Thursday, April 26, 2018

Why Civilizations Die

Life arose on Earth around 3.8 billion years ago, although some evidence suggests that life was here closer to four and one quarter billion years ago. It's been a bit of a struggle ever since. A crude understanding of the way of life is the classic, cliched "kill or be killed", but that's inelegant and nihilistic in the way that we characterize petulant, moody, brooding teenagers as nihilists. They aren't really nihilists, you understand, we call them that because we don't really understand nihilism (because Nietzsche is, like, hard, man), and they call themselves nihilists because the word nihilism sounds pretty fucking metal.

A better way to characterize the way of life, and indeed the way of the universe, is that everything has a cost. People think of dollars and cents when they think of the cost of something, but what something costs really means what the requisite exchange is for an intended result. The man lifting weights in the gym is spending time at the gym, money for a membership, and calories and ATP expended during exercise for strength and (more often than not) improved aesthetics. The man who spends his evenings playing vidya instead of working out is exchanging his hours of leisurely (but pointless) stimulation at the cost of doing practically anything else.

In a more natural setting, the eternal war between predator and prey comes at a cost to one or the other's life. For the predator to eat, it must take the life of it's prey. For the prey to survive, the predator must expend precious energy on a fruitless hunt, thereby risking starvation. This is the story of life from the beginning to the present, and beyond. The struggle is an immutable, omnipresent fact of life. It has always been so, and as such, we should expect life to be finely tuned to the need to struggle. Life and death are balanced by the war between predator and prey. While the brutality of failure startles us - either through the agony of being consumed, or the ignoble end through starvation - struggle is not without hope. There is no hope of reprieve from the struggle, other than through death. But there is hope in that, over time, the better will win out over the worst, and the good will accumulate while the bad is washed away.

The accumulation of the better and the erasure of the worse is the very condensed version of how we got from simple single celled organisms to the complex civilization of today. Obviously, this version of the story is a little misleading, as there were quite a few ups and downs along the way, but the general trend of life has been a move from less complexity and less organization towards greater complexity and greater organization. And, again, the point must be stressed that getting from there to here cost something - the countless creatures that were eaten or starved or perished in some cataclysm or unfortunate accident.

This is all well and fine, but at this point all I am doing is reiterating, in a very puffed up fashion, the sort of narrative that you'd find in a middle school zoology textbook. How do we know that life is finely tuned to struggle? Besides going into the wild and observing that animals tend to eat one another, we can go beyond base observations and examine what happens when the opposite conditions are met. What happens to a population that isn't forced to struggle?

Thankfully, this question is not just an idle hypothetical. In the 1960's an ethologist named John B. Calhoun embarked on a series of experiments using lab mice that culminated in the famous (but widely misunderstood) mouse utopia experiment. You can read a scan of Calhoun's paper here. I strongly suggest that you do so.

Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment, naturally, involved observing mice in a literal mouse utopia. A colony of mice was introduced to a controlled environment with unlimited access to food and water, zero risk of predation or natural cataclysm, and thanks to regular testing for the presence of harmful pathogens and periodic cleaning of the mouse enclosure, mitigated risk of disease. For the first year, the mouse utopia expanded rapidly. Between the first year and day 600, the birthrate declined as the mice began displaying increasingly aberrant behavior. After day 600, no more birthed mice survived, and the aberrant behavior reached its crescendo with a complete abandonment of natural behaviors as the mice became withdrawn and solitary. From there the mouse colony collapsed into extinction, with only 27 mice surviving to the close of the experiment. For reference, at it's peak, the mouse colony contained over 2000 individuals.

Calhoun, incorrectly I believe, postulated that the cause of the decline of his mouse utopia was a "behavioral sink", where aberrant behavior formed as a result of all space and roles being filled with no outside release to vent the excess. The problem, I noticed, with this line of reasoning is that the mouse colony never ran out of space. At it's peak, the colony still had room for almost double the population. The 2200 mice that existed seems an arbitrary point of collapse if we are to accept that all 'social roles' being filled was the cause of the colony's decline. Why 2200? Why not 2300? Why not 1000? Why not the 3900 that the colony could, in theory, accommodate?

