Chapter 32
What’s to be done
I have spent years working myself up for this moment. I should be bursting with suggestions. The problem is infertility. The mechanism is outbreeding depression. The danger is planet wide human extinction. OK, if we know that much, what kind of tools might fall into our hands?
Any intervention must be private or public. Any private intervention will not be enough to moisten a society in flames. Sorry. I’d prefer a private route because I have such little regard for public servants above the rank-file; indeed, I have less regard for public servants and other celebrities and power merchants than I do for the humble. But we live in a society where power has been permitted to accumulate in few hands just like money has found its way into few pockets. If we want to go anywhere, we need to start from where we are, miserable though that might be.
Looking for what the big shots can do is a lot easier than looking at what the people can do. Survival depends on most folks marrying reasonably close cousins, which in humans means it has to be a status symbol; we mate, alas, for status and not for love. If we can make biologically productive mating choices, we can survive. Don’t worry your head about over population. It may become an issue someday, but currently extinction is the threat. OK, if marrying cousins is to be status symbol, and if public action is needed, exactly which public action will work?
Here, in no particular order, is a list of things the government can do:
Taxes.
Give away money or things of value like health care.
Bring in migrants.
Fight wars.
Establish a bureau of weights and measures.
Infrastructure: make it possible for people to drive, fly, ride boats, transfer credit, messages and other information cheaply and safely and have access to electricity and fuel.
Police and a criminal justice system.
Fat men behind desks and a civil justice system.
If you can think of anything else, you are smarter than I am so you probably can work out the right agenda. Do let me know what it is so I can fall in behind you.
Taxes
Centuries ago, a king named Croesus or one of his staff found that if you crushed gold ore to a power, boiled it in brine and rendered it down to a pile of stuff, you could heat the stuff until gold of extreme purity ran out. There are other stories of this king, but the important one is that a constant weight of extremely pure gold was a fixed value; if I am swapping my vegetables for your goose, we must agree on the quality of the goose and of the vegies, and after the barter, both are going to need attention, but if I buy your goose for gold, you can stick that in your pocket for years. Obviously, this was a great advantage for trade, and Croesus – since as king he owned everything – got very rich.
Nowadays, when you buy something, probably some government will put a tax on it, and if anybody makes a profit, that gets taxed, too, and if your heirs get something of value … you see where these leads.
The question is whether the taxing itself is a good thing. Some think so, and tobacco and alcohol are taxed accordingly so a government can punish us for our sins. I don’t see how taxing folks will save the world. But there might be a glimmer. Many years ago, President Eisenhower oversaw the coup by the Supreme court to institute a Nazi government. That is not exactly a political party in this case, it means “national socialism.” The court announced that there could not be more than one society in the US. You had to integrate the schools, and so it has been ever since. Another move on the part of Eisenhower was to begin dismantling the income tax structure, which had placed very high taxes on very high incomes. A more level tax structure meant that there would be a steadily increasing gap between rich and poor. Aside from the inherent injustice, it meant that the most productive members of society would have great disposable income, which could be used to select mates from a broad range. That means less probability of marrying cousins so the productive families took an unseen fertility hit and our leaders got stupider, as we have discussed.
Giving away money or something of value like (maybe) health care.
A government might spend money on enhancing the health of the people. Except for very old or mentally challenged people, this would mean increased average productivity. We make a ham-fisted gesture toward accomplishing this in the United States, but the outcome seems to be the greatest cost and the worst health of any rich country. Other government programs have been set up, but giving money to people seems unlikely to make marrying kin a status symbol. If anything, it would probably move a few people in the direction of having sufficient resources to make really bad mating choices.
Bring in migrants.
If you are following the logic of this, I suspect there will be a number thinking, “Right, that’s totally evil. The government should never permit any immigrants at all. Throw me out of my house, and I’ll manage. Give my country away, and I am ruined. And that is exactly what immigration does.” They can’t take your house without paying fair market price. Fair market price for a share in the US has to be at least a million bucks; you need to be paid a million for every man jack brought in.
