Is having children with your cousin a good thing? Yes, without a doubt, if you value you and your descendants being what is currently considered to be in line with the definiton of "alive", and if you value as many of your descendants being able to experience being alive as possible. In an initially small but still very real way, all instances of inbreeding are basically tiny acts of heroism that promote the survival of the human race by way of increasing its longevity as a species. For too long, parochial westerners obsessed with unobjective at best and suicidal at worst forms of monodirectional social and technological "progress" have chastised various groups of people with a higher incidence of cousin (and other forms of inter-relative) marriage than their own. This includes religious, ethnic and socioeconomic groups which are all more likely to inbreed, and which are all attacked for it by the modern enlightened-with-a-capital E western metropolitan area-dwelling bugman.
Because it's needed for the argument in this post to work, something needs to be gotten out of the way - the industrial revolution and its consequences have been disaster for the human race. If one is too intellectually timid to accept this, all they need to do is sit and wait; if you are capable of any sort of individual thought at all, you will eventually realise that history has vindicated Ted Kaczynski and will continue to do so as time goes by. You are currently a slave to technology, even if you do not realise it. Maybe you do but can't do anything about, and the thought of it makes your skinnyfat, devoid of muscle tone body writhe like a worm in your computer chair because of how painful it is. You are on this website, you either accept this is you or deny it is you, because it is you. Keep focusing your beady eyes on your screen at my post, unable to do anything to stop it even though this is a massively addictive time sink, the use of which is in all likelihood promoted by economic and political elites to keep you complacent and unlikely to do anything. Even flipping out kills tax paypigs, which is why modern industrial societies that cause mental illness on a massive scale have been forced to integrate behavioural psychology services into the welfare state through the bloated, very ineffective institution of psychiatry. Then again, proper understanding of how the human brain works on a level that is achievable within the space of this century would give those in politics, advertising and law enforcement such a foolproof ability to control human behaviour that maybe SSRIs and cat lady therapists sitting you down on leather chairs to nod at your problems are a good thing)
Whether or not you take your digital opiate, your life is shit and it will continue to get shittier. If you're anywhere close to the conventional person, you are alive because you are contributing in some small way to the government through taxes and to the major corporations that influence it by working for them. Even if you are useless and work in a busywork field like HR, your busywork still allows your higher-ups to launder money from the system at large and your existence as purpose. As the automation of both physical and mental labour progresses, the average person will become less wanted and less needed. In a hypothetical future in which the average, 100 IQ Joe "average schmuck" Blough person's abilities and talents are not needed in the slightest to have an efficient and productive, it costs the welfare state or whoever is feeding him a certain amount of money each week, day and hour just to keep him alive. Do not kid yourselves, a UBI quasi-utopia will not happen and any state using a universal income will have incentives against things being that way forever. Nobody gives a shit about the average person in an increasingly cutthroat, competitive world where they are less valuable than ever before and need to put in even more effort than before simply to stay afloat.
You die in a cubicle sized apartment at age 90, your heart giving way as you hold a bag of sun chips in your hand and wear an oculus rift over your eyes. Your advanced age and modest life savings, the latter having been accumulated after passing through a variety of career fields before you were inevitably cast out of them by automation, have warranted you a personal carer (herself trying to stay afloat in a dwindling service sector so she does not become a useless eater), but she was not home. You die completely alone. You have no family, there is no need to have one in an advanced industrial society and the television spent 90 years telling you not to have one anyway. You have not spoken to anyone apart from your carer in a month, people instead prefer digital forms of entertainment specially-engineered to enthrall the primitive human brain. Runaway capitalism, given a boost by the accelerator effect of digital technology, has turned all interaction between human beings into some form of transaction anyway. As you die you realise you haven't really made any important decisions in your entire life, your entire existence was spent being a cog in a machine which you require for food and rent, but which does not require you to exist. All the major human events, the stock market crashes and company mergers, which have affected your life have been decided by a relatively small group of people at the top of society. Maybe if you lived in a small agrarian village in a pre-industrial society you would have control over the human affairs over your own life more than you did as a cog in a giant industrial-technological machine. Sure crop failures could kill you, but in the place of modern first-world security of living standards you could have had autonomy over yourself and, ultimately, dignity. Maybe you could have died with dignity as well.
