2,004 words

Edward Dutton and J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles
Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism
Imperium Press, 2024

The progressive left—social justice warriors, the “woke,” or whatever one wishes to call them—imagine that they are creating a new world free of racism and oppression. Their opponents think they are destroying all that is good and decent: respect for God, tradition, history, beauty, and even rationality. But the effects of men’s actions often bear little resemblance to what they intend.

In this new book, Ed Dutton and J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles propose that both social justice warriors and their opponents have gotten matters wrong: the “woke” are indeed making the world a better place—but only by helping to remove people like themselves from it.

Viewed biologically, civilization represents an easing of selective pressures on the human species. In the authors’ words, it “creates an artificial warm period, or zoo, in which survival is easier and in which it is easier to have surviving offspring.” Since the Industrial Revolution (c. 1800) we have been enjoying the greatest reduction of selective pressure in human history. Childhood mortality, the main instrument of genetic selection, has fallen from about 50 percent to less than one percent in Western populations.

The negative side of this easing of conditions is that harmful mutations cease to be purged from the species, and so begin to accumulate. As a result, Europeans have become “increasingly genetically maladaptive: physically sick, mentally sick, barren, and decreasingly group-oriented, meaning that they permit themselves to be displaced by other groups.” The authors believe woke thinking is the mental sickness caused by accumulating mutations: “the rise in leftism in Western countries over the last 70 years is likely substantially due to rising mutational load.”

Ideas, of course, are spread mimetically rather than being passed down in our DNA. But our willingness to entertain a particular idea can be influenced by traits we have inherited. The authors propose that “people with higher mutational load will have a weaker mental immune system” protecting them from ideas harmful to their genetic interests. Mutations do not create such ideas, but can leave people vulnerable to them where they exist.

The nature of the woke mind virus can be illuminated by moral foundations theory. Human beings belong to groups which they normally identify with and want to see thrive in competition with other groups. But they would also like to rise to a position of high status within their group. These two concernscan be difficult to balance.For the leftist, however, this does not present a problem. Much of what is called left-wing, progressive, or woke thinking amounts to a loss of interest in what is good for one’s group.This does not mean the leftist lacks a moral sense, but that heisexclusively concerned with thoseaspects of morality which relate to competition for status within the group: the “individualizing moral foundations”of equality and harm avoidance.He is unconcerned with the binding moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

The woke will, therefore,

attack anything that is associated with the traditional power system—as they are low in a sense of sanctity—and attempt to tear it down, as they perceive themselves, sometimes wrongly, as lacking in power. They can also be expected to harbour great resentment against the symbols of the system in which they feel they do not have the power which, being high in Narcissistic traits, they feel they deserve.

The authors point to the recent coronation of King Charles III as a good occasion for observing the difference between the woke and their conservative opponents.

The pomp and pageantry, which conservatives consider beautiful and inspiring, deeply upsets [leftists]. Leftism involves critiquing and undermining traditional norms—that which is sacred—and replacing them with that which evokes disgust. This can be observed in the ugliness of contemporary architecture, the vileness of much contemporary art. Beauty inspires people; beauty makes people feel good; feel transcendent, even. It is about order, it aims to inspire the group with a sense of the sacred and the eternal. If you are low in status, it is central to the system which caused you to be of low status. Thus, if you are physically and mentally weak and cannot attain to status within the system, it makes sense to attack the system. Being low in sanctity and low in disgust, liberals will be positively attracted to art and architecture which is revolting. Being concerned with equality, they will be horrified by the very idea that some things are more beautiful than others . . . and ultimately maintain that the ugly is beautiful so that everyone can feel equal.

Political preferences correlate with personality traits. Conservatism is associated with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and mental stability. The woke tend to neuroticism, meaning that they experience negative feelings such as anger and paranoia strongly. They are also high in Dark Triad personality traits, especially Narcissism (involving a sense of entitlement, arrogance, exploitation, and a desire for praise) and Machiavellianism (involving manipulative behavior, deception, desire for power and to force others to comply). Many woke women, especially, evince “vulnerable narcissism,” meaning that they “fear abandonment and constantly seek reassurance from others.” They are sensitive to rejection and perceived insults and can respond by becoming vengeful. Vulnerable Narcissism shades over into Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD),

characterized by highly unstable and extreme moods, poor emotional regulation, a fundamental fear of abandonment and of being alone, extreme feelings of shame, intense and unstable relationships and unstable goals, due to being plagued by intense negative feelings and a weak sense of self.

The authors believe BPD is crucial to understanding certain aspects of woke thinking and behavior. For example, last February, 15,000 people signed a petition protesting the establishment of a “Pro-Life Society” at Manchester University.

The Student Union had been compelled to ratify the society, which is run by male students, due to new “freedom of speech” laws. Some female students claimed that the very existence of the society “made them feel unsafe.” [One] stated that “The society has made me feel weak and inferior to my male counterparts . . . I have also had messages from multiple women who have been through abortions and felt personally victimized and threatened by the presence of a society such as this.”

