Elon's IQ Shredder

Our immigration strategy accelerates Idiocracy (& we can't colonize Mars with idiots)

Yesterday I analyzed one of the factors which undermines Mr. Musk’s strategy in his quest to become multi-planetary:

…immigration actually accelerates the trend which it is implemented to solve. Immigration kills family formation and birthrates.

…Populating Mars - and the stars more generally - will require a huge and rapidly growing population. This will have to be achieved in the context of an alien planet, artificial habitation, and tremendous environmental pressure. To achieve such an ambition, we must therefore be ruthless in our analysis of what sustains birthrates. It should be noted that our societies are currently a very, very long way from such fecundity. Something must change.

This was a simple observation: there’s not much point in getting to Mars if we don’t have the requisite numbers of humans to fill it.

But the same is true of a second, more subtle point: the ambition to colonize Mars cannot be fulfilled unless we have massive and growing numbers of healthy, intelligent, and capable people. Terraforming and settling a planet is a monumental challenge.

Is our current civilizational configuration capable of producing such a population? No. Far from it. In fact - as we shall see again - Mr. Musk’s current approach is destroying the very thing it will shortly need.

Yesterday I noted that although I am only moderately interested in populating Mars, using this hypothetical as a vehicle to understand our more general (Earthly) fertility crisis is productive. Today I will clarify that I am not advocating for eugenics or any artificial population engineering to increase intelligence. What I am concerned about, however, is preventing the inverse of this: reducing the imposition of artificial circumstances which makes future generations less healthy than they otherwise would have been.

So - how is Elon undermining population intelligence? Here it’s time to revive an old school neo-reactionary concept: the ‘IQ shredder’. This is a term coined by

Spandrell

in his 2013 essay ‘Lee Kuan Yew drains your brains for short term gain’.

The IQ shredder is a polity which attracts large numbers of unusually capable people and then exposes them to environmental pressures which radically suppress their fertility. The classic example is Singapore, which sucks in exceptional workers from all over the world with its wealth and then adjusts them to its way of life and commensurate birthrate (1.04 and falling).

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How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity...

(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.

In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value… and then partially sterilize(s) them. It is the first-order (local) eugenics that makes the second-order (global) dysgenics so extraordinarily destructive.

— Nick Land, IQ Shredders

Elon’s vision of a productive society (a ‘competitive America’) is actually an accelerated IQ shredder, in that he wishes not just to follow the basic model described by Land above - with worldwide talent scouts pulling exceptional people into America to work for his enterprises - but he (and Vivek) advocate unashamedly for the addition of a working lifestyle that is bound to compound the sterilizing effect:

1. Extreme hours (leaving little time for family formation);

2. High levels of immigration (causing negative wage pressures);

3. Study & exam culture (incentivizing fewer, higher-investment children).

Having worked for a big tech company known for its intensity, I have some sense of what this is like. The company becomes its own society, in which it curates your social activities and supports your basic functions (providing meals, showers, laundry…)

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The only people who you associate with are other tech workers, because they’re increasingly the only people you have anything in common with; you don’t have time to meet anyone else; you’re often a long way from home in some tech-hub; and the comfort of only interacting with unusually intelligent and high-openness people becomes addictive.

The problem is that this is toxic to family formation, because no one else around you is prioritizing family life and there is little supporting social infrastructure; everyone around you is a striver working 60+ hour weeks; and because everyone around you is from a jumble of international backgrounds natural partnerships are often hard to find.

In short, the concept that Musk is currently pursuing is extremely short-term. It might make the next rocket faster and cheaper, but it’s making the really difficult step of conquering a planet infinitely harder (and perhaps impossible). He’s selecting for the smartest people, collecting them, and exposing them to massive anti-reproductive pressures (set to worsen over time as the mimetic effects deepen).

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Hope remains. For the IQ shredder has an opposite: the IQ spring. I will shortly introduce this concept of mine in an upcoming piece. The ambition will be to clarify a 21st century model of ensuring healthy domestic families and talent.

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I hope you’re enjoying this brief series on global fertility. This is a specialist subject which I know is primarily interesting to a subset of my audience. If not - fear not! We will return to more traditional ‘Becoming Noble’ topics shortly. I’m just processing my thoughts on the great H-1B debate.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please do leave a like below, and consider supporting this publication.

Sic transit imperium,

Johann