Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
I tried to write a motte post and accidentally wrote a book. Chapter one is here.
User ID: 3846
It's a pertinent question and deserves a good response. I've come at it a few times before but am happy to keep doing so.
One answer would be: Consider the narrative arc of this chapter. Consider the level of abstraction necessary to plot this course through the conceptual cloud. By using a simplifying thought experiment (lower resolution), I can point out higher patterns which would be challenging if not impossible to portray accurately at a higher resolution. Imagine spending all day looking at the tile fragments in a mosaic at the inch-scale, appreciating the nuance and subtlety within each, only for someone to grab you by the scruff of your neck, off the floor, and haul you up high enough that you can see that it is a picture of a tiger.
Forest vs. Trees.
And no, Hajnalis aren't 'white people' and Tropicals aren't 'blacks'. For one, you could replace 'blacks' here with any of, e.g.,: Tahitians, Equatorial Amerindians, Malays, bottom-cast Indians, or several others and get results which, while varying in specific flavour, yet have enough in common to hit most of the same notes. Tropicals are tropicals. And being a Hajnali isn't about skin colour; both are about certain constellations of genetically-rooted phenomenological traits with external traits correlative but not really actually important per se.
This chapter might feel like a random, jeering diversion, just an atlas with the names filed off, but it does in fact tie into and build off the previous ones, and supports what's to come later. It has several of its own points to make. One of these is that the historical engine of human advancement, i.e. pre-industrial warfare among warrior aristocracies, has been so badly disrupted as to leave us in wholly-uncharted territory, facing general genetic meltdown, with no real plausible solution.
Put it this way: Human history has been a successively-occurring drama of a man coming in from the cold, having his way with a woman in a warm place, and making babies with her. The babies have some of the better and worse features of each. The better ones are mostly-conserved, but the worse ones are mostly-corrected when the next man comes in and does the same. Things got better and better for a long time.
Until, one day, the inhabitants of the warm place finally, permanently, got the upper hand, and had no extant credible suitors. What happens next? The question is intentionally left open. But it's clear, given the patterns I've laid out, that things are going to get very bad unless something very out of the ordinary happens. This is going to be recapitulated again next week from the perspective of sex relations.
In neither case is my goal to complain about non-whites or women. My goal is to illustrate a deeper, recurrent pattern which may be viewed from multiple angles and still holds true. The pattern is that of Male and Female, which recurs and plays out fractally across this thing we call reality, or Being.
This is my goal for at least five reasons.
- I want a cliff-notes version of who we are and how we got here to help explain this stuff to my kids when they're older, and serve as a jumping-off point to dive deeper into the truly fascinating real-life complexities of these patterns. It's taken me most of my life to put these pieces together and a lot of the bridges I used to get here have been retroactively burned by the servants of the Lie. I'm worried the perspective itself may become lost; the fire itself may go out, unless it is very intentionally-tended. I won't be around to do that forever, but I do want to play my part in making the task easier for current and future generations. If not a hearth, at least a sort of 'comet' or kangir. I sense that dark times are ahead and this may be the best that can be done.
- All of this is only the beginning. We're going to leave race and (literal) sex almost entirely behind for a long time in book two and look at the playing-out of abstract concepts amongst themselves. It will be very helpful to have higher-order, more-abstract 'Male and Female' well-established as a go-to example, since many other concepts impinge upon and tie into this. A scaffolding if you will. And also a proof of concept.
- Hilariously-enough this book grew from the seed of an effortpost which was trying to answer a long-lost redditor's question about why woke media is the way it is, and the patterns in this chapter are required infrastructure to get to that point. The point itself is almost laughably incidental in the context of the waters necessary to cross in order to get to it, but it is nonetheless the target at which I aimed, the endpoint of the spine of the structure I built to explore the other things in the book. So, propriety demands that it be satisfied, even if it's... beyond asinine, in the scope of things.
- This tiger I keep mentioning is real and it is trying to eat you. And it's not black people or even Tropicals, or women, or Jews, or anything human at all. (If that sounds completely deranged to you, what I'm talking about is at least cousins with what Nick Land describes in Meltdown). It will take me time to build this out but I think it's a real and important thing to talk about, and our society, which once had the vocabulary for such things, has all but lost it, such that I must go back and rebuild the infrastructure or else it's game over, man, and for much more important things than Hajnalis. I mentioned Lie-servants burning bridges. Many books I read as a youth which can no longer be found anywhere; many departments shut down such that generational knowledge carried for millennia is disappearing at a pace unimaginable a century ago. Who even speaks Latin or Greek anymore? How many know our founding myths, or why they matter? Those myths are metaphors, yes, but they are not only metaphors. They are signposts, vital descriptions of reality, and without them we are already finding ourselves lost in deeper and deeper fog. In general there is a trend of order arising from chaos, but as of a few hundred years ago that seems to have started to reverse. From where I'm standing this is clearly enemy action, and little is more worth doing than trying to throw a wrench into the process. Step one is to try to inform people that they have been so-domesticated as to be literally-unable to even perceive the thing which intends to have them for lunch, which process is indeed already alarmingly-advanced.
- Some people know a lot of these things but have never had them put together in a coherent narrative before and I realized that I could and that it would be fun and useful and also help work off some of this nervous energy I'm always carrying about the future. Fill in a bunch of gaps along the way for the worldviews of others who are already on the same path. Save them some time and energy; maybe show them a thing or two they were liable to miss on their own.
Thanks for the question.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
4d ago
I think that much depends upon the next few years, and upon whether this strategy of mine of lighting myself on fire in the hopes of screaming as loud as I can for attention manages to pay off at all.
Seriously, where is everybody? Did you all scoot off to some other planet while I wasn't looking? Where are all the men?!
I'm busy and not going to answer this unless I do it really quickly, so here we go.
I'd rather just hear what you know, but fine.
A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category. Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.
But I think you are appropriately calling my attention to something that I'd stopped noticing by force of habit. To wit, I'm using the term 'mutation (or 'mutational') load' in a way that is new to you and must appear very screwy. It occurs to me that I am indeed being loose with the term; I simply don't think we have better language for what I'm talking about. Most readers won't have that problem, never having heard of the concept, but you do and I apologize for not offering you more consideration.
What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together. If you do have any suggestions as to what else to call this, I'm all ears. And of course the real holy grail would be a reference to a paper describing and naming it. But in the meantime I am, as it were, going to war with the army I have.
Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, etc. Isn't this your overarching thesis?
I'm really glad that you called this out specifically because the answer is no. I've always chafed beneath that aphorism and part of the project of the book is to explain how it's incorrect. Unfortunately, I do not yet have a replacement which is anywhere near as pithy. Bear with me as I scratch in the dirt here, but,
- Highly-selective environments make finely-tuned creatures
- Finely-tuned creatures find new slack in their personal ecologies
- This poisoned gift may be passed down to their offspring, who are now in a less-highly-selective environment
- ...Resulting in less-finely-tuned creatures but with some cool new tricks.
- Who then take the female part in the mating game with the next finely-tuned males to arrive.
An isomorphism is indeed present between the two, but they're not quite the same thing. And "good" is of course as troublesome a concept as always, but we can't seem to help ourselves, can we?
A larger sort of synthesis is going on in human history. Finely-tuned people conquer an area populated by indigenes. Admixture occurs. The product generations are generally less-finely-tuned but contain some new beneficial adaptations as it were. The superstructure crumbles beneath the pressure of another finely-tuned people, even given all the defensive advantages of agricultural society. The system climbs higher and higher across iterations.
So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?
You have a large number of relatively common variants in your population floating around, and as soon as you relax purifying selection on the weak alleles, your model organism/people are suddenly 50-65% less 'whatever' even in the F1 generation. I'm not a population geneticist, but I don't see how that can be possible? You're telling me that if you relax all selection and let everyone breed (and you're also telling me that all your captured animals have this trait!) a single generation is enough to wreck what you're looking at?
Less a trait than a sort of index, and... yes.
Calhoun's mouse utopia bred like gangbusters from 8 mice to 2200 without any kind of purifying selection. Shouldn't they have crashed in a generation or two?
No, I don't think so either. This was a correct objection on your part and I hope I've answered it satisfactorily in general in the comments of this chapter. Mea culpa for playing too fast and loose with my English. I don't actually expect F5 to be mostly-infertile; I was just gesturing at it as an example of the sort of odd, nebulous, systemic issue that I do expect to have popped up somewhere by that point.
Whatever behavior you're looking at (you're an animal psychologist, right?) has a significant environmental component, and living in captivity is deleterious. Plenty of animals fail to breed or exhibit other behaviors in captivity and this has nothing to do with 'catastrophic mutational load.'
Entirely correct, and I understand why you think that's at issue, but it's not. We can control for this as it were via experiments such as the one I described with pigeon eggs elsewhere.
Consanguinity/founder effects - I assume you're trapping these in a smallish area, and your starting population might be significantly related? It seems unlikely to be able to account for the early effects, maybe some of the future generations.
No comment but I applaud your sharp eyes. This doesn't bother me either.
The rest seems to circle back around.
Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.
Edit: Oh and @faul_sname
Now how would you respond to someone who came back at you with:
Would you keep trying to communicate, if you thought it were important, or would you just stay silent?
What I'm doing here is saying guys, this is my sincere best guess as to what's going on. And I want feedback, I want arguments, I want corrections, insights, the whole works. Because even though, for systemic reasons, I cannot provide the receipts, this is the only place on the internet where the conversation may be had.
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