The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 27, 2024


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Woke Eugenics by Ed Dutton


Episode Stats

Length

23 minutes

Words per Minute

178.65494

Word Count

4,253

Sentence Count

236

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

24


Summary

In this episode of Brokernomics, I discuss the new book Woke Eugenics by Ed Dutton, and why we should all be woke about it. I'm joined by the author to talk about his views on wokeness and evolution.


Transcript

00:00:00.620 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, I have been incredibly fortunate on this show to have
00:00:06.120 some superb guests and quite a lot of them have been writers because of course, you know,
00:00:10.460 writers, you know, if they're good at thinking, they're probably good at writing and they do
00:00:14.260 that kind of stuff. And I always read some of their books, but some of them I get quite
00:00:17.760 hooked on. And one of them in particular has written quite a lot of books and they're really
00:00:22.520 good. They're really conversational. They're full of interesting stuff. So I've been on
00:00:26.840 a bit of a bender working through all these books. And I got to one of them, which is
00:00:32.160 this one. And I started to realise that it's absolutely sort of jam-packed with good news.
00:00:37.660 I mean, this is, well, this is encouraging, this is. And you guys in the comments, you're
00:00:42.860 always saying to me, Dan, give us some white pills, give us some good news. So I thought,
00:00:46.620 right, I'm definitely going to have to cover this book. I'm going to do a book review on
00:00:50.340 it. And maybe the author might be so kind to come on. So I popped him a question. He's
00:00:54.640 very kindly agreed to come on. So the book that I'm talking about is Woke Eugenics. And
00:01:00.560 the author is, of course, Ed Dutton. Ed, thank you very much for coming on.
00:01:04.560 Hello. It's good to see you again, again.
00:01:06.760 Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you very much for taking time out of, you know, your busy
00:01:12.400 Finnish evening of yodeling and sauntering and, you know, whatever else.
00:01:16.460 Yeah, I've been jogging. That's why I'm looking at it. I've just been jogging.
00:01:20.780 Right. Well, yes, but you've got to keep yourself in shape.
00:01:24.380 You've got to keep yourself in shape for the winter, for the winter, where there's no
00:01:27.540 life. Right. So rather than me butchering it, maybe you should explain to me, why did
00:01:33.740 I read this and get so excited? What's all the good news about that?
00:01:37.000 The essence of it is that wokeness is not that we, on the right, it's become a cliche
00:01:42.800 that we criticise wokeness. A lot of GB news and whatever is focused on making fun of
00:01:48.580 wokeness and so on. And my argument is that maybe we should have a more sympathetic attitude
00:01:53.020 towards wokeness. Maybe, in fact, we should be woke ourselves. Maybe people that are woke
00:01:58.500 are actually crypto nationalists that are trying to bring about a better, conservative, brighter,
00:02:04.920 more reasonable, more traditional future. Because the argument in the book is that wokeness
00:02:11.120 is basically a kind of a selection event. In essence, what wokeness does is it takes all
00:02:18.600 but those who are extremely genetically healthy. And being genetically healthy, physically healthy,
00:02:25.660 correlates with being genetically mentally healthy, with being genetically conservative,
00:02:32.180 with being genetically religious. These are all highly genetic or significantly genetic.
00:02:35.740 And with being ethnocentric, let's say group oriented, positively ethnocentric, oriented
00:02:41.320 towards a group negatively, ethnocentric, propelling the outsider. These things all cluster together
00:02:45.200 into a kind of a fitness factor. And what wokeness does is it takes everybody who is not genetically
00:02:52.980 resistant to it, to these anti-conservative ideas, and it really kind of induces them, in the case
00:03:00.420 of the more intelligent ones, to not have children. So those people, people who are
00:03:05.300 intelligent, but also genetically liberal, and this is associated with poor genetic health,
00:03:11.500 mental health and physical health, they are removed from the gene pool. So among the more
00:03:16.720 intelligent, therefore, what you have is an ethnic group that remains that is going to be the same
00:03:22.620 as the people that were before the Industrial Revolution, when harsh Darwinian conditions were