Strong AI is never happening in all likelihood, but the ability of weak AI to understand a multitude of small processes and piece it all together means that even creative pursuits like writing, poetry and music can be done by machines just as well as humans (google David Cope Emmy Vivaldi to see how much of a joke futurist techies talking about a future creative gift economy where everyone designs an app is). As humans become less wanted, less needed, and are inevitably pushed to the sidelines for the sake of self-prop systems becoming increasingly efficient to outcompete their rivals, the running of the system becomes much less human than it was before. What is medicine when your GP's office is full of computers staffed by technicians? What is economics and financial planning when human beings need calculators to deal with large amounts of money efficiently? The vast majority of humanity are, in the long term, useless eaters. In the longer long term, all of us are. Who's to say that a system can't run itself using entirely or almost entirely weak AI with no human beings involved? Silicon and metal cockroaches, crawling around in a very complicated way and replicating for the sake of replicating. Are humans needed for that in the long run? If you are a humanist and value human dignity and quality of life, does it bother you that in the extreme long term we will be replaced by things with nothing even resembling individuality, spirituality, camaraderie, appreciation of aesthetics or love?
If you believe in any political cause because you want yourself and others to live under a government with a certain policy, surely you believe in the success of that political cause as soon as possible? You want yourself and as many people as possible, in the present and in the future, to live in a world with that goal achieved. Especially if you are a leftist who believes in some sort of utopian cause (by neoliberal standards) like socialism, don't you think the moral imperative to have the entire world under a crimson flag, as many people as possible, means that for the sake of the extremely old socialism should be introduced as soon as possible so they can benefit from it in what remains of their lifetimes? If the future is uncertain (which it is) and you are not sure when your political cause will succeed, don't you want it to succeed as soon as possible even if that occurs after your lifetime? Some things to consider, if you believe something is either moral or it benefits you and your progeny you should want it to be instated as soon as possible.
I believe in the continued existence of the human race. I am not saying the world is at all perfect for the 7 billion people living in it, but there is something nice about being able to sit there and realise that you are alive and conscious. It's seems really weird and kind of absurd when you really think about the fact you're alive and experiencing everything, but it's pretty neat at the same time and if somebody offered to shoot me in the head I don't think I'd say yes for that reason alone. I personally would like this for myself and for my progeny, for as long as possible, and while it isn't rational you can suck my balls because there's no truly rational objectively justified reason for doing anything. Why do you need food? Why do you need to be alive? Haters can fuck off lmao if you want something go for it, if you don't like it I'm going to do it just to spite you.
Dunno about you guys but I reckon a lot of folks on this navel-gazing forum will agree. People dying is bad. People being alive is good. Kids and future descendants of people being alive is good. People and their descendants should keep the whole being alive thing going for as long as possible.
What does this have to do with inbreeding? How does inbreeding keep the human race alive for longer than it otherwise would be kept alive, so the maximum amount of people possible can sit in a bathtub and think about the fact they're alive and conscious?
If we believe in the piece of text right above the above one, starting with the word "dunno", surely we should all be able to agree that the industrial-technological system will bring about the extinction of the human species (and of all biological life which is able to be sentient and conscious in the way we are) eventually for the sake of efficiency. We invented agriculture 10,000 years ago and a century ago we didn't even have computers, whereas the human species evolved twenty times longer ago than we developed agriculture, so it's pretty hard to deny that technological progress is accelerating as time goes by (and with it the march towards total human obsolescence, which will end every single one of our bloodlines and prevent any more of our descendants from being alive, which most people believe to be fundamentally moral). Therefore, the industrial-technological system, if it continues to exist, will have massively pushed forward the date of human extinction and is immoral. We should therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system, and beyond that we should make sure no similar system arises ever again following that. The stars can touch themselves if it means the preservation of humanity.
Reading Industrial Society and its Future and the first half of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, it is hard not to feel fatalistic about the inevitability of the industrial-technological system. In the former piece of text Ted is extremely vague about how revolutionaries would hypothetically keep the industrial revolution from happening again, and in Ted's writings on self-prop systems he points out that a more technologically advanced group of people will always outmuscle a less technologically advanced group of people, replacing them in the process. History is a testament to this, as are our bloodlines (if you are of European descent, a large portion of your ancestry comes from Near-Eastern Neolithic farmers who displaced indigenous European hunter-gatherers with their superior numbers, even though skeletons show that the nutrition of these farmers was much poorer and genetic studies show that one man for every several women was reproducing, probably due to accumulation of land, warfare and increased competition that made life a living hell for reproductively-unsuccessful gents at the time)
Although it's dubious as to whether or not it's a good way of looking at history, an interesting way of looking at how history went is through allohistorical what-ifs that compare what did happen with what could have happened. A good site for this is alternatehistory.com. There are several threads on alternatehistory.com, in particular on its ASB ("alien space bats", a slang term for unrealistic scenarios, don't ask me how it became a thing) subforum, giving a what-if on a world without coal. I read through a few of these threads and saw people talking about industrialisation eventually occurring on a limited scale using hydroelectricity. This would in turn have an accelerator effect on technological development even with the difficulties of a no-coal world and, unless it collapsed, lead to total human obsolescence at some point or another.
