SJWism is not simply a variation on liberalism or leftism. It’s best understood as a replacement religion—one that is flourishing in our putatively secular age. Traditional religions succeeded in making populations more evolutionarily adaptive: more fertile, cooperative, and willing to outcompete others, all of which are conceived as the will of the gods. SJWism, by contrast, is a “death cult” that aims to lose.Among other effects, the rise of the SJW marks the return of heresy as a religious and political concept, as well as the dolling out of quasi-death sentences to those who think “evil” thoughts. One cannot understand current controversies around social-media “de-platforming” and “cancel culture” without inquiring into the evolutionary origins of the SJW religion, which undergirds and legitimizes these phenomena.In the end, the West’s collapse into “Clown World” is due to the impact of industrialization on the human environment and the end of Darwinian selection. One surprising result is the birth of a new intolerant religion, which shares much in common with monotheism, but has dispensed with God.https://nationalpolicy.institute/2020/03/26/the-return-of-heresy/ 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
SJWism is not simply a variation on liberalism or leftism.
It's best understood as a replacement religion, one that is flourishing in our putatively secular age.
Traditional religions succeeded in making populations more evolutionarily adaptive, more fertile, cooperative, and willing to out-compete others, all of which are conceived as the will of the gods.
SJWism, by contrast, is a death cult that aims to lose.
Among other effects, the rise of the SJW marks the return of heresy as a religious and political concept, as well as the doling out of quasi-death sentences to those who think evil thoughts.
One cannot understand current controversies around social media deplatforming and cancel culture without inquiring into the evolutionary origins of the SJW religion, which undergirds and legitimizes these phenomena.
In the end, the West's collapse into "clown world" is due to the impact of industrialization on the human environment and the end of Darwinian selection.
One surprising result is the birth of a new intolerant religion, which shares much in common with monotheism, but is dispensed with God.
Ed, how are you?
Welcome back.
Hello, I'm doing okay.
How's it going?
Good.
Well, it's been crazy for me recently, but it's been crazy while quarantined.
Maybe that's the title of an autobiographical essay I'd write about the last two months.
That will be the title of some bad novel that will be published a few years ago.
But things are doing well.
I'm healthy.
I'm glad you're healthy, too.
I hope our audience is healthy and staying safe.
So, let's talk about SJWs.
You wrote a provocative work that delved into the history of heresy.
Delved into the history of religion and its evolutionary function, you could say.
And so I think you really deepened our understanding of SJWs.
I think a lot of people have tweeted out, SJWs is like a religion, but to actually understand it properly as such and not just use it as a slogan, I think that was very important.
So I do want to get into the depths of this, but before we do that, let's just...
Talk about this new thing that seems to be something that's new on the left that didn't quite exist in previous decades and now seems to dominate the left.
And that is the burgeoning of woke culture and the social justice warrior and the blue-haired feminist screaming at you while you're watching YouTube.
I mean, we're roughly the same age.
This kind of thing seemed to exist.
Maybe at universities 20 years ago, but it's really been over the course of my adult lifetime that it's come to dominate the left.
Do you think it, at least ideologically, had its origins in universities?
Yeah, it's a movement that's primarily associated with the sort of middle class, I suppose you'd say, for want of a better term.
And those people tend to dominate at universities, and I think it did have its origins at universities.
Even when I was at university 20 years ago, that woke culture thing, these concepts were very new.
I had a friend who I'll talk about in a future essay I'm doing for our group, who was transsexual, and that was the first time in the year 2001 that I heard the term safe space.
That was absolutely the first time I heard it.
And I mentioned to other people this concept that the head of the LGBT society, as it was then known, of course, the acronym grows and grows and grows, that the LGBT society had used this concept of safe space.
And all of these concepts were absolutely on the fringes of university life when I was there, the idea of safe space.
University lecturers then would openly say to you, I am here to challenge your ideas.
This is the purpose of university.
Your ideas will be challenged.
If you don't like that, Sod off.
Go somewhere else.
The purpose of university is not...
It's not to say they weren't biased towards the left.
They were biased towards the left, particularly in humanities departments, but they certainly weren't biased to the same extent, and there certainly wasn't this woke culture and this anti-free speech culture and this kind of dominance at all to the same extent.
