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Jan. 1, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:03:58
Pandemic!

The Corona Virus outbreak shows no signs of slowing down. And the world is on edge. Is this just a regional epidemic that has sparked pandaemonium through social media? Or might this be The Big One—an unstoppable killer, spread through the pathways of globalization, that will devastate nations and bring modern medicine to its knees? We discuss. Taking a step back, the panel examines pandemics throughout history. Looked at through a cruel, unfeeling lens, might there be some positive, eugenic silver linings to the devastation? We go there. Special guests: Keith Woods and Edward Dutton This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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It's Saturday, February 1st, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
Joining me today are Irishman Keith Woods and the ever-inseparable Edward Dutton.
Top issue, pandemic.
The coronavirus outbreak shows no signs of slowing down, and the world is on edge.
Is this just a regional epidemic that has sparked pandemonium through social media?
Or might this be the big one?
An unstoppable killer spread through the pathways of globalization that will devastate nations and bring modern medicine to its knees?
We discuss.
Taking a step back, the panel examines pandemics throughout history.
Looked at through a cruel, unfeeling lens, might there be some positive, eugenic silver linings to the devastation?
We go there.
All right, Keith.
Well, let's first talk about the most important question related to this matter.
There are no reports of coronavirus in Ireland, so I presume the hysteria has not affected your bat-eating penchant.
Yeah, no, well, you know, as long as it doesn't affect the potatoes, you know, we're all right.
I mean, I know they say...
That's good point with potatoes.
Well, yeah, I bet, you know, I mean, one of the arguments for diversity is, you know, the recipes, and I'm quite looking forward to all the splices we're going to get, you know, bat and Irish stew, you know, once we get these great cultures coming together, so...
Sounds delicious.
You probably wouldn't even know it's bat, you know?
Oh, no, how could you really...
Tell the difference between bat and Irish cooking.
Well, I would say perhaps the most appalling cuisine I've had is snail.
I've had escargot, but these snails are cooked, steamed, and I have to say that I love to eat snails.
It's one of my favorite appetizers when I'm at a...
You know, hoity-toity restaurants.
So who am I to judge bat eating?
I guess perhaps we are to judge.
The Chinese do, or I think particularly regions of China, just like to eat everything.
My Twitter feed has been inundated with videos of people eating raw, maybe even alive animals that I can't identify.
And this is quite something.
There's a quote by Prince Philip.
Prince Philip said, if it has four legs and it isn't a chair, or if it swims and it isn't a submarine, or if it flies and it isn't a plane, the Cantonese will eat it.
Yes, it is something.
But yes, we're going to talk about the coronavirus, and I think we'll touch upon just some of the news.
I think it's more important to take a couple steps back and talk about, A, just the hysteria that can spread extremely quickly, but then also the kind of way in which a pandemic or even the idea of a pandemic is a kind of dark side of globalization.
And also whether...
And I guess I'm getting quite dark here.
We have a global population built on effectively dysgenic breeding, and we have very low child mortality rates.
And overpopulation and just the degeneration of the population is a serious issue.
Must be part of the context that we think about this, you know, global pandemic virus.
Anyway, let's start off with the just newsy aspects, you know, and then kind of jump into deeper questions.
So as of Monday, reportedly 80 people have died, but the infection is much higher.
Again, I'm taking these from mainstream sources.
New York Times, Wikipedia, the infection is approaching 3,000.
So that would be a fairly low mortality rate.
But the infection rate, you know, again, this is the reported infection rate.
Many people have suggested that the information is being suppressed and so on.
But the reported infection rate is climbing at a, you could say, parabolic rate.
It is not increasing in a linear fashion.
It is parabolically increasing.
diseases, the way of thinking about them is this basic reproduction number, which is that if you have it, how many people are going to be affected?
and that means that the virus will just eventually die out.
If you have infection rates in that...
You know, above one, especially if it's something like four or eight, which is quite high, you are going to start to get exponential spreading.
It will breed like rabbits.
It will double and double and double, and it's doubling the doubling, compounding the problem, and it can be a terrible thing.
So the basic reproduction number of this virus seems to be between 1.4 and 3.8, which means that...
Again, this is a mainstream report.
guess we can plausibly assume that it's an under estimation so this means that the virus will continue now we've seen all this before we can remember avian flu and SARS and a couple of other pandemic fears that made
I would say at some point, this actually is...
I think we should put it all in context.
I mean, remember, it was between 60,000 and 80,000 people died of influenza in the United States last year.
That actually is a shocking number.
If there were an 80,000 death catastrophe, we would never hear the end of it.
It would be something that would be blasted all over the media.
But now it's something that's just kind of forgotten because it's assumed.
It's like car accidents and so on.
So these kinds of things, even in their much more benign, mundane forms, can actually have a catastrophic effect.
Keith, I'll start with you first.
We've seen this, as I've mentioned earlier, we've seen these kinds of things before, and they've resulted in deaths and hysteria, but then they've ultimately faded and kind of left the news cycle after a month or two.
What do you think is going to happen with the coronavirus?
And also...
Is hysteria justified in the sense, not necessarily that this will be the big one, but that these kinds of things have occurred throughout world history and will occur again?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard to know at this stage how we see if people are taking it seriously enough or not serious enough.
But, you know, it is one of those things that...
As advanced as we're getting technologically, there's still things we can't really protect ourselves against, and there's things that the system can't really deal with.
I mean, there's this problem now that's a direct result of globalization, like antibiotic-resistant diseases, and that's directly due to the spread of first-world medicine to third-world countries.
But more generally, like...
Breeding superviruses, in a way, because...
