Video. Elon Musk urges people in developed countries to have more children:
https://www.euronews.com/embed/2436858
It is anti-scientific to ignore intergenerational trauma and the heritable genetic and epigenetic effects of poverty. The aetiology of poverty is complex, but it definitely includes social abuse and social and financial stressors that are caused by people behaving in a greedy and dominating manner.
Short-term stress response is an evolved useful response to stressors. However poor, unintelligent people are under sever stress continuously. This is incredibly damaging and psychologically speaking it is miserable. No one who lives like this has any decent quality of life — including in wealthy nations:
(I am not left or right wing, and yet it is a standing fact that although the free market economy has strengths, it also has longstanding dire problems and causes immense damage. This includes to the environment. As a realist and absurdist I do not look at capitalism through rose-coloured glasses.)
Poor, uneducated, and — especially — unintelligent and unattractive people are exposed to far more pervasive and constant stressors. Especially financial.
A far more direct way to approach this entire problem is to control breeding. Do not allow any human being with an IQ under 130–140 to breed/reproduce. In fact it is undeniably very cruel and unkind to do otherwise.
This approach is an especially good strategy now that general purpose robots will soon be available to do all manual and unskilled jobs and to fight wars.
However currently the problem with this strategy is that it is in fact opposed by two powerful groups in particular:
- Religious cults like Christianity and Islam
- The wealthy
(And especially wealthy theist cultists.)
Wealthy capitalists love having poor, suffering, undereducated, politically neutralised people to use as wage slaves. In fact — many wealthy people have entire businesses and corporate empires that rely on the existence of such underling-consumer slaves.
Am I being socialist? No way. I am saying we should build robots to do work and eliminate labour markets.
You can see this kind of pathological attitude of the wealthy in the weird political and ideological duplicities of people like Elon Musk. Musk wants to fight unions who demand better pay and conditions for dumb, undereducated normie workers whose parents should never have been allowed to breed in the first place. Their behaviour (breeding), and the behaviour of those facilitating their behaviour, is cruel and unkind. Such people’s progeny will — with high statistical certainty — suffer lack, trauma, failure, depression, elevated levels of mental and physical disease, disappointment, and anger.
However, Musk also wants people to breed more people! Simultaneously — he opposes the influx of cheap labour or poor workers into the US from South America. (Although to be fair- to some extent this is probably because Musk regards it as a Christian invasion and because many of the immigrants are Catholic and therefore he probably thinks them likely to join unions!)
But someone has to do the jobs that the wealthy elite won’t do, right? The gardening. The dishes. The prostitution.
Philosopher of psychology Schopenhauer was right when he said that people should not breed. However, Schopenhauer’s anti-natalism was thoroughgoing. He applied it to everyone. This makes little sense. It should only be applied to those who are not highly gifted intellectually and otherwise. It makes some sense to breed wealthy, smart, good looking people who will do well and enjoy life. (Again in fairness to Musk, he is known to endorse the idea that the intelligent and attractive should breed.)
To be fair to Musk — he’s interested in smart people in first world nations breeding.
A final note about the title of this article. Why refer to physical attractivness? That’s simple. Because being unattractive is associated with elevated levels of social failure and unpleasant psychological stress that causes pathological outcomes. It is the pscho-emotional knock-on effects that are the problem. Not being able to find the mate that you want is a nasty, unpleasant, miserable constant stressor that will cause damage — including bodily damage.
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APA PsycNet
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