I mean, I remember somebody who's now a member of parliament in the UK, actually, writing an article for the student newspaper condemning the LGBT society called Stop This LGB Madness.
And he talks about how it used to be just about gay people that wanted other gay people to meet, and now it's become this crazy group, a very prescient article, with all of these monstrous, absurd ideas, anti-freedom of expression, anti-freedom of association, totally pulling it apart.
And the people there, the people that were this minority group that were the LGB, went absolutely bonkers about this, and went to the student union and demanded the newspaper retract the article and fire him as a student, and they just said, no, absolutely not.
No way.
It's freedom of speech.
Imagine how different that would be now.
And so, yeah, I think it started there.
It was a nascent movement, circa 1999.
It was gradually replacing what was still there, which was that students get involved in communism, basically, in the more traditional far left.
And now it's gradually displaced.
In the 80s, students would be out campaigning for the minors in England.
And it's displaced that.
Yeah, I mean, due to our age, we missed the 60s revolutions on campus.
I remember when I was at the University of Virginia in the year 2000, I believe there was a big anti-globalism protest, effectively.
I can't even quite remember what it was about.
But basically that had gone away.
But I think what's peculiar about it is that Is the moralism aspect of this.
And I think it's also what's peculiar.
I mean, moralism is always there on the left.
But it went away from pragmatic demands for working class people or the third world or anti-colonial struggles.
And it became about...
Getting in the heads and reforming normal people.
So it's not so much we need to empower the minors or we need to empower the Algerians or the illegal immigrants.
It is that you are evil and you don't even know that you're evil and we need to change you.
It had this moral impulse to it, which really does make it peculiar among the left.
I don't think you would find that among Revolutionary communists.
They might want to crush the bourgeoisie.
I think there is an ideological connection.
They do talk about altering the minds of people.
They believe that everything is a matter of environment, for a start.
And so consequently, they do believe that you can remake man, which is empirically inaccurate, but that's one of their dogmas.
And so they do believe that you can remake man in a different way.
Where it's...
Where it's changed is the issue that you virtue signal about, if you like.
When my parents were at university, it was women.
And it was the working class.
And then it moved on to race.
And so that's when there's a fundamental separation, because then you're militating in favour not of people just in your own society who are downtrodden, but within your own society.
You're now on people from other societies, people who have other interests.
And that's, I think, the fundamental change.
And then, as well, you start militating in favour of people that are basically mentally ill.
And saying who are just abnormal, and saying that they should be understood to be normal.
And it goes so far that you start questioning, I mean, even concepts such as truth, it goes that far.
And the communists didn't do that.
So you've got this...
And you've got this situation where people aren't really even working in their own interests because it's such a confused mishmash of things that you've got, for example, homosexuals campaigning in favour of fundamentalist Muslims being allowed to come to the country who hate homosexuals.
So you've got something that you could argue.
You could possibly even argue that for people that are working class, communism or whatever is an adaption.
And even is an adaptive thing.
It's in their group interests.
They are a genetic section of the community.
The heritability of class is quite high.
And so it's in their group interests for there to be socialism or to be communism.
Those that are middle class, it's not in their group interests, but it's in their individual interests for there to be those things.
And once you get to the level of importing entire new countries into Europe, the damage to the group interests of these people is so...
Everybody's group interest, everybody, is so strong that you're doing something that's maladaptive in a way that I think you could argue that perhaps even communism wasn't.
And we had that chap on our show the other day that, I mean, there's a lot of evidence for this, that in a lot of ways, okay, communism undermined things that were adaptive, but it did so, such as the monarchy, such as religion or whatever, but it did so in order for people that weren't at the top of society to get to the top of society and thus in a...
It's an evolutionary context in which being at the top means that's where you get children and your offspring survive.
That's where you've got to be.
So that's the adaptive thing to be.
So you undermine religion to get there.
And once you get there, then you kind of create your own religion once again, your own system.
That's what Christianity kind of did, really.
So you've got something that could be argued, even with communism, to be adapted.
But with this thing, it's something that's maladaptive.
It's just totally maladaptive to anyone's interest.
To the extent that you encourage people not to have children.
So it's something that's like, it's different.
It's a change that reflects, I suppose, a certain percentage of the society almost going mad in a way that they were if they wanted to be communist.
And then that starts to reach a tipping point and spread.