Either the patient is not taking the full term of the medication and so they're kind of killing off the weak virus and the strong survive and thus they're evolving into stronger viruses.
Or there is that tiny percentage that will survive the full term of the medication and the viruses are going stronger.
It's almost a kind of pendulum effect with the spread of medicine where you can We can resist the small-level diseases, but we almost create more intense ones.
Yeah, and I mean, one of the other things that gets discussed a lot, probably more on the left, is the impact of climate change and how we're going to see all these catastrophes.
Whatever you think about climate change, there's definitely historical precedent for these kind of pandemics coinciding with big...
Climactic changes.
I mean, like, you know, the sort of golden age or when the Roman Empire really came to its pinnacle was during an ideal climate period.
They called it the Roman Climate Optimum, which was like 200 BC to 150 AD.
And then in 150 AD, when you get kind of an interim period, that's the start of the Antonine Plague.
And that's probably smallpox now looking back at it.
But that's a time when Marcus Aurelius is in power.
It may have actually been what killed Marcus Aurelius.
It killed his co-emperor.
But that was a time of huge social change in the Roman Empire that was brought about by this pandemic that was in turn brought about by...
Climate change.
And I've been reading some interesting stuff on that.
And some of the more recent work done on this, you know, like the fall of Rome is something that's been theorised a lot.
I think there was a German classist that put together like over 200 reasons that have been invented for the fall of Rome.
But one thing we have available now that someone like Gibbon didn't have available is this large record of evidence now we have about the climate from that period.
Like, you can actually see from We're starting to discover that these plagues had probably a fair greater impact than we would have thought.
Gibbon did put down one of the reasons for the fall of Rome being that it spread itself too thin.
But obviously, if you lose half your population, That's probably happened in about 550 AD with the Justinian Plague, which was another, that probably was a bubonic plague, and that followed, again, the start of a mini ice age that was caused by volcanic activity.
But one of the interesting effects, you know, this gets to the social effects that these things have throughout history that are often maybe overlooked, is...
I've written some stuff about the rise of Christianity because the start of the 3rd century was an especially significant time.
Around 180 AD, I think, was when Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations.
And that was a time when Rome was under severe pressure in terms of losing their agricultural base, losing soldiers to this, because it's especially spread among soldiers due to conditions.
But one of the things this caused was a massive, massive rise in Christianity.
Because some of the recent work done on it, you know, there was this practice of exposure by Romans, where they left children to the elements, and it was often thought that this was a form of birth control, basically.
We've discovered recently that there was actually common herbal forms of birth control that would have been popular.
And so this wasn't done for family planning.
It was done for other reasons, like, you know, the kids having deformities or whatever.
But probably one of the most common reasons was that they were born girls.
And someone compiled a lot of verses by various Roman poets where they talk about this practice as being common.
There was a particular quote from a Roman poet that even the rich families get rid of the girls and even the poor families keep the boys and one of the things was that there was a dowry for girls that put an economic pressure on poor families especially but this wasn't practiced among Christians and so one of the things that was theorized was when there was this huge falling off of population that it wasn't so much that Christians were affected less so they probably were due to You know,
their own forms of charity within their community and stronger social bonds.
But actually, they were able to rebound far, far better than the pagans because...
You know, there was a much greater stress because there was less Roman women to start with, but then they also had to have more children to make up for, you know, the exposures.
Whereas Christians had a much more even balance.
And also, it was a time when there was like a 40% conversion rate to Christianity.
So most converts were tended to be younger.
So not only did they have an even balance between men and women, but they had a fair younger population, and they had this kind of stronger social solidarity with the charity that was done in this time.
So it is interesting to look at the social effects these things have.
I mean, you look at the meditations, and you read that, and it's much different from the kind of paganism that would have come before Marcus Aurelius.
It's much more...
I guess it's much more kind of a...
Yeah, well, Stoic.
And I mean, then even you look at, you know, following the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and you have, like, the cloud of unknown, which is this great mystical text that's much closer to kind of Eastern spiritualities than traditional Christianity.
So, I mean, yeah, I guess the conclusion of all this is, you know, we have a much better idea now of how these things impacted world history, and it seems like they were much more causative than we would have thought.
Yeah, I could see similar things happening today.
People gazing into the abyss of global catastrophe and moving away from the kind of happy consumerist liberalism and reverting back to a...
I think there are actually strong trends in that direction now, you know, anyway, regardless of whatever happens to coronavirus.
Ed, what do you think about this subject of...
You know, pandemics in global history and their effects on the population and also their effects on religiousness and kind of world outlook.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
It's a very interesting point that Keith made that I pick up on about why it's fascinating that it would have caused the plagues in Rome would have caused less damage to Christians.
It also makes sense in terms of intelligence.
Because intelligence would have, the people that were converting to Christianity tended to be middle class.
There's this sort of urban myth that they were working class and they were poor.
It's not true.
And analysis even of the kind of names they had indicates that these people tended to be from the middle class of society.
Being a middle class is associated with intelligence, and intelligence would be associated with making plans to avoid plagues.
It would be associated with having money, which would allow you to avoid these problems as well.
intelligence is also associated with the low level of mutational load and if you have a low level of mutational load in the brain then you're going to have it probably in the body as well and So it completely makes sense that this would have elevated the demographics of Christians.
And so that makes sense.
But more broadly, in terms of these plagues, yeah, there is a sense in which they make key changes.
One is to intelligence, and the other is to religiousness.
So in terms of intelligence, obviously, yeah, a better immune system if you're more intelligent.
You're more able to plan for the future.
You're more able to get away from the situation.
You're more able to successfully pursue your plans.