I would previously have been inclined to dismiss such statements as insincere “crybully” tactics meant to strongarm others. But if the authors are correct, the extreme emotional vulnerability displayed by these young women, and their consequent inability to cope with disapproval, may be entirely sincere. For such women, “criticism or even disagreement induces fear and anxiety,” since they are “unused to it and have no way of coping with negative feelings.” Insofar as such women become influential, they create environments where opposing opinions are treated as serious threats. This is why our increasingly female-run universities have come to resemble nurseries.

As we see from this example, woke thinking demands that “the stigma surrounding abortion be reduced as much as possible, with young girls taught it is perfectly reasonable to destroy their nascent babies.” But this is merely one aspect of a larger tendency for woke thinking to promote sterility. Movements such as “Extinction Rebellion” and “Just Stop Oil” rationalize childlessness as an appropriate response to “climate change.” Other woke activists argue that it is immoral to bring children into a world of “inequality, racism, capitalism, war and violence.”

More often, the promotion of sterility is indirect, as through woke support for “transgenderism.” This new ideology teaches moody teenagers to believe they were born into the wrong body, and that their problems can be solved by “transitioning” to the opposite sex (and becoming unable to reproduce in the process). “Fat acceptance” and voluntary euthanasia for otherwise healthy people who feel depressed (now legal in the Netherlands) are other ways of promoting death and infertility.

The authors veer into satire as they enumerate more of the fertility-sapping aspects of contemporary thinking:

Young people must be put through decades of useless education due to runaway credentialism and made to go into debt for it. [They] must be kept busy to insure they don’t breed while they are at their most fertile. Food should be expensive, especially eating out, as this would permit young people to socialize, make friends and perhaps meet partners with whom they might breed.

Young people must not be allowed to afford cars. They must be underpaid, or on short term and insecure contracts is the are employed at all. Keeping young people living with their parents through their twenties and thirties will discourage them from marrying and having children. Whites must not be allowed to afford their own homes until they are too old to reproduce. [Instead,] social housing is to be given to foreigners.

Wokeness not merely fosters mass immigration, but assures immigrants they are morally superior to the natives, who are holding them back through “structural racism and colonial oppression.”

Why shouldn’t black men in London cause trouble if highly intelligent white people are telling them that their low socioeconomic status is nothing to do with their IQ of being lower in conscientiousness? Their situation is due to evil white racism, so why shouldn’t they commit crime to redress this?

Wokeness fosters heavy over-representation of ethnic minorities. Blacks, e.g., are four percent of the UK population but are 37 percent of those depicted in television commercials, which also frequently present mixed-race relationships in order to sap morale from native males. Recently Google introduced an AI image generator which responded to requests for historical images of Vikings or Medieval Englishmen with pictures of blacks. They were only forced to rethink this when it emerged that requests for images of the Third Reich also resulted in pictures of black Nazis.

In short, wokeness is a disaster for the individual genetic interests of those who embrace it, promoting sterility, mortality, and outbreeding. But by the same token, it is beneficial to the group by purging it of harmful mutations. It represents a recrudescence of group selection within a pathologically individualistic society. In effect, the woke are resigning from the gene pool, which ought to leave us with a more group-oriented, healthier, and more competitive society. This gives our authors confidence for the future. Indeed, the more maladaptive woke thinking is, and the more ruthlessly it eliminates its votaries from the gene pool, the healthier and more resistant the remaining population should be to such influences in the future. Contrary to pessimistic conservatives, one might almost hope for the greatest possible success of social justice warriors for the present, so that the process of purgation might be as thorough as possible. This appears to be the authors’ position.

I see at least two factors complicating this optimistic scenario. First, once harmful ideas become popular, they infect the minds not only of those rendered vulnerable by mutations, but also of genetically healthy young people who adopt them out of conformism or to gain status (as the authors admit). Among the most conformist people in any society are its young women, those upon whom society is mainly dependent for the task of reproduction. Reportedly, many now shun young men who reject the woke thinking they themselves have been inculcated with. Much of the plausibility of the authors’ thesis depends on the assumption that the purgative effects of the woke mind virus will act more surely on the mutants than on ordinary young women.

Second, although the authors devote attention to immigration, they do not give much thought to how it might interfere with the otherwise healthy process of purging mutations. This is likely to involve a kind of population bottleneck, which might not be such a bad thing for a society isolated on an island as the British used to be. But today the process will occur in the presence of highly competitive and ethnocentric foreign groups who may easily overwhelm the reduced white population before it can regain its genetic health or rebuild its numbers. Under these conditions, the inevitable purging of European mutations may only accrue to the benefit of Pakistanis looking to set up a Caliphate on what used to be British soil.