On a slight tangent (but ultimately, only a slight one) Nick Szabo’s epically brilliant essay ‘Shelling Out’ is remarkable — among other things — for its profound biorealist foundations. It makes an excellent theoretical preparation for Jim’s paper on ‘Natural Law and Natural Rights’, which also draws productively upon John Maynard Smith’s game-theoretic model of the ‘evolutionary stable strategy’ as the natural substrate of psychological and cultural deep-structure.

This is an important opportunity to put down some discriminatory markers. Can we turf group selectionist ideas out of NRx entirely, or do we have to fight about it?

It has been difficult to keep up with Henry Dampier recently, on feminist predictions, discount slaves, incoherent elites, brittanus americanus, globalization and war … and more, and more, and more (plus some genuinely useful advice). This blog is not among those immediately assuming the explanation lies in methamphetamine. Category theorizing. Yuray is digging up some authoritative support for the restoration of Latin. Meta-fragmentation. Hawk politics. No enemies to the left. Greetings! Unity (I don’t get it) — this seems to be related. The basic dissymmetry. Reliable nets.

Paleao-reaction goes mainstream.

Casual Marxism. Curricular Satanism. General Gruberism.

Malthusian mechanics (in pre-industrial England). Escaping the Malthusian trap. Evolution of culture, chain-letters, dark nets, and the (ancient) Egyptian state. Predation games. Killer apes. Genetic ontology. Shrinking brains. Social media hooks. Hmmmm.

Amerika on The Peripheral. Troll points. Auto-cannibalization watch (1, 2, 3). Sound convictions.

British decay in context. East Asia does it better, Japan notably excepted. Hold the fix. Peak delusions. McCloskey on Piketty.

Uses of racism. Race in your face. Villains of Ferguson. Last gasps. Amnesty and disillusionment.

Weekly golden oldies.

Social evolution is just a modern myth. No scientific theory exists about how the process is supposed to work. There’s been much empty chatter about memes — units of information or meaning that supposedly compete with one another in society. But there’s no mechanism for the selection of human concepts similar to that which Darwin believed operated among species and which later scientists showed at work among genes. Bad ideas like racism seem to hang around forever, while the silly idea of social evolution has shown an awesome power to mutate and survive.

(Gnon laughs.)

As archaic hominids were selectively adapted to increasingly complicated social relations, they were facialized. The human eye acquired its white sclera, to accentuate expressivity, making the direction of attention directly communicative. With the arrival of language, gesture and expression was augmented by articulate messages. ‘Face management’ became a demanding sink for cognitive functionality, in its aspects of performance and interpretation. A new, instinctive, ‘theory of mind’ had begun to believe in persons, and — almost certainly simultaneously — to identify itself as one. This was a new kind of skin, or sensitive surface. From psychological sociality, a model of the self as a social being, self-scrutinized as an object of attention by others of its kind — which is to say, an ego — was born.

The ‘inner person’ corresponds to nothing real. The person, or socially-performed self, is essentially superficial. It is irreducibly theatrical. It exists only as the mode of insertion into a multi-player game.

However we ultimately come to make sense of agency and fate, it will not be in terms commensurate with the person (the face) unless by stubborn self-delusion. Personal freedom is an act, a performance within a play. It has no real depth. All questions addressed to it are doomed to confusion. The real — free or fated — thing wears a face, as an allotted role within the world.

The inanity of Facebook, and also its extreme popularity, follows almost immediately from this arrangement. The writer must assume a face. The stupidity of these portraits, adorning book jackets and news columns, is indistinguishable from their social necessity. Each is already a little conspiracy theory, a misattribution of agency, based on the preposterous monkey thesis that words come out of the face. Don’t take words seriously until you can see the whites of their eyes — evaluate the quality of the smile that accompanies the thought. Thus, everything goes missing.

It is beyond the face — outside it — that occurrence is decided, the plays written. If we do not start there, we are not starting at all.

ADDED: “Everybody’s losing their faces …” (Admin note: I cannot endorse these methods.)