To conquer the stars, mankind must become a race of conquerors.

We who have for sixty years been threatened with the technological future stand at the dawn of history; more precisely, we stand at a fork, between the future of humanity and the eternal present of the human, an eternal present that leads inevitably backwards. The world-stage victory of liberalism has turned us toward the latter. The time-preference curve cuts off to zero. Historical stillbirth.

There is no longer a positive vision of the future; there is only eternal masturbation in the Garden of Eden, under the shade of the ever-static civilization tree. Measures to secure the future against the orcish hordes of the present are deemed intrinsically vile. Utilitarianism is protected against the eugenic conclusion only by the cutoff of the time-preference curve: zero care for the yet unborn. The rot has set in so deeply that antinatalism is no longer taken as a reductio ad absurdum: there are people who really believe that there are logical arguments against reproducing and that they ought to be spread, and somehow these people have not all been silenced or shot. Antinatalism without active, forceful pressure toward human extinction can never succeed, for the simple reason that some people are either too stupid to follow logical arguments or too impulsive to care; but for the same reason, if it is not completely and utterly ineffective, it is necessarily dysgenic.

The death of history is not a leftist conclusion. It is strictly a liberal one.

The reason for that east-western difference is the fact that the GDR had an “educated mother scheme” and actively tried to encourage first births among the more educated. It did so by propagandizing the opinion that every educated woman should “present at least one child to socialism” and also by financially rewarding its more educated citizen to become parents. The government especially tried to persuade students to become parents while still in college and it was quite successful in doing so. In 1986 38% of all women, who were about to graduate from college, were mothers of at least one child and additional 14% were pregnant and 43% of all men, who were about to graduate from college, were fathers of at least one child. There was a sharp decline in the birth rate and especially in the birth rate of the educated after the fall of the Berlin wall. Nowadays only 5% of those about to graduate from college are parents. … A study done in the western German State of Nordrhein-Westfalen by the HDZ revealed that childlessness was especially widespread among scientists. It showed that 78% of the female scientists and 71% of the male scientists working in that State were childless.

Intelligence, like most things, is about 50% heritable. If education correlates to any non-negligible degree with intelligence, the GDR was completely right. To value the future, as communism apparently did and as liberalism emphatically does not, leads necessarily to the eugenic conclusion.

Intelligence forms and is amplified by the Old Law of Gnon:

The penalty for stupidity is death. Gregory Clark is among those few to have grasped [this law] clearly. Any eugenic trend within history is expressed by continuous downward mobility. For any given level of intelligence, a steady deterioration in life-prospects lies ahead, culling the least able, and replacing them with the more able, who inherit their wretched socio-economic situation, until they too are pushed off the Malthusian cliff. Relative comfort belongs only to the sports and freaks of cognitive advance. For everyone else, history slopes downwards into impoverishment, hopelessness, and eventual genetic extinction. That is how intelligence is made. Short of Technological Singularity, it is the only way. Who wants a piece of that? No one does, or almost no one. … Monkeys … are able to revolt, once they finesse their nasty little opposable thumbs. They don’t like the Old Law, which has crafted them through countless aeons of ruthless culling, so they make history instead. If they get everything ‘right’, they even sleaze their way into epochs of upward social mobility, and with this great innovation, semi-sustainable dysgenics gets started. In its fundamentals it is hideously simple: social progress destroys the brain.

Liberalism is thus quite literally a cancer: a memeplex that, on entering metastasis, threatens civilization itself. Civilization is taken for granted; it is believed to grow on trees; no measures for preserving it are necessary, and measures for enhancing it are reminiscent of the high modernism, the biological Nietzscheanism, that led man to believe that he could conquer first his own condition and then his living-conditions, and that was defeated in the war that ended the West.

The Second World War, in the American mythological reading, was a war between the rights of the present and the promises of the future. This reading is not entirely accurate, since, as we have seen, the Soviets opted to search for a balance between the two rather than adopt the liberal solution of utterly abandoning the latter and accelerating the former into dysgenic burnout leading inexorably to a collapse that is no longer taken to matter. But the American mythological reading is more relevant than the historical fact of the matter, since it is the founding myth of the postmodern liberal religion, and the postmodern liberal religion is preached today from San Francisco to Samarkand.

Our popular culture reflects the liberal view of history: the technological future is dystopian, evil and oppressive, reminiscent of the Nazis or the hyper-Reaganism of Snow Crash. If the future has any merit, any promise, it is fundamentally moral in nature: civilization will remain at its current technological level, not moving an inch in either direction, but its ethics will advance, advance toward the singularity of total dissolution, total atomization, every thede dissolved into its component parts, united only by the no-thede, the all-thede, the recognition of the simple and objective moral truth that has gone unrecognized by literally every other civilization on the planet only because they were on the wrong side of history. If technology is to advance at all, it must be solely for the purpose of solving the inherent immorality of the human condition.

While popular culture looks forward to a more moral future, aesthetically it can only look backward. Folk music and Whole Foods. Craft beer and organic artisanal soap. Technology must stop looking technological: it has to be friendly, it has to look like a kitchen appliance or a bar of soap, made of soft curves and pastel-colored plastic. No wires, no rectangles, no beige. IBM is right out.

Marinetti’s call to flood the cellars of the museums has been reversed. Science fiction gives way to fantasy; space programs give way to social justice. There is no longer a USSR for the liberal regime to assert itself against in the propaganda of technological achievement. Oh well, the space program was undemocratic anyway.

The single most important error of liberalism is that it either has forgotten or actively desires to avoid knowing that there are prerequisites to civilization, and that these prerequisites, like most traits, are most likely about 50% genetic.

If there is room within liberalism for the other 50% to be worked on, it must be worked on. If there is a non-negligible gap between potential and actual intelligence, due to childhood malnutrition or lead poisoning or whatever, this gap must be closed. But it is of paramount importance that the cancer be treated. It took untold hundreds of years for the West to develop civilization and the prerequisites thereof; if these things are lost, with them goes one path toward the future, one bridge between ape and overman.

Get married and have children, all of you.