Sawasdee-Kah from Chiang Mai!
Hello from Chiang Mai. An ongoing improvisation about female evolutionary selection pressures and where (eventually) I find an ideal solution to those pesky pronouns. Ongoing essay...
This is part #1 of a freeform piece, a personal narrative and memoir that also encompasses the subject of evolutionary selection pressures. I’m writing my book in a much more structured style so this is improvised. Let me know what you think in the comments. Oh, and don’t forget to share! Some of my upcoming posts will be paywalled as they will be referring to uncommon perspectives and unique hypotheses in the book.
I gave up my job in the UK to come out here and Substack is my only income now, so please think about becoming a paid subscriber. The new adventure starts here and there will be new content every week.
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I moved to Chaing Mai in northern Thailand a week ago on a six-month visa to concentrate on writing my book, The Rise of Female Chauvinism, and plan ahead now my years as a mother of a dependent child are over. My son is now 19, at university and, way back in 2004 when he was born, I always planned to put his needs before my own. It’s been a very long haul and I’ve learned a huge amount, both academically and intellectually (as we all know those two things are not necessarