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Good post. It does a good job of clearly stating the problem of R/K selection theory in the context of human beings.
The vast majority of human history is a bunch of elite men getting lots and lots of women pregnant. The problem with this is that once you hit the agrarian revolution, let alone the industrial, the necessities of society at a scale beyond the village means you have to find some sort of social institution to prevent a lot of intra-male mate competition.
Enter marriage.
Marriage is a miracle. It's institution (which is close to a human universal, btw, in any society that's progressed past hunting-gathering) creates a way for males to pacify their natural urge to kill other males as means to guarantee mate access, and also creates a basic economic and social building block. Throw on top of it property and inheritance rights, and you've got yourself the beginnings of something durable.
When the institution of marriage breaks down, you can see what follows. It isn't anything new, it is a de-evolution to our chaotic ancestors' way of mate selection. Does this kind of sound like the modern dating market? Lack of commitment, multiple partners in parallel, "infidelity" beginning to lose all meaning and significance, "situationships" being strategic ambiguity by both men and women to hedge their bets.
I'll dig it up later (if I remember) but I was listening to a podcast where the guest had a great line. Marriage, specifically the wedding, isn't about a public commitment of love to the other person, it's about publicly signaling that both of you are off the market and that you'll abide by all of the laws and norms around marriage - and so should other people! There's no ambiguity. If you sleep with a married man or woman, you're a homewrecker. You should know this because of the publicly displayed wedding band that is visible at all times (and also, you know, that other person should tell you they're married).
But marriage, at least in the west, is utterly meaningless - doubly so for any sort of real legal or social consequences for failing to live up to its requirements. Cheated on your wife? No big deal, there's couples counseling. Or you can just get a divorce. You've been divorced? Who hasn't! It's so easy to do now that you don't even need a reason other than "I guess I just don't like him/her anymore."
And we haven't even got to the wildly out of balance reality of the legal system. If I'm a 34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income, getting married is such a high risk that many lawyers specifically recommend against it. The only exception being a prenuptual agreement that is so stacked against the wife that it becomes quite foolish for her to get married because she'll be in a kind of economic concubinage.
As many others have said, the way to fix this issue - to the extent that it is possible - is through recultivating social esteem. Marriage should be a capital-B Big Deal and should be reserved, frankly, for worthwhile men selected by women with honor and virtue. I'm not going to get all "virgins only" here, but when a retired pornstar marrying some guy isn't scene as laughably retarded, we've got a problem. Marriage should be seen as a goal for the ambitious young man in the same way that starting your own business is - not for the feint of hard, full of needs for sacrifice and hard work, but, ultimately, a quite noteworthy achievement.
Adultery should be a crime. I'd not recommend locking people up for it, but it should be a misdemeanor that is publicly searchable. There has to be real consequences for promiscuity that violets a marriage contract. If you want to sleep around with other unmarried folks, that's fine.
Finally, I don't see how you can re-invigorate marriage in a wholly secular worldview. An important mental shift is in seeing "husband" and "wife" as a distinct and special human role. What are the specific and unique duties a man has to a woman and vice-versa in a marriage. How does one's behavior necessarily change? If these questions aren't answered thoroughly, you devolve to the modern secular marriage; roommates who occasionally sleep together and file taxes together.
To comment on your framing of "alphatize the betas" vs "betatise the alphas" -- the answer can only be to alphatize the betas through a series of verifiable and impossible-to-cheat milestones in life. This traces back to ceremonies and traditions around the journey to manhood. In human history, a woman wouldn't marry a man who couldn't provide food and shelter for her and their likely offspring. Today, marrying an unemployed man or a man with shaky employment stability should be a not starter. Physical fitness matters - fattys need not apply. I think the biggest missing piece is social and community esteem. If a man has literally no friends or has no meaningful community network, he is not marriageable - even if making millions of dollars!
But again, even with the rubric I've just laid out, it doesn't matter unless marriage matters.
This is an oft quoted meme, but I’ve researched this and the evidence is questionable.
