compete with introduced mammals that had adapted to similar niches in more competitive continental environments.

Each species occupies an ecological niche. Lineages within that species compete to occupy the available ecological niches. This is normal natural selection. Post-extinction surges in new species are a surge in occupied niches, in evolutionary strategies, for that group of species. Strategy shifts that would not have been competitive before the harrowing of species suddenly become so.

Living organisms constantly search for opportunities to eat and breed. This is a matter of competition and opportunity. After a mass extinction event, there is considerably less competition and many more opportunities. It is not that the processes of search have sped up, it is that those processes have way more opportunities to find successful, new-to-the-lineage, strategies. Lineages spread out among these opportunities, becoming new species on the way. Mutations do, however, speed up in occurrence as populations increase.

What is odd about Homo sapiens is that, being a technological and cultural species, we create varied social niches within our species—first a few, then scores, then hundreds, then thousands then … of such social niches. Moreover, we can move between niches.

Elite overproduction, for example, represents heightened competition for elite niches. This can lead to civil war, revolution within a polity, or even the collapse of a polity. One of the many things Marx gets wrong is that states—by their imposition of order and extraction by taxation that greatly increases available surplus: aka resources beyond subsistence—dramatically increase the number, range and form of social niches. This effect includes generating what we might call the society’s class structure.

Jungle environments have way more species occupying similar niches than do desert environments because there are more resources to support more niches. More lineages can sustain themselves through very similar strategies.

Similarly, state societies have way more, and more varied, social niches than stateless societies because, once again, they generate far more resources than do stateless societies. This is due to state taxation both extracting and thereby creating surplus plus the creation of more extensive social order enabling a greater range of transactions and connections.

You can get a lot more spontaneous (social) order when a state is able to impose sufficient order through its suppression of violence so as to regularise its revenue extraction. The combination of increased population plus assets to fight over (farms and herds) led to a massive harrowing of male lineages until the new social strategy of chiefdoms and states developed.

The process of new lineages occupying ecological niches that is so dramatic after a mass extinction event, is clearly not just a process of selection acting on random mutations. The question is whether random mutations—and particularly useful-for-survival random mutations—happen fast enough? Or is the feedback between search and genetic change stronger than that? What all those vacant niches after an extinction event means is that the bar of viable mutations, and of good-enough strategies, gets lowered.

Lactase persistence

What raised my doubts about whether the conventional story is sufficient, is the evolution of lactase persistence in Homo sapiens. Any human population that persists in pastoralism long enough develops lactase persistence—the continuation into adulthood of the capacity to digest lactose. This despite humans having relatively long generations—20-25 years or more. A recent study of late Roman and post-Roman Central Europe found an average length of generations of 28 years.

Moreover, those pastoralist populations do not develop the same mutation for lactase persistence. This suggested that it is not just some process of random mutations, that there is a mechanism of search for opportunities, of strategy-gene feedback, that is more directional than selection on random mutation. It turns out, however, that lactase persistence is a particularly easy mutation to evolve as it merely requires breaking an instruction to change the digestive response to lactose, and there are various ways to break that instruction.

Perhaps the most striking feature of living organisms—things that use information and resources to maintain themselves, what I call their directedness—is that they are anti-entropic. Right down to the cellular level, they act to reduce entropy; to incorporate what maintains or increases order within themselves and to expel what reduces it.

Life incorporates multi-level equivalents of Maxwell’s Demon. Given both the explosion of new species after a mass extinction event, and the varied evolution of lactase persistence in human pastoral populations, this anti-entropic feature, this directedness, perhaps extends down to gene-strategy feedbacks.

How? Have no idea. But this is a question that rests on how common mutation is—really quite common, as it happens, and it gets more common as our population increases. The question rests even more on how common useful mutations in particular evolutionary contexts are. The answer to that is: it depends.

One suspects, for example that mutations breaking the instruction to stop digesting lactose have turned up quite a lot. But as it was usually advantageous to wean children so one could have the next one—given how high infant mortality was—such mutations did not go anywhere until you had populations that were consuming a lot of dairy, when it suddenly became an advantageous, rather than disadvantageous, mutation.

Spiteful mutants?

But mutations can spread without being advantageous to the larger population, just particular lineages. Cancer, for example, represents cells defecting from cooperation. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs is the principle of both families and cancer cells.

If you are sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci) or physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg) then that is going to degrade your experience of society. Physically attractive people are more likely to be conservative while conservative politicians are more likely to be physically attractive. Likely due to different distributions of cognitive traits, conservatives report better mental health than progressives. There is something to Josh Slocum’s notion of “wokery” as including the revenge of the uglies.

The problem becomes if you engage in grandiose theorising on the basis of personal alienation and then inflict such ideas on the rest of us. This leads to the spiteful mutant hypothesis. A rather grim hypothesis. I leave you with a picture of the members of the Frankfurt School.

References

Ali Akbari, Annabel Perry, Alison R. Barton, et al. ‘Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,’ Nature (2026). https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2026_Akbari_Nature_selection_0.pdf

Jens Blöcher, Leonardo Vallini, Maren Velte et al, ‘Demography and life histories across the Roman frontier in Germany 400–700 CE,’ Nature (2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10437-3

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 year explosion : how civilization accelerated human evolution, Basic Books, [2009] 2010.

Pascale Gerbault, Anke Liebert, Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mathias Currat, Joachim Burger, Dallas M. Swallow and Mark G. Thomas, ‘Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction,’ Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B, 2011 Mar 27;366(1566):863-77. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048992/

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions,’ American Political Science Review, June 2017, 111, 3. 622-636. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2016/twerp_1129_moav.pdf

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356707920_The_Origin_of_the_State_Land_Productivity_or_Appropriability

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

In Australia, in the Saturday 9 May 2026 by-election for the seat of Farrer—a House of Representatives seat that had previously been held by a Leader of the National Party (Tim Fischer) and of the Liberal Party (Sussan Ley)—the national populist One Nation candidate romped home with 40% of the vote on a stunning 33 %pt swing. By contrast, the Liberal and National Party candidates in Farrer totalled 22% of the vote between them. The winning candidate—the first One Nation candidate elected to the House of Representatives—is a figure of genuine gravitas.

This dramatic win was a manifestation of the One Nation surge in the polls that has been occurring since the 3 May 2025 Australia Federal Election and surged further after the 14 December 2025 Bondi massacre—so that One Nation is now outpolling the LNP Coalition federally. This polling surge has now become a voting surge, with the Farrer by-election win and the 21 March 2026 South Australian State election, where One Nation also gained more votes than the Liberal Party.

