On humans

Humanity is engaged in a perpetual cold war of all against all. This follows from their peculiar biological position as group-level apex predators. Individual resource acquisition is not determined by hunting, gathering, or farming success, as one would expect, but rather from relative status: an Omega male who hunts with superlative talent and skill eats less than an Alpha male who does not participate in the hunt at all (ref: lions). Because “all war is based on deception”, the human predisposition to relentless deception (ref: young children) and sabotage can be blamed on this cold war for relative status. This produces a nature (a phenotype) which is characterized by an efficiency in maximizing status obtained from minimized nurture.

Biologically, man is characterized by his encephalization and effective use of scarce calories. The latter trait appeared first, being inherited from a survival strategy of endurance predators. The former may be explained by two needs: 1) natural problem-solving to adapt to harsh and/or changing food production conditions, and 2) social perception and navigation to increase one’s status and decrease the status of others without threatening the commonweal. As man became the group-level apex predator he is today, the former need became irrelevant and the latter dominated the development of his mental powers. I distinctly remember, at the age of puberty, when my peers became disinterested in any activity other than impressing each other with their increasingly well-practiced social fluency. So we see that a man or group of men who quits the political field is, ultimately, committing genetic suicide (hence the inborn male fascination with political advocacy).

A rogue human, even one of superlative talent and skill, acts outside his biological imperative as an apex predator because this position is predicated on group-level adaptations. The Omega male thus faces the choice of cooperating with the group and being killed slowly as a slave, or defecting from the group and most likely being eaten by animals or barbarian raids (e.g. the individualistic neanderthals). If he cooperates, he suffers the dual indignity of having the spoils of his hunt apportioned to others and receiving only a nominal share for his efforts, and negative transference (blame) for all the group’s woes. Because man is a magical thinker, he assumes that low-value (low-calorie) people are also the source of all evils (i.e. group-level calorie loss), and in times of group-level crisis will attempt to cull the low-status population in a perverted atonement for the group’s sins (as opposed to the Mosaic practice of sacrificing the spotless first-born lamb).

A phenotype of this sort ultimately explains the typical strategy of shrouding the acquisition of status in mystery: You “get it”, or “you don’t get it”. You “got it”, “have the X-factor”, etc., or you don’t. The meaning of “get” is twofold. 1) One understands how to navigate fundamental social realities by instinct, without being told (and in a strenuous social milieu of intratribal cold war deceptions), or one doesn’t. And 2) one either “gets” (obtains) resources because they have high-status and are desirable to associate with, or one doesn’t “get” resources. This is why the notion of nurturing his young by communicating social realities appears to be a mystery to homo sapiens—by definition, a person who needs to be told the truth does not deserve to receive it. Due to this assumed environment of in-group sabotage, people instinctively discount the spoken beliefs of others and are only persuaded by observing and “aping” how a successful (high-status, resource-abundant) person acts, this being generally more expensive to fake (“words are cheap”).

In conclusion, we see that the highest status human is defined as one who appears to have come by his status without effort, and in the total absence of nurture. This is why women are attracted to dark triad traits and humanity is doomed to continue breeding these and breeding out problem-solving traits. If a man has put forth effort to obtain his social status, then it was not passed to him by birth and he will not, in turn, bless his descendents with this instinctual sort of understanding. He may pass on his understanding by nurture, but this is a bad genetic bet in the long term: the overwhelming human tendency to in-group deception and sabotage will win out and the cultural knowledge will be lost, and the artificial Alpha’s genetic line will be extinguished. This is the source of the female instinct to feel that she has been “cheated” if her lover shows a conscious understanding of how he obtains his value, status, and resources.