Let me give just one example: It’s well “known” on social media that, historically, two women have reproduced for every man that has reproduced. However, the evidence for this is tenuous. It comes from Imran Khan quoting John Tierney mis-quoting Baumeister mis-quoting Wilder et al, a study which said no such thing. The actual number is that 1.4 women reproduced for ever man in African tribes, 1.3 in Europe, and 1.1 in East Asia.
Other evidence shows that polygyny does not look to be normal human behavior.
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There exists the concept of a Covenant Marriage which doesn't seem to have gotten much uptake.
From "The Right to Marry" by Sister Y:
Ironically that was a common tactic back when most marriages could only be dissolved for fault. You’d move to a state with no-fault divorce long enough to establish residency and then get divorced. Everything that’s old is new again.
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So, how do you incentivise people to actually sign up for your newly highly gatekept version of marriage? All those people in situationships are not going, "I wish there were a death pact contract I could enter with a partner that society and law would force us to respect". You can't just decree from above that some action is to be seen as desirable and have people abide; otherwise social engineering would be a lot easier.
First off, when you say something like "highly gatekept" you're giving away some of your online habits and, more enjoyable for me, you give me the opportunity to -
YesChad.jpeg.
I absolute want to gatekeep marriage. That's, like, the point, bro. If you don't literally keep the gates you're doubly fucked when the barbarians show up.
That's hyperbolic and you know it. People in situationships want to get out of them. So much so that "defining the relationship" is literally the next meme after situationship in the meme-chain of modern dating. The problem with that next step is that it isn't actually a true next step. There are plently of memes and funny YouTube videos that illustrate how when one part wants to "define the relationship" the other party swerves and avoids in order to keep the undefined situationship going. And the world continues to
burnturn.I agree completely.
We used to, however, let people make their own decisions and then live by their own consequences. If you didn't want to make a good decision, you totally could! But then, later, you'd have to deal with it. The problem today is that a large part of society that routinely makes good decisions and employs delayed gratification, self-sacrifice, and discipline is actively coerced (via taxes) to subsidizing tens of millions of people who not only make bad decisions but actively defect from a pro-social game.
Let me be clear, I don't want be to be forced to abide any of my personal values system ideas. That would be tyranny. I just want consequences to have actions for everyone. My original comment that gatekept marriage attempted to outline what I think the requirements for making a good marriage decision are. People are free not to abide by that, but they must abide by the consequences.
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This is something that a big state could easily do. The US and much of the West quasi-criminalized going outside during Covid, there is an enormous river of state power that merely needs to be directed towards pro-social ends. In Britain they arrest thousands of people for tweets, that's their 'incentive' for people to think a bit more carefully before they speak. The state can indoctrinate children for hours and hours a day, there's a gigantic surveillance apparatus watching just about everything, they have 20-40% of GDP to spend...
Our elites simply need to make a decision and then enforce that decision and then it just happens. The difficulty of social engineering is overestimated. The US did it pretty well, they pointed bayonets at teenagers so they'd go to school with blacks, they forcibly bussed whites to black schools, implemented affirmative action schemes to give blacks better jobs. It didn't change performance-based outcomes that much but they certainly could produce behaviours, they dramatically reduced racism just via straightforward suppression and indoctrination.
They could suppress adultery too, it's really not that hard. But they don't want to.
The risk I see with 'make marriage a much stronger contract' social engineering is that even more people opt out of it. Marriage has already become an elite institution, with the commensurate dysfunction among the lower classes who aren't getting married.
Marriage worked better when everyone did it, because it reinforced the norm. The collapse of that norm is tragic, but making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Sex outside of marriage: it's illegal. Unacceptable. Totally contrary to Our Values. You're in prison, you're a lowlife, a scumbag, media will show you to be the bad guy.
Done!
Alternately, affirmative action for married couples in the workforce. Companies must declare targets of married employees, explain what actions they're taking to achieve these targets. You could boost fertility the same way.
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Yes, probably, but people will adapt.
Think about the way it worked in the past. If you wanted to have sex, marriage was the only way for most people. In fact, the whole trope of a man promising he loves a woman only to flee the morning after coitus is illustrative of this. If you were sleeping around a lot, as a man or a woman, you were circling the drain, so to speak. After a while, the only people you could have sexual congress with were just as on the margin of society as you were. The obvious exception here is, of course, wealthy / elite men who could engage the services of discreet prostitutes or employ some sort of concubinage on the side.
