George Rebane

In free societies merit and its reward will always seek a commensurate level.

As we enter the Biden years, America’s Left has a once in a lifetime opportunity to permanently tip the scales and guide the country into the Marxist future they have been seeking since the Bolshevik Revolution a century ago.  Following Lenin’s dictum in educating our young, our Left, in its co-opting of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control for the last half-century of the country’s public education.  And by all available observables and measurables (e.g. National Center for Educational Statistics) they have now produced an America that in the large reflects what the late Steve Allen referred to as “national dumbth”.  Today merit has been replaced by mediocrity (more here). The best illustration of this is the political behavior of our least well-read neighbors who have shown themselves to be robotically compliant to the state and its corporatist manufactured reality.

The eternal goal of collectivist autocracies is to evolve humankind into an amalgamated society that will respond reliably to top-down rule.  A major tool for creating such a population has been the successful decoupling of merit and reward in the American mind.  This has been achieved by appeal to the siren songs of ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’, each having malleable and/or implied meanings that are fashioned daily to promote the latest state diktat.

The demonstrable aspect of the merit/reward principle in determining human behavior has some compelling corollaries –

1. Merit always has an open market price.
2. When reward for recognized merit is withheld, the level of delivered merit declines.
3. When reward for recognized merit is lavished, it invites an increased supply of merit.

This universal principle is totally counter to collectivist ideologies in general and today’s progressivist narrative in particular.  The command-and-control elites of autocratic governments understand the merit/reward relationship, and use it cynically in shaping public policies designed to hide its teachings.

Rewarded by merit and perseverance, the human species have naturally evolved into a diverse lot.  Along almost all dimensions that describe our biology (genotype), physiology (phenotype), and mentality (cognitype) all of us are distinguishable and measurably different.  And such differentiation also applies upward in the human organizational tree whose leaves are the individual.  That means that as we gather in ever larger social groupings, these aspects of our being also turn out to be measurably different.

A profitable examination of such differences can begin with gender, which today’s Left-dominated social sciences have pronounced to be merely a “social construct”.  Noted social and political scientist, Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame), authors a generously documented and compelling counter to this viewpoint in his Human Diversity: The biology of Gender, Race, and Class (2020).  In it he presents and defends ten propositions.

1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.
2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.
3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.
4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.
5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.
6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.
7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.
8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior.
9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.
10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.

(Tolerably even-handed descriptions of the work and critical review are available here and here.)

In the present treatment I want to focus on the cognitions of gender as informed by the reading of Murray, along with my life experiences and doubtless biases that readers will affirm.  But at the outset, we should all recognize that hormones, or more accurately ‘hormonal dynamics’, strongly influence cognition.  At a minimum, all civilizations have recognized this in the post-puberty rites of passage of our teenaged offsprings.  There we continually see expressions of injurious irrationality and self-destructive emotional behavior as the teenage bodies of both genders undergo transformation from child to adult.  The study of genotypes, phenotypes, and cognitypes amply confirm the relationship between the measurables of body and behavior.

So now let’s come to hormonal dynamics in adult humans and their impact on behavior.  Here we see a marked difference between the experience of being a biological male and female.  The female, who bears the greater burden of species continuation, has evolved so that, with unstinting regularity must prepare her body internally, externally, and cognitively to form a new human fetus, nurture its early development, and finally introduce it to the outer world.  And when no fertilization of her ovum occurs, it must then with equal regularity deconstruct all the preparations – both physical and, yes, mental – and return the body to normative function during the interval until the process is repeated once more.

In the female, this menstrual cycle is repeated until the onset of menopause, at which time the body and mind go through more hormonal dynamics designed to permanently shut down this reproductive functionality.  And, of course, as again has been known for millennia and now measurable clinically, the hormonal dynamics of menopause also express themselves in the female’s cognitype with notable behavioral dynamics.  (Male menopause turns out to be a much milder malady of this type that in most males is behaviorally not discernible.)

In the past, most cultures deemed that women’s participation in society and even their franchisement in the social order should be impacted by gender-imposed limits due to their supposed periodic emotional instability and being ‘unclean’.  Variously included in such limits were their inability to own property, handle finances, assume custody of children, travel, hold political office, and, of course, vote.

Today in enlightened societies, most countries have removed these gender-based prohibitions.  And many of these same countries have adopted the ‘social truth’ that there is no difference between men and women, save for some variations in plumbing that really don’t matter.  In fact, these social truths have actually expanded into modern day tabus that prohibit any meaningful discussion, let alone further investigations, into the question of man/woman differences especially in their cognitypes.  That question has essentially been removed and proscribed even in some nations’ legal codes (e.g. the United States).

And yet in America the ignored evidence of such differences continues to pour in from our infatuation with polling and the reported patterns of voting.  Undeniably there exist marked attitudinal differences between men and women toward almost every aspect of human life.  We unflinchingly report such findings based on collected data, but miraculously have no further interest in any attempt to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how come’ of the differences that stare us in the face.  It’s as if we’ve convinced our selves that there is really nothing there to investigate and understand.  And today anyone who dares venture into that region of political tabus, is quickly attacked, the investigation stifled, and the hapless individual silenced.

Now that by political fiat women have filled positions at all levels in commerce, industry, and finally government, would it be prudent to not only permit but encourage scientific and clinical investigations into all significant aspects of the nature of these cognitive differences?  Today a woman is a heartbeat away from possession of the nuclear response ‘football’.  Given her age and health, what hormonal dynamics does she still experience, and how do these affect her reasoning and decision-making abilities?  The answer may be that, say, post-menopausal women possess an extraordinary ability to think clearly under stress.  If so, would we not want to take that into consideration when a woman is a candidate for a position that includes the requirement to make such decisions under stress?

Of course, the same investigations should then be encouraged for men, to study the impact of their hormonal dynamics on a range of cognitive functions, and thereby take into equal consideration their intrinsic suitability for certain kinds of positions and responsibilities.  But today, even in light of overwhelming differentiating evidence, none of these kinds of enquiries are possible.  Even making a proposal such as I have done here is considered by most collectivists to be a step too far out of line motivated by all sorts reasons ranging over systemic racism, misogynistic thought, anti-science, religious fundamentalism to perhaps even white nationalism.

To circle back to my original arguments on our country’s current progress through mediocrity to dumbth and compliance, the proscription to discuss and/or study certain realms of knowledge is now firmly ensconced in America.  And those who transgress into prohibited areas are dealt with swiftly and comprehensively to include limiting the reach of their speech, destruction of their careers, ability to earn a livelihood, and soon the criminality of wrong thought.