And so plagues will tend to elevate intelligence.
And this is quite clear if you look at the Black Death.
It does elevate, it's very clear that it elevates intelligence, because 100 years after the Black Death, you have the Renaissance, and the Renaissance is a manifestation of a Europe that has become much more intelligent.
The other thing it does...
Can I jump in real quick?
I don't want to interrupt your flow, but there is a...
A theory about the Black Death and just the creation of the middle class itself from a purely economics point of view in the sense that you had a lower supply of labor and therefore higher prices of labor.
And just this general kind of upward push that generated A more urban middle class, just because, you know, your labor was worth more after this catastrophe.
And that this is actually a tremendous, you know, tremendously important creation of the modern world, yet, you know, we don't generally like to think of, you know, die-offs, inventing liberalism and middle class lifestyle.
You know, for the catastrophe, something wonderful like that.
Yes, the Black Death kill, it's true, well, I don't know, it depends on how, the middle class people are, it's a double-edged sword, because they're often attracted to left wing.
That's what I was about to say.
We couldn't be driving SUVs without the dinosaurs, I mean, it's all...
Well, yes, but one thing, the mortality rate in England of the Black Death was at least 40%, but the mortality rate among the, what's called the lower sort, so the free labourers and the serfs, was, 80%.
Wow.
Because, of course, they were poorer, and so it was only those that had, for random genetic reasons or just through nepotism working against them, who had been kept down in that class, in the lower class, who suddenly found that their labour was worth an enormous amount of money.
And so, yes, it certainly had this kind of interesting effect.
But the other effect, I think, was the elevation of religiousness.
So what religiousness is...
There was actually an interesting study on this in terms of the pacification of Europe, The issue of execution.
And it was found that across the medieval period, we executed about 2% of the male population every generation.
Because all felonies carried the death penalty.
And that 2% would have been young, and would have been male, and would seemingly have been at the bottom of society.
And there's records to indicate that.
And so obviously, intelligence, the heritage of intelligence is about 0.8.
Low intelligence is associated with criminality, and the heritability of personality traits is at least 0.5, and it's low conscientiousness and low agreeableness that are associated with criminality.
So we're removing from the population, due to this execution, this system of widespread execution, every generation, stupid, psychopathic men who are young.
And so, of course, they're not passing on their genes.
And so this is going to act to pacify Europe, to change the personality of Europe.
I argued in a paper, we traced across time the extent of people dedicating themselves to religion to the extent of becoming monks or nuns, and we show that it increases across the medieval period quite steadily.
There's this increase, which would be consistent when it's becoming more religious.
Now, religion is about 0.4 heritable, and it's associated with precisely these personality traits that would predict low criminality.
It's associated with conscientiousness, i.e.
impulse control, rule following, and it's associated with agreeableness, i.e.
altruism and empathy for various reasons.
But those associations are there.
So what we demonstrated was that it was certainly the case that we were becoming more religious across the medieval period.
Now, to the extent what the plague would have done, then, is not only would it have selected...
For intelligence, it would have selected for religiousness indirectly, because religious people being higher in conscientiousness and higher in agreeableness would be of higher socioeconomic status than the more psychopathic people, and they would also be more able, being higher in conscientiousness, to make plans and alliances and whatever to get out of the situation.
So it seems that the place did those two things.
It elevated intelligence substantially, so you get the Renaissance, but it also elevated religiousness, and consequently you get the Reformation.
And it creates general social chaos, and one of the things at the environmental level that's associated with religiousness is chaos, is a feeling of insecurity and uncertainty.
So then you get this massive religious revival under John Wycliffe and people like this, and it continues.
And it seems that we were selecting for religiousness right up until the Industrial Revolution.
And also for intelligence.
And then, of course, Darwinian conditions are relaxed.
So, yeah, I think it's probably that was what was going on in ancient times.
It's what's going on more recently.
And if there was a complete breakdown and Darwinian select because of this coronavirus, which is unlikely, let's face it, but anyway, then I would suspect that those two things would be under selection pressure once more.
We definitely become more religious across the medieval period.
And we proved this.
The proxy we used in our study was the percentage of the population that are joining monasteries and things.
And it goes up across the medieval period and then starts to go down.
And what seems to be happening is that we're just becoming more religious because we're selecting for religiousness because religious people breed.
Religiousness is associated with...
In general factor of personality, it's associated with high social status in these societies.
So religious people pass on their G. It's associated with conscientiousness, which gives you high status, and high status is what predicts breeding.
And so religious people seem to breed.
And so we become more religious.
And it's probable that the Black Death would have massively selected in favour of religiousness, because what would have predicted surviving it would have been high impulse control, the ability to cooperate with other people.
And those things are associated with religiousness, which would have elevated religiousness massively, and intelligence as well.
It would have selected for intelligence, which would explain why, a hundred years later, you see both the Renaissance, i.e.
a function of the high intelligence, and the Reformation, i.e.
a function of the high religiousness.
But anyway, those are my thoughts on what Keith was saying.
Just to put a point on this matter, one of the narratives in the mainstream media with global warming is, it kind of reminds me of the old joke of, the world ends, this is a New York Times headline, the world ends women and minorities most affected.
And this notion that, obviously it's picking a victim, but the basic narrative is that global warming, A, is terrible, And B, it's going to actually affect the third world more in the sense of rising water levels.
And yes, I think in the words of Andrew Yang, you've got to get your $1,000 a month and run to high ground.
But to the contrary, at least...
Taking a historical global view on it, warmer climates are going to positively affect the third world.
It's simply easier to survive when it's warmer, as simple as that.
And we've seen that.
I mean, northern populations are not growing.