I have previously posted on why a Party (One Nation), that has been around for decades, is suddenly surging in the polls, and now in votes.

It has become an open question whether the Liberal Party continues to have a serious base of support. If social conservatives hive off to One Nation, and affluent Merchant Right folks vote for Teal independents, it is hard to see where their base of support is.

The Liberal Party membership has been atrophying for years. Much of its recent politics appears to have been driven by young political staffers of limited life experience who seem to think getting coverage on the public broadcaster—the ABC—is the height of political achievement. A similar pattern appears to have afflicted the Tories in Britain, prior to their crushing defeat in the 4 July 2024 UK General Election.

Meanwhile, in Blighty …

On Thursday 7 May 2026, so a few days prior to the Farrer by-election, elections were held for the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments and various English local councils.

The Welsh and English elections were catastrophic for the Labour Party. In the Welsh Parliament, Labour lost 35 seats, leaving it with 9. In English local councils elections, Labour lost 1,496 seats, winning only 1,068 seats. Given that Sir Keir Starmer is by far the most unpopular British Prime Minister since polling began, the Labour Party is clearly in lots of trouble.

The Scottish results were merely poor for Labour, losing 4 seats and winning 17 in the Scottish Parliament.

The election results were almost as bad for the Tories in Wales and England, and worse in Scotland. They lost 19 seats in the Scottish Parliament, winning 12. They lost 22 seats in the Welsh Parliament, winning 7. They lost 563 seats in English local councils, winning 801.

The two Parties that have governed the United Kingdom since just after World War One have been crushed. The Tories have been reduced to the fifth place in the Scottish Parliament, the fourth place in the Welsh Parliament and in wins in the English local council elections. Labour has retained second place in the Scottish Parliament, been pushed to second place in wins in the English local council elections, while being reduced from first to third in the Welsh Parliament.

Labour and the Tories lost 57 seats between them in the 96-seat Welsh Parliament. They “only” lost 23 seats in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, where the SNP also lost 6 seats. Of the 4,967 English local council seats being voted on, Labour and the Tories lost 2,061.

Labour lost more seats in Wales and in the English local council elections than the Tories, but had a larger “ballast” of seats to begin with. This greater ballast of seats is even more true in the House of Commons, where it has an enormous majority that, on these figures, would be decimated at a general election.

The biggest winner was Reform followed by the Greens and then, rather distantly, by the Liberal Democrats. Plaid Cymru was a big winner in Wales. The rejection of mainstream politics was clearly stronger on the political “right”, and by working class voters, than elsewhere. The Tories are not picking up the intense dissatisfaction with Labour because people (rightly) blame them for not stopping the “breaking of Britain”.

Reform is essentially stripping the Tories of their past gains among working class voters. One Nation is doing the same to the Liberal and National Parties in Australia.

If one looks that the voting percentages, the results in the UK are even clearer. In the English local government elections, Reform received 26%, the Greens 18%, Labour and the Tories both 17% and the Lib Dems 16% of the vote.

This was a rejection of the UniParty. The two Parties that have governed the UK since just after World War One got 38% of the vote between them, the two insurgent Parties (Reform and the Greens) were the two biggest winners and received 44% of the vote in total.

Trying to tell a Left-Right story is more complicated. The “economic left” (Labour + Greens) got 35% of the vote. The social liberal “left” (Labour + Greens + Lib Dems) got 51% of the vote. The “economic right” (Reform + Tories + Lib Dems) got 59% of the vote.

None of these things are particularly surprising, given what trends are operating. One is the balkanisation of Britain due to multiculturalist “big lumps” immigration. This effect has been predicted for decades and is now playing out politically as well as socially.

As many observers also predicted, Muslims voted for Labour as a half-way house until their numbers reached critical mass. They are now shifting to the Greens and to Muslim independents. The shift to the Greens continues the pattern seen in the 26 February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election where Muslim voters also shifted to the Greens (who won 41% of the vote); Reform crushed the Tories (with 29% of the vote to the Tories’ 2%); and Labour ran third (with 25% of the vote).

The second is the shift of working class votes away from the Labour Party as it becomes more and more the Party of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up, whose income has little connection to their performance or the social value of what they do. Typically, they are paid for process not outcomes.

The public broadcasters of the Anglosphere—the BBC, CBC, ABC, etc.—are the propaganda arm of the unaccountable classes. This is even more true of their cultural output as of their news coverage, based as both are on purveying narratives of righteousness.

If your personal income has little connection to the creation of value—as measured by reality-tested results, such as by the consent of consumers of what you do—your concerns are going to shift towards other things. Specifically, it is going to shift towards the politics of status. Moreover, this will be status that is driven by interactions within your organisational and social milieu, so with other persons whose individual incomes are also not connected to the creation of value-by-consent.

This is bad enough, but in a modern welfare state it becomes even worse, as much of the welfare state apparatus—including much of the non-profit sector—is paid, in effect, by the level of social pathology. The higher the level of social pathology, the greater their claim on authority and resources.

They are not merely paid for process not outcome, they are paid for processes that continue, or even increase, the worse outcomes actually are. For example, public health gets more money as our metabolic health gets worse. Spending on Aboriginal disadvantage gets more money as their problems get worse. Spending on the homeless gets more money as homelessness gets worse, and so on. In the classic words of the late Charlie Munger: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

All this applies even more to academics. Outside STEM and municipal (i.e. domestic) Law, academics do not have to make anything actually work, all they need is the approval of fellow academics. In the absence of either systematic reality tests or strong accountability mechanisms, the politics of status—of shared status games—therefore becomes paramount. The more grandiose the moral and cognitive grandstanding, the better.

Since we live in the most successful societies in human history, such moral grandstanding has to be directed against social success. That so much of the so-called social sciences are not sciences—they fail the basic test of being consilient with what we know from evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology—is both an indicator of the lack of reality tests and what a weak reed approval by other academics can be. On the other hand, various utilisations of Marxian mysticism—what economist Arnold Kling calls falling into the tarpit of Marxism—have perennial appeal precisely because they provide such a sense of shared meaning, of shared grand purpose.

