Enlightenment thought created a study of economics regarding the exchange and distribution of wealth in large societies but the view that people were more or less interchangeable created a curious blindspot. Never was there a similarly detailed inquiry into how the market of sexual exchange affects the destiny of a people.
Though DNA was only discovered in the 20th century, any caveman could easily observe heredity matters when it comes to humans and livestock. Now with the unraveling of traditional mating patterns, it’s no longer possible to ignore the study of sexenomics.
Living in complex civilizations of millions of strangers doesn’t come naturally to humans and only those selected for it can thrive. We can see that one of the key pressures that decides the direction of a society is selection through arranged marriages. Where men must accumulate wealth and prestige in order to breed, they are selected to achieve and explore. In less organized societies, where men just have to persuade ovulating women to have sex a couple times, they are selected to talk smooth, dance well, and beat up male rivals.
The weird thing about men bred to live in civilization is the majority of their energy goes into activities not directly related to their immediate reproductive success. At first glance it’s not biologically rational to spend time going to boring jobs, reading books, practicing hobbies, climbing mountains, making scientific discoveries, or being curious about anything that doesn’t produce a payoff.
One thing that’s readily observable about men from more “primitive” less organized backgrounds is they spend much, if not most of their surplus energy on courtship and mating. It’s one of the reasons why they become devastating defectors in a society of cooperators with lower testosterone and less focus on the mating market.
As we’ve discovered since the 1970s, in a sexual free market, the most aggressive men with the best courtship skills get rewarded with soft harems and plenty of babies while boring schlubs busy at their desk jobs get cut out of the game while they waste time they could have spent out courting.
The pressures of mass society have squeezed civilized men to compete by adopting elaborate bower-building behaviors like we see in birds. This formula works in a society with strict rules that mandate high reproductive investment, but in a sexual free market, a lower investment strategy is far more successful. A man can forgo the bower and secure 5 or 10 mates in the time it takes a career schlub to lock down just one who’s at the end of her reproductive years.
So we can see very quickly that what we call “civilization” depends on sexual market protectionism. When we return the sexual market to its primeval state, all the rest of society soon returns to its primeval state.
We have only to look at feral dogs to see that within a few generations, they revert to a uniform breed best suited to the area whether it’s the forest or city streets. Humans are no different. A few generations where thugs and sociopaths clean up and before long there’s lots of males predisposed towards aggressive sexual strategies. There’s nothing inherently special about European peoples, the qualities that got them ahead mostly resulted from certain breeding practices that have now been dismantled. The status quo of Black society is already emerging as the norm for the bottom 70% of whites. Before long all the awkward nerds are mercilessly scraped from the gene pool and society goes to hell as defectors battle each other for turf.
This of course is why whites first got ahead by being cooperators. The law of the jungle selects for the most formidable individuals but undermines the formation of large groups. So when there’s an alliance of millions of cooperator bower-builder males who free each other from relentless direct sexual competition, quarreling tribes get crushed effortlessly underfoot.
The problem with the civilization model though is that it is dependent on enough scarcity to act as a practical constraint on mating behaviors. Whenever a certain level of prosperity is achieved the constraints on mating relax. Once women no longer need to restrict their mating choice for fear of starvation and men can be reasonably sure his offspring will survive and breed without his help, the incentives re-align to those of a pre-civilized state. What follows is what we like to call “decadence” in the history books or in our own time “the sexual revolution.”
Within a few generations, the genetic wealth of nations is squandered and another Empire is left to crumble for future archaeologists.
While a new empire may soon rise on the ashes of the old, something seems to be lost each cycle. Those peoples that have been civilized longest tend to stagnate.
The genius we associate with China, India, and the Middle East mostly comes from ancient times when their civilizations were still young. Northern Europeans have been yet another young civilization to make brilliant advances but it now seems they may be nearing the point of stagnation reached by other civilized peoples.
So a couple of the biggest problems a study of sexenomics must address are to:
-prevent the fatal decadence caused by prosperity
-stop the slide into stagnant torpor that besets peoples who have been civilized for too long.
Finally, sexenomics provides the core concept that civilization requires sexual market interference by definition, legitimizing righteous rulers to take the necessary corrective measures.
See also: Market Demand Must Be Regulated,
Smart People Are A Social Luxury,
The Three Keys To Anglo Success
FORWARD BASE B 
16 replies on “The Need For Sexenomics”
Steve Sailer writes about this in how crime was punished in britain in the middle ages, leading to a more pacified population over time.
Anyway seems to me like its kind of self defeating to domesticate a people by giving nerds affirmative action sex. I mean, so eventually you get a bunch of nerds but can they fight effectively as a group against outsiders? Like you said, civilization is human domestication, and maybe too much domestication leaves a people vulnerable? Maybe its better to balance chaos with order, instead of trying to undue chaos entirely? My personal experience in the US imperial wars show that your best soldiers are usually not your best citizens.
I pretty much agree with you. History shows us that the best civs have the right balance of high testosterone barbarian fire combined with civilized discipline and cooperation. A sexonomist would want to find where the right balance lies and how to maintain it.
Arranged marriage is pretty much sexual affirmative action for nerds who’d end up involuntary celibates without it. I figure the brain space used for courtship gets freed up for other purposes as selective pressure gets relaxed and/or aspie mutations that make someone a good specialist make guys awkward with the ladies.
