*
When a significant proportion of the the ruling elite have had been married more often than the number of their children, then that society is deep into decadence.
Thus an average marriage/ children ratio of above 1 in a group is evidence of exceptionally deep psychological pathology of the self-loathing-suicidal type.
*
Note: Of course the above does not apply to each individual person, since individuals have different callings and serve different societal functions; but it does apply to cohesive groups such as The Ruling Class, or religious denominations/ atheists, or nations.
3 comments:
Focusing on the ruling class misses the point. Charles Murray has shown that (in the US) the marriage/child ratio is much more likely to be high for the underclass than for the elite.
A significant number of people on the alternative right seem to want to ignore this point - we do so at our peril.
It's worth pointing out that we have
de facto a (serial)polygamous culture,perhaps the most polygamous in human history,that is highly skewed towards high status males.
@Foseti - The point is not differentials between high and lower class - but that high class (wealthy, educated, intelligent, conscientious) choose fertility on average significantly below 2 - especially the women.
(So do the underclass, on average. The exceptions to sub-replacment fertility are the devout traditionally religious of whatever class.)
Of course there is now a mix-up between marriage and long-ish term partners.
But the phenomenon I was interested by is the severally married high status man with fewer children than wives, or none. By choice.
There is a special interest about the behaviour of the highest status people, the elite leadership: they set the parameters for everyone else, and are where decadence shows-up with the least confounding.
@JP - this *may* be so, although I am not convinced that we really know this, and either way the correlation is so weak as to be pretty worthless at the individual level.
For example, when you meet a high status man, do you think it reasonable to assume that he is highly promiscuous? Or vice versa? I don't think so.
Partly it depends on how status is defined - some definitions of status are circular with respect to sex.
Post a Comment