Obsessive Hermit@obsessivehermit
On a partially related note, I have a theory that the degree to which a society cares about universal human rights is directly proportional to the percentage of people in that society who are childless.
To explain, we need to ask the following question: why would an evolved organism ever care about unrelated strangers? How does that make sense evolutionarily? Why would an organism care about another organism with which it doesn’t share kinship?
The answer: to avoid inbreeding. To avoid the genetic abnormalities associated with incest, organisms need to find genetically unrelated mates.
Thus, teenagers and young adults—potential parents—are at the stage in life where they are most attuned to caring about/impressing people who aren’t related to them.
This explains why young people without children are drawn to ideologies which promote freedom, openness, and empathy/caring for unrelated strangers (e.g., socialism, libertarianism, LGBT+ rights, etc.).
However, once they mate and have children—their own kin—to worry about, they no longer need to impress or care about unrelated strangers (except for their romantic partner). Protecting their own kin becomes their primary concern. And if someone threatens your kin, all concern for the rights/welfare of unrelated strangers goes out the window.
E.g., If some random guy rapes your daughter or kills your son, you don’t just want them dead—you want them tortured to death in public, to send a message to everyone else: “you don’t dare fuck with my blood line!”
If this theory is true, then it explains why people on the political left are so focussed on human rights and freedoms—many on the left are either unmarried or don’t have children/kin of their own to worry about. Thus, they STAY in the young adult stage of needing to impress unrelated strangers (i.e., potential romantic partners).
Conservatives meanwhile, are much more likely to be parents, and thus, they don’t need to care about the welfare of unrelated strangers anymore. If the rights/welfare of a stranger conflicts with the welfare of their children, their children will take precedence.
You can see this very clearly in the current political battle between (conservative) parents and trans rights advocates, for example.
This also explains why cultures that practice endogamy/cousin marriage (such as Pakistan) are so hostile/dehumanizing towards outsiders. It's why, for example, the rape gangs in the UK consisted overwhelmingly of Pakistani men, raping white women and girls: endogamous cultures don't see human beings as individuals - your worth is determined by your extended family. Thus, women and girls who don't have elaborate kinship networks/extended families to protect them were seen as less-than-human.
This also leads me to wonder: will cultures many generations from now even care about human rights anymore? Any culture which doesn’t have children is obviously not going to last. Right now, the political left and libertarians can only survive and flourish by recruiting young people from conservative families/backgrounds.
But that obviously can’t last forever, because 1) almost every region in the world now has a below-replacement fertility rate and 2) for self sorting of young people based on genetic predispositions will slowly reduce the number of of left-wingers/libertarians in the gene pool.
It’s concerning, to say the least.
