Once the fertility transition to controlled fertility occurs in a population, its fertility generally continues to decline until it is below replacement. The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

(Admit it, you’re hooked …)

Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be counter-productive.

Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown accustomed to.)

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

If you think this sounds simply horrific, this argument is not for you. You don’t need it. If, on the other hand, it conjures up a vision of terrestrial paradise — as it does for the magnetized migrants it draws in — then you need to follow it carefully. The most advanced models of neoreactionary social order on earth work like this (Hong Kong and Singapore), combining resilient ethnic traditions with super-dynamic techonomic performance, to produce an open yet self-protective, civilized, socially-tranquil, high-growth enclave of outstanding broad-spectrum functionality. The outcome, as Spandrell explains, is genetic incineration:

Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an increase in talent.”

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

The most hard-core capitalist response to this is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital is fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames. (I don’t expect this suggestion to be well-received in reactionary circles.)

What is especially pronounced about the IQ Shredder dilemma, which passes beyond the strongly-related considerations of Jim (most recently here, here, and here) and Sister Y (here, and here), is the first-order eugenics of these machines. They concentrate populations of peculiar genetic quality — and then partially sterilize them. It is the first-order (local) eugenics that makes the second-order (global) dysgenics so extraordinarily destructive.

So, that’s the problem starkly posed. Rather than reaching hastily for a glib solution, we should probably just stew in the cognitive excruciation for a while …

ADDED: Mangan helpfully abstracts the IQ Shredder concept beyond the specific Pac-Rim city-state example.

ADDED: Jim is on the case.

ADDED: Fertility false-consciousness.

ADDED: Hurlock in defense of cities.

100 years ago, Einstein, Bohr, Edison, H. Ford, Tesla, etc. were alive on the earth. Today, the earth’s population is about 4 times greater. There should be all of those great minds alive today times 4. Where are they?
A) Incentive structures prevent the truly brilliant from contributing to great epoch-making discoveries; or
B) The human race getting dumber on a genetic level; or
C) both
Any of these answers is quite frightening if you have a long term concern for the human race.

… or even if you have a long-term concern for anything other than accelerating idiocracy.

ADDED: If it looks as if all the “we’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit” comments are ignoring each other — the fault lies at this end. A wave of these remarks were released simultaneously from the securomaniac Outside in spam filter this morning. Apologies for the resulting impression of redundancy. — Admin.

There are things that cannot be changed, disasters that cannot be averted. It is best to focus our energy and resources on the battles that can be won. And to learn how to best live on to fight another day.

This is the true kernel of wisdom of the dark enlightenment. Not to take over the Cathedral and run it the way we want. That would never work. Rather, the kernel of wisdom is to survive the building climax of insanity in high places, and to preserve enough resources and wisdom to pick up the pieces, in the midst of an Idiocratic collapse.

For those still haunted by shreds of false hope, the post includes two excellent dysgenics links (here, and here).

(Thanks to Stirner for the prompt.)

Charlton:

The Industrial Revolution had the effect of allowing many billions of people who would have died to stay alive — this meant that genetic mutations which would have been eliminated by death during childhood instead accumulated. […] … on the one hand mutations have been accumulating, generation upon generation, with (approx) one or two deleterious mutations being added to each lineage with each generation; on the other hand, people who exhibited traits caused by deleterious mutations — such as lowered intelligence and impaired long-termist conscientiousness, or higher impulsivity, aggression and criminality — were positively selected, were genetically favoured — simply because their pathologies meant they were either unable or unwilling to use fertility-regulating technologies. […] In other words, accumulating mutations which damaged functionality actually amplify reproductive success under present conditions and for the past several generations.

At some point, the proportion of mutants — who are on average significantly damaged in functionality — will become so great that the Industrial Revolution will fall-apart, collapse; the 6-7 million excess population will be unsupportable; there will be a Giga-death (i.e. billions of deaths) scale of mortality over some period … […] A population of mutants whose intelligence has been dragged-down to a certain level will be much less functional than a population where selection has kept it in equilibrium at that level — the mutants will be carrying multiple pathologies in addition to their impaired intelligence. […]

And if the dying-off lasts a few generations, some weird mutant ‘scavengers’ may come to dominate in some places.

It’s possible that this passage isn’t drawing us into a Zack or “African Rabies” scenario of cannibalistic Zombie Apocalypse — just about — but the final paragraphs aren’t easy to interpret in any other way. If I was a Hollywood script writer, I’d be onto this speculative narrative like a carrion-eating mutant on a mountain of corpses.

If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.

A fascinating paper by Michael A. Woodley (via @intelligenceres) is able to be more comprehensively persuasive. Its second table describes the innovation rate per capita across  a sample of European countries falling by almost three-quarters over the period 1845-2005, and roughly halving from 1945-2005. (Great Stagnation anyone?)

It shouldn’t need adding that it’s impossible to read this often enough (it’s always there in my ‘Resources’ roll).

Two more, somewhat more distantly related links.

(We’re so screwed.)

ADDED: More on this topic at Charlton’s place.

ADDED: Gregory Cochran’s ‘outliers’ argument against this thesis has as its core: “In another application – if the average genetic IQ potential had decreased by a standard deviation since Victorian times, the number of individuals with the ability to develop new, difficult, and interesting results in higher mathematics would have crashed, bring such developments to a screeching halt. Of course that has not happened.”

I would have found it profoundly confidence-crushing if Cochran had simply said: the collapse of a complex trait on this scale, in this time-span, is inconsistent with everything we know about population genetics. The argument he relies upon instead, while far more elegant, is also much less persuasive (see the excellent comment thread at his site). As Dave Chamberlin notes, the parallel increase in assortative mating over the period in question means that assuming a stable standard distribution (variance) might not be safe. An increasingly heterogeneous population would to some degree shield its outliers from averaging effects.

Compared to the evidence mustered in support of the IQ collapse thesis, it is hard to be impressed by the rather impressionistic claim “Of course that has not happened.” Up to the mid-20th century — the era of Gödel, Von Neumann, and Turing — this might indeed have been irresistible, but today? Charlton’s counter-argument seems by no means risible. How sure are we that mathematics has not “collapsed” — at least down to the level of ‘normal’ (rather than ‘revolutionary’) science? What was the last mathematical break-through that mattered dazzlingly to the world?

ADDED: Mangan adds a significant complication.