If you make social success a vice—a negative moral signal—you turn failure into a virtue, a positive signal. The more dysfunctional a group, the better they operate as moral mascots for such status games, because the more you have to ignore/rationalise away, so the stronger the “sacralising” of them operates as a signal of commitment to the shared moral status games.

The result is clear: the growth of the pathological politics of status based on quite toxic ideas. Politics that is not merely not concerned with creating and maintaining a functional social order; this is politics that is actively hostile to it.

If one wonders why Green Parties have sidelined the environment for Trans and Gaza—for there are no groups one has to not-notice and rationalise away more than Hamas and Trans fetishists—this is why. That is where the pathological politics of status purity spirals lead you: to the issues furthest from the practical politics of providing peace, order and good government and most about performative moral display. The Greens can play to the purity spirals of such performative status politics even better than Labour, so peel off those most focused on such purity spirals.

Those most insulated from making things work are those in the education system, particularly academe. The Greens in the UK clearly did best where higher education votes were highest.

When one examines the policies and politics that seem so mad, a consistent feature is that they increase social pathologies—and the employment opportunities therefrom—for paid-by-process folk. This is not just a matter of public sector employment, though it is most pervasive there. HR departments; various non-profit organisations—most notoriously, the homelessness-industrial complex in West Coast US; ignoring or rationalising away various negative patterns among immigrants—see Somali-based fraud and corruption in Minnesota and elsewhere or the grooming gang scandals; policies of not prosecuting “minor” crimes by “marginalised” groups; and so on.

Truth on the Streets

This is Why I Call It the Homeless Industrial Complex

The homeless industrial complex is a multi-billion-dollar system that thrives on homelessness. Governments, nonprofits, and contractors all get paid as the problem grows. Programs are measured by how many people they serve, not by how many actually exit homelessness. The result is a system that manages people instead of solving anything. Good intentions…

Read more

8 months ago · 164 likes · 54 comments · Kevin Dahlgren

What makes Trans even better, is that it enables state authority to reach into, and trump, parental authority. Hence schools hiding from parents the social transitioning of their children and threats to remove children from parents who oppose transitioning their children.

This is status politics based on publicly affirming the “correct” beliefs. This is status politics that actively denigrates the views of those you are asserting moral and cognitive authority over, precisely so as to elevate that sense of status and those claims of authority and on resources. It is also the politics of censorship, of the de-legitimising of dissent, as, if believing X makes you a moral person, then believing not-X must make you an immoral one. This perspective underpins the development of the censorship-industrial complex.

For instance, under such politics of de-legitimisation, it is not legitimate to express dissatisfaction with immigration. Immigration can, apparently, never be done badly, except by not having enough of it.

The creation of the DEI moral caste system—female is better than male; coloured is better than “white”; queer is better than straight; disabled is better than able-bodied; immigrant is better than native; trans is better than cis—is facilitated by many people clearly being unable (or unwilling) to think statistically, to consider trade-offs, or to think through changes/costs across time. So the binary thinking that identity politics thrives on appeals particularly strongly to the articulate but innumerate.

Because these status games operate through networks, and are inherently intolerant of dissenting views—since if believing X makes you a moral person, believing not-X must make you an immoral one—there has been a steady march through the institutions. The monopoly processes of networks—the bigger the network, the more the value in joining it—operates to facilitate increasing domination by such status games across those organisations and institutions, or sections thereof, that are dominated by those paid-for-process not for outcomes. These networks operate internationally, hence the international development of the censorship-industrial complex.

The moral hysteria over One Nation is a case in point of the delegitimisation of dissent. If one examines their actual policies, it is essentially Menzian Liberalism without the white Australia policy.

The notion that this is some sort of moral outrage, or a threat to democracy, is ludicrous hyperbole showing an ultimately totalitarian hostility to dissent. Such is, however, the natural outcome of the politics of believing X makes you a moral person, so believing not-X makes you an immoral one.

When such folk say “our democracy” they mean “democracy, but only if we get to determine what’s legitimate”. The thought-terminating cliche of far right just means “wants to take politics in a direction we do not like”.

The failure of status quo conservatism

The postwar centre-right Parties have been dominated by various forms of status-quo conservatism. These are the folk, who when in power, did little or nothing to combat or reverse any of this. At times, they actively facilitated this. That is the UniParty dynamic.

Such conventional centre-right politicians do not understand the cultural dynamics, they do not understand the institutional dynamics, they just let such march on. Typically, they did not even notice, even (perhaps especially) when they were actively facilitating such.

So, the question becomes: what have they conserved? The answer is, increasingly, nothing.

Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—eliminating an external existential threat—meant that Western elites no longer had any strong reason to conciliate their working classes. The result was trade, immigration, cultural and other policies and politics actively hostile to working class interests and concerns. The debauching of various beloved entertainment franchises by a Hollywood increasing dominated by such status games—and the DEI moral caste system—is part of a much larger pattern. The spread of a shared interests across borders—so elites in various Western countries have more in common with each other than their own working classes—coordinated by shared elite status games leads to the development of an international, networked, censorship-industrial complex.

The gross failure of status-quo conservatism—plus the systematic assault on the interests, concerns and standing of local working classes—are now intersecting with the collapse of UniParty, of status quo, conservatism in the rise of national populism. The working classes are politically re-asserting themselves.

Meanwhile, the UK Greens are successfully harnessing the toxic politics of the unaccountable classes that is at the heart of the problem. UK Labour is, like most of the continental European Social Democratic Parties, losing ground to those more able and willing to either express working class concerns (national populists) or engage in the performative politics of moral display (progressive populists).

The politics of the UniParty have been a gross failure: socially, politically, culturally, organisationally, institutionally, fiscally. This has been particularly intensely so in “Broken Britain”.

Despite attempts to de-legitimise dissent, electoral systems are acting as they are supposed to: provide feedback about the concerns and dissatisfactions of voters. Whether this can be translated into genuine policy solutions in the face of enormous institutional resistance, we shall see.

References

Forrest Bohler, ‘Medicine Without Merit,’ Compact Magazine, May 07, 2026. https://www.compactmag.com/article/medicine-without-merit/

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980844

James Hankins, ‘Why I’m Leaving Harvard,’ Compact Magazine, December 29, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-im-leaving-harvard/

Hrishikesh Joshi, ‘Democracy and the Academy,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs (2026): 1–14. https://philarchive.org/rec/JOSDAT-2

David C. Lahtia, Bret S. Weinstein, ‘The better angels of our nature: group stability and the evolution of moral tension,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 2005, 47–63. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Lahti/publication/228350694_The_better_angels_of_our_nature_Group_stability_and_the_evolution_of_moral_tension/links/5a218253aca2727dd87a9e97/The-better-angels-of-our-nature-Group-stability-and-the-evolution-of-moral-tension.pdf

Jacob Savage, ‘The Lost Generation,’ Compact, December 15, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papa.12075

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.