So that's, I think, the difference between what was going on my parents or your parents were at university and the seeds when we were.
Yes, yeah.
And also, again, before we go into the history of religion and so on, just the moralism angle to it and the desire to cancel.
And again, I don't think that this is totally unusual.
There's slogans of eat the rich, and obviously revolutionary communists cancel people on the most basic of levels in the sense of...
Murder, kind of the ultimate cancellation.
But this cancel culture of someone expressing something that is not with the times, something that might very well have been with the zeitgeist even 10 years ago or so, but something that is kind of not going with the flow right now, and to destroy his...
Life and livelihood just immediately.
A death sentence.
It's very difficult to come back after being cancelled by these people.
Very much the equivalent of murdering someone for heresy in previous ages.
And the thing is, the other difference as well, and this is again what I mean, this is a maladaptive form of religion, this is what I mean, is that when they used to have heresy trials in England, they did everything they could to try to persuade you to recant.
You were given chance after chance.
There was a case in England in about 1540 or something, 1555, of a guy called John Marsh.
And everything was done to persuade him to recount, and people were sent to him to prison to try and persuade him to recount, and bishops were going, everybody, and he was just utterly obstinate, and he just wouldn't recount.
Even when they were about to burn him, he was given a final chance to recount, and to be untied and taken away.
He wouldn't do it.
And so that's the difference, in a sense, with heresy.
With heresy, it was a formal thing.
It's heresy.
Retract your statement and in doing so submit to the dominance of the church.
Whereas as far as they're concerned, it doesn't work like that.
The fact that you've said it, you're not even a heretic.
You're an unbeliever.
You're worse.
You're an infidel.
And you must be just utterly destroyed.
You are just in league with Satan.
You're worse than a heretic.
You're a witch.
And so it's a whole different thing.
Yes, absolutely.
So let's talk about your understanding of social justice warriors and how that relates to the history of religion and religion's evolutionary function, which I think is often something that we obscure.
Maybe even particularly religious believers like to think of it as...
Something totally disconnected from human evolution and from the pragmatic needs of a people and so on is something that is ethereal and universal, etc.
But actually, religion does function within the context of group evolution and, let's be frank, the quest for dominance and power and flourishing.
So we know, if we look at what is it that makes something likely to be adaptive?
Well, the first thing is that it has a reasonable heritability.
Well, we definitely have that with religiousness.
So the heritability of...
There's lots of different traits that make up religiousness, but the heritability overall, that means how much of it is genetic, is about 0.4.
So we can say about 40% of the difference, the variance in religiousness is to do with genes.
Secondly, something will be...
Real quick, what are you referring to there, in terms of taking on the religion of your parents, or are you talking about religious zealotry or emotional?
Religious impulses, how strongly do you...
Believe in God.
Have you ever had a religious experience?
Things like that.
These are the markers of religiousness.
Indeed, having had a religious experience was found to be 0.66 heritable in twin studies.
So it's very highly heritable.
So the first thing is that it's got a heritability.
It's got a heritability.
The second thing is that it's associated with mental and physical health.
Because if it is, then that shows you that it's adaptive.
And it is associated with mental and physical health.
Correlation between religiousness and health is about 0.3.
Thirdly, are there...
Identifiable parts of the brain that you can stimulate in order to make someone more or less religious?
Yes, there are.
So that demonstrates that it's the case as well.
Fourthly, and most importantly, is it associated with elevated fertility?
Yes, it is.
So it's therefore got all of the...
It's significant, but strongly so.
So therefore it's got all of the key markers that make something...
An adaptation, something that therefore evolution can work on that's been selected for over time.
Now, why has it been selected for?
Well, at the individual level, it's also associated with pro-social personalities.
It's sort of getting on with people.
This is important as well.
So why has it been selected for?
Well, at the individual level, if you've got this little homunculus on your shoulder telling you to be moral and to behave, or telling you that you're, you know, don't worry, it's all going to be okay at the end.
Then you're going to be lower in mental illness, basically, suicidality, things like that, and you're going to be more pro-social.
So you're going to be less likely to kill yourself and get too stressed and get ill, and you're going to be less likely to get cast out by the band.
And secondly, at the individual level.
And other people will like you and get on with you.
So it will be selected for the individual level.