To carry on with the subject, in Canada they bring in immigrants but give preferential treatment to people with high status and high productivity. The US seems to follow a reverse pattern. Anyway, the Canadian government say their aim is to increase the population until it is equal to that of the US. Fat chance. Those high-status trophy immigrants already have their fertility reduced by outbreeding among their ancestors. You may well expect them to marry high status Canadians and establish a doomed line. Conservatively, I would estimate the loss of one Canadian citizen for every immigrant until there is nobody up there but moose and bears, brown ones, since the polar bears will likely to have been wiped out by people one way or the other.
But all of that is just an extension of the infertility Canada faces anyway. Somebody in French speaking Canada once said that the local birth rate was suicidally low. I wrote him, and he was kind enough to answer. He said no worries, the birth rate had climbed. Of course, it was still suicidally low, but he had the numbers that permitted him to kick the can down the road a bit. Further birth rate increases would be somebody else’s problem.
The actual genetic distance between two people is not very important after you get to, say, tenth cousin. What does matter is how many generation outbreeding persists. Throw me off the second floor of a building, and I should be OK no matter how far out you cast me, shark pools and tiger cages being absent. It’s not how far I’m chucked, but how long I fall. Tenth floor and fish and cats do not matter; no more does the distance out. Canada will die of its own accord long before immigration would have killed them.
Fight wars.
Fighting wars is so much a preoccupation of governments that a casual observer might figure it was their primary goal. Well folks do kill other folks. Somebody once remarked that all truly ancient skulls showed the heads had been knocked in with antelope thigh bones. Reducing this carnage has permitted the human population to expand until there is a cottage industry of shouting about the horrors of overpopulation even as we can see that the opposite is the one existential threat.
So, show me a bunch of people who are not killing each other indiscriminately but leaving that to social rejects and a bunch of men in uniform answerable to somebody or other. That somebody I would call the government.
Given the monopoly on violence, governments regularly – and pretty much uselessly – exploit that monopoly. They regularly get vast popular support for this counter-productive activity. After all, hating outsiders on a local scale is vital to survival so on the larger scale we hate them even more and eagerly cheer their destruction. As I type, it is just after Memorial Day. A cartoon I think should have had greater popularity showed a man on a soap box with a heckler asking, “Who gave you the right to spout your obnoxious lies?” Behind the heckler, the statue of a soldier says, “I did.” So yes, if you have a treasure like freedom of speech, it is worth defending, but wars seldom wait for such excuses. Nowadays, a lot of us think the freedom of speech is rotting out from within, of course.
But the effect of modern wars is to move a lot of people around, which means outside of their normal orbits, resulting in outbreeding, infertility and thus the precise opposite of what natural selection was accomplishing by instilling the fratricidal instinct in us.
Establish a bureau of weights and measures.
So, what is a pound, I mean the unit of weight? Well, it used to exist, and then they borrowed the standard from the metric units for a gram and then calculated what a pound ought to be. That was OK for a number of years, but eventually routine laboratory measurements were more precise than the techniques for measuring weights used to calibrate those instruments. They made a big deal of it with the meter bar. It was a big platinum bar with a couple scratches on it a meter apart by definition. When they looked at the scratches, they were crooked and jagged so less than ideal. Since a heated atomic nucleus gives of radiation at certain fixed frequencies and thus wavelengths, getting a pretty good standard measure of length was pretty easy for those skilled in the field.
Having standard, accurate and reliable refences to which labs can calibrate is obviously a jolly good thing. It might be the only thing governments do that justifies tax money being spent. Oh yes, there is staying out of wars, but governments are really bad at that.
Infrastructure: make it possible for people to drive, fly, ride boats, transfer credit, messages and other information cheaply and safely and have access to electricity and fuel.
These are all things we use frequently, even daily, and are so useful we’d think of losing them as a calamity. Maybe we could get along without some of them if our population were smaller, but it’s hard to envision our seething cities without lots of modern infrastructure. Of course, much as these things cost to develop and deploy, I recon they save us a lot of money. So, we are all richer, if sometimes rather less free, because they are there. Richer already means having a broader social horizon, and, say, having a passable road between us and potential mating partners increases our social horizon more directly and thus suppresses our fertility and our chances of long-term survival.