A comment on Arnold Kling’s response post suggested I did not understand the phenomenon, citing a post by Greg Cochrane on his blog.

In My Tribe

Lorenzo Warby on Feminization

Preliminary: What is wrong with feminization…

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4 months ago · 41 likes · 48 comments · Arnold Kling

In understanding the bottleneck, one needs to understand that bottleneck itself was a limited-in-time phenomenon that, nevertheless, extended across generations. It was a sorting process that most male lineages did not survive even if, in any particular generation, a large proportion of men were reproducing. To understand the phenomenon, both its beginning and it (mostly) ending has to be understood.

That the bottleneck was limited in time is why an explanation resting on patrilineality and polygyny is not sufficient. Both of these things played a role in the bottleneck, but both of the these things also continued past when the bottleneck (mostly) stopped.

It is also important to separate out some male lineages having wildly disproportionate reproductive success from the large-scale elimination of male lineages. This distinction is clearest with the Han “super-grandfathers”. China had a combination of features that fostered a continuing pattern of some male lineages being wildly disproportionately successful in reproducing. It had a polygynous elite, which absolutely favours some male lineages doing disproportionately well, reproductively speaking, especially in combination with a patrilineal kin system.

China also had a non-reproducing underclass. China did not import many women relative to its population. So the transfer of women up the social scale to the polygynous elite meant that a rolling pool of men at the bottom of society were deprived of potential breeding partners. This systematic frustration of underclass breeding possibilities had a great deal to do with the banditry and peasant revolts that were such a feature of Chinese history.

Such a pattern absolutely produces wildly disproportionately reproductively-successful male lineages. It is a sorting process. It has effects on Chinese culture and distribution of genetic traits within the Han population. But it is not a male lineage bottleneck. Most male lineages continued.

A time-specific process

Why the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck started is not hard to work out and I alluded to it in the post. The development of farming and pastoralism both greatly increased the human population and generated assets (farms and herds) worth fighting over.

Kinship systems thus evolved and intensified to increase warrior cooperation, both to defend such assets and to seize them. Successful seizure means killing or enslaving the losing men and taking (and breeding with) their women. Do this over enough generations, and there will be systematic elimination of male lineages at scale. You can see this process particularly clearly in the population replacements uncovered by the “ancient DNA” technology.

So, what brings this bottleneck to an end? Creating a situation where winning teams have a reason to keep defeated/conquered males alive and breeding. There are names for this reason: tribute and taxes. Having conquered males retained—and indeed protected—so they then breed more generations of tribute- and tax- payers becomes the superior social strategy. Thus tribute, and especially taxes, is the social technology of exploitation ameliorating the social technology of aggression.

In evolutionary terms, we would expect one of two things to occur as a result of the harrowing of male lineages. One, that the capacity of male teams would tend to equalise across the sorting process. Two, that some alternative social strategy would evolve. Chiefdoms and states represent that alternative social strategy.

“I am mighty, I protect you from border raiders” is a regular artistic trope of rulers. The chariot-riding pharaohs of New Kingdom Egypt were particularly fond of it.

The protection-by-the-state social strategy was only available to kick-off if there were seasonal crops that provided storable food as a tax base. On the other hand, the more one relied on seasonal crops—so food and seed storage—the more incentive there was to develop/acquiesce in such a protection strategy.

The point of my original post was not about how long the harrowing of male lineages took, it was that there was (1) differential selection between male and female expression of genes (clearly true, and true quite intensely); and (2) this differential selection was particularly focused on the capacity for team work. Conquest is the ultimate expression of successful team work. But so is much of success within polities.

Note, the massive reduction in the harrowing of male lineages does not stop some male lineages being wildly reproductively successful. It does not even stop male lineages terminating. What the development of chiefdoms, and particularly states, does mean is that the male lineage bottleneck mostly goes away. The harrowing of male lineages enormously reduces.

In stateless societies, male teams—typically organised as clans—can engage in particularly brutal forms of “self-help”. Much of the function of states is precisely to suppress such “self-help” so as to protect taxpayers so they can breed more taxpayers. Chiefdoms, and especially states, organise to block the harrowing of male lineages at scale within their own territories even while they continue to enable some male lineages to be wildly disproportionately reproductively successful within—or perhaps beyond—those territories.

Foragers, farmers and pastoralists

There are some further wrinkles in this. Most eliminations of human populations in history have been elimination of forager populations, either by fellow foragers or by incoming farmers.

Foraging populations have low population densities. It is relatively easy to push their numbers below the level where they can sustain their technology; foraging populations cannot readily incorporate captives in any numbers; and there is limited transferrable skills into farming. Such elimination of forager populations has very limited differentiation between male and female lineages.

Interactions between pastoralists and farmers have a rather different dynamic. Pastoralists have higher protein diets, operate in patrilineal systems specifically evolved to create resilient and effective warrior teams, and are far more mobile, than farmers. There is a long history of pastoralists raiding, and periodically conquering, farmers. Pastoralists eliminating farming populations is much rarer, as the farmers usually dramatically outnumbered them—which makes the pattern of periodic conquest of farmers by pastoralists even more striking.

Meat-eating folk on horses (or in ships) raiding, and militarily dominating, mostly plant-eaters has a long history. The pattern is particularly intense when those mostly plant-eating farmers spend their time in water-logged fields full of pathogens and parasites. Notice how often the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges and Yellow River valleys were conquered by pastoralist elites.

There was a lot of women-stealing, and just plain slaving, involved in pastoralist raiding. Eastern Europe continued to be ravaged by pastoralist slave raids into the third quarter of the C18th. The Cossacks formed in response, as essentially Christian warrior-pastoralist and river-pirates, raiding back against raiding and enslaving Muslim pastoralists. The Muscovite state created a series of border fortifications to defend against pastoralist slave raids.

The Habsburg Militärgrenze (Military Frontier) was a similar response to protecting taxpayers from border raids. Farmer polities building border walls to block pastoralist raiders has a millennia-long history, including by far the most famous such border wall—which itself is part of a much longer pattern.

