"Fertilizing the moron farm"

 

That's how El Gato Malo, blogging at Bad Cattitude, describes our society today.  (He [?] eschews capital letters.)

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

There's more at the link.  The article is well worth reading in full.

I've seen this at work in multiple levels of our society, from the inner city ghettoes to so-called "refugees" being handed more money and largesse at the border than many Americans earn by the sweat of their brows.  One incident in particular sticks in my memory.  A few months after I came to this country, I was invited to speak to a couple of classes of high school seniors in Lake Charles, Louisiana, about Africa and current events there.  After a couple of classes, I went outside during a break to talk to any students who were interested to learn more.

A young woman introduced herself to me, and wanted to know about "welfare programs" for single mothers in Africa.  She was openly shocked and disbelieving when I told her that most African countries don't have any.  It emerged during our conversation that she was 17 years old, and was currently pregnant with her fourth child.  She'd had the first when she was only 12.  All four had different fathers.  The truly shocking thing to me was her casual claim that her mother encouraged her to have them all, because the State of Louisiana would pay her welfare and other benefits totaling several hundred dollars per month for each child.  She'd basically chosen to have her babies as cash cows - not because she valued them as human beings.

What sort of mother brings up her daughter to think like that?  What sort of family brings up kids who will surely realize, at a very young age, that nobody really loves them or cares for them, except as a source of money?  When they grow up, they'll be kicked out of the house to make their own way.  What are the odds that they'll do precisely and exactly the same thing as their mother and grandmother?  The highlighted sentence in the last paragraph cited above fits their situation to a T.

Another example came my way during my time as a prison chaplain.  There's a program run by a group of churches which aims to give a Christmas present to the children of incarcerated inmates, who otherwise might receive nothing.  During September and October, the chaplains at my prisons pass out forms to inmates, one per child, and have them fill in the details, then return them.  I was dumbfounded at the number of inmates who casually asked for six, or eight, or ten or more forms, and returned them all with the names of all the children they'd fathered.  Almost all the children were born to different mothers.  It was almost like a contest among the criminal element, the "winner" being the man who'd begotten the most children on the most mothers.  Not one of them showed any shame or embarrassment at their conduct.  This was just the way their lives were.

I fear El Gato Malo is correct . . . but I don't know how to change that, apart from cutting off all such benefits - which would undoubtedly result in rioting and plunder on a huge scale as the outraged "moronicals" demanded that their free stuff be restored.

Oy.

Peter