Progressives do not reproduce at anywhere near replacement rate. But they set things up so that conservatives have to send their children to educational institutions controlled by progressives.
If memes reproduce from parent to child, then in the long run, surviving memes will be favorable to the people that hold them.
If, however, memes reproduce through state pressure and state sponsored evangelism, they are going to be selected for state pressure and state sponsored evangelism, which is likely to result in those memes being hostile to survival and favorable to ever greater state intrusion on everyday life.
In Old Testament times, Hebrew memes reproduced from parent to child, hence natural selection apt to result in pro survival memes.The Hebrews had a lower death rate due to their rules of washing their hands, burying their feces, and not eating animals that died of natural causes.
They had a higher reproduction rate because of strict patriarchy, no female autonomy, female consent preferred but not required for sex and marriage, absolute patriarchal power over wives and children, plus a patriarchal duty of care and protection for wives and children, in particular the no infanticide rule. (B. disagrees with my interpretation of Old Testament rules, interpreting them in a manner curiously compatible with modern progressivism. To see how the people of the time interpreted them, read the Book of Ruth, chapters three and four, and Genesis chapter twenty four.)
According to the Pentateuch, the twelve sons of Israel produced six hundred thousand adult males four hundred and thirty years later, which corresponds to a high, but not at all miraculous, growth rate of 2.5% per year.
The Hebrew economy was more productive because of rules protecting private property, and prohibiting coveting, thus prohibiting redistributionist ideologies.
We don’t know much about Canaanite memes, but it is clear that the practice of burning one’s children alive in front of the congregation, like progressive memes, reproduced through state sponsored religious practices and state sponsored evangelism – that members of the elite were coerced or pressured to burn their children alive, thus inspiring emulation among the commoners.
Soft power, the power of the state department, is the power that accrues to a state by propagating its belief system beyond its borders. When the State department gets Muslim states to make abortion available on female demand, the state department accrues power, and when the Canaanites got Hebrews to sacrifice their children to Moloch, the Canaanite states accrued power.
The Canaanites suffered from the decadence characteristic of the last days of Bronze Age civilization. Ipuwer depicts late stage Bronze age decadence as something very similar to modern leftism, which is a meme system that today reproduces through state sponsored quasi religious practices and state sponsored evangelism.
The practice of sacrificing one’s infant children to Moloch by casting them into the flames in front of the congregation demonstrated one’s faith – and having done such a terrible thing (perhaps to advance one’s career in the state apparatus) difficult to doubt the belief system that made it a good thing.
Thus, burning children alive was an effective means of making people into Canaanites. The Canaanite memetic system reproduced, while Canaanites did not, just as progressivism reproduces, while progressives do not.
The Canaanites were successful in their efforts at conversion, inducing some Hebrews to sacrifice their children to Moloch (Canaanite equivalent of Jehovah). This sacrifice was conducted by dropping the living child into the fire in front of the assembled congregation.
Similarly, today’s progressives do not reproduce, but instead seduce the children of conservatives.
Memeplexes that propagate through coercion seem an almost unavoidable aspect of states. Such a memeplex is subject to selection pressures that are apt to make it more and more evil, destructive, and insane. Propagation through power is orthogonal to truth or survival, thus entropy prevails. Local reductions in such entropy tend to be astonishingly expensive.
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