Farmer-pastoralist tensions continue to the present. A long history of a pastoralist elite (Tutsis) dominating farmers (Hutus) was a large part of the back history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide of mostly Tutsis. The 2003-2005 Darfur Genocide was largely Arab pastoralists massacring Nilo-Saharan farmers. Syria has been experiencing clashes between Druze farmers and Bedouin pastoralists.

The farmers typically saw the pastoralists as thieving, murdering, raping, enslaving bastards. The pastoralists typically saw the farmers as weaklings who could not defend their own. In accordance with stereotype accuracy, they were both correct. It is not surprising that, if you give farming populations gunpowder weapons, and the organising capacity to use them, they become quite enthusiastic about killing pastoralists.

Nor is it remotely surprising that so many of the “super breeder” male lineages are from pastoralist societies. Pastoralists add recurrent violence to polygyny and patrilineality. In doing so, they provide a pattern for understanding the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck in a world without—because before—states.

The social technology of states is like the food technology of farming. It starts in identifiable origin locations and spreads out from there. Farming populations spread as invaders. Similarly, far more of the world had states imposed on them than were origin points for states. This is part of why the Marxian view of states as subordinate-to-the-class-structure “creations” of their societies is so mistaken.

The reason why there was never another Roman Empire is that the Romans spread the social technology of statehood—albeit often through emulation—too far across Europe and Europe’s geography (unlike China’s) strongly militated against successful political union.

The Mediterranean itself encouraged political unification, but not if there were too many powerful states to its North getting in the way of such unification. As both the Eastern Roman and the Ottoman Empires discovered. The EU is not a conquest polity, so the geography is much less of an issue, even without considering how modern technology reduces geographical constraints.

Historical demographer Peter Turchin has argued that interactions between farmers and pastoralists encouraged the development of large empires through a mutual spiralling-up of raiding-and-resistance interactions. I would add that pastoralists are also traders. There is clearly an interactive correlation across history between the level of trade and the extent of empires: an interactive correlation that collapsed after 1945.

One of Africa’s many geographical and ecological disadvantages is that the tsetse fly stopped the African savannah acting like the Eurasian steppes. The savannah was unable to support pastoralist societies that could act as conduits for trade, technology and ideas while providing a prod for state formation. Yes, one could reasonable argue that, in terms of institutional learning and development, Northwestern Europe and Japan were both advantaged by being out of range of the Steppe pastoralists. Nevertheless, both civilisational regions still regularly benefited from the trade-and-transmission role of the steppes.

Modern oddities

One of the many, many oddities of the modern world is we have these very highly-taxing states who are presiding over fertility rates that are below population replacement. They are substantially failing to breed sufficient new taxpayers to sustain themselves. It is one of the reasons cited to engage in mass immigration. The point is, as the UN put it, to replace the children the locals are not having with foreigners.

The trouble is, this is so often being done incompetently, bringing in low-skill, low capital, workers who make the welfare states less sustainable. Moreover, immigrants often then proceed to replicate the fertility collapse of the locals.

Some of this is straightforward social-pathology parasitism: aka the welfare state. If you pay folk and organisations according to how many social pathologies there are, they will have an obvious interest in promoting social pathologies and further demands on the welfare state—such as from low-skill, low-capital, immigrants. They will certainly have no interest in solving or reducing such pathologies that thereby reduces their claims on resources. Have enough such networks and they will generate weird-and-wonderful politics to match.

Some of this is having elites made up of non-hereditary office holders, so with short time-horizons. There are many problems with hereditary elites, but they do have the advantage of longer time-horizons. That, plus clear succession rules, inter-generational transfers of skills and advantages in building connections, are why hereditary elites are so common in history. On the matter of incentives and time-horizons, patronage by aristocratic elites shelling out their own funds, and who cared about their reputation, generated great art, music, buildings, literature and the Scientific Revolution. Bureaucrats handing out other people’s money as grants have generated fashionable sludge, feminist Glaciology and the replication crisis.

Some of this is urbanisation, as cities tend to be demographic sinks: especially apartment block cities. Cities, especially apartment blocks, tend to strongly select against the large family “tail” that is needed to sustain positive fertility rates.

Some of this is the loss of male bargaining power, particularly lower down the social scale. The bargain of male protection and provision, in return for women providing children, that has been the basis of human mating for almost our entire history as a species, has broken down across much of modern industrialised societies.

There is also the problems of the social media panopticon and device-distraction that gets in the way of modern dating, or even just socialising. Our technological development is creating evolutionary novelties on an unprecedented scale that are way outstripping our evolutionary adaptations.

So, lots going on. Nevertheless, the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck is not a particularly mysterious process and generated different selection effects on the male and female expression of genes, whose echoes are still with us, as discussed in the original post.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

You may not be Interested in Genes, but Genes are Interested in You

This is Chinese actor Deng Kai. In the huge hit drama Zhu Yu or, in English, Pursuit of Jade—which is terrific, you absolutely should watch it—he brilliantly plays a creepy, charismatic, obsessive stalker. Naturally, he is now being mobbed by female fans. This is the intense genetic “filter” of the…

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4 months ago · 259 likes · 61 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

References

Patricia Balaresque, Nicolas Poulet, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Patrice Gerard, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Evelyne Heyer & Mark A. Jobling, ‘Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: Young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations,’ European Journal of Human Genetics, January 2015. https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2014285

European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en

David Friedman, ‘A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations,’ Journal of Political Economy, Vol.85, No.1, Feb. 1977, 59-77. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24107762_A_Theory_of_the_Size_and_Shape_of_Nations

David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, Faber & Faber, 2018.

Léa Guyon, Jérémy Guez, Bruno Toupance, Raphaëlle Chaix, ‘Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 15, 3243 (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47618-5

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions,’ American Political Science Review, June 2017, 111, 3. 622-636. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2016/twerp_1129_moav.pdf

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356707920_The_Origin_of_the_State_Land_Productivity_or_Appropriability

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Peter Turchin, ‘A theory for formation of large empires,’ Journal of Global History, (2009), 4(2), 191-217. https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Turchin_JGH_2009.pdf

Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, Picador, 2014.