Then, during the sexual revolution in the west, this changed. You didn't have to promise yourself to your high school sweetheart. You could kind of dog around for at least college, but maybe get wifed/husbanded up right around graduation. But, if we play the tape forward another 50,60 years, we have what we have today; perpetual fuckery (or an utter lack thereof) well into one's 30s.
If we flip the switch back, you'll see a dip in the marriage rate for some time. Then, as a planned and stable marriage becomes more rare it will regain social currency and people will begin to orient themselves towards it. Situationships, polyamory, etc. will be seen as weirdo fringe stuff.
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For a lot of people, when you have an utterly destroyed shell of an institution, it doesn't make much sense to even bother with it. It's pointless paperwork that can be undone on a whim, but at the pain of much more paperwork and likely legal wrangling.
Elite women obviously still want to opt in, because they're likely getting a wealthy man on the hook. If you're both poor? Who cares? Religious people still do it, because their religious communities still enforce some amount of social approval for proper use of it and some amount of social sanctions for improper use. It's still a somewhat stronger social contract for them, if not a legal one.
In Whit Stillman’s brilliant indie debut, Metropolitan, Taylor Nichols’ commedically-pessimistic Charlie Black is convinced that the entire preppy class is doomed, fated, to suffer downward social mobility.
Late in the film, Charlie engages a man in a bar, a member of the preppy class perhaps a decade his senior, looking for confirmation of his theory. Man at Bar, played by Roger W. Kirby in his lone acting role (who in real life would go on to co-found the law firm of Kirby McInerney), tells Charlie, resignedly, that he is going to have to accept that many of his peers will indeed be successful.
I’ll set aside elite, as I am not sure exactly how that would be defined, but most college educated Americans still get married. And, like Charlie Black, commedically-pessimistic single men need to accept that the upper two quintiles of Americans are still mostly getting married, and for reasons beyond and exempting ensnarement. Things like love, support, companionship, respect and admiration shared between two imperfect people looking to build a life together.
I will grant that one could want high marriage rates solely for their cumulative societal impact. And structural changes have reduced that rate, but much moreso the lower one travels down the socioeconomic ladder. And all the same, when I see getting someone “on the hook” errantly proffered as the driver of marriage in, say, the top two quintiles based on income, I want to tell the speaker to rejoice at the institution’s decline.
For every black- or red-pilled unwed man I encounter online that has reduced women’s motivations down to a hypergamous id — wicked daughters of Eve, all! — I hope they realize they have been set free. From experience, the overwhelming supermajority of a marriage is spent outside of scratching one another’s physiological itches, and as such, any man that does not particularly like women would be wise to avoid marrying one. You almost-invariably wind up cohabitating and spending time in each other’s company.
I guess most of this comes down to what one categorizes as "elite", as that was the specific category mentioned.
In any event, yes, love and such. Great things. Though I have heard it flippantly put, "You should marry for love and not for money... but it's just as easy to love a rich man." But that's neither here nor there. I do believe that many folks marry for love, but then the challenge returns to your court. Is the driver of whether or not people fall in love their position on the socioeconomic ladder? I doubt so. When it comes to discussing differentials, or particular categories like "elite", there may be other factors concerning what modern marriage has become which may be relevant.
No, that would be mistaking a second-order effect for a first. The requisite is proximity, which itself is heavily influenced by position on the socioeconomic ladder.
And all this time, I've been told that poor people are stuck living in cramped, high-density areas. Now I don't know what to believe!
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How do you square this view with the fact that marriage was invented and became wildly successful to the degree that it's one of the most popular human institutions historically speaking?
I think people would like to commit to stable partnerships were this an option, actually. How about we legalize marriage and see what happens?
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As a starter, speak out against the folks who are working to accomplish the opposite. I've covered this before as being a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. "How do you convince people to sign up for [any view that is a minority view, which by definition is not preferred by most people at the current moment]? Well, you, uh, convince them. Maybe giving reasons, showing them data, making arguments, etc."
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