00:03:28.020 impactful, and when the child mortality rate was 50% rather than 1%. And what it does to those who are
00:03:35.080 low in intelligence, and people who are low in intelligence are people who are, that's
00:03:39.460 associated, again, with poor genetic, mental and physical health and so forth, those people are
00:03:43.740 induced by wokeness to essentially resign from the English group or the European group or whatever.
00:03:49.680 They miscegenate. They become part of the growing, we've got good evidence for that,
00:03:53.500 who does that, of the growing non-British, non-whatever, non-European group. And so what you are left with
00:04:01.020 then is a European remnant group that is going to be highly conservative, highly ethnocentric,
00:04:07.260 highly group-oriented, and is able to combat other groups in harsh group-oriented conditions.
00:04:14.760 The second thing wokeness does is it collapses civilization. It helps to bring about, it induces
00:04:23.280 people, particularly more intelligent people, because it creates this evolutionary mismatch where
00:04:28.140 you're surrounded by foreigners and there's dysphoria and whatever, and it doesn't promote
00:04:32.340 the best, and it just basically encourages intelligent people not to have children through
00:04:36.700 materialism and so on. It therefore collapses civilization back towards harsh Darwinian levels,
00:04:43.380 which again makes us genetically healthier. And the third thing that it does, and this is very
00:04:49.280 important, is that the species must, what the species cares about in evolutionary terms is staying
00:04:56.020 healthy across time. That's what, that's, that's crucial. It's surviving. That's what Darwin,
00:05:01.920 Darwin's cares about. At the group level. Not, yeah, not the civilization who cares about that. That's just a
00:05:07.400 function of certain evolutionary pressures. It's surviving across time. So that when the
00:05:13.320 next comet hits and wipes out civilization, like Comet Enk that wiped out, that probably wiped out
00:05:19.480 civilization in 10,000 BC and probably did it again many times before, many times since, when that
00:05:24.540 happens, if the group is totally unhealthy and deracinated, the whole species dies out. But what
00:05:30.600 wokeness is ensuring is that the species is being forced back to genetic health. Because all those who are
00:05:39.720 not highly genetically healthy are being induced via wokeness, via the runaway virtue signaling,
00:05:46.060 where therefore you do things for the good of other groups or whatever.
00:05:49.260 So if I'm understanding this, if I'm understanding this correctly, it doesn't make us all healthy. It
00:05:54.420 makes most of us much less healthy, but it forces a certain group to become more healthy. And that's the
00:06:01.800 group that survives the event. In a context in which people are very, very, very genetically unhealthy,
00:06:07.680 which they are, it is being genetically unhealthy that is associated with being woke. People who are
00:06:15.180 genetically highly healthy will be also religious and conservative for genetic reasons, because these
00:06:21.360 things all bundle together, things that are genetically selected for all bundled together, and therefore
00:06:25.300 they will be resistant to wokeness. And therefore what wokeness does is it indoctrinates those who are not,
00:06:31.020 who are anything other than extremely genetically healthy and conservative and religious to not have
00:06:36.660 children. And therefore they are removed from the gene pool. And therefore all that is left is this highly
00:06:43.440 ethnocentric, conservative, religious, mentally and physically healthy population, which is able to survive in the
00:06:51.980 group selection battle of harsh Darwinian conditions, which wokeness also brings about because it brings down
00:06:57.380 civilisation by encouraging intelligent people not to have children. And then as a whole, this group will be able
00:07:03.020 to survive the next time there is a catastrophe, which there inevitably will be. As such, wokeness is a selection
00:07:10.460 event and indeed a crucial selection event, which helps us, helps our group, the English, helps our race, the European, and helps our species to ultimately survive.
00:07:22.020 Okay, so there's fascinating stuff there. And there's so much that I want to pick up on. And, you know, one of them is, and maybe we
00:07:30.500 come back to this, it's the whole idea that actually, the these genetic events precede social change, not the other way
00:07:38.880 around, which is something. But before we do, can I go slightly sideways and ask you about the gaze? Because there was this