Shi Yan, Chuan-Chao Wang, Hong-Xiang Zheng, Wei Wang, Zhen-Dong Qin, Lan-Hai Wei, Yi Wang, Xue-Dong Pan, Wen-Qing Fu, Yun-Gang He, Li-Jun Xiong, Wen-Fei Jin, Shi-Lin Li, Yu An, Hui Li, Li Jin, ‘Y chromosomes of 40% Chinese descend from three Neolithic super-grandfathers,’ PLoS One, 2014 Aug 29;9(8):e105691. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4149484/

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

To create a Communist society requires mass appropriation (i.e., theft) of property, abolition of class differences and direction of all social effort to the transformation of humanity based on claims about Homo sapiens that are not true while using ludicrously inadequate analysis of social dynamics. This is a massive concentration of power over others based on falsehoods.

Of course Communism has demonstrated itself to be murderous, tyrannical and hostile to human flourishing. Indeed, the greater the commitment to the goals and claims of Communism, the more murderous, tyrannical and a disaster for human flourishing a regime has been.

This is all particularly so in the Marxist version—the only version of Communism of significance in modern history. For Marxism explicitly holds that there are parasite classes, whose elimination makes everyone else better off. All the Marxist mass murders used categorising people as exploitive parasites, or being lackeys thereof, as justification for mass killings.

In the 1917-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern and Central Europe that Lenin, Stalin and Hitler created; the Soviets mass-murdered deemed-parasite classes, the Nazis mass-murdered deemed-parasite races. Trying to parse moral differences between them in the face of such horrors is ridiculous.

They were also using different evolutionary strategies. The Nazis mobilised a culturally-connected—that they racially defined—set of lineages against other lineages, organised around territorial aggression, a very old pattern in our evolutionary history. Our evolutionary history includes plenty of genocides, though the Nazi scaled-up-through-industrialisation intensity was horribly new.

This is why the Nazis come across as atavistic and—in their murderous grading of entire races as unfit to live—as a profound affront to the moral universalism that Christianity embedded in Western Civilisation. But being a greater affront to particular moral sensibilities is not a moral category.

Communists use an aggressive, block-any-escape, version of a levelling down evolutionary strategy. A strategy of social aggression, eliminating those with more status and resources than themselves and transferring both status and resources through and to themselves (allegedly on behalf of others). During their respective Civil Wars, both the Bolsheviks in Russia and the CCP in China mobilised the least successful, the most angry and resentful, locals to kill the larger landowners and take their property, in a series of local massacres.

It is the moral arrogance that left-progressives so regularly display that they seek the social power to cement and enforce, hence the prevalence of dissent-suppressing mechanisms such “no debate” demands, blanket moralised condemnations, and so on. In the contemporary West, they use networking tactics rather than a centrally-directed Leninist Party, but it is the same social dominance exercise, generating many of the same patterns.

Thus, we have the equivalents of commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc) whose “training” often involves little more than struggle sessions; Zhdanovism in the arts and literature (writer Jenny Lindsay writes about her experience, an example of much wider patterns); Lysenkoism in science and science publishing (see, for example); and censorship (originally paraded as “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information).

Notionally, the levelling-down strategy’s downward transfers are done for the general good, but there is a huge difference between those being equalised and those doing the equalising. Every Marxist revolution or takeover creates a highly exploitive bureaucratised activist elite as an inevitable consequence of the entire political project. For the total transformation of society requires total control of the society by the declared transformers.

The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, not of the proletariat. But that is true, and inevitably true, of every Marxist revolution and takeover then and since. The NGO advocacy economy; the HR scolds; the moral-project bureaucracies; are the networked contemporary versions of this: a “softer, gentler” form of moralised predatory parasitism.

The levelling-down strategy turns some groups into righteous targets and others into righteous mascots. So, precisely because of its ostentatious commitment to equality, Left-progressivism creates moral caste systems.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in contemporary Western societies is very much a moral caste system, that puts heterosexual “white” males at the bottom of the moral heap. Such moral caste systems are very apparent in the precursors to DEI: the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s Black and Red identities; the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system. (A short outline of the full horror of the last is here.)

The failure to confront the way their own political tradition metastasises by editing out the tyrannising mass murderers, and their regimes and their social control mechanisms, from their conception of the Left does, indeed, matter.

James Lindsay’s formulation that:

Communism represents progressive means to regressive ends;

Fascism [and Nazism] represent reactionary means to progressive ends

therefore has something to it. Marx conceived Communism as the return, on a global scale, to humanity’s “species being” as originally manifested in “primitive communism”: so, regressive ends. Left-progressivist politics, from the Jacobins onwards, has stressed the embrace of modernism, of new is better, of championing the socially disenfranchised: so, progressive means.

Conversely, Fascism and Nazism both wished to progress their favoured groups to a higher state of social being and achievement: so, progressive ends. They were clever adapters of the techniques and technology of mass politics. Nevertheless, their fetishising of military modes of social action, their glorification of the past and of military heroism, their explicit rejection of liberal and left notions of progress, their fondness for Roman imagery and forms, their corporatist harmonising of social orders (within the nation or the volk) are reasonably cast as reactionary or regressive means.

Moralised mislabelling

We are normative beings because we needed persistent and robust structures of cooperation to raise our biologically expensive children reinforced by the human predatory pattern. Hunting providing highly variable nutritional returns from day-to-day—so encouraging the pooling of risk via habitual sharing of food—further encouraged the evolution of norms as a basis for robust social cooperation.

Our emotions are a much more basic decision-making mechanism than our reason and well precede it in evolutionary development. Tribalism is also normative and can have great emotional power. Politics operates by mobilising shared emotions and sense of belonging. Normative is not the same as moral.

Such emotional and (yes, normative) tribalism makes it very easy to read political categories as also being moral categories. Easy to do, but wrong, no matter how much people seek to moralise the tribal affiliations of politics and find it congenial to do so. Political categories such as Left, Right or Socialist are not moral categories.

References

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Frank Dikotter, Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Bloomsbury, 2026.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Paul L. Hooper, Hillard S. Kaplan and Adrian V. Jaeggi, ‘Gains to cooperation drive the evolution of egalitarianism,’ Nature: Human Behavior, 5, 847–856 (2021). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian-Jaeggi/publication/349707572_Gains_to_cooperation_drive_the_evolution_of_egalitarianism/links/603e684392851c077f127935/Gains-to-cooperation-drive-the-evolution-of-egalitarianism.pdf

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, The Bodley Head, 2010.