Quite depressing stuff. However, there are other arguments which suggest that an industrial revolution might not have been so inevitable if history had gone differently. This article, by economics professor J. Bradford Delong, argues that it is perfectly possible industrial civilisation could have failed to take off after getting stuck in an equilibrium trap, and that early modern-style "gunpowder empires" could have potentially been the peak of human development. He argues that if the industrial revolution was such a logical progression and so easy to achieve, why did a multitude of historical Empires with a high degree of prosperity for their time and non-outrageous private property norms fail to industrialise? Perhaps the industrial revolution would not be so inevitable a second time if we were to tear this shitshow down.
Because securing the existence of the human race for as long as possible is our moral imperative, how do we hold back the twilight of the human species that is industrialisation should we fight back this era of it and be faced with the task of preventing it from happening again? Biology has an answer.
You may have seen an article a few years ago, posted on a number of news and pop-science websites in roughly the same format, talking about the fact that human evolution has not slowed down but in fact sped up over the past ten thousand years. Lactose tolerance, blue eyes, a bunch of new selective pressures from a changing environment producing other changes which are either harder to spot or cannot be named off the top of this OP's head - all have occurred in an era of human evolution speeding up since the rise of agriculture. Although some would like to deny it, human evolution does not stop when you get up to the neck.
Enter the Hajnal Line.
“The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history — feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems.”
What does the Hajnal Line have to do with genetics? The Hajnal Line marks the outline of Catholic and Protestant Europe, the homeland of Western civilisation in other words. As the homeland of a society distinct from other societies, people live a certain way and social organisation is done a certain way. The way society was organised in the West, from the time of the Frankish kingdoms to the abolition of serfdom in early modernity, involved a great deal of manorialism. Manorialism does two things to fertility - it makes reproductive success dependent on the ability to hold land and prosper, and it gives the upper classes a higher fertility rate than the lower classes because they are able to prosper more. For more than a thousand years in Medieval Europe, especially during early modernity, the upper classes' higher fertility than the poor meant that rich people came spilling out of the upper class into lower tiers of society, displacing the poor genetically several times before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolutions even happened. This is no bullshit, you can read about this population replacement here, the guy that wrote it was a white nationalist but recently stopped being one purely because he realised white people are not a genetically-homogeneous group, not at all a prejudiced bloke given he's willing to look at data and base conclusions on it. Also, both articles I have posted will mention a gradual reduction in the homicide rate throughout Northwestern Europe due to a steady execution of a large number of criminals each generation. Think genetics having an influence on people's social attitudes and behaviour is bullshit? Legitimate academics would disagree with you.
Because higher-class people are more likely to have a higher IQ and also for genetic reasons (social class in a society which requires mental ability to function in does not crystalise upon nothing, after all, although /pol/yp troglodytes will quote the bell curve exclusively for talking about race a lot more of the book is dedicated to differences in IQ along socioeconomic lines for genetic reasons) along with environmental ones, flushing out your lower class genetically several times over the course of a thousand years is going to make your population more intelligent on average. Intelligence is heritable and determined at least in part by genetic traits, if people who are more likely to have "smart genes" are breeding the population will get smarter over time, it's not rocket science. Other regions of the world which experienced manorialism such as Northeast Asia also have people who score better on IQ tests than surrounding groups of people, just like Northwest Europeans. IQ is a legitimate means of measuring intelligence, it predicts success in academic pursuits, career pursuits and in life outcomes. The fact IQ is so old and continues to be used is the case for a reason, anyone denying these facts is a lunatic. I am not a white supremacist or even a white nationalist, Albanians have the same average IQ as people from Sierra Leone for a reason and the Irish have an average IQ in the low 90s BECAUSE they did not experience manorialism on the same level as the rest of Northwestern Europe.