00:07:45.180 absolutely fascinating bit in here, because I always assumed from, from a, from an evolutionary perspective,
00:07:51.040 that, you know, if you were, if you declined the vagina, you would, you would not be having children
00:07:58.220 passing on your genes. So that was just, that was just a sort of a hard stop, right? But you've got a bit
00:08:05.340 in here. Well, first of all, first of all, a few pages before you explaining how, how, if you look at these
00:08:09.600 things at the group level. So, so for example, it makes sense for an aunt and uncle to, to raise
00:08:15.180 their, their nieces or nephews, you know, if something should happen to the parent on the
00:08:19.380 reason being that your nieces and nephews, they share 25% of your genes. And yes, it's not 50%
00:08:24.900 like your own children, but 25% is still not bad. So therefore, you know, if you look at these
00:08:29.740 things at a group, even if you don't have children yourself, caring for the group, still get those
00:08:36.280 genes passed on. So I got that bit. That made perfect sense. And then, and a few pages later,
00:08:40.980 you talk about, it has been suggested that a low level of homosexuality may be adaptive for the
00:08:46.320 group because it leads a cast of men who do not have children and therefore funnel their energies
00:08:51.800 into activities, which is useful for the group. I thought that was fascinating. Yes. This may well be
00:08:58.320 the case. Yes. But it has to, it has to be in a context of homophobia. So if you have, if you have
00:09:04.200 people who are sexually attracted to people of their own sex, and it is utterly unacceptable for
00:09:10.940 them to have sexual relationships with people of their own sex, then the argument is, and there is
00:09:17.080 some experimental data for this, that if you suppress your sexuality, you will, it's a very
00:09:23.780 Freudian, but it seems to be true, then you will funnel that energy into something else. And what that
00:09:30.220 will normally, that could be art. And there was, there was some novelist, I forget his name. Every
00:09:35.200 time he had sex, he used to say, oh God, there goes another novel. A French novelist. And that sort
00:09:42.880 of thing. And so that's, that's the argument. They'll have this sexual energy, but they won't be
00:09:47.600 able to express it. And so therefore it will be pushed into some group selected work, whether it is
00:09:53.800 genius, and there's elevated levels of homosexuality among scientific geniuses and people like that,
00:09:58.340 or whether it's being a shaman or a priest. And there's anthropological evidence that these
00:10:02.740 shamans are often highly effeminate. And so they're, they're passing on their genes at an
00:10:07.480 extended level. And it makes sense because if you look at Frank Salter's research in his book
00:10:11.440 on genetic interests, if you divide the world between, if the world is just English and just
00:10:17.220 Danes, then the random English person compared to another random English person is the seventh
00:10:21.500 cousin. So, yes. And what that means in real terms is that if he prevented 20 English people from being
00:10:32.940 killed by 20 Danes, that would be the equivalent of him have preserving one child.
00:10:40.700 Okay. Now, if it, the, the, the more genetically distant the interloper is, the fewer, the fewer
00:10:46.700 other things are in, are in, are involved. So if he, if it was, if he prevented four, uh, Japanese
00:10:52.780 people from replacing four English people, that would also be one child because of the genetic
00:10:58.780 distance.
00:10:59.020 Well, hang on, that's, that's a big, going from, so you went from a thousand to four.
00:11:02.740 I went from 20 to four.
00:11:04.760 Oh, 20, 20, 20, 20 to four. Because, well, presumably.
00:11:08.400 Because the genetic similarity between English and Danes is much higher than between English
00:11:13.580 and Japanese. Because I might reasonably expect to share a common ancestor with a Dane somewhere
00:11:19.180 in the middle ages or something. Whereas with a Japanese person, it could be, well, a hell
00:11:23.220 of a lot longer. It would be 40,000 years ago. Whereas, whereas with a Dane, it would, yeah,
00:11:28.200 it would be probably at least a thousand years ago. So that's the difference.
00:11:31.940 Right. Okay. So, so on, on the, on the homosexuality thing, it's, it is, it is group positive because
00:11:39.300 you take all of this sexual energy that would normally be spent, you know, running around
00:11:43.180 nightclubs and, or, you know, whatever. And, and you put it into your mathematics or whatever.
00:11:48.000 So, so presumably somebody like Alan Turing is a good example of this.