They're stagnating or declining.
Africa is exploding, sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
So this notion, you know, the general, I mean, whether, you know...
We accept general global warming trends.
This is something that is very positive for the third world.
And a global cooling would result in much harsher living for lower IQ people.
That's right.
Well, there's the mediating factor of healthcare and whatever, but as we select against intelligence, as we know, these things are, I think, a temporary thing that are going to decline.
And if there were a massive pandemic of the kind that...
People like to speculate on the possibility of, then yeah, undoubtedly, the people that it's going to affect will be people who can't access healthcare, of course, which is the third world, but also the mutants within the first world, such as trans, you know, transsexuals and left-wing people and whatever, will affect them, because they have poorer genetic health.
It's just a fact.
So they'll be more likely to die.
They have poorer immune systems.
Literally, they have poorer immune systems.
There are studies on this.
Religious people have better immune systems than atheists, with actual studies on that.
So, yeah, so I think it's not necessarily an entirely bad thing from that perspective.
Everyone on this podcast will perish.
A white hill.
Yeah, we'll be all right.
We'll be all right.
I'm no concern about it.
But I broadly agree with Keith on what I think is some very interesting points, but I think I just enjoy putting it back into the science.
I think we can do that with the collapse, the rise and fall, and the climate, and we can do it with the religion and what he said about the...
But to get more arty-farty, don't you think that the obsession with the global pandemic, even in what you're saying, Ed, it does express a certain religious sentiment that some kind of omnipotent being will kind of wipe out?
People that we don't like or us because we've kind of sinned and we, in a way, deserve it.
Now, I don't necessarily dispute what you're saying.
I think everything you're saying makes logical sense.
But this notion that, you know, the low IQ and mutant transsexuals will not survive, there does seem to be a kind of comeuppance, you know, sentiment involved in all of that.
I know that you're interested in the data.
And if the data happens to me, I would know.
But also, in what Keith was saying before, in the sense of the human being has to deal with this in some way.
I caught the coronavirus virus, you could say.
I became really obsessed with this.
I actually rented the...
I rented this movie called Contagion It's kind of
interesting, again, on this kind of backside of globalization where you have a bunch of You know, competent people, but they're ultimately all helpless.
And the people who die, or at least are destroyed by this virus in some kind of personal way, kind of had it coming.
There's some sin that they're being punished for.
And the patient one of this is actually an obnoxious white woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow in an effort.
Perfect casting.
Who is just kind of this silly, you know, corporate female going to China and going to casinos and picking up the virus from a chef.
And then she's actually cheating on her husband, her poor husband, who doesn't.
The cuck does not die.
He survives and he takes care of his daughter.
But there is at least implied in the film a kind of...
Comeuppance for this woman.
That you can't have it all and you can't just be this silly person flying all over the globe doing corporate nonsense and not be punished for it.
And everyone in the film...
It kind of has either a great or small sin that brings them down.
And I think this film, which was directed by Steven Sonnenberg, it was written for high-AQ white liberals, like, no question.
They're the only people who liked this movie.
Even among them, the most rational, like, least religious, etc., even among them, there is this kind of religious instinct for punishment on a global scale.
And I think in a way, this is the kind of flip side of global secularism in the sense that, I mean, I'm just going to speak frankly.
We're all kind of fascinated by this, and at some dark level, we actually kind of want it.
We have a death instinct that we're fascinated, you know, it's like, oh, look, there's been more infections, more people have died.
It expresses something about our psychology that we almost want this end times to occur.
Well, yes.
I don't know who...
Keith, do you want...
I mean, I've got quite a lot of things on it.
Yeah, well, no, I just say, yeah, I noticed that trend.
You do get that a lot in the right, especially these, like, collapsical people that, like, you know, they don't...
very pessimistic about Everton and they don't want to get involved in the sort of power process of politics, but they have this It's going to wipe out all the problems that they have overnight because everyone in the cities is going to die and in the rural communities it's going to be ethnically homogenous You know,
non-whites live in cities and, you know, it's like all their problems are going to be solved kind of overnight with this one collapse.
But I just find that...
By a vengeful god, basically.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, god or nature, you know, deus div natura, like Spinoza.
But I just find it's like, you know, those people tend to be very passive because...
Everything comes back to, you know, well, nature is going to return to harmony and fix all this anyway.
But, I mean, I said it on the last show I was on with you guys that, like, it's unbelievable how many people, like, whether they're left or right, everyone seems to believe that there's going to be some catastrophic collapse in the next, you know, in this century.
I just find it incredible how widespread this.
At a time when we have such technological progress and our elites tell us we've never had it so good and Steven Pinker is writing The Better Angels of Our Nature saying that this is the best time ever to be alive.
Everyone you speak to thinks there's going to be a full-scale apocalypse within a few decades.
I do think it's interesting, the contrast there.
And there have been studies that people tend to...
that there is a kind of wisdom of crowds in this.
When people...
People have this ability.
We have this ability of reading signals, an adaptive thing, or reading subtle signals in all kinds of ways of social interaction.
We have the ability to read these things, and that's one of the reasons why pessimism will spread around a population, and then optimism will spread around a population.
It's one of the reasons why you get collapses on the stock market or whatever.
People have this sort of instinct, and it's a correct instinct often, of how other people are going to behave.
And so if we do think there's going to be an apocalyptic collapse, or there's going to be...
I mean, the negative, the thought is there's going to be serious violence in the next 10 years, let's say.
And that's consistent with serious research by super forecasters that have been like this guy, this guy Turkin, Pete Turkin.
That's precisely what is predicted to happen.
2020 is going to be the most appallingly violent decade.
