The L.A Playboy did a twitter poll a few days ago where he offered the choice of various relationship options to choose from, among the choices were traditional monogamous marriage, an open relationship and marriage but cheating on the down-low. I’ve spoken about marriage on this blog before, in terms of a business contract, and I also devoted a chapter to the topic of relationships in Gendernomics that analyzed it from the perspective of a joint venture. However, several conversations and developments in the sphere as of late, made me realize that it is time for a second analysis. This time from the perspective of a market place.
I’ve used the term “reproductive Marxism” to illustrate how social rules, law, and various other human constructs serve to normalize reproductive outcomes between those who by nature are very successful in the sexual market place, namely high value men and high value women. Those who do “OK”, but nothing special, namely the ones clustering around the mean. Finally those who are bottom of the barrel.
The reasoning behind using this term, is that the core principle of Marxism is that while effort is input to the system to varying degrees, the outcomes are uniformly distributed. This is different from capitalism in that for capitalism there is a relationship between input and outcome. Marxism is in a sense an extreme case of utilitarianism, where one seeks to maximize aggregate happiness, at the cost of individual happiness. Those who would be better off are worse off, those who would be mediocre are equally off, and those who would be the worst off are better off, thus instead of accepting that rewards follow a normal distribution, one seeks to average out rewards across the entire population so that nobody experiences a worse outcome than another.
Reproductive Marxism
The construct of hypergamy is in essence the observation that women seek to maximize the deals they made in the sexual market place, attempting to gain access to the maximum quality genetics and the highest possible level of provision. However, in most cases they are not able to secure both with the same man. This is referenced by the shorthand “Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks”.
In nature, it appears that the natural order mating opportunities flow to men much in the same way that capital does in capitalism. It flows from those who are unsuccessful to those who are successful, and the more capital a person has, the more capital will flow to them. A man who is unsuccessful in the mating market will be left with very little, if anything at all. A man who is successful in the mating market will receive even more mating opportunities.
However, this creates instability in the system in the same way that the above average collection of wealth among a small number of highly successful businessmen creates instability in a capitalist system. The fundamental order of capitalism is competition, as constant competition ensures that resources are efficiently allocated. However, the goal of any capitalist businessman is to gain a monopoly position where the maximum amount of revenue can be generated and where above average profits will be attained. Once an oligopoly or a monopoly comes to exist, resources will no longer be efficiently allocated.
The instability created by such monopolies or oligopolies in the reproductive market is that some men have a high number of mating opportunities within the system, and thus want to maintain the system that is giving them a great boon. However, the remaining men to whom mating opportunities are scarce, will have no reason to invest in the system or contribute to maintaining it. In this case, the system will be a social grouping of some sort, where the excluded men will have great incentives to revolt, murder their competition and establish a new system as I write in Gendernomics:
In a human mating market, humans respond to above average resources being held by others by waging war (12). Over time a group of males with no reproductive opportunities would have sought them out by the means they had available, namely force. Perhaps they would have taken the path of the Vikings and stolen women from other tribes and groups. Alternatively, they would have staged revolts against their own leaders and exchanged one king for another
The answer to fixing this was monogamous marriage. By establishing a set of social rules, such as no premarital sex, no divorce, and various other rules, one limited female sexual nature, in that few women would be willing to risk their lives for a quick romp that may be discovered and render her unmarketable. This secured a wife for a great majority of men, a husband for a great majority of women, and children for the future of the social group. A man was more or less guaranteed a wife if his performance was up to the minimum standard of the group.
However, it also negated much of the natural incentive for both inter-gender and intra-gender competition. This is no different than how the core statement of Marxism “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” dismantles any incentives to be an above average performer.
Incentives and Competition
Incentive theory is one of my pet interests in that it quite accurately predicts how people will behave in given situations. If one knows what a person wants, they will do what is required to get it within a value paradigm. If the person expects a desired reward if they do something, they will do it.
Humans are quite remarkable in that we are built to conserve energy, this makes sense given that we evolved in an environment where food was scarce and one of the differentiating factors would be those able to survive a famine or two. Thus, we tend to not expend energy unless there is an incentive for us to do so.