The answer, I've concluded, doesn't have to do with numbers, but is rather drawn out from the aberrant behavior displayed during the decline of the colony and the natural mating habits of animals. First, copying directly from Calhoun's Wikipedia article for convenience, the following are the irregular behaviors Calhoun observed in his mice:
"...between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against.
After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed."
Does any of this sound familiar?

The next important piece of evidence, which Calhoun evidently did not consider, is why animals breed the way that they do. Of course rabbits fuck (and therefore, reproduce) like bunnies, everyone knows that, but the why actually has to do with... resource availability. Animals favor one of two selection patterns, r or K, a theory (really, less a theory than a simplified categorization of observed behavior) more or less given new life by a Dissident Rightist who calls himself Anonymous Conservative, to whom I at least owe the courtesy of a link.

The two strategies, basically, are quality versus quantity. A population of r-strategists favors quantity, like rabbits and mice. The characteristics of r-strategists with regards to mating are promiscuity, polygamy, low parental investment, rapid sexual maturity, and low tribal loyalty. These characteristics are important for a successful r-strategist because r-strategists inhabit an environment of resource plenty. In order to spread it's genes as effectively and as efficiently as possible, an r-strategist quite literally fucks like a bunny, because investing in a life-long mate, rearing your young, or fighting over (nigh infinite) resources means that your competitor who wastes zero energy on any of those things while burning all of his calories in the pursuit of making more of himself has a genetic advantage over you in the long run. If you have not deduced this already, r-strategists are exclusively herbivores, although herbivores are not exclusively r-strategists (elephants being an obvious example of an herbivore that doesn't clearly fit the r-strategy profile, off the top of my head). The herbivore thing will be a little funny later. In a dark sort of way.

Anyways.

K-strategists, being quality, are the opposites, naturally. A population of k-strategists favors quality, like the wolf. The characteristics of K-strategists with regards to mating are low promiscuity, monogamy, high parental investment, delayed sexual maturity and high tribal loyalty. These characteristics are important for a successful K-strategist because K-strategists inhabit an environment of resource scarcity. Where the r-strategist is reproductively advantaged in an environment of extreme plenty by promiscuity and extreme fecundity, the scarcity of calories available to harvest relative to the calories a K-strategist must expend in the acquisition ultimately mean that promiscuity and extreme fecundity are simply not survivable options. However much a wolf might want to mate with every female he encounters, his young will never survive - and therefore his genes will not pass on - if great care is not taken in rearing of the young. Hence the opposite traits from r-selection manifest in large predatory mammals: Tribalism, monogamy, paternalism, delayed maturity, and - for lack of a better word - chastity.

This all basically boils down to a ratio I referred to in the paragraph above: Calories available for consumption compared to the calories burned acquiring said calories. In simpler, individual terms, we use this rough approximation to gain or lose weight, depending on what your goals are (or aren't - the most grotesque fatbodies I know don't seem to think all that much beyond the reflexive action of shoveling food down their gullets). A 1:1 ratio is stasis, 1:>1 is surplus and >1:1 is starvation. A pack of wolves (that survives to reproduce over a given time period) is probably closer to 1:1 without descending into starvation, while a selected population of rabbits is far more heavily skewed into the 1:>1 range.

What I believe John Calhoun's experiment actually demonstrated wasn't a behavioral sink. I also don't believe his experiment simply showed the consequences of simply introducing an r-selection population to an environment free from culling. If this were the case, we should have seen a population continue to expand exponentially until all available space was occupied. What the rise and then fall of the population seems to show us is that - surprise - an environment does indeed shape a population. In this case, Calhoun took natural features and benefits the average mouse might expect to find in the wild - namely an abundance of calories for cheap - and removed the natural hazards and revealed that the selection strategy will eventually produce and extremely warped population that displays aberrant behavior. In a sense, the 'individualism' Calhoun observed at the end of the mouse colony is r-selection taken to it's superlative form.

Isn't that curious? But what does that have to do with why a civilization dies?

Near the end of the British Empire, a soldier by the name of John Glubb was stationed in Outremer - the British holdings in the Middle East - where he sated his soldierly boredom by voraciously reading the ancient texts of the old Islamic scholars. Later in life he wrote a fascinating essay called The Fate of Empires, which I strongly suggest you read as well. The Fate of Empires is short enough that I need not explain the entire essay to you - really, go read it. The most important takeaway from the essay, in relation to this one, is that civilizations follow similar life cycles. First comes the outbreak, colonization or conquest by the strong and adventurous. After establishment and a period of growth, a mercantile class arises, which generates wealth. Wealth eventually begets great public works, and then intellectualism, as duty, industriousness, strength, optimism, and virtue fade. In their place, selfishness, sloth, weakness, pessimism and corruption take root. Soon there after, the civilization dies - no longer capable of maintaining itself, it collapses under it's own weight. Glubb noticed that the tipping point in all great civilizations was the onset of great wealth, but he could not explain why.