Yeah, starting out with a bang.
Yeah, I just threw this in there.
I don't know if I've mentioned this on a podcast that you two have been on, but I've long been fascinated by this stock market forecaster named Robert Prechter.
And he talks about this.
He has a social mood hypothesis, which is basically that many people think that the stock market causes depression in society.
So the economy and the stock market will crash and then people get depressed.
And he actually takes he thinks the causality is reverse news.
This is kind of funny to say news does not create stock market volatility.
Stock market volatility creates the news and stock market volatility is itself just an expression of social mood and pessimism, which is periodic and predictable.
I'm not...
Positive, I buy into it wholly, but it is actually interesting.
He traces this through popular culture.
Things like the return and revitalization of the horror movie genre usually precedes a stock market crash.
Popular music is actually very interesting.
You go from very upbeat bebop, et cetera, to the kind of 1970s of this soft rock and ballads and so on.
And then you end up in punk music, which is kind of like the ultimate expression of nihilism, you know, banging away a good car and screaming.
And then that kind of flips over and you get pop music again.
That's very interesting.
What's his name?
Robert Prechter.
The most famous one and the most kind of obvious one is the miniskirt.
And so, basically, as times get better and people are more euphoric, and again, remember, euphoria can be just as dangerous, if not more, than pessimism.
But as things get euphoric, basically, the skirts get higher and sexier, and they end up being the unbelievable miniskirt, effectively, you're wearing a bikini.
And then, basically, by the 1970s, the popularity was the maxi skirt.
That is a skirt that was literally dragging on the ground.
And men's lapels and tie widths.
I know this sounds totally stupid, but it's not.
It doesn't sound stupid.
It sounds stupid to a lot of people.
For it to be a good theory, it should make predictions at every level.
There shouldn't be all these ad hoc exceptions where you can say, oh, well, accept those lapels and accept that skirt.
But the lapel size, if you look at photos from the 1930s, the classic thing is a double-breasted suit and this massive lapel that goes to your shoulders.
Then if you go to the mid-1960s, so peak euphoria, peak stock, We had tiny little thin lapels and tiny little ties.
And this keeps recurring.
1970s, big fat lapels, depression.
Low economic activity, stagflation, etc.
And you can actually see this come back again.
I remember in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer, he gave a speech at one of these Macworld or whatever, and he was literally wearing a coat without a lapel.
So it had gone to zero, the lapel indicator.
The stock market crashed three months later.
I'm not joking.
So pessimistic is small lapel.
That's very interesting.
No, no.
Wide lapel is pessimism.
Long skirts, wide lapels, wide ties are pessimism.
Why?
I don't know.
Well, the skirt makes sense in the sense of you're euphoric, it's sexy, you're floating on air kind of thing.
And then when there's a greater pessimism, there's a greater tendency towards, you could say, Prudery or prudishness in fashion.
And also, housing bubble era.
What was popular?
Mad Men and wearing these tiny lapel suits and tiny little thin ties.
That kind of mid-60s thing came back right at the moment of the housing boom.
So it is quite predictable.
That's very interesting.
I was thinking about, as well, you talk about music.
I was thinking, when I started at university or whatever, 1999, 2000, Boom, bubble, popular, you know, happy, euphoric people.
And you think about how women were dressing, and it was this, what you call a crop top and a hipster trousers.
The shirt would go down above the navel.
The trousers would be just above the, you know, vaginal hairline, essentially.
And there'd be this big gap where there was bare flesh.
And then when the collapse happened, that's gone.
That's gone.
It's a much more prudish way of dressing.
And the music as well in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Aqua.
Barbie Girl.
Bubblegum Pop.
These silly, jolly things.
Almost to a point of parody where it can't go any further.
And this is kind of what Prector would point on.
You know, Aqua as like, what is that?
Come on, Barbie girl.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, it's almost a parody of...
It just has to flip over.
And even bands themselves that emerged out of punk...
Went into kind of synth-pop in the 80s, New Order being an excellent example of that.
They went from the punkishness to kind of using synthesizers, really kind of almost feel-goody kind of things.
What's the name of that crazy bitch with blue hair that everyone keeps telling me I should listen to?
I don't know what to say when you say that crazy bitch with blue hair.
You need to narrow it down.
Billy Eyes, that's the one.
We've got a resident Zoomer here, so we can actually talk about this now.
People kept saying I should listen to it.
I was like, good God, what is this?
I much prefer Aqua, frankly.
I bought two of their albums back in the day.
Yeah, we can...
Okay, we've gone in a digression, so might as well just go on a full-on rabbit hole.
I think she won five Grammys last night.
She did.
And what is...
I listened after we talked about her.
I went and also forced myself to listen to Billie Eilish.
It's not certainly the worst thing I've ever heard, but what's interesting is this depressive attitude that we were getting at.
It's like she's...
It reminds me of music from the early 90s.
It was like, I can't even...
I can't even bring myself to sing this song.
And I'm almost mumbling while I'm singing it.
It's a very, it's an interesting look, and I think it bespeaks at some level this general depression in the society that she is the artist of the moment.
She's kind of the Madonna of the moment.
Mid-90s was very depressing stuff.
There was some British band in the mid-90s that they satirized in Father Ted, I remember, which I liked, because they were so depressing.
I forget what the band was called.
Oh, Radiohead.
Radiohead, yeah.
Oh, I loved them when I was in high school.
Yeah, they're awesome.
They're still good.
And idiots at school used to, when they should have been buying Aqua albums and things, were Perch and...
There was this Irish band as well at the same time as Aqua.
I'm a freak!
I'm a widow!
What the hell am I doing here?
