Civilization depends utterly on men producing a massive surplus. And men used to willingly produce that surplus because part of it went to support their own children. Moreover fathers would hope to produce enough to leave a legacy for their children to inherit. Childless men have no such incentives. They see no need to produce a surplus or a legacy, and so no surplus or legacy is produced.
That is the Dirty Little Secret behind civilization. It’s also why civilization as we know it is terminally ill.
As a species, Homo sapiens is both hypersexaul and hypergamous. Popular wisdom likes to point at the hypersexual bonobo chimpanzee as our nearest “cultural” relative among the order of Primates and it’s true we share some behavioral characteristics. However, when the genetics of the situation are examined the picture becomes more nuanced.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of the “Mitochondrial Eve”, the matrilineal most common recent ancestor determined by examining mitochondrial DNA. Because such DNA is passed from mother to child without recombination, we can use it as a clock of sorts. What you may not know that along with the “Mitochondrial Eve”, there is also a “Y-chromosonal Adam.”
Y-chromosome is passed from father to son. It can be used as a clock like mitochondrial DNA. It is also the fastest changing portion of the human genome. More importantly, because it’s passed from father to son, it also can be used to measure a specie’s level of hypergamy. Simply put, the more fathers having sons the more basal lineages you can identify. It’s when these basal lineages are examined that the alleged linkage between our specie’s behavior and bonobo behavior falls apart.
Much like bonobos, humans are hypersexual. Unlike bonobos, however, human males have a poor chance of actually procreating. The bonobo genome has a large number of Y-chromosome basal lineages because large numbers of male get to procreate. The number of such basal lineages in the human genome, however, more closely resembles that of the gorilla genome.
Gorillas are markedly hypergamous. Approximately 20% of male gorillas manage to procreate compared with over 80% of females. Silverback males monopolize procreation with harems of females while blackbacks groom eat, play, and even engage in homosexual behavior. Newly dominant males even practice infanticide to remove their defeated predecessor’s bloodline from their newly won harems.
So, while we humans f~~~ like bonobos, our genome indicates a long history of human female hypergamy like that of gorillas. For most of our specie’s history, human males got to f~~~ but not procreate.
What does all this mean? Read this next sentence and then stop to think for a bit:
Human civilization is the accidental result of cultural “solutions” to female hypergamy.
Controlling female hypergamy, albeit only partially, through means like monogamy, religion, patriarchy, and all the other cultural mechanisms our feminist friends hate so much allowed those societies with such cultural mechanisms to harness the labor, assets, and productivity of men who would normally have been unable to procreate in a our species natural hypergamous society.
Finding a way to let more men have children – or, more accurately, believe they have children – meant that the more men now had “hostages to posterity”. More men now had a reason to care about the future and thus worked for the general good as a way of providing for their progeny’s future – or for the future of what they thought was their progeny. Societies whose cultures provided mechanisms which limited female hypergamy were able to harness the labor, assets, and productivity of previously non-reproducing men and thus out compete those societies which didn’t limit female hypergamy.
The benefits of limiting female hypergamy were profound.
In less than fifty centuries, this happy cultural accident took a nondescript species of hunter-gatherers from primitive stone tools to telescopes finding planets orbiting stars tens of light-years away.
In less than fifty years, this happy cultural accident has been abandoned by the most advanced societies on our planet.
As feminism allows female hypergamy greater and greater rein, more and more men no longer have any compelling reason to support human civilization. More and more men no longer have hostages to posterity. More and more no longer have any real reason to care.
And that’s why civilization as we know it is terminally ill.
That was genius. As the zen master would say “the lesson has been delivered”.
Jan Sobieski 3 years, 10 months ago.
