Will Civilization Collapse?

2,142 words

Czech version here ^[2]

Even the mainstream media are acknowledging ^[3] that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is declining in most of the world. My view of intelligence is that is partially genetically determined. Genes give you a ceiling for intelligence; you have a potential IQ and a real IQ. Your biology determines your potential IQ; let’s say it is 120. If you receive the proper nurture, i.e. good food in childhood, exercise, and cognitively stimulating activities, by the time you are 25 (the age the brain fully develops) or before, you will have an IQ of 120.

You will never exceed this, however, no matter how much you study. If studying and reading continuously made someone smarter, then every medical student would be a Newton or von Neumann.

It also provides a floor of some sort. A person with a potential IQ of 120 will never fall below a certain threshold. He may not have an IQ of 120, but he’ll at most be an average person with an IQ of 100 to 105. Injuries to the head or some trauma might reduce it further, of course, but those are outside the purview of this discussion. The point is that he’ll never be an imbecile who applies Gorilla Glue to his hair.

This might be where the Flynn effect comes from. In the 20th century, IQ increased by as much as 15 points across developed and developing countries. This is owed to better nutrition and a standard education system enabled by the second industrial revolution.

People in these countries have been boosted to their maximum genetic potential. However, the genetic potential itself has been decreasing for some time now. It’s estimated that the highest intelligence ever achieved in a human society was Victorian-era northwestern Europe (barring France), with an average genetic potential of 125 IQ.

This was the result of 1000 years of eugenic breeding, beginning with the birth of Western civilization in 800 AD with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. In these 1000 years, in every generation, the upper third of the population outbred and replaced the lower two-thirds. The Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage removed maladaptive effects further, and, in every generation, the top 1% of violent men were executed.

Of course, very few met this potential. Life in the Victorian era was horrible for average people. Nutrition was terrible, education was rare, and poverty was endemic. Even as late as 1940, there were people in Britain so poor that they couldn’t afford a 2nd pair of pants.

As a whole, people became smarter in the 20th century with the onset of the economic boom, the second agricultural revolution, and mass education. However, their genetic potential has been decreasing for some time now due to dysgenic breeding.

The aristocratic and rich bourgeoisie have been practicing contraception for more than a century now, being constantly outbred by the lower-IQ working classes. In France, this dysgenic process started even earlier in the 18th century because it was the first country in history to adopt liberalism and secularism on a wide scale.

Among the Western Europeans, Germany and the Nordic countries were perhaps the last to phase into dysgenic breeding, owing to greater religiosity among the elites and eugenic laws. German intellectual superiority was plain for all to see from 1871 to 1945. They won more Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry than any other nation. In just 30 years, they went from being a largely agricultural society to being the world’s second-largest industrial power.

This intellectual superiority translated into military excellence as well. Even its worst detractors had to admit that the German military was second to none in quality and efficiency in both World Wars, coming to the cusp of victory against the entire world despite being chronically short on resources and manpower.

Modern warfare is a very cognitively demanding task, and the superior intelligence of the German soldier shined in both wars. In World War 2, in offense and defense, the Germans were 25% more efficient in combat than the British and Americans, and 50% more efficient than the Soviets. In fairness to the Russians, it was largely a third-world country in 1941 and the Great Purge had decimated its officer corps, while in the 1920s, the Bolshevik Red Terror had slaughtered or exiled Russian intelligentsia.

Now, what does this have to do with civilization falling?

Well, first of all, the rate of scientific advancement would’ve slowed down even without dysgenics. It’s because the easier fruits have already been picked. It’s far easier to lay down the laws of magnetism than to decipher why time moves forward or bodies have a mass.

The more tech progresses, the harder and harder it becomes for us to decipher the remaining mysteries. How does one solve the problem of interstellar travel, or Newtonian dynamics-related problems, time dilation, or faster-than-light travel? It simply might not be possible, or it could require intelligence beyond our physical limitations.

There certainly must be a thermodynamic limit to how smart a human can become. The brain, after all, is only 3% of the body’s weight, but consumes 20% of its energy.

But how about sustaining civilization?

You need intelligence for that as well. One only needs to look at Africa. The Belgians, French, and British left them with modern medicine, railways, and infrastructure. Yet these things collapsed within a decade or two of them leaving the continent.

The blacks simply lack the intelligence to even maintain a civilization, let alone advance one. The reason Africa as a whole isn’t descending into mass famine and cannibalism is that more intelligent races like Jews, WASPs and Chinese are propping these countries up.

Africa receives a whopping 130 billion dollars in aid every year. Imagine what could’ve been achieved if this money had been used to research nuclear fusion, electromagnetic propulsion, or prosthetics. Instead, it’s dumped into the bottomless basket known as Africa, disappearing forever into the void.

In the US, we have seen countless trillions go towards black communities, providing them with everything from free housing to unemployment, maternal assistance, healthcare, and more. The bill easily extends into the tens of trillions ever since LBJ’s Great Society project.

You can see a similar effect in India, where a minority of high-caste Hindus maintain civilization for a vast Australoid mass. High IQ Chinese are the reason why Malaysia has near first-world living standards.