Yeah, it's that kind of thing.
That grunge 90s stuff.
In the late 90s, it was positive.
Did you listen to this band called Bewitched?
I don't know them.
Irish band.
And they did a song called C 'est La Vie.
And it was just these Irish girls being ridiculously happy.
Some people say, I look like me, duh.
You're serious?
It's very good.
I bought that one as well.
It's very rare that I buy music.
Right.
But generally, the whole point is...
And Radiohead is a good band.
I would defend them.
The whole point is that there is a kind of social mood in which some artist is the thing.
It's not necessarily even that they sell the most albums.
It's that they're the most culturally significant.
They kind of speak to this age.
And if you speak to the current Zoomers and young millennials, it's about...
Being depressed and embracing your mental illness in a very strange way.
And I don't think we can just overlook this and say, oh, the kids these days, they need to get their act together and start working harder.
I think it's telling us something about a broader social mood, which is extremely negative and nihilistic even.
When people my age left university in like 2001, they immediately got a job.
Right.
No one had any trouble.
It might not be quite the job they wanted, but it was a reasonably well-paid job because you've got a degree.
And now, no, no way.
At University of Virginia, when I was there in the late 90s, graduating, and again, UVA is a very good school, but it's not Harvard, it's not Stanford.
Goldman Sachs was recruiting on campus, and they were passing around Goldman Sachs Frisbees.
So it was like, come work for us.
It's fun.
Like, that was the level of euphoria and excitement.
And you got a degree, boom, you're going to make, you'll make 80, 100 grand in a year, you know, kind of thing.
And that was, it's huge money.
You had it at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol, a few others, a thing called the Milk Ground, where these companies would all come and, you know, pitch to you.
It wasn't you begging them to give you a job.
It was them begging you.
To come and work for you.
That was how it worked.
What is it now?
What is the salient political issue for Zoomers?
Student loan forgiveness?
UBI?
Less salient, but still impactful.
It's basically the politics of low expectations and depression.
You kind of see this reflected in the meme culture as well.
As in...
You know, 10 years ago, memes were very, like, kind of normie-friendly or whatever about, you know, whatever the daily stresses of life, but they've gone, like, they've been kind of abstracted to such a weird place now, and they've kind of created all these weird archetypes, but, like, they do touch on something, you know, like, there's the Doomer, which is like, you know...
The depressed guy in his early 20s that spends all his time on the internet and chain smokes.
The archetypal alienated young man.
There's the wagey, the guy loaded with student debt that has to work a wagey job at McDonald's or something.
There's all these nihilistic archetypes that have really been created through meme culture.
Kind of do a lot to reflect the reality of life in the 21st century.
It's interesting they kind of morphed into that.
They've taken on this much sort of darker kind of nihilistic aspect where they kind of deconstruct in society in kind of a deeper way.
Yeah.
Are the memes polarized?
Because that's what you predict would happen as well.
There'd be this polarization of quite separate memes for left and right, which wouldn't have been as...
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, like, you know, there's normie memes, but then, you know, there's all this stuff.
There's all these archetypes now that are so, like, self-referential, like, you know, the boomer and the doomer and the, you know, they spawn all these.
Like, there's, you know, these subcultures that are so referential that if, you know, if a normie looked at one of these, they wouldn't be able to even begin to interpret it, so.
Right.
Why is there a frog with Joker makeup?
Yeah.
You know, while he's killing a...
You know, Bill Clinton or something.
Like, what the hell is this?
Like, I have no earthly idea what this even means.
Yeah.
Keith, are you familiar with Doreme?
Doreme?
No.
Somebody, I was introduced to that the other day by one of my followers.
It's this Japanese thing.
Just weird, messed up.
I just find all Japanese culture just...
I don't know if the Japanese have created it, but it's got anime images on the video, and then this bizarre, this really quite sort of poignant and not in any way a good way music.
I was surprised to find out, like, you know, a lot of people are talking about the weird culinary habits of the Chinese, but, like, the Japanese being, like, weird.
Sex Pest actually goes back a long way as well, because, you know, like all this weird, like, tentacle porn stuff they have.
It's like, there's actually like, it was like, there's all these old drawings from...
I've been researching that, actually.
Yeah.
But there's like, there's old paintings and drawings from like...
There's old drawings and paintings from AD, where, you know, it's like erotic paintings of a woman having sex with a giant octopus, or a giant mushroom.
So this has like a long history of the Japanese being perverts.
A friend of mine went to the biggest sex shop in Tokyo, which is on four floors or something.
And it's made with the assumption that people are short and thin.
So you have to sort of push past people that are sitting there looking at porn or whatever, you know.
And you've got the sort of...
Children's section, essentially.
They're 18, maybe.
But being Japanese and 18, they look like children.
And then there's the sort of...
There's a children's section in the porn shop.
Maybe it's time to call the police.
Japanese girls have a slow life history strategy, so many Japanese girls who are 18 years old will look, for all intents and purposes, like they're 12. And there's porn.
And then also, you've got a tentacle porn section.
And there's a substantial section of this huge sex shop on four stories dedicated to tentacle porn.
It's an extraordinary thing.
As bad as the global homo-Americanized culture is, imagine if Japan had global hegemony, the kind of culture we'd be...
Yeah, I mean, they didn't ban child porn until about ten years ago.
Really?
So, they're very liberal on that.
Tentacle porn, obviously.
And taking your shoes off in the house.
All kinds of stuff.
Right.
Don't they censor their pornography in a kind of weird way?
Where?
That's why bukkake became popular?
Isn't Japanese porn still censored?
I mean, I don't know.
They censor pubic hair.