At the sexual level, religiousness will become a marker of an insurance policy, that you're a pro-social person, that you have access to a community that has resources, that you get on with people, that you can move up the hierarchy, you can get resources, your genes will pass on.
So it's sexually selected for.
It means you're a moral person.
It means the woman can trust that you're not going to love her and leave her, and the man can trust he's not going to be cuckold.
Religiousness will be that marker.
And then thirdly, at the group level, there are these computer models and whatever.
Religiousness is associated with ethnocentrism.
And ethnocentrism being ambitious to the out-group but cooperative with the in-group is associated with dominating in-group models.
So therefore it's group selected for as well.
And also of course it inspires the group to believe it's of eternal importance and gods on its side and all this.
Right.
All these ways in which religiousness should be selected for because we can see that it's an adaptation and it evidently is selected for.
Let me...
Go ahead, finish your thought, and then I'm going to jump in.
Under Darwinian conditions, what would happen is that religiousness would become the genetic norm.
There's all kinds of variations in it, but the collectively worshipping a moral god and so on, or gods, would be the genetic norm, and it would be associated with other genetic norms.
It's like health, wanting to have children, like fertility, whatever.
And that's what I think has happened, and consistent with that.
Atheism is associated with the opposite of these things.
Yeah, let me jump in real quick.
When I was a young adult, the big thing on the internet was new atheism.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al.
were taking part in this.
And one of their memes was that religious people tend to say that religion can make a bad person do a good thing.
So someone who is a drug user and down on his luck.
His life is going nowhere.
He finds Christ and then he kind of learns to become a good person.
And there's obviously a lot of evidence that that can happen.
But Hitchens and Dawkins would talk about, no, the power of religion is making a good person do a bad thing.
So the power of religion is turning an otherwise normal human being into someone who's going to engage in a...
Inquisition and torture of a heretic, or someone who's going to go to war because they think God is on your side, and so on.
And my take on this, I guess some people might find it a bit amoral, but...
Yes, that is the power of religion, in fact.
Dawkins and Hitchens are getting at the power of religion.
It is to make otherwise normal people do extreme or important things.
But that's its power, and that's why religious groups will win and dominate, is that you can organize a band and say, no, we're not just taking this territory because we need more...
No, we're doing it for God, for the gods.
And that ability of religion to give supernatural inspiration to power seekers and to basically say, to have kind of a commander who isn't ordering you and doesn't have a whip in his hand, but has a supernatural whip in his hand in order to channel society to dominate others.
That is the most powerful thing in the universe.
And so it's kind of like Dawkins and Hitchens are in a weird way kind of getting at religion, but then missing the whole point.
And what they're putting forth is like, we should all be end of history, boring, individualist consumers.
And, you know, look, there's...
Maybe some virtue to that, but at the end of the day, it's the societies that feel like they are channeled by a divine will who are going to win, and that's what matters.
Right, precisely.
And when you talk about the end of history, that's a very good point.
There was an incredible decadence after the Cold War, an incredible...
Some arrogance to think that, OK, this is it.
We've done it.
It's all solved.
That was an appalling book, The End of History.
Francis Foucault, was that his name?
Yes.
And to think that that's it.
That's it.
And now we can just enjoy ourselves.
What a ridiculous way of thinking.
Of course, no basis in reality at all.
And yeah, you're quite right.
They just missed the point.
They missed the point completely, which is, yes, it can make people do, by your outsider standard, very good things, very bad things.
But that's not the point of it.
The point of it is to ensure that the group who is religious dominates.
And there are all kinds of variations in that, but that's what overall it does.
And so that's why religiousness becomes associated with these normal things.
And you have a bunch of adaptations that make up religion, such as pattern, over-recognition.
That's one they tend to see evidence of God everywhere.
Such as obeying your leader, such as group consensus, in-group, out-group attitudes, whatever.
And they all come together, and this idea of a god being there, that's pattern over detection to some extent.
And they come together and they make this highly adaptive thing, which then gets selected for.
And that's the other marker, of course, that it's something that's adapted, is that you get it in all cultures, and you do get it in all cultures.
There isn't a single social tribe or whatever that we know of that doesn't have some kind of belief in spiritual reality.
So that's where it comes from.