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32008953/

Jessica C. Thompson, Susana Carvalho, Curtis W. Marean, and Zeresenay Alemseged, ‘Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins,’ Current Anthropology, Volume 60, Number 1, February 2019. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:da2850f1-f415-4130-9d35-8ed23fdd6b89/files/r2b88qc185

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

It is a regime of eschatological terrorism. Israel and the US are its proclaimed enemies-to-be-destroyed, but so is every Sunni monarchy: Israel and the US are simply more salient targets. The Islamic Regime’s role in both Lebanon and Yemen has been highly destructive. Where does it end with a regime that has been ever more violently destructive and disruptive across decades?

This second test also applies to commentary on the Russo-Ukraine War. Does a commentator examine or consider the patterns of Russian history? If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Western politics and policy.

Putin is acting like a Muscovite autocrat from anytime in the last half a millennium. This is something Russia’s neighbours understand. If a commentator refuses to do so, or is so ignorant they do not realise that there is a clear historical pattern, then their commentary can be dismissed.

As I have previously noted, both the Russo-Ukraine War and the current Iran War are part of much deeper historical patterns of the wars of continental anarchy and with the mercantile maritime order.

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

Yes, great battlefield commanders have an excellent sense of the opponent’s responses and have already incorporated that into their own operational plans. Yes, better trained and equipped forces, with superior operational capacity, can overwhelm opponents, sometimes with startling speed.

But, with any military campaign—and particularly such a complex, multi-level campaign as the Iran War—successful military action is going to operate as a decision-tree, even in such lopsided cases. This is even more so in a period of flux in military technology.

Now, one can hope that one’s side has a well-thought out if-then decision-tree, but there is still going to be a fair bit of “if, then”. The real test is how one copes with the unexpected.

A persistent advantage Western armies—including the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF—have displayed in conventional warfare is being much more able to cope with a fluid battlefield than their Arab opponents. Indeed, the IDF, and Western armies in the Gulf Wars, found generating fluidity on the battlefield very much to their advantage.

This has also proved true for the Ukrainian Army fighting Russia. Hence the successful advances to Kherson and from Kharkiv in late 2022. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the Russian Army has learnt how to block such fluidity from arising. Well, mostly. Recent, albeit limited, Ukrainian successes suggest turning off Starlink has degraded Russian ability to follow its preferred operational patterns.

Whether the Iranians have the same military limitations as Arab conventional forces have displayed is less clear. The disruptions of the revolutionary military purges, problems of coordination between the regular army and the IRGC, and the Iraqi use of chemical warfare, complicates assessing the (highly variable) Iranian performance during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 and they have not been involved in a major conventional land war since.

The US and Israeli forces have very rapidly established naval and air supremacy in the war against the Islamic Regime, but they are superior forces at every level—number, training, equipment, technology, operational capacity, command and control. This has included completely negating the operational strategy that Iran had developed for use against the US Navy in the aftermath of Operation Praying Mantis (1988). The US and Israel have still not been able to fully suppress IRGC missile, and especially drone, attacks, even in such circumstances.

So, two easy, and a more subtle, test to winnow out the truly remarkable amount of bad commentary on the Iran War.

References

Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

This was a disastrously bad decision. The argument for going back at the 1914 rate was to preserve the UK pound’s value as a medium of account: meaning that, prices and debts were expressed in pounds and were paid in pounds.

Going back on the gold standard turned gold into the medium of account for what was still the world’s premier reserve currency, mediated by (and denominated in) pound notes. UK bonds would thus have the same value as they did in 1914, when the UK left the gold standard so it could finance its war expenditure.

The bonds would have the same value provided the UK Government could continue to service the interest owed. There are some complications here regarding bond yields, but the intent and reasoning was clear. Government bonds were a promise, and the UK Government was keeping its promise.

The lower the risk on bonds, the lower the interest rate, the cheaper (in pounds) bonds were to service and the easier to sell new bonds as “risk-free assets”. As UK bonds were denominated in UK pounds, the value of the pound made a difference to the value of the bonds. Hence, the decision to go back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate was focused on the UK pound as the medium of account for UK bonds.

So, if the logic is clear, why was going back on gold on the 1914 rate such a bad decision? Because a lot more pounds had been printed since 1914 than the UK had gold to support at the 1914 exchange rate. (This increased printing of pounds was the point of going off the gold standard in the first place.)

In terms of output, of goods and services, a pound in 1925 bought considerably less than it did in 1914. This meant that, at the 1914 exchange-rate with gold, the pound was significantly overvalued. Gold bought more outside the UK. The consequence was obvious: gold tended to flow out of the UK, putting the pound under more stress.

The solution to the pound being overvalued—it did not buy enough goods and services, enough output, to support its exchange-rate with gold—was to have the pound increase in value in goods and services, in output-value. [For prices in pounds to express the value of gold as the medium of account.]

Money increasing in output-value has a name: we call it deflation, or falling prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys more and more goods and services. (Just as money decreasing in output-value is inflation, or rising prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys less and less goods and services.)

So, putting the pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate imposed serious deflation on the UK economy. Prices fell, so incomes fell, while debts increased in output-value. This all put downward pressure on wages. The 1926 General Strike was a direct consequence of putting the UK pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate.

All this made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been, increasing the burden of the public debt. It also tended to bleed confidence out of British society, prolonging the effects of the trauma of the 1914-1918 Great War. (You may not be interested in Economics, but Economics is interested in you.)

The roles of money

The classic analysis of money is that it is a unit of account (what prices and obligations are set in), a medium of exchange and a store of value. The store-of-value role is the least important role of money. We can tell that, because people still use money during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst asset, the worst store-of-value, in the economy.

People’s expectations about the future value of money do, however, matter a lot. Precisely because a hyper-inflating currency is such an awful store-of-value, people unload it as quickly as possible. This creates a hyperinflation spiral, where the speed at which money travels between transactors heads towards infinity and the output-value of the currency heads towards zero.

Conversely, if people have strong expectations that money will increase in output-value, they will tend to hold onto it, so transact less, so incomes fall, so production falls, so prices fall, so money increases in output-value, increasing the incentive to hold onto it. Debts increase in output-value while incomes fall, so bankruptcies multiply. All this creates a debt-deflation spiral where transactions fall dramatically, so output heads downwards as the output-value of money heads upwards.