Police and a criminal justice system.
The government does not restrict the use of its monopoly on violence to the military. Morale in the military tends to be high; people have social interaction with others upon whom they may need to trust. The interactions are structured so that pretty much everybody knows what to expect.
In addition, the military uses and maintains nifty pieces of equipment such as ships, helicopters, tanks, airplanes and so forth. That’s good for morale. If you have messed up so badly that a tank you need to maintain simply sits on its butt making farting noises and refuses to move, everybody is going to know. They need say nothing; you are already embarrassed.
The police, by contrast, deal with the floating, unwholesome minority of the population. Having to think like criminals, their minds tend to conform to the same expectation. There might be few armored vehicles, but it would be expensive to have the cops keep them running. Some private concern will do the job on the cheap.
In a way, the police act as if they were part of the infrastructure. They facilitate movement of people and so forth, making a paved road a safer and better running place. I occasionally have heard the phrase, “defund the police.” If that means anything, of course it effectively means disband the police. Our rich celebrity overlords and overladies would be just fine. Even now they are mured up behind stout walls with guards suffering from just a tad of excess eagerness to kill somebody. It is obvious that the poor will suffer the most in coin of murders and torched businesses.
And the middle class? Say no more, say no more. Instead of being idle, we’ll go back to lynch mobs. And you thought scrapping lynch mobs was progress, eh?
Fat men behind desks and a civil justice system.
There was an English comic song about some fine old ladies sitting around a table with a jug of liquid refreshment. The refrain was that they, “Pushed the jug about.” Well, our politicians may be old, but by and large I’d not call them fine. They, too, as it were, sit about and drink. But it as a far more costly, intoxicating and habit-forming swill they ingest, including power and ill-gotten wealth.
The arrangement appears to be optimized for securing deals in secret. I don’t know that this means that nothing happens for the public good, but it seems unlikely much does, and it seems impossible that these scum buckets take any chances doing something like explaining kinship and fertility that is not entirely understood by the masses.
So far as I can tell, the chance that the government will save us from ourselves is zero. No, maybe not quite. Biden has suggested that when you look at commercials, three out of five feature mixed race couples. This, of course, is irrelevant, but closer to being something of interest than the main stream.
Bottom line is that you can’t look for any help from government. They are totally preoccupied with snorting down power and wealth. Any help must lie elsewhere.
Once again, I give a shout for the book Wrong. Now in times gone by we would say, “Before the advent of penicillin, the average person going to the average doctor had a less than even chance of being better off from the encounter.” Following the evidence of the book, the average person going to the average expert in anything has a less than even chance of being better informed by the encounter.
Reading between the lines I perforce fantasized the director of some exalted department in, say, science beginning his day with a stack of papers, each of them being the last word on one of the many research projects ongoing in the department. He snatches the first paper and calls in the effective leader so they can look together at how the paper is going. If it does not seem to be going well, they figure out how the data can be tweaked and the risk of disgrace if the enhancement is discovered. He then dismisses the minion and grasps another paper. When he gets to a letter from me, he reasons that it is perfectly safe to ignore it; the decision from there does not take long. The circular file beckons.
But it’s worse than that. Toward the end, the author gives a list of characteristics of less trustworthy expert advice. There are four. Of them I am characterized by two. There is also a list of warnings not to pursue at all. There are seven; I score three. In short, my letter will have five red flags even for the wise and prudent who have read the book and use its guidelines to sift their work. It would be unrealistic to expect more thence than from the public servants. It is all very discouraging.
So having ruled out any rational ray of hope, it leaves us with the irrational. Consider a person finding a large python in a nursery where the responsible adult has stepped out. None of the hopes I have cited is going to do anything before babies start getting swallowed. With no rational plan, that person would do well to run screaming to the biggest crowd around. Thus, I must conclude with the only message I can think of: HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!