Monogamy taxes and social control

The dictator was in a good mood so when the young man asked him how he managed to stay in power, he did not have the impudent infant executed immediately, but ordered a servant to bring a cane, and took the young man for a walk.

As they walked through fields of bright red flowers they talked. Of all kinds of things. The young man noticed that the dictator invariably used his cane to strike off the head of any flower that was taller than the rest.

In “Where have all the Intellectuals gone” which I discussed elsewhere Frank Furedi attempts to understand the mediocritisation of culture and the decline in educational standards. He talks of postmodernism and a cultural elite of non-elitists but seems to miss a vital point.

Socialism and communism, elegant theoretical structures, tend, when implemented as forms of government, to turn to totalitarianism very rapidly.

In “The Black Swan” Taleb documents the misuse of the Gaussian distribution and shows how this leads to inevitable disasters ( and, to be fair triumphs) .

Taleb describes how the 19th century intellectual Quételet fell in love with the Gaussian and its associated bell curve and, assuming that all human characteristics were distributed in the population as a bell curve, defined the concept of an average man. The Gaussian distribution was originally applied to the description of errors in astronomical measurements, and the measure of the spread was known as the standard deviation.

By confusion of statistical deviation with social and sexual deviancy large deviation from the average began to be considered abnormalities to be cured or punished: divergence from the mean was treated as an error, an attitude prevalent to this day. The dictator would have been ecstatic at that, for he would not have had to execute the brighter humans, the populace would have lynched them for him.

Marx fell under Quételet's spell and Taleb quotes Marx as writing

“Societal deviations in the terms of the distribution of wealth for example, must be minimised”

Taleb links this to what he calls the Grocery store mentality that led to Poujadism, characterised by a suspicion of wealth and brilliance that lingers to this day, and is often confused with envy.

I recall reading that a few years ago the Dutch government wanted to tax returning expatriates higher than the stay at home citizens as part of a “crackdown on excessive remuneration in the private sector”,

Most governments try to arrange their tax system so that everyone ends up with about the same disposable income. Their freedom to do this is limited because if they try too hard the bright and brilliant either emigrate or simply stop trying to increase their income when they judge too much of the increase is taken by the government.

In Britain is it still common to see the self employed and entrepreneurs described as “getting ideas above themselves”.

Obviously those in power want to keep power and will use obvious tactics, like the dictator, and subtle ones, like debasing the educational system as documented by Furedi,  to ensure the populace are docile and conformist. 

As mentioned above  Quételet led Marx to drive  communism and its sibling socialism in a needlessly conformist direction.  At the other end of the political spectrum the right want to preserve the power of the rich and the easy way to do this is to turn the human populace into sheep. Since governments inevitably see  people as problems to be managed not talents to be encouraged, and fear honest informed political debate,  corporations find it easier to market to the average person (and most often target the lowest common denominators of society),  employers love tractable  nearly stupid employees to brilliant mavericks, and many other  groups prefer a population that is docile, conformist and predictable, the pressure is on to swipe off the heads of the taller flowers.

In chimpanzee bands and ancient civilisations the big men got the  best women and those at the bottom  got the remainder or went without. Taleb  asserts that  monogamy, one man one women, or limited polygamy, as in Islam today, gave the man at the bottom the chance to mate without having to  start a revolution just to get access to females. Monogamy can therefore be seen as an institution of social control.  Taleb however ignores  both the fact that monogamy in theory does not mean monogamy in practice, any more than medieval priests and popes were celibate.  and the evidence suggesting that women are more likely to engage in adultery than men since according to an essay by Eric Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”   a woman who has children by different fathers maximises the chance her children will have good genes.  Monogamy however, by increasing the ability of everyone to find a mate, also tends to ensure the the genetic component of brilliance and creativity, if there is any, is diluted by the  conformity and docility bred into the lowest classes by the highest.  Even a child genius cannot fulfil their potential if the environment in which they live is hostile to deviations from average intelligence.

    Thus  an obsession with the average person,  and a vision of deviations from the mean as  errors led to a political culture on the left that stressed uniformity and conformity , while on the right  a conformist society was desirable as a way of preserving the power of the rich. The cultural and other elites  promoted a culture of inclusion based on the nonsensical ideas of postmodernism, that resulted in the lower orders being given the illusion of education while the elites retained the reality and the power that went with it. And monogamy was used partly to ensure political stability and partly to   reduce the incidence of brilliant but  hard to control thinkers in society.

    As a result we have democracies that become fake democracies, an education system that pretends to include everyone but but  reserves the best education for the rich, and a sexual ethic that tends to reduce the overall intelligence of the population.

After their walk the  young man said “You do not need to  lop their heads off, just tax them till the pips squeak and the populace will love you for bringing these people down to  their level”.

The dictator thanked the young man and proclaimed  eternal friendship. But the young man was not stupid and saw the look the dictator gave to his guard. He left the country immediately and became the richly paid advisor to a great emperor far away. The dictator had a long and happy reign and after his death his reign was, wrongly, seen as a golden age.