00:11:51.880 You know, he had all of this sexual energy.
00:11:53.240 They play this up too much as if like all gays are geniuses or all geniuses are gays.
00:11:57.580 But he, he would be a genuine example of it. Yeah. He's obviously a genius and he's obviously,
00:12:02.960 obviously homosexual. He was forced to express his sexuality, which he was. And, and then you
00:12:08.340 see him push this into this kind of genius, genius work. And so that, yes. So, so he, yeah,
00:12:17.300 because of course, you know, cracking the Enigma code makes it more likely that 20 English people
00:12:22.660 are not going to be killed by German. And therefore, you know, it's, it's, you know, his work for him,
00:12:27.960 he probably saved many, many children.
00:12:29.660 Indeed. He, he, he, he passed on his genes substantially. Yes. At the group level effect.
00:12:36.640 So, but, but, but, but were the constabulary a bit over the top with, because of course he,
00:12:42.560 he would enjoy a little bit of, of the gaying at the pub in the evening.
00:12:47.460 The argument is that the, the research was that you have to suppress the sexuality. So it has to be
00:12:52.480 seen as something shameful and taboo and all. Right. And so from an evolutionary perspective,
00:12:57.240 I would suggest to you that no, they were not over the top. A problem. You could argue that they
00:13:01.140 went too far because in the end he committed suicide. And perhaps if he hadn't committed
00:13:06.500 suicide, he could have come out with some more brilliant genius stuff. So they went too far in
00:13:10.000 that sense. But in terms of, in terms of suppressing it from any, I remember, I'm not saying either that
00:13:14.820 homosexuality is good or not good. I'm just telling you the theory for people that seem to get
00:13:19.660 confused about these things. It had to be suppressed. And because it was suppressed, it's very interesting
00:13:25.980 by J.D. Unwin called Sex and Culture. And he argues the same thing, that as cultures develop,
00:13:31.120 they become more sexually repressive. And this causally precipitates greater creativity,
00:13:37.900 both artistically and scientifically. Yes. So, so the other thing on sex that was quite
00:13:42.540 interesting was the Victorian era, because, you know, we all know the Victorian era was very
00:13:46.480 sexually repressive. And I can't find the quote right now, but it was, it was something along the
00:13:50.580 lines of industrial revolution leads to concentration in towns and cities, leads to cramped living
00:13:59.280 conditions, leads to more opportunity for pathogens to spread, leads to more sexually transmitted
00:14:08.760 diseases, leads to the response being sexual repression. To disgust. To disgust, yes. Which then leads,
00:14:19.100 so the Victorian era of repressed sexuality was a evolutionary level response, and not just
00:14:27.180 something that they did because they thought it was a good idea.
00:14:31.140 That is, that is what, well, you could, you could, you could see it in two ways. One is that we tend to
00:14:35.020 rebel against what that, what comes before, and what was before, i.e. in the 18th century, was a very
00:14:40.040 licentious kind of period. So therefore, Charles II, all that, yes.
00:14:43.720 Right, precisely. So therefore, you might expect to be more puritanical for that reason alone. But, but,
00:14:48.600 but certainly, I would suggest that a big part of what, what explains why the Victorians were so much
00:14:54.200 more sexually repressed, even compared to the Tudors, even compared to the Puritans in the 17th
00:14:59.240 century, even compared to people that, I mean, they were, as they were, boulderising Shakespeare and
00:15:05.080 Chaucer and whatever, because it was so, they were so repressive on these things, was probably
00:15:09.400 that there was a disgust response to, to these illnesses that all became endemic at exactly the
00:15:14.280 same time, and in which you could suddenly die. You could just drop dead within a day. If you've got
00:15:18.900 something like cholera, you could, you could basically, you just die very, very quickly.
00:15:22.920 And so, and so it was, in a sense, there was higher mortality salience, even than there have been
00:15:29.000 before, when, in a sense, there was more child mortality, but that was predictable, you could
00:15:34.200 tell the baby wasn't healthy, and it would die slowly, and whatever. But no, this was just like
00:15:38.380 sudden death. And so you, and, and of course, you had syphilis becoming endemic, very much so at
00:15:43.500 around that time, and other STDs. And so you can see why there would be a disgust response, and that
