fertilizing the moron farm

the emergent journey to idiocracy

the other day, gatopal™ “the drunk republican” was pointing out one of the odd contradictions of modernity.

but i wonder: is this a contradiction at all? i suspect it is not. i suspect it is, in fact, a sort of emergent property from plenty and wealth and the societal and individual incentives that seem to come with them.

let us explore this emergent stupidity excursion as, like all such pehnomenon, this highly complex and varied structure appears as though it may be well explained by only a few simple causal drivers.

consider the possibility that the advent of moronical modernity finds its roots in a simple tenet of economics:

when, all else equal, the price of something drops, people choose to consume more of it.

the price of being moronical declined and so consumption of this "good" increased.

pre-enlightment, people were poor and life had more notable tendencies toward "nasty, brutish, and short."

it was a time full of severe selectors any of which would both cull you from the herd and assure future generations that genes like yours would not be around to commit further foibles.

the price of moronicality on both the individual and the societal levels was severe and rapid. a world near the edge of its structural carrying capacity to support its humans is a world with small margin for error.

didn’t lay in enough food or firewood this winter? guess what happens now.

allow the nature of your society to become inconsistent with human flourishing and supportive of dependence and predation, and guess what happens then?

how many who fell for “communism could totally work if we just get the right people in charge this time!” are no longer with us to fall prey again?

such calamity used to be near instant. now it is a slow burn through the sizable fat reserves of the once replete civilizational success that made everyone so comfortable in the first place.

the plenty of the post enlightenment removed these penalties even replacing them with welfare state subsidy.

that's how you fertilize a moron farm.

it's also how you drive and enable antisocial behavior and open up a society to conquest and collapse.

overmuch plenty and the softness it begets seem also to lean in against the very nature of the societies themselves, the high trust high function underpinnings of human flourishing.

you no longer need them to survive as well meaning empathy creates “safety nets” whose inherently coercive nature turns them into vectors of abuse and tyranny.

such safety nets are a positive right, a right to food, to shelter. on a first order basis, this seems a good thing, but the second order underpinning is always authoritarian and a violation of the negative rights to self determination which stand as fundamental. the mantra becomes: we will take (by force or threat of force) from some in order to give to others. this is the very definition of bastiat’s legal plunder:

“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

many seek to cast this as an economic crime, an assault on property. “taxation is theft.” and to the extent that this taxation is coercive (more or less the definition of taxation) i would agree. but often left to go begging in this analysis is the deeper moral and philosophical implication: such legal plunder is not merely a matter of property; it’s a set of incentives most perverse and a civilizational and social solvent undermining at once comity, fraternity, and ethics.

consider:

once, most people needed to lean heavily upon their communities. it was the safety net, and if you acted like a jerk, you were on your own.

i remember when my grandmother died, we were going through her old photo albums full of pictures from the 1930’s and 40’s. there were loads of pictures of weddings (as photos were uncommon and weddings a place where one would splurge). it became apparent as we looked through these pictures that perhaps 10 different brides had all been married in the same dress. the neighborhood basically bought one and the young women all used it in turn.

now, obviously, this is a sign of scarcity, a depression era choice to “have something nice” that no one family could afford on their own for such a single use occasion as a wedding. clearly, to modern sensibilities, we’re all grateful (or aspire) to be richer than that. this is a state we strived to escape and from which plenty removed us. the once common idea of “not being able to afford a special dress for your special day” is gone. we are far wealthier and few want to go back.

but consider the incentives in a society like that. the co- and interdependence of the neighborhood and family as support and cooperation toward goals unreachable alone were acute, and as such ideas like “trust” and “acting toward others as you would have them act toward you” pervaded as vital underpinnings of social interaction and choice. being shunned from such society because no one trusted you meant no wedding dress, it meant no one would loan you tools or help you move or spot you a couple of bucks in a tight spot. and absent a welfare net or great wealth, that meant you were in trouble.