They censor pubic hair.
I'm just wondering.
Is there like an alt-right Japanese Twitter making like return to tradition memes where it's like one of those paintings of a woman having sex with an octopus?
She's so dread.
Remember what they took from us.
Okay, so is something like a global pandemic, do you think this...
Back to that, yeah.
Do you think this would ultimately be eugenic in some way?
I mean, I read this too, because I was reading up on pretty mainstream articles on the Spanish flu, but it was striking that it was seemingly not eugenic at all, and it was affecting people between the ages of 20 and 40. So I guess I'm actually, you know, I would be safe.
I'm now from the coronavirus if it reproduces earlier pandemics.
But it was actually affecting men and affecting young, healthy men.
Then it also affects pregnant women as well, which seems to be going after the most healthy.
And also, it seems to also be literally correlated with a good immune system.
Having a high IQ is a sign of low mutational load.
You have low mutational load in the brain.
And so therefore you have levitation node everywhere, so it correlates with having a good immune system.
So in some way, probably very weakly, one would expect a pandemic to be eugenic on the level of intelligence or personality, if that's what you're interested in.
And certainly in terms of immune system and things like that, and physical health, it would of course be eugenic.
And we've been totally unwilling to engage in eugenics.
So after the Industrial Revolution, and I think something that's more impactful, really, the fossil fuel revolution, which is related but separate from the Industrial Revolution, we had this massive expansion of the population, lower mortality rates at birth, and general health.
Miracles, you could say, and sanitation and so on.
And in the 20th century, people usually coming from the elite and coming from the wasp elite, actually, recognize the necessity of eugenics as a countervailing force to these miracles that I don't think anyone...
We have to think about its negative consequences.
And contraception is another thing that can be added in there.
We need to think about the potential negative and positive consequences of contraception.
And so basically, there was a eugenic movement coming from the elite down that was popular, remarkably, and also You know, among the Normie population, but also was implemented into policies.
By the 1930s, before the Second World War, that started to become taboo in the Great Depression and the ascendancy of, you know, Boasian anthropology and so on.
And then after the Second World War, eugenic measures, at least in the West, have become all but impossible.
If you even suggest something like this, you're accused of being Hitler.
So basically, we've refrained from eugenics.
We passed this singularity with the Industrial Revolution and the Fossil Fuel Revolution, where the natural selective forces that were previously in effect have dissipated, if not disappeared.
But we passed through that singularity, but we're not willing to engage in conscious evolution.
And at some level, These global pandemics, or a vengeful god, if you want to think of it that way, are going to have to do it for us.
And I know that's a pretty dark thing to say, but I'm not sure it's exactly wrong.
If we actually engaged in sensible eugenic policies involving contraception and so on, we would have a population that is more robust and is more ready to take on some of these, you know...
kind of negative consequences of globalization.
I mean, one of the things about eugenics is that, well, yeah, as you said, it was hugely popular.
I mean, George Bernard Shaw was a big proponent of it, actually.
That's in one of his main plays.
But yeah, it was a pretty popular position.
But I mean, one of the things, the way people discuss it now, as if it's a no-go that you'd even...
That you'd even discuss it, that you'd do anything with that.
But it's one of those things, you can't not take a position on it, because not taking a position on it, you're still doing a form of eugenics.
I mean, if you think of something like child benefit, like most countries have some kind of universal welfare for having kids in Europe.
But I mean, that's something that, you know, when it's a flat rate like that, the poorer you are, the more money that is to you relatively.
So I mean, that is a form of direct dysgenics through welfare.
Because, you know, obviously, you know, 500 euros a month is a lot more to someone that doesn't have a job as compared to someone wealthy.
So, I mean, you know, that's a direct form of dysgenics that we engage in.
So, yeah, I just find the discussions around that are very muddied and people just kind of close their ears and won't discuss it.
But it's just a denial of the reality that we're engaging in dysgenics in all kinds of ways.
No question.
Yes, yes.
There's no question about it.
Adam Perkins' book, The Welfare Trade, has shown that if you divide England into families where both parents are working, i.e.
IQ of about 100 average, families with one parent's on welfare, i.e.
about 90, and families with both parents are on welfare, i.e.
about 80, is only the families where both parents are on welfare that are breeding at above replacement fertility.
So the future and the heritability of intelligence is extremely high.
0.8.
Heritability of personality, about 0.5, 0.6.
Being on welfare is predicted by low IQ and poor impulse control, which is a personality trait.
And so the future is those people.
We know he also shows that when welfare is changed, when welfare is decreased, people who are on welfare do seem to limit their fertility more.
And when it's increased, they...
Happily, consciously, I suppose, but they seem to have more children.
So it clearly is an extremely dysgenic thing to do.
On the other hand, bringing in a policy of eugenics is likely to be problematic because if it's in terms of intelligence, then it seems that once a certain IQ is reached with a certain level of luxury, people just don't want to have children.
And they noticed this even in the time of Augustus, where men who didn't have children, who were upper class, had to pay a tax.
And they paid the tax.
They just didn't want to have children.
Because when you reach a certain level of intelligence, intelligence correlates with intellect, which is...
To do with ideas and fascination by your life adventures and rationalizing everything, including the having of children and being not particularly instinctive and being able to kind of control your instincts.
And these mean that once you get to a certain level of intelligence, you don't want to have children.
And the only thing that makes you want to have children is religiousness.
Religiousness, God telling you to have children, if you genuinely are religious, that's what makes you want to have children.