Some specific, curious developments that Glubb linked between the downfall eras of the great civilizations he examined included cosmopolitanism and an increase in the presence of foreigners, the loss of martial and religious traditions, the liberation of women from traditional roles, the primacy of higher education, and the growth of state welfare and benefits reserved for the underclass.

If you haven't already caught on to what my argument implies, allow me to hit you over the head with it: The reasons civilizations die is because they prosper themselves to death. We've demonstrated this phenomenon under laboratory conditions, we've experienced it through the many iterations of the civilizational life-cycle, and it's happening to us right now.

Why do you think that is is now, at the apex of Western prosperity following World War II, that this exists?
Or this?
Or this?
Or this?
Or this?

Go to any major city across the United States and the freakish signs of this sort of dis-ease will smack you in the face with the tsk-tsking noise constantly coming out of the mouths of hipster urbanites with a chip on their shoulder for their ruralite cousins and an unrelenting, unwarranted sense of self-importance. The garish hair dye, the obtuse politics, the ugly mode of dress, lumpy bodies, poor aesthetics, weak arms and necks and backs... these aren't mere signs of a culture swirling the drain, hijacked by a merciless cabal of coin-clutchers. These are the outward manifestations of a deeply sick population. This sickness is caused, essentially, by gains at no cost. The prosperity we live in is like nothing that has ever existed in all of history - ever. All the way back to the primordial era of proto-cellular life. At no point was life ever conditioned to live in such absolute plenty. We're living longer, fewer of us die at birth, giving birth, during our childhood, or through the violence of war and conquest. Our lives are mostly sedentary, food is so easily accessible that our underclass is grotesquely fat. Jobs less and less involve direct labor, most of us sit at desks or in chairs, talking on phones or typing on computers. We weren't built to live like this. And given the clear indications of decline, it appears that nature isn't too keen on letting us live like this for a whole lot longer. Someday, the bottom will drop out on us. The imbalance between naturally occurring hierarchies will bring this whole thing toppling to the ground, and the survivors will sit in the wreckage, dazed, confused and covered in ash. It may happen as soon as 10 years from today, or 100, but whatever date it will look like 410 all over again.

As an aside, the biological reality of unaccounted prosperity equals aberrant behavior conveniently answers the question of why former vassal-states of the U.S.S.R. seem immunized to the call to degeneracy, while their Western neighbors are completely enthralled by hedonistic pursuits. Material prosperity is, ultimately, more toxic than communism.

Go figure.

Any system that arises out of those ashes (our out of the clay that formed the West, remolded) must take into account the toxicity of accumulated gains without paying the costs. This is why I never really enjoyed or supported Richard Spencer's policy ideas. I met Spencer once, at a clandestine meeting near my hometown [if you're reading this, I asked you if BAP was your Chad-Nationalist alter-ego], and while he was a likable fellow in his own right, I immediately realized that Spencer's policies were designed to entice the shit-lib urbanite crowd. This is a mistake. Supposing, for a moment, that a significant portion of shitty White urbanites can be enticed into a racial awakening by baiting them with "you can have socialism! but only if you let go of darky", that would win one battle while leaving us desperately weakened in the face of our most important obstacle: The decline in quality of our own people. So far as I am concerned, the genetic shredding urban sprawl is a boon to we who wish to make it through the dark of this night. The worst of us migrate to the cities, where our desire (and eventually capability) to reproduce fades under a deluge of alcohol, hedonism, swelling fat cells, and cats. Good riddance.

This also explains why Feudalism, however unrefined it may otherwise be, provided the momentum for the greatest technological advancement in human history. One thousand years of segregating the bad from the good (usually vis-a-vis the gibbet) provided us with the intellectual and social fuel to get us to the moon. We are on the downward side of that rise, but with we catch, or really, make, a new wave, then perhaps we really will be able to claim the stars as our birthright.

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