In the US Scots-Irish and other Celts are overrepresented in the military. They’re the descendants of the frontiersmen who went in to kick out Indians with their long rifles and started distilling whiskey. Celtic fringe peoples of North Europe are still relatively closer to barbarism and tribalism. Like other peoples in history half-way through the civilizing process very creative and dynamic far beyond their small numbers. It’s a heritage I identify with myself.
Very nice. Spencer says the Scots-Irish are the wild men of the White race, which I kind of agree with. Thats a proud heritage you got and you should be proud of it. Myself, I am a Slav. I wonder how we would be described?
I always had better understanding with Slavs and Italians than most core Anglo-Saxons, North Germans, and Scandinavians. I used to wonder why I never felt at home in typical “White” society. I eventually learned about the ethnic divides between European peoples: The clannish and pastoral peoples of Europe clash with the more outbred and settled groups. Even Arabs are easier for me to empathize with sometimes than core whites who just want to compete to impress strangers and never back each other up.
You’ve just got to keep the ‘fire’ and the ‘ice’ separated. That’s why caste systems have worked so well, and then separate laws for the military in more developed civilizations.
A very good summation of a very complicated subject. At this time I see no way to rectify the situation. Everything will have to collapse first so the Women are scared enough to shut up and do what needs to be done. Right now they don’t want to be told anything.
Are you familiar with a poster goes by the name of “Heaviside”?
No, who is he?
‘Once women no longer need to restrict their mating choice for fear of starvation and men can be reasonably sure his offspring will survive and breed without his help, the incentives re-align to those of a pre-civilized state. What follows is what we like to call “decadence” in the history books or in our own time “the sexual revolution.”’
Connecting Spengler to PUA. Interesting perspective!
“The genius we associate with China, India, and the Middle East mostly comes from ancient times when their civilizations were still young. Northern Europeans have been yet another young civilization to make brilliant advances but it now seems they may be nearing the point of stagnation reached by other civilized peoples.”
Is there some other field where a similar cycle of futility was once observed, yet someone came up with a new pattern that allowed the previous finite state machine to become infinite?
Ie is there some method that could be implemented to make civilization antifragile?
Indian Brahmins were always among the best commenters on my old introvert blog and I feel a certain empathy with Advocatus Diaboli despite his slide into jaded cynicism. I feel high caste Indians may have come closest to fighting the brutal cycle.
The Chinese came tantalizingly close to an industrial revolution during the Ming and early Qing, but they were already too orderly and incurious about the rest of the world to burst forth and set up colonies.
I think a new mode of organization is required to thrive in the modern age and that is where I diverge from neo-reactionaries who want to “restore the Stuarts.”
As I see it, the Stuarts failed for a reason, into the trash(rubbish) bin they go.
I think it’s very likely the Spartans and Romans fell for the same reason the West is. The disincentive for Women to act in a manner conducive to civilization. As most Women can have children anyways, civilization or not, they really have no strong interest in the matter. In Sparta they ran out of troops. I think Women had full rights and could inherit property. Maybe they just decided having children was too much of a bother.
If you really wanted to tip the balance you could declare all Women’s eggs the property of the State. I know mice have been spliced with Women’s breast milk genes…maybe splice human wombs into cows and Men could just have their own children. Could you make Women earn the right to breed just as Men have to now? What would be the criteria? Be VERY tough to make this happen. Too many Women’s votes and they just don’t seem to care. Yes I know many do but the average is not good for civilization.
When you talked about China almost entering a Industrial Revolution were you talking about William H McNeill’s book,”The pursuit of power: Technology, armed force, and society since A.D. “? I think I read about a Chinese merchant that was making so much iron/steel it took well into the I.R. in England before they equaled his volume. Of course he had too much power and was crushed. McNeill was such a great writer. I love BIG HISTORY books like he wrote. Big ideas. Smart guy.
To the point of making civilization ‘anti-fragile’, unfortunately the best we have is a system of patriarchy where the sexual freedom of women is determined by male guardians through accentuated sexual dimorphism. Societies can last like this for millennia if they can also maintain a fairly poor majority. The Middle-East and India provide the best examples in the modern world, although India is changing rapidly. This is what Giovanni meant when he said, “We can see that one of the key pressures that decides the direction of a society is selection through arranged marriages. Where men must accumulate wealth and prestige in order to breed, they are selected to achieve and explore.”
If you want social justice and civilization growth, I think you would have to start altering human nature artificially to mimic the state of growth, but without the tyranny. Of course, this is not something that people very interested in social justice are likely to want.
Thanks Giovanni for the excellent reading of sexual economics.
Yes, material technology has outstripped the capabilities of the technologies of social organization, which have remained mostly static as pyramidal tyrannies since the first cities.
Humans may just keep hitting the same hard cieling of growth until better methods are engineered, and humans themselves become transhumans better engineered for constructive mass social life.
Are you Penman, author of Biohistory by any chance? If so, I’ve taken note of the thesis that societies considered primitive such as the Middle East are in fact the most advanced since nature doesn’t select for “human rights” or comfort for individuals, but what spreads and competes best.
No, I was part of the research team and junior editors on the books. Now I’m working on the youtube videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4-Od8cq5Gk), etc.
The Middle East is incredibly misunderstood by the Western world. We’re like tourists in jeeps looking out at a tiger and thinking thinking it’s a cute, albeit wild, tabby. Every once in a while some idiot opens a window and discovers the reality of the situation.
Biohistory, the videos make sense but you need to stop doing that flash tweening animation on classical artwork of historical events/people. It is unsettling.
The alt right likes to shit on libertarians these days but it seems high-C. Growing wealth on the individual and family level and interacting with outsiders on a impartial basis matches what is seen in the video.