And that's what Francis Galton argued, and that's what other people, beyondism and these kinds of philosophies, all the same thing.
only thing that allows a society to continue being eugenic just to make it intelligent people have children is religiousness and if religiousness isn't there then they for due to spiteful mutants telling them not to be religious or due to such low levels of stress that you no longer believe in God because believing in God does correlate with being stressed, then it doesn't work.
So I just don't see how it could work.
It wouldn't work.
People would pay the tax and not breed.
I agree.
I think it probably would help.
And I'm not at all opposed.
And I say this as someone who is not a Christian, but I am absolutely not opposed to this notion that religion is...
There should be no separation between church and state.
I actually don't think there ultimately is on a phenomenological level.
I don't think we should think in this term.
I think that's negative.
I don't think we should think about religion as some hyper-Protestant private thing that we do on our own time or something.
No.
Religion is deeply connected with our future as a group and the power of the state itself.
Rabbit hole that we, real quick, that rabbit hole that we went down with, you know, negative social mood and something.
There's no question that that's correlated with the waning of religiosity and just a descent into nihilism among the population.
We need a new God.
At least today, I mean...
There doesn't seem to be, I mean, there's probably a correlation, but I mean, if you look at, I'm sure Ed can speak on this, but if you look at countries like Poland that are 99% Catholic and the birth rate there is like 1.3, and then, you know, Czechia, which is like 75% religious or non-Christian at least, has like over twice the birth rate.
So, I don't know, maybe you can speak on that, but at least, you know, just the conventional return to Christianity doesn't seem to be enough.
Today, whether that's due to industrialisation or whatever, I don't know.
Part of it is religious.
I think part of it with these countries is the pressures they were under in the Cold War and in wars and things like this.
And they can have things which are related to religion, like nationalism.
And nationalism without God is still nationalism.
And you reify the peasant or whatever.
So it may be other sort of mutations of religion that are popular in certain parts of Eastern Europe.
But when you said, Richard, we need a new god, I thought that Keith was going to intervene and volunteer.
But he doesn't appear to have...
Not done so.
But the other thing is that when women, for example, are given the chance to eugenically select, what they select for, they want people that are extrovert.
That's what they want.
They don't care about intelligence.
You ask them to make a choice.
They want the sort of X-factor bullshitter, basically.
So that's a problem.
Another problem is that we don't quite...
It's so complex, this, and there's other issues as well, like group selection and having the optimum percentage of different types within the society when battling with another society.
There's all these subtleties which we don't really understand, which would be problematic if we brought in overtly eugenic policies.
And also, it may just be that there's an inherent limit on intelligence.
Once intelligence gets too high because of its correlation with intellect and low levels of instinctiveness and whatever, then you stop being normal.
As people become more intelligent and their G goes up, their ability to do...
Things which are weakly G-loaded, like tying their shoelaces or driving a car or whatever goes down.
And so if we keep going, like the Sheldon Cooper types, a world of Sheldon Coopers, which is what eugenics would ultimately lead to, would be a world of chaos.
So there needs to be, it's a very complex road to go down.
So maybe you just have to let nature take its course.
But you can do things to slow down the collapse.
And one of the things that would slow it down would be reducing these welfare payments, which are preposterously hard.
Right.
All right.
This was a very interesting discussion.
I might put a bookmark in it unless anyone has any pressing thing to add.
All right.
Go ahead, Keith.
Yeah, well, one thing I don't know, I don't think it was mentioned, but just about globalization and these pandemics, I mean, one thing that experts are really concerned about is this antibiotic-resistant diseases that are popping up.
Sure.
You know, supposedly one of the, actually one of the main causes of that is that in less developed countries, you have people that will take, you know, they don't have proper medicines to give out a full course of antibiotics.
So you'll go to the doctor and they'll give you three or four antibiotics and you'll take those.
And apparently that's the main cause actually of these antibiotic-resistant diseases.
That's worse than not taking antibiotics.
Yeah, it'd be better.
It'd be better if they just didn't take anything, you know.
So that's...
That's the problem that's coming out of the third world, and that's the direct result of globalization.
Because we're giving them first-world medicines, but they don't have the resources or the education to use them properly, and so then it's coming back to us.
We're giving them the first-world medicines, and we're getting back antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Right.
All right.
We'll put a bookmark in it.
Thank you, Ed.
Thank you, Keith.
I hope we can do this again.
That was a wide-ranging discussion.
We'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
I haven't had any bat recently though.
So I'm not worried for myself.
There is a Chinese restaurant in Odoo that sells bats.
You know how you can select the lobsters yourself?
I didn't know anyone ate that until five years.
Wings are very...
You've got to make sure it's well done.
It's no good having rare bats.
It's not like having beef or something in France or Spain.
You've got to have it well done.
And they take you to a cage where the lobsters are and you say, I'll have that one.
It's like that.
They take you to a cage full of live bats that are squawking about.
And that's what they did.
They took me to this cage full of live bats.
So you eat the bats?
You don't want them looking at you.
I'm probably going to kill, eat me, but I don't want them looking at me in the face first.
But they're all these bats.
And I couldn't decide, but then I saw one that looked like Keith.
So I said, I'll have that one.
And so, no, no, they don't.
I'm wondering, can you get a discount?
Is it possible to get a discount at a Chinese restaurant if you bring some roadkill with you?
Yeah, very possibly.
Maybe you have to pay the equivalent of corkage.
Yeah, it's a corking fee.
I've brought my own live mice.
Can I sit here and eat them, please?
No, certainly, but you have to pay 10% of the value of the mice or something like that.
I was thinking more like if you bring them a badger and they make a big soup out of it and they'll give you part of it free, then...
Oh, I see.
That's a good point.
They should think about that.
Have you ever seen a badger in real life?
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