The fact that there is a certain level of consumption people are going to do regardless puts something of a limit on the deflation spiral. Also, money constantly increasing in value creates an increasing incentive to inject money into the system. In the case of the gold standard, to either find new sources of gold (what cured the 1890s Depression) or to take the currency off the gold standard (what cured the 1930s Depression).1

The less store-of-value risk there is in money, the more money becomes a potential safe haven for wealth if there is some increase in risk.2 Hence, if a central bank credibly protects the output-value of money—for instance, by generating expectations of low and stable rates of inflation—but does not credibly generate expectations of stable levels of total spending (so incomes) in the economy, then a sudden increase in risk can lead to a flight to cash (and other “safe”) assets, so a crash in transactions.

Why did the US and other developed economies experience the Great Recession after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but Australia experienced neither? Because Australian prudential regulation protected from it from the GFC and the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy generated strong expectations of stable levels of total spending in the Australian economy, which almost none of the other Western central banks did for their economies. In those economies, there was a flight to cash (particularly US dollars) and other “safe” assets and so a crash in transactions aka the Great Recession.

Transaction good

But money is a store of value because it can be used in future transactions. This is why expectations about its future value matters so much.

Holding money is using it as an asset. Using money in transactions is using it as a medium of exchange. The term medium of exchange is a usage I particularly dislike, because it helps mystify money.

I much prefer to call money a transaction good, because that focuses on what money primarily does: it reduces transaction costs (particularly search and information costs). It does so massively. That is why people continue to use money even during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst store-of-value asset in the economy.

Calling money a transaction good also helps think about money in terms of supply and demand. Any analysis in terms of supply and demand has to define the scope of the commodity—i.e. supply of what, demand for what. If money is being held as an asset, it is not being used as a transaction good. Therefore, money held as an asset is not included in the supply of money being used as a transaction good.

Expectations about the future value of money hugely affect people’s willingness to use money in transactions, so its supply as a transaction good. But no analysis of money that conflates its use as an asset with its use as a transaction good is going to be a good analysis of money.

Thus, any quantity theory of money that aggregates together money being used in transactions—so, as a transaction good—with money being held as an asset is going to be wrong. Calling money a transaction good makes the importance of avoiding such conflation of the uses of money clearer.

Even with supply and demand for money as asset or as transaction good there are some scope complexities. The number of US dollars that circulate outside the US is remarkable. Demand for US dollar notes is by no means limited to their use within the American economy. The excellent Conflicted podcast recently provided a very informative discussion of the dynamics of money laundering and why US cash remains king.

I also dislike the usage the real economy or in real terms, preferring output or goods-and-services as the role of money—and, indeed, credit—in facilitating transactions is very real. Both money and credit can be means of payment, but the latter is even more driven by information and risk than money.

Money is a physical—so physically possess-able and storable—thing. Credit is a promise, paid for (i.e., made worthwhile to do) by interest. (If someone is paying interest on it, it is credit, not cash.) Cryptoassets, such as Bitcoin, are … odd.3

Banks generate credit, based on their assessments of risk. Such credit can, and usually does, generate claims on cash; but it does not multiply money—it does not increase cash in the economy, unless the bank can issue its own banknotes. It does multiply means of payment denominated in monetary units. Hence, it is perfectly possible to analyse monetary policy without worrying specifically about credit, as these are another set of transactions affected by expectations of the future value of the money they are denominated in and the expectations about future income that they have to be paid back in.

Monetising

The term transaction good also helps thinking about the process of monetising an economy. The more an economy is monetised, the lower transaction costs are going to be, so the more transactions and so the larger the economy can be expected to be. Governments have a particular incentive to encourage the monetising of an economy, not only because a larger economy generates more taxes and other revenue, but because monetisation reduces the transaction costs for government itself in acquiring revenue and expending funds.

The alternative to monetised transactions are in-kind transactions. I much prefer to talk about in-kind rather than “barter” because you can have in-kind taxes, in-kind debts as well as in-kind exchange. A medieval manor was not a “barter” system, it was a series of in-kind arrangements.

The processes of monetisation took centuries. As late as the 1940s, the Chinese economy was far from fully monetised, as villages tended to avoid using money in their internal arrangements—to the extent that villagers would travel to the local market town to engage in monetary transactions with a fellow villager.

Chinese society was based around kin-groups, and other connections, far more than were the very individualist Western societies. Law also penetrated Western societies—including rural communities—far more than it did Chinese villages. All this made in-kind arrangements more viable within Chinese villages and monetisation more viable in Western rural communities.

Historical aside: the long history of Chinese villages keeping the state at arms-length helps explain how Chinese villages could spontaneously de-collectivise agriculture after the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution had disrupted Party (CCP) control in the villages. The “clever” thing that the CCP did was to work out how to cope with the de-collectivisation that was already happening.

Robust expectations of a stable path for total transactions

In summary, Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, focused on money as the medium of account for assets (specifically, UK public bonds) rather than the central role of money—as a transaction good. Eight decades later, the Great Moderation was interrupted by the Great Recession because the US Federal Reserve, and other central banks, focused on expectations about the future value of their currency (i.e., inflationary expectations) and not on generating expectations of a stable path for total transactions when financial risks dramatically increased.4

The medium of exchange usage gets in the way of thinking clearly about money.

Money is first and foremost a transaction good. Its use reduces transaction costs, so makes the economy larger than it otherwise would be. [Its greatest benefit is enabling transactions that otherwise would not happen.]

Monetary policy does best, when it generates strong expectations of a stable positive path for total transactions in an economy. What is the most useful measure of total transactions in an economy? NGDP: GDP at current money (nominal) value.

Sure, there is an asset economy as well as an output—a goods and services—economy. But new assets require goods and services in their creation. (Cryptoassets, for instance, require computers, computer code and electrical power.) Assets are mainly of value either from producing goods and services or providing more reliable access to the same. This includes prestige/status assets.

Moreover, as money can be used as a transaction good, or held as an asset—and is the medium of account for output, assets and obligations—money operates as the “hinge” between current and future transactions and between output and assets.

So, monetary policy does best when it generates robust expectations of a stable positive path for NGDP.

References

Katy Barnett, ‘The Australian Approach To Cryptoassets: Another Block In The Chain,’ forthcoming Journal of Banking and Finance Law and Practice JBFLP (2026). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6477598

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Independent Institute, 2015.

Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Money, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

James Tobin, ‘Commercial Banks as Creators of ‘Money’,’ Banking and Monetary Studies, (ed. Dean Carson) 1963, 408-419, cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cm/m21/m21-01.pdf.

Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society, trans, with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, University of California Press, 1992.