Amerika

We humans find ourselves caught between symbolism and naturalism at all times; the former makes us feel better as individuals, the latter helps us understand our world.

Our dilemma comes from having understood the world enough to be masters of it with our captured fire, but not enough to understand its subleties that make long-term results different from short-term results.

This means that we deny anything that we do not control.

Control has a weird duality. We want to be able to participate in whatever is current and exciting, like a rock concert, but we also want to be able to turn it off. We are passive until we have an opportunity to make our narcissism dominate, and then we become parasitic. This is the nature of individualism.

An individualist believes that the individual comes first before all else. For this reason, he wants to control any anti-individualistic forces out there. He wants to constantly have something in which he can participate and by doing so, make himself more important. But tell him that reality exists outside the human mind, and he rages.

Denial of reality takes many forms. There are religious forms and secular religious forms like equality, which is a symbol that makes people feel good despite having no relationship to reality. Some just take drugs and drink; say what you want about them, but at least they are honest in their need and the desire they hope will sate it.

One of the biggest forms of denial of reality in our age is the denial of Darwinism, which is a denial of the mathematically-necessary inequality at the heart of nature:

In the most detailed report, Wilberforce sought to undercut Darwin by insisting, like Cuvier, on the fixity of species. “The permanence of specific forms,” he said, “was a fact confirmed by all observation. The remains of animals, plants, and man found in … the Egyptian catacombs, all spoke of their identity with existing forms of … an unalterable character.”

In light of this evidence, Wilberforce could conclude only that there was no Lamarckian transmutation, and no adaptation by means of natural selection: “The line between man and the lower animals was distinct. There was no tendency on the part of the lower animals to become the self-conscious intelligent being, man; or in man to degenerate and lose the high characteristics of his mind and intelligence.”

The crowd now waited, the museum in silence, as Huxley rose to speak. “If the question is put to me,” he declared, “would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs these faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

This debate occurred in Victorian times. The religious people, much as they had during the debate over heliocentricism, insisted that God had made the world in a fixed form and this did not change. God created the Earth, animals, plants, and people, and that was it. Things were kept in perfect categorical definitions of what they were.

This type of “purity” appeals to the human mind. It is not so much simple as it is comprehensive. Everything is explained to satisfactory levels of detail with this single concept; Creation in fact becomes “symbolic” through this in the sense that it is immutable and has the same meaning in every context (the definition of a symbol).

Humans have problems with the idea of reality as a shifting landscape. They can handle it never changing, or moving in a linear direction toward some Utopia, but not the idea that it moves in cycles to renew itself. The idea of God’s creation generating and refining life offends the human need for control through symbolism.

A generation later, the same debate raged with the Scopes Monkey Trial in which not just natural selection but evolution were put on trial in the court of public opinion:

Scopes Trial, (July 10–21, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee, U.S.), highly publicized trial (known as the “Monkey Trial”) of a Dayton, Tennessee, high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

In March 1925 the Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act, which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible. World attention focused on the trial proceedings, which promised and delivered confrontation between fundamentalist literal belief and liberal interpretation of the Scriptures.

Creationism-versus-evolution is now a feature of American politics as if this were never resolved, but more importantly, the Left have become the new deniers of Darwin. They believe that only external influences separate a poor man from a rich man, a beggar from a king, a dilettante from an expert.

All of the data points to another conclusion, which is that genetics determines intelligence and many other features of individual humans.

Ironically, the original advocates for Darwin also embraced Galton because to recognize evolution is to realize that humans must apply those selection pressures by ourselves, now that we have replaced nature:

Bashford is unflinching in her portrayal of Thomas Henry’s support for British imperialism and white superiority over non-white peoples, as well as Julian’s promotion of eugenics. The grandfather conducted research on skulls knowingly stolen from aboriginal gravesites and argued that indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania were “living ancients.” In the context of the American Civil War, he confessed to his sister in Tennessee that he had “no sympathy for the ‘black man’” and contended that slavery should be ended only for the sake of the morality of “the white man” (p. 305). The grandson Julian believed in a “Family of Man” and argued against racial prejudice and class privilege in the 1939 Geneticists’ Manifesto 4 but asserted that culture was hierarchical.

The Right wing, traditional supporters of eugenics, find themselves caught between the Christian Right and the scientific Right. The Christian Right wants to believe that all souls are equal just as the Left does. The scientific Right wants to make more functional people and suppress the deleterious mutations that accumulate in permanent civilizations.

In the sanest calculus, the purpose of human society is to safeguard genetics. This is the root of whether a civilization rises or falls, and the civilization that not just stays true to its roots but improves its gene pool through a rigorous selection process will last.

On the other hand, most civilizations accumulate waste humans who have lost some parts of the full profile of genetics required to make a functional human mind. These waste humans are DKE arrogant, narcissistic, and incredibly selfish, especially when claiming to be selfless as a way to get free stuff for all.

We in the West, by virtue of making a functional civilization, made it easy for these partial humans to breed abundantly and now have lots of people who are interested only in what can be given to them today. These form the basis of the Left; it is literally the party of deleterious mutation load.

The Right on the other hand is the party of natural selection. We distrust systems, which reward partial people, and instead want a pioneer mentality where problem-solving without textbooks and YouTube videos is rewarded and those who cannot do it fade out of the gene pool.

At this point, the Left is entirely comprised of people who are dependent on the system. They care only for benefits and rights granted to them by government; they want to vote for more of the same, and are oblivious to the debt and consequences for the economy. That should just be regulated by fiat, they say.

Election 2024 comes down the struggle between system people and natural people. The former think in terms of categories and symbols, like who is “racist” and who is “rich,” not in terms of effects on society as a living entity running through cycles of renewing itself.

Donald J. Trump is running on a campaign of being “America’s Dad” or the guy you trust to clean a garage, fix a business, or get the church roof replaced. He like most natural people aims for function; he cares a lot less for the judgmental language of categories and symbols, which he views as merely marketing or advertising.

He offers a restoration of 1980s America, back when people were proud to be born here and it meant something to be American other than being a benefits sponge. To get that level of function back, he will have to defeat the partial humans and cut off their means of support, the anti-Darwinian government benefits.

Tags: charles darwin, donald j. trump, entitlements, eugenics, francis galton, Idiocracy, socialism