One Market to Rule Them All - The Death of Industrial Society

Note: This post is still a work in progress. Your comments are welcome to help improve concepts being worked.

More brilliant minds than mine have noticed the intersection and codependency of leftist society and technological society.  Only more recently, and less noticed is that leftist belief is correlated with low fertility rates and leftism is correlated with feminism.  Further, leftism (of the cultural variety) and technological progress seem to be uniquely products of European societies, by which I include Canada, Australia and the United States. How did this evolutionary dead end come to exist; what are its root causes in terms of evolutionary biology? Is technological society is an evolutionary dead-end or is there a way out?

First what do I mean by leftist?

The leftist is oriented toward large scale collectivism. He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duly of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. Me tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically "enlightened" educational methods, for planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the common catch-phrases of the left like "racism, ""sexism, " "homophobia, " "capitalism," "imperialism," "neocolonialism " "genocide," "social change," "social justice," "social responsibility." Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, and political correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with all of these movements is almost certainly a leftist.'

From the same author:

Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

Modern society is cut off from the roots of man's recent evolution.  However, in modern industrial and technological society, in addition to the jarring discontinuity with the natural order, man also experiences significant loss of freedom over the activities of life that are meaningful. The lack of autonomy inherent in modern technological life is oppressive to the human spirit, but technological society cannot function without it.  We need lanes for cars and speed limits to limit wrecks.  We need workers to follow instructions because large scale disasters like widespread power outages can result from human failure.  But the result is a loss of autonomy that is irreconcilable with human nature.

As a result, we oversocialize our youth to get them to adapt to industrial society.  We do this because to date, industrial society has overwhelmed all other forms of social organization through possession of superior technology.  The most efficiently ordered industrial societies have defeated the others and serve as the model, but at a heavy price in human freedom.  This oversocialization produces a large number of people who feel helpless and weak and lacking in autonomy.  They are unable to experience themselves as powerful individuals.  They become leftists:

But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.

The industrial system has a need for ever expanding economic output.  Until recently, that output has been increased in part by bringing women and minorities into the work force, increasing the overall labor participation rate.  (Productivity forms the other portion of rising output, but is not of interest here.) Leftism has contributed by clearing political and cultural hurdles that might have slowed this trend. Since the conditions that produce the leftist mindset have the seemingly good intentions of adapting children to industrial society and the leftist mindset in turn produced more workers, it is no wonder that the culture has lurched leftward rapidly.  Simultaneously, with more women in the workforce, with work itself being less physically demanding, current evolutionary pressure has produce more feminine men and more masculine women.  The traditional bonds of marriage, religion, and nationalism that were impediments to these outcomes have become the targets of leftism because these cultural institutions are barriers to increasing the work force.

Feminism is a subset of leftism with special emphasis on denying the truth that women are generally physically and emotionally weaker than men and have a genetic predisposition to play a different role in society than men.  Feminism seeks to not only destroy any sane legal protections for the weaker sex, but to destroy marriage (through divorce and the promotion of gay marriage) and to expand government so that women need not depend on any husband for financial support for her offspring.  This result is feeds the industrial system initially by supplying  more women to the labor force.

But human beings cannot evolve fast enough to keep pace with these changes.  As a result, women actually long for the very virility in men even as they decry it.  However, the vicious circle of industrialization and leftism has delivered a population of men unable to rise to this challenge.  Further, because traditional European monogamy has been destroyed, a large portion of the male population has little hope of establishing a permanent family.  Woman in society are like petulant children who have not been given any limits, they continue to push past supposed boundaries while secretly hoping for their imposition.  But alas, society is no longer capable of imposing any social order.

Modern social change is characterized by:

• Breakdown of traditional sexual morality
• Unrootedness, that is lack of identification with a locale and its people
• Universalism, a belief in the actual equalism of all people, genders, etc.
• Low fertility 
• Androgyny 
• Pathological altruism or empathobesity

Feminism is a evolutionary maladaptation to industrial society that is sowing the seeds of the destruction of western civilization.  The low fertility will ultimately result in a the death of a culture overwhelmed by sheer numbers by more procreating races.

Borrowing from concepts popularized and refined on the blog Chateau Heartiste, I make the following assertions regarding the current feminized political environment.

• The invitation by feminized political systems to bring in young, virile men from other cultures as a "shit test" to the androgynous beta male western culture.  A "shit test" is simply a test of reproductive fitness to see if the male under test has the emotional wherewithal to counter body blows to the ego by a woman.  Males who pass demonstrate their fitness for reproduction.
• Low fertility is the unintended consequence of feminism, and is just now beginning to threaten technological society.  However, universalist belief that low birth rate can be compensated by importing Arabs, Africans or Mestizos workers has not fully collided with the reality of those cultures failure to produce reliable and intelligent workers.
• The exact biological mechanism causing increasing androgyny is unknown.  Reversing its trend will prove difficult lacking knowledge of its pathology.
• High African fertility rates will result in pressures to allow African emigration to conquer European societies (including Canada, U.S. and Australia.)  A sort of world-wide "Camp of the Saints" with African refugees substituting for Indian refugees will result.

Other Explanations

I want to consider that technology might not be the direct cause of leftism, but that both technology and leftism arise out of a common root cause.  We might consider why advanced technology has arisen in advanced civilization at all and how leftism is related.  In Biohistory, Jim Penman argues that the rise of technological civilization come from the ability of cultural artifacts like religion to mimic natural conditions that influence human behavior.  The cultural beliefs that conservatives and/or traditionalists embrace that led to the rise of civilization are undermined by its own success.  To some extent this parallels the argument in "Industrial Society and Its Future."

A weak point about these cultural systems is that they are vulnerable to the effects of abundance and population density. Wealthy urban societies with plentiful food tend to abandon ascetic behaviors, such as restrictions on sexual activity, which mimic the effects of food shortage. This in turn leads to society-wide change in temperament and behavior which undermine success. In effect, the greater the wealth and density of a society’s population, the harder it is to maintain the cultural strategies responsible for the society’s rise. In the chapters to come we propose that the collapse of civilizations, along with their replacement by people from less-developed societies, can be understood in this way.

Any way out?

In general, religious whites have higher fertility rates than the non-religious whites.  Given that religious belief is heritable, will religious belief make a demographic come back?  If so, how will the evolutionary pressures of industrial society be overcome.  Possession of superior technology has proven throughout history to be an important part of Darwinian societal success.