This was the downfall of the communist states, as humanity tends to produce value on a bell curve. A great majority of people are average performers, and do contribute to their social group, not to the point where each of them is greatly profitable as an investment, but they are more or less breaking even. A small minority of people are above average performers and contribute substantially to their social group, being highly profitable as investments. The final group are below average performers and costs their social group resources.
In a capitalist system, the above average performers are incentivized to perform to the best of their ability as they are rewarded individually. The average performers are incentivized to perform to the best of their ability based on the desire to reap the rewards reserved for the above average performer something they can achieve by increasing their performance. The below average performers are incentivized to become average performers to reap the rewards reserved for average performers.
In a communist system there exist no such incentives to be a high or even average performer, thus people attempted to expend as little energy as possible, and thus production falls. If the reward for poor performance is the same as the one for amazing performance, why expend additional energy?
In reproductive capitalism there is an incentive for men to maximize their sexual market value in order to secure the maximum amount of mating opportunities in line with the male sexual strategy. Likewise, women are incentivized to maximize their sexual market value, in order to compete for the top males in the group. This creates a situation in which the evolutionary imperative of selecting the genetics with the most reproductive fitness is naturally fulfilled. Furthermore, it adds great benefits to the social group who gains not only a healthy, strong and motivated population, but also one that produces goods in excess.
In reproductive communism there is no such incentive for men to maximize their sexual market value, as an average value will secure the majority of rewards. There is also a strong incentive for women to attempt to game the system to fulfill their strategy of alpha fucks/beta bucks, as they will be guaranteed a Beta Bucks unless the appropriate safeguards are in place.
Summary and Conclusions
The preference between reproductive communism or reproductive capitalism largely comes down to ability to compete. A man who has the ability to compete will better fulfill his sexual strategy within the capitalist system as this system gives him the opportunity to secure above average rewards. A man who has very little ability or desire to compete will better fulfill his sexual strategy within the communist system, as this guarantees him reproductive opportunities that he will not have within the capitalist system.
From a stability perspective, one could argue that the communist system is better able to control the anti-group consequences of unlimited reproductive competition, currently being exemplified in the west. One could argue that the old controls on female reproductive strategy served the purpose of creating an incentive for the men to become average or above average performers for the social group as this would have afforded them better quality mating opportunities.
The fact that divorce was rare, premarital sex was strongly discouraged, bearing a child out of wedlock made a woman damaged goods, the cost of an unmarried daughter would be born by the males of her family and similar structures, ensured a form of stability through regulating the mating market.
This meant that men had less of an incentive to be top performers, they just had to perform enough to not be below average performers. Women were not able to maximize their hypergamic deals between high value Alpha for genetics and a high value beta for provision, but they were guaranteed a minimum level of provision and genetics.
The market regulation simply worked to average out the outcomes between different men and different women. The people who “lost” by this deal are the high value men and high value women, who would have had better outcomes than those they were granted under reproductive communism as they could then fulfill their sexual strategy to the greatest possible extent. Those who gained was the rest of society, especially the great majority of men clustered around the mean, who were able to obtain more equitable deals in the sexual market place.
There is however one aspect of competition that is rarely mentioned in Red Pill discussions on competition this is competition between species. Our species is quite unique in nature in that we have the ability to construct a system of reproductive communism to regulate mating in a manner that produces the maximum outcomes in other areas. Male Gorillas are not able to sit down and say “Listen guys, John is monopolizing all the females, if we kill him, we can share them among us and everyone gets laid”.
One must wonder, if in nature a large amount of men would be deemed not worthy of reproducing with by the females, is this not nature’s way of ensuring that the men and women of our species are those with the qualities that make our species stronger as a group? This is not to say that the way of nature is always the optimal solution, given that there are considerations that humans must take into account, such as the stability of civilizations, but even from a utilitarian perspective, does it create maximal happiness to add regulations to reproduction?
A note:
I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).
I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page
As always you can buy my book Gendernomics at Amazon.com as both paperback and Kindle