And then, of course, the problem comes, what we're seeing, I would suggest, with the SJWs, is you're seeing a breakdown of normal Darwinian conditions, which has been happening for a very long time.
And that breakdown has then consequences which are bigger than the sum of its parts in terms of it then undermines institutions which further uphold those Darwinian kind of ways of thinking.
And they get undermined.
And so you get a complete collapse into just chaos, really.
And from this you get the beginnings of a small number of people that have a sort of death wish.
And this can start to spread.
Yeah, let's talk about this because I think to go back real quickly to the idea of the end of history and so on, I think on one level, the SJW phenomenon is just an excretion of the end of history.
We're all happy.
I mean, granted, wages aren't keeping up and so on, but through credit card debt and whatever, we're all kind of...
Satiated.
And there's no new revolutionary frontier.
And so we need to engage in all this kind of tedious nonsense like gay rights, tranny bullying in schools, or, you know, you can take this further.
Like, the left has kind of lost its revolutionary impulse, and it's just going into these...
Rather mundane and tedious and kind of unimportant thing.
But I think it's bigger than that.
Well, you could argue, yeah, in terms of a kind of pyramid of needs, once one set of needs is met, then you move up the pyramid.
And something like the rights of minuscule and irrelevant or formerly irrelevant sexual minorities would be very, very high up that pyramid of needs and would therefore only become relevant in a time of, as you say, total satiation.
But the problem is that that Period.
And this is not the first time this has happened, although this is the first time in history that this has happened to this extent, that we have been this, as you say, satiated to this extent.
But what happens is that when a society is in decline, and there was a very interesting book by Sir John Glove on this, you see the same things again and again, because the basic needs are met.
And therefore, you start to see people talking.
First of all, they start questioning the religion.
So you see the rise of atheism and of some other...
Other religious ideas and whatever other than the main cult of the group.
Then you see them questioning the things which are upheld by the religion and the religion tends to uphold patriarchy because it's patriarchy.
It's the group that's more patriarchal that will tend to be the more ethnocentric positively and negatively and therefore will tend to dominate other groups because men will be more likely to internally cooperate, i.e.
be positively ethnocentric if they can be sure that their children are theirs.
They won't be fighting over the women.
Patriarchy ensures that that is the case.
So therefore the groups become more patriarchal.
As they rise, as they become satiated, the patriarchy starts being questioned.
You see the rise of women.
When Baghdad collapsed, you have female lawyers, female judges, possibly.
You see a complete collapse in patriarchy.
You see a collapse in restrictions on sex.
You had sociosexuality in the collapse of Baghdad.
Rome, Greece, in all of these societies.
You have lack of fertility.
People don't want to have children.
When they're really rich, they just become materialistic and they stop thinking of the future.
So you have not breeding.
All these same things happen.
It's just that we reached this greater height, if you think about it, almost like a catapult.
If the degree to which we developed is the sort of elastic band of the catapult, ours was a much longer elastic band and it was much, much tighter and it let go.
Flew up so much higher, and we have therefore so much farther to fall so much more quickly.
And that's what's happening.
And I think that the SCW is part of that.
Yeah.
So I agree.
But let's go a little bit more into...
We could use a Freudian term, a death instinct of the SJW, because it's not just silly leftism.
Even though I think SJWism, you could combine with a kind of...
I think it's called caviar gauche, or the limousine left, or whatever word, where you have a bunch of upper-class people who don't actually want to change the status quo, but just want to take part in their silly little...
charities and causes and so on that aren't really going to question anything and certainly not their own wealth status.
But I think there's something bigger with SJWs where they're not just giving money to the humane society or something like that.
Something that you could say is a frivolous cause, but it's something that I don't think anyone has any problem with.
You and I most likely support those things.
But it's that death instinct, that desire to kind of I think we should distinguish the SJWs from previous,
let's call them replacement religions, or even just religions.
So something like Christianity has parallels with SJWism in the sense that it starts among the lower class, or actually maybe the middle class.
That's where a lot of these things come from.
It starts among the middle class, and it's a way for the middle class to attain power, but they virtue signal or whatever, even under the point of death and sacrifice, but they virtue signal.
And this gives them attention, and it makes them want to be like them, and it kind of empowers them.
And it's a way of getting their group, the people that genetically like them, more power.
It does.