Look at the traits, which can be said to be AT THE VERY LEAST partly determined by genetics, which Northwest Europeans in particular have. Individualism, high-trust societies with low homicide rates, and high IQ are the killers. These people are built to make prosperous societies with a high degree of innovation and private property norms conductive to industrialisation. What if part of the reason Europe industrialised in the early modern era, along with economic conditions at the time and the agricultural revolution, was genetics? It's not outlandish to suggest that, especially seeing as the scientific community is now starting to tell us that human behaviour and cognitive ability is largely heritable, and that human evolution (which DOES NOT stop above the neck) has been speeding up since agriculture was first developed.
Another trait of societies inside the Hajnal line has been plenty of outbreeding, with a low rate of inbreeding. Inbreeding has been shown to reduce IQ over generations, although an article from Nature tells us that effects start to level off when you live in a society with insane amounts of inbreeding such as the Middle East. Speaking of the Middle East, did you know that less than 1% of scientists worldwide are Muslim. This isn't a coincidence, sure a lot of the reasons are cultural, economic and historical, but the way we reproduce and therefore our genes is heavily involved with how we organise our societies. If, during the early modern era, the entirety of the world's population was replaced by a Middle Eastern stock, the Industrial Revolution absolutely wouldn't have happened. That would be in no small part due to inbreeding and other arguably "dysgenic" (subjective term) breeding patterns in Muslim societies.
Just a heads up, inbreeding in the Muslim world really is that insane. In Pakistan, more than half of marriages are between people at least as close as second cousins, with countries like Syria, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia not far behind.
If we have a moral imperative to prevent the industrial revolution from happening again should the industrial-technological system today collapse, it would be handy if we could establish a society with a high degree of inbreeding. This would lower the intelligence of the population to such a degree that they would have a noticeably more difficult time developing a European-style Enlightenment and industrial revolution. Remember that modern capitalism was in a large part developed by the dutch, parliamentary democratic government by the English. The heart of the Hajnal line was where things were popping most of all, do you think Waleed Abu-Bakr Mohammedi and his legion of cousin brides would be able to accomplish anything like that? Potentially, yes, but don't count on it as much as you would with early modern Europe.
I might sound kind of demeaning towards cultures with a high rate of inbreeding myself here, but trust me, I'm just messing around. There is nothing wrong with inbreeding unless it ends your family line like it did with the Spanish Habsburgs. Societies with normalised cousin-marriage, although they have a higher rate of birth defects and a lower average IQ, are doing nothing wrong. In fact, by contributing less to the development of technology because of inbreeding, they are actually prolonging the survival of the human species and holding back human obsolescence. If NW European-style breeding was brought to the Middle East during the middle ages, can you imagine the difference in technology we could potentially have now from Pakistani and Arab scientists? It would absolutely be noticeable, maybe for the sake of the human race it is best we didn't do that. Hold back the darkest night of all, the night in which the human race goes to sleep and never wakes up, even if it means impregnating your cousin. It is your moral imperative unless you are a massively fucked up person.
Furthermore, along with producing less people able to continue the suicidal march of technological progress, inbreeding in the here-and-now produces more disfigured and mentally-retarded people who place a greater strain on the industrial-technological system than would exist otherwise. These people too are holding back human obsolescence, and if the industrial-technological system of today ever collapses in the future, sparing the human species, they will have contributed a small but undeniable bit to helping it collapse by being a burden on it. Even if they die in the collapse, they died for their family and friends of their family who live on.
Furthermore, is inbreeding an effective strategy to fight technology? It's not the end all be all, but if you can normalise it or at least get a significant portion of your gene pool doing it you are making change with every birth. Because of how many branches family trees have, regions of the world are less people branching off from each other and more a churning pot of people. The average Englishman is descended from about 80% of the English population that was alive in the year 1000, I can't find the link on where I read this autiste-tier little fact but it is quite reasonable (ancestors double with each generation you go back) and should effectively drive home how much damage we can do to the industrial-technological system just by dedicating our lives to inbreeding.
It is absolutely moral because it secures the survival of the human species for as long as possible, it is quite effective because it damages the gene pool for everyone after a dozen generations, societies which are inbred and pre-industrial in development will almost never have industrial revolutions in part for genetic reasons, and most of all even a seedy relationship with your second-cousin is more laden with human love and affection than machines replicating for the sake of replicating and expanding out into the void like giant metal cockroaches once the human race has died with a whimper. Next time you meet your cousin, tell her she's looking good.