But what happens when this dumbing down takes place across the planet? What if the entire world undergoes dysgenics to a point where they can’t even maintain the existing tech they have?

Maintaining existing technology is much harder than in the Victorian era. An engineer at that time only had to maintain steam-powered machines and steel-made tools.

Today, just to maintain a nuclear plant, an engineer must study for 6 years and master a dizzying number of topics ranging from mathematics to physics, thermodynamics, mechanical engineering, and so on.

What happens when the whole planet’s IQ falls to 85 or worse? There simply will be too few smart people to sustain civilization, notwithstanding the network effect. After all, a 100 IQ civilization will be far more conducive to the cultivation and proper utilization of intellect than an 85 IQ one that doesn’t even understand the knowledge and thus can’t appreciate it.

Sam Harris famously quipped that more books are translated into Spanish in Spain each year than the number translated into Arabic in the Arab world over its entire history. And even those books are probably mostly religious. Spain, being a more intelligent nation, has a robust academic environment in which the rare genius can go and flourish.

In 70 IQ Africa, surely some geniuses are born. Even if 1 in 100,000 Africans born in the continent is a genius, they should still have 12,000 or so of them. Statistically speaking, they certainly have more geniuses than Switzerland, and should produce more intellectually than the tiny country of 8 million. But because a society of 105 IQ Swiss are more likely to appreciate intelligence, create systems where knowledge is stored and studied, and hold genius to greater esteem, the Lilliput nation in the Alps has contributed magnitudes more to human accomplishment than the massive continent of Africa.

In a 70 IQ society, a genius probably just plows the farms all day — if he isn’t berated by his peers for “acting white,” which is what occurs in 85 IQ (I find this questionable) black American society.

If global IQ sinks to such depths, civilization would collapse and a new dark age will unfold. That is the road we are headed to right now.

There is a strong inverse correlation between a woman’s education and her fertility. The more educated she is, the fewer children she will have by the time she’s 45. Intelligent women in developed nations tend to spend their fertile years studying and chasing a career; less intelligent women with fewer prospects tend to be more fertile.

In China, smart people go to cities where they have fertilities of below 1, while the dim remain in the villages with near-replacement fertility. In Germany, half the scientists are childless. In Japan, a quarter of the population lives in Tokyo — certainly all the ambitious ones. There they have fertility below 1, while the simpler village peasant breeds more. Large cities effectively act as IQ shredders. They take in the finest stock of the nation and subject them to feminism, hypergamy, extreme living costs, and the rat race of the “free market.”

Whites in America, Brahmins in India, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia. . . the list goes on. In every country, the best populations waste themselves away in material pursuits. 

Then there’s the Africanization factor. Birth rates are collapsing worldwide yet remain sky-high in Sub-Saharan Africa. The liberal establishment heavily promotes miscegenation with blacks. Pornography and media portray the black man as a heroic demigod of sorts. One only needs to look at Northern Brazil to see where this leads to.

So, the world does seem to be heading for a great reset: a scenario in which intelligence falls to a stage where civilization can no longer be maintained. Then it collapses, and mankind is returned to Darwinian selection. Hopefully, this time they can avoid the plague of Jewry and liberalism.

However, there is a catch. In one scenario, the intellect of mankind could collapse, but see civilization and its tyranny continue: the emergence of the machine God.

Already we see vast automation in every sphere. By 2035 or 2040, there won’t be any physical labor left. All will be left to machines that are far more efficient. But what if this goes even further?

Some cognitively taxing but repetitive jobs, like cashiering, will also soon be automated. We already have AI that censors speech, autonomous drones that engage military targets at will, and AI that runs the stock market. How long before algorithms and AI evolve to a stage where they can simply manage industries and supply chains on their own, distributing goods and services to the population as needed?

An AI-run machine army can easily police any population. An AI-run military could turn out to be more efficient than any human force. DARPA recently created an AI that was able to defeat a US Air Force ace pilot in a simulated dogfight with the F-16.

An AI-run society could maintain civilization near indefinitely. Yes, it can’t advance civilization any further, but it can maintain existing society. The entire population could be barely-human, with IQs of 70, who sit around listening to rap and eating watermelons all day, and civilization could still continue.

The trains would be maintained and would run on time by algorithms. Drones would maintain law and order according to programming, industries would run according to algorithms, goods would be delivered according to needs, and all could be orchestrated by a central AI. Most of this technology already exists in some form. The only limitation is the required bandwidth and public resistance.

Strides in quantum computing increasingly seek to make this a reality. Already, an AI owned by Goldman Sachs runs the NYSE, the world’s largest stock exchange, an enterprise of unfathomable complexity.

If this is the case, are we doomed to an eternal hell? One in which this rotten civilization is artificially propped up forever and not allowed to collapse and return to Darwinian selection?

I see this as essentially a race against time. Will humans grow dumb to a critical threshold before the machine god emerges? Or will the machine god emerge first and become an eternal babysitter?

Where will God’s dice fall?

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