And you see the collapse of the old Roman system and you see the rise of the middle class.
You see this as well in the West with Protestantism.
It's the middle class that was where Protestantism was most developed.
And these people, through virtue signaling and whatever, overtly being Protestant, gain.
Social contacts and whatever, and it helps them to become rich, and they become rich, and they gradually start to displace the traditional, more kind of group-selected, more kind of novelist, oblige, upper class.
And you see this even, and because they've got God on their side, they're more fertile, they believe children are everything to do with God, God's will to have lots of children, all this kind of thing, and they end up being more fertile, they end up breeding the people that are higher up than them in the social hierarchy.
And so this is an adaptive thing to do, and it's using these kinds of ideas.
Looking after the poor and basically virtue signaling.
Champagne virtualism, shall we call it, in order to attain this status.
And that's happened throughout history.
You could argue that was happening in the Roman Empire with Christianity.
You could argue that was happening among the Greeks.
This is a bit different because it's fundamentally destructive to humanity.
And in the whole history of mankind, it's been very, very rare.
There have been groups like that.
I mean, in the early church, you have Gnostic groups that regarded the world as an utterly appalling place.
We shouldn't have children.
And those people, of course, were just dismissed as completely mad because they were a tiny minority of society and society itself was so adaptive and had institutions to make it adaptive and was genetically adaptive.
There were so few people like them that they weren't able to reach the tipping point, which is about 20% of people thinking like that.
For other people to start to join their group, which we know from psychological experiments happens.
Whereas SJWism, the uniqueness of it is that we've never got to a point before where they've been able to get this much influence.
You've had nutty groups that are anti-naturalist and anti-life before, but they're...
The nature of the society, society is so genetically wholesome, if you like, that they haven't been able to gain any power.
Now they have.
That's the difference.
And I put it down to, as I discussed before, that with the collapse of Darwinians, under Darwinian conditions, you have 50% or so child mortality.
90% of people that were born never had children.
90% of people never had children.
It's been shown.
Because 50% child mortality, 20% don't have kids, don't marry, whatever, ugly or...
And 20% watched all their kids die before they do.
So consequently, 90% of people effectively don't pass on their genes.
20% do.
These are the most healthy and adapted people to these Darwinian conditions that we run until...
About the Industrial Revolution.
With the Industrial Revolution, they collapse.
Child mortality collapses from 50% down to currently it's about 1%, possibly even a bit less than 1%.
And there is a relationship, a significant relationship, between the mind and the body in terms of mutational load.
so what was happening every generation was that these sick children would die out before they could pass on their genes they'd have poor immune systems or whatever they'd have high mutational load if you've got high mutation load of the body you'll definitely have it of the mind because the mind is 84 perhaps of the genome it's a massive target mutation and so with the collapse with the bit with the collapse of the
You then have more and more of these people that have these maladaptive ways of thinking.
We've got evidence for this of them securely rising, depression, schizophrenia, autism, lots of other of these traits.
And these are associated with SJW, particularly depression, depression particularly, with SJW ways of thinking.
There was a study that was published the other day, or some data that was analysed the other day, which found that 56% of females in America who regard themselves as liberal at age 18 to 29 have been diagnosed with a mental illness by a doctor, which is overwhelmingly depression.
And so they have these maladaptive ways of thinking which would have been washed out, purged, under the previous Darwinian conditions, such as that you should put the good of other people's families before your own, other ethnic groups before your own.
That you shouldn't have children.
That you should behave like a man.
That you are a man.
And all of this just genetic garbage.
I mean, these maladaptive mutant genes would have been washed out.
Filled up and built up.
And you get these people.
My colleague Michael Woodley calls them spiteful mutants.
Because we are so...
We are like bees.
We are such a eusocial species.
That we are strongly influenced by all those that are around us.
And this is why if someone that you're with a lot is maladaptive, this will make you maladaptive.
Your genes will be expressed optimally.
For example, depression is contagious in that way.
And so, therefore, these spiteful mutants start to undermine these structures we've developed, like religion.
What does religion do?
It makes that which is adaptive and it makes it the will of God, so you're more likely to do it.
Take away religion, undermine it, destroy it, then you're less likely to do these adaptive things.
You're less likely to be ethnocentric because religion tells you to be ethnocentric.