00:15:48.300 disgust is associated with a highly conservative response. And so you end up with sexual puritanism,
00:15:54.460 repression of sexuality, which would, could be seen to causally precipitate higher levels
00:15:59.020 of creativity, even on top of the fact that the Victorians were, compared to us, probably
00:16:04.540 15 points more intelligent as well. So all of, all of these things coalesce to bring about
00:16:10.340 15 IQ points, something like that. Yeah, that's a hell of a difference. That's a hell of a difference.
00:16:15.640 Yes, well, based on reaction times, yeah, we're losing something like one, one IQ point per decade.
00:16:21.780 So it makes sense that between 1880, when we were measuring reaction times, which correlate
00:16:26.780 negatively with IQ at about 0.3, when we were measuring those in 1880, which we were doing in
00:16:32.680 the same way that we do now, by the way, we can see that the reaction times have lengthened,
00:16:38.500 consistent with about a 15 point IQ decline. And there are other measures as well, which indicate
00:16:44.640 other proxy measures, because we didn't actually have proper IQ tests in about 1912. And there's
00:16:49.320 problems with them across time anyway, that indicate the same kind of decline. So this means
00:16:56.200 that basically the average person of Victorian England would be capable of being a high school
00:17:00.420 science teacher these days.
00:17:02.300 Right. Okay. So yes, yes, that was, that was fascinating. And I forget how you frame it now,
00:17:12.240 but you then go on to talk about how, because we talked, okay, so the Victorian sexuality repression
00:17:20.700 was a response to an evolutionary mechanism, not wanting to die and discuss response and that kind
00:17:25.560 of stuff. And I forget how you explain now, but you then go on to talk about how the, the 60s and
00:17:32.000 the liberalism that came out of it, that could also have been driven at a largely genetic level.
00:17:37.840 So it wasn't that people just suddenly decided that they wanted to get more liberal or whatever
00:17:42.120 it was, but there was some sort of mechanism that was pushing people towards behaving in a more
00:17:48.500 liberal way, which then starts to sort of become a bit runaway in the same way that Victorians
00:17:53.880 probably overdid their sexual repression.
00:17:55.540 Yeah, it became runaway and you get to a point where in the thirties, someone like
00:18:00.580 Sir Cyril Smith or earlier Catherine Cookson, someone that was illegitimate, would be shunned
00:18:07.220 in shops because it was somehow considered that just by interacting with them, you would be
00:18:11.920 polluted by, by their, you know, their, their, their, their sick bloodline. And so you get
00:18:19.140 runaway in that sense. And then by the, by the fifties, children that are born to affairs
00:18:23.940 between a lawyer and his secretary or whatever, are being adopted by other families, things
00:18:29.340 like this are going on. So you get runaway the other way, but yeah, the argument is, I think,
00:18:34.700 oh yes, the argument is that we were under half Darwinian selectory until 1800. We were selecting,
00:18:41.320 as we know, as I look at in the book in detail for conservatism, which is basically all five
00:18:46.480 moral foundations, that is to say, obedience to authority, sanctity versus disgust, in-group
00:18:54.280 loyalty, equality, and harm avoidance. We were selecting for conservatism. We were selecting
00:18:58.460 for religiosity, which tends to take that which is adapted and make it into the will of God
00:19:01.960 and associated with fertility and other adaptive traits associated with mental health and physical
00:19:05.180 health. We were selecting for mental and physical health. We were selecting for ethnocentrism.
00:19:09.020 And so as the Darwinian conditions of selection pressures are weakened from 50% child mortality
00:19:16.820 to 1%, there's going to be a huge buildup in mutation. And because things which we are selecting
00:19:22.420 for become bundled together, they become playa-tripically related to each other, then what that means
00:19:27.820 is that any deviation from that pre-industrial norm is almost certainly going to be in the direction
00:19:33.900 of liberalism, atheism, poor mental health, poor physical health, and so on. And those things indeed
00:19:39.220 are all correlated with each other in the modern day. And so you get then a buildup in, the only
00:19:45.780 acceptance is intelligence, but we can look at that separately. You then get a buildup in mutational load