even the welfare nets themselves were viewed with disdain. people had too much pride to use them and would work fingers to bone rather than mooch off the neighbors. it was seen as shameful, a taking from others. i wonder to what extent this ethos was supported, even necessary, in such an interdependent society where if you “went on the dole” everyone knew and knew you were sponging and not pulling your weight and where this might have ramifications for lots of other things you needed. when no man is an island, you sink or swim with the people around you and their ongoing good favor and trust has powerful implications for your own success and safety.

then everyone got much, much wealthier.

now, you can be an utter pill because you really need no one. everyone is too rich. you don't need to borrow tools or transportation. in extremis, you still get money from "the neighbors" because the state collects it for you and often rewards fraud and being a leech.

and the safety net is cushy enough and the overall level of life around us high enough that behaving is such a fashion can keep you afloat and OK without needing anyone else. life as a low-trust non-contributor has become tenable and shame at the idea of doing so has attenuated and even inverted into levels of astonishing entitlement.

neighbors no longer share wedding dresses and make do, they share strategies to get more EBT and apply for additional benefits.

this sort of morality is not a self-sustainable ethos.

it can only persist in the presence of the largesse of others.

it’s quite literally “i’m not going to work so you have to buy me energy drinks.”

interruptions or requirements to seek gainful employment are met with fury.

again, we have dramatically reduced the price of “acting like a jerk and abusing systems.” so, of course, at the margin, people choose to consume more of it.

and this is a societal trap.

this selects for propensity to abuse systems instead of propensity to improve them.

it pits citizen against citizen as once you place “free stuff” plundered from others upon the table, someone will reach for it and the race is on to grab limited resources first. in this way, the demos is pitted against itself, induced into a race to the bottom.

these issues explode disproportionately in rich welfare states, especially if you start adding low-trust people to them. a soceity that would once not support any such behavior gets overrun by it.

bumper crop of low trust morons this year…

once the dam breaks and a sufficiency of people begin to consistently choose to “defect” in the prisoner’s dilemma of the social contract, the once virtuous cost/benefit incentives become perverse.

and then whole lexicons of faux moral structures are erected to justify the plunder and vilify the virtues that created anything worth plundering in the first place.

it’s highly effective civilizational solvent once the social censure imposed by “needing the neighbors as a support network” is removed from such piracy prerogatives. familes move apart and strangers happily take from strangers.

and you get a race to the bottom to see who can invent the most outlandish and memetically viral pretext to usurp that which is not theirs and live at the expense of others.

(i’m pretty sure this is parody, but not 100%)

and all of this leaves me with a hard to shake belief that the very success of flourishing societies carries within it the emergent seeds of its own dissolution germinating as luxury beliefs and entitlement growing unchecked by effective forms of social censure.

the selfsame good intentions of "wanting to make sure everyone is OK" are precisely what land us in a society of takers crowding out makers and where plenty and safety are lost.

this selects for those low in motivation, intelligence, aptitude, and trust to have many children to maximize benefits while at the same time upping the burden on those who do pay and rendering their own child rearing options more limited.

paying 35% tax rates to support what is basically a massive intergenerational and inter-class wealth transfer system whose costs alone already exceed all tax receipts and that therefore churns out annual debt in excess of the GDP of all but a few countries in the world (the US federal deficit would be the 12th largest economy inthe world, edging out spain and almost supplanting russia. in 2020, it would have been umber 8) places huge stress on makers and their ability to make little makers. they are too busy funding the takers and their burgeoning broods.

if this basically sounds like the opening scene in “idiocracy,” well yeah. exactly.

when, at the margin, you tax high agency success in order to subsidize low agency low trust behavior (and pay per child) you’re running that exact playbook.

people may not like this fact and sincerely wish that we could just make things nice for everyone, but when you subsidize the people and behaviors that oppose ideas like flourishing, self-sufficiency, and agency, well, that’s why we cannot have nice things.

they all get grabbed by the orcs.

it’s just simple emergent incentive.

soft times create morons and morons create hard times.

and we all know what comes after.

buckle up.

the next part of the cycle is not kind to the stupid.

“remember that bank account you used to have..?”