So you have this whole house of cards that can be brought down by large and large numbers of people spreading maladaptive ideas.
And when those people become too high a number, then of course they have a power to them and people start to move over to them.
And this is what we're seeing, and this is the difference, and this is what's happened in the last 20 years.
They've gone from being nutcases on the borders of normal discourse to being a tipping point of, let's say, 20% on university campuses that openly think like this, and then people move over to them.
And that's what's happened.
So we've basically got, for the first time in history, a death cult that has serious power in...
And this might very well be unprecedented, because not that death cults, literal and figurative, didn't exist throughout history.
They obviously have.
But if the spiteful mutant really is a new phenomenon, it is an end-of-history phenomenon.
A spiteful mutant would at least...
A class of them would not exist previously just simply due to child mortality and the dangers of being alive in ages previous to our own.
So this might very well be something totally new.
In human evolution.
I mean, we were talking earlier about my book, Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West.
And in that book, I look at the way that witches...
Which hasn't been published yet, by the way.
Just for our listeners, yes.
You'll be able to buy it soon, but not right now.
Yes.
And look, that book, which I'm currently working on.
So I look at the way that witches are in many ways spiteful mutants.
Because what were the witches doing?
They were...
By virtue of being single women that were able to make money and whatever, they were undermining the patriarchy.
Secondly, they were often quite nasty people that would go around cursing people and being generally unpleasant.
So in a very limited form in their village.
Not to mention flying.
And also the flying orgies and all that stuff.
Disconcerting.
Very disconcerting, upsetting for people.
Imagine trying to do your farming and there's all these people talking about like mosquitoes.
So yeah, so this sort of thing.
So they were the spy pollutants of their time, but they were a tiny, tiny minority, and the vast majority of the people were highly genetically adapted anyway, including even them to a certain extent.
And so consequently...
They had no space to have any impact at all on the society.
The institutions of society of hell-adaptive behaviour and religion were robust, and if people like that manifested and managed to live into adulthood, and they behaved like that, they'd track them down and remove them.
With these new spiteful mutants, it's those people, but magnified God knows how many times, because they're way more maladaptive than these witches.
I mean, they're way more spiteful.
They're way, way worse.
A, because they tend to manifest at the top of society rather than at the bottom, so they have more influence for that reason, because Darwinian conditions are harshest at the bottom of society.
And therefore, evolution collapsed first at the top of society.
So you'd expect the build-up to be more, in a sense, in some ways, at the top.
And so they're much worse.
It's maladaptive things that would never, ever have come across, been manifested to anything before, such as antinatalism, such as actually thinking we as a species shouldn't exist.
And that's happening to a society which is itself maladaptive, which is itself not as robust.
Mentally, psychologically, as a society of 400, 500 years ago.
And it's a society in which, therefore, they're able, therefore, it's less, it puts less of a front, and therefore, they're better able to undermine its institutions and spread their madness.
So, yeah, in that sense, it's a completely new thing.
We've never been this, had a mutational load as a people that's this high.
Wow.
We're like the mic experiment.
Like that experiment where they took away...
Explain that.
I know what you're talking about, but explain that for our listeners.
In 1967 or something it was in the University of Maryland and John Calhoun and he set up a utopia for mice, took away predation, selected them for illness, made sure they were all gently stiff and whatever, made sure there were no parasites in there.
So you have a utopia for mice.
What you have is exactly what's happened to us.
So first of all, the population spikes up, huge growth because there's no infant mortality or whatever and there's no predation.
Then the growth starts to slow down.
As you see with us, then the growth starts to fall.
The population starts to fall.
They're not having as many babies as they used to have.
And when that was noticed, it was noticed that there were these interesting changes.
Mothers were behaving maladaptively.
They were throwing their offspring out of the nest too young so that the offspring weren't socialised properly.
That could be akin to the undermining of institutions that are useful, religiousness or education or whatever.
And then you've got more and more of these males that were just these autistic weirdos that were effeminate and didn't do anything and didn't fight for territory and didn't do anything other than sort of lick each other and drink water.
They were known as the beautiful ones.
And then eventually, so you've got more and more females that then weren't interested in men, and then those that were had to pest them for sex and they weren't interested.
And then eventually they got into Japan.
And so eventually you had a situation where all the males were these beautiful ones, all the females were these butch.