00:19:51.280 and in that direction. And eventually what you would expect is that a tipping point would be reached,
00:19:56.800 where it would be so high that the culture itself would tip over. And when that happens,
00:20:03.560 and there's studies indicating that when 20% of a group defer from what, sorry, disagree with the
00:20:11.860 viewpoint previously held, then the rest of the group see them as the up and coming new thing and
00:20:16.860 tip over very quickly. And when that happens, it's going to be intelligent people that are going to
00:20:23.560 spearhead that change, because this is why intelligence is an anomaly. Intelligence was
00:20:27.720 also under positive selection until the Industrial Revolution. But intelligence is associated with
00:20:32.840 social conformity. And that means that in a religious society, intelligent people are going
00:20:39.300 to be more religious, probably, and more conservative. And there's evidence, actually,
00:20:44.200 that in somewhere like Brazil, intelligent people are more conservative. And there's evidence that
00:20:51.020 intelligent people were more conservative at the beginning of the 20th century. But then
00:20:55.660 they're also more socially conformist. Intelligence is associated with noticing the norm mapping,
00:21:02.020 with noticing the dominant set of values and forcing yourself by ethical control to conform to them.
00:21:07.480 And then once you do that, then you competitively signal your conformity to them.
00:21:11.440 And so what happened around about, I suggest, 1963, is that we, that tipping point was reached.
00:21:17.400 And so we tip over from being a broadly group-oriented society that's interested in,
00:21:22.160 in those group-oriented values I mentioned earlier, to being an individually oriented society that's
00:21:27.120 associated, that's interested in equality and harm avoidance. Because if you're at the bottom of the
00:21:31.220 pile in prehistory, you're interested in equality, because that means you get more, you get more of
00:21:37.300 the pie, basically. And you're interested in harm avoidance, which is that, you know, then you don't get
00:21:42.800 harmed, rather than necessarily the good of the group, which could mean that you're harmed and
00:21:47.180 that you're sacrificing things. And we know that if you are, obviously, if you're at the bottom of
00:21:52.580 the pile, if you're physically weak, which will put you at the bottom of the pile, or you're mentally
00:21:56.420 unstable, which will probably put you at the bottom of the pile, then you're going to fear a fair fight.
00:22:02.140 And so the only way that you will be able to attain status will be via signalling.
00:22:06.980 Now, there's two ways that you can signal. In a conservative society, you're going to purity
00:22:11.900 signal, the church ladies, ugly old spinsters signalling how purely religious they are, right?
00:22:18.140 And in a more liberal society, you're going to signal equality and harm avoidance, i.e. you're
00:22:23.900 going to virtue signal. So that's what you start to get. And then you get runaway virtue signalling.
00:22:29.280 Now, once you get that, it gets quite interesting, because what does it actually involve to virtue
00:22:34.660 signal? The conservative, his worldview is a series of concentric circles based around self.
00:22:41.340 And his moral circle is stronger the more genetically close it is to self. So he loves his family more
00:22:49.620 than his kin, his kin more than his class, his class more than ethnic group, ethnic group more than his
00:22:54.180 race, his race more than his species, his species, whatever. With the liberal, it doesn't work like
00:22:59.320 that. The liberal is attracted to a more distant group over his own, let's say a different class
00:23:05.120 over his own, a different ethnic group over his own, whatever. This is brilliant if he's an
00:23:09.440 individualist, if he's because individualists are about power, remember, they're individually oriented,
00:23:14.180 they want to get to the top of the group, they're about power. And if they're if they're weak kind of
00:23:18.800 people, mentally or physically, then they will do this covertly by virtue signalling, which is what the
00:23:23.280 left do. So they're individually oriented. And so what they will do is they will, let's say, like the
00:23:29.480 left is a good example in 100 years ago, a different social class over their own, they then collaborate
00:23:35.000 with that social class against the interests of their own social class, in order to gain power over
00:23:40.940 their own social class, and thus society as a whole. To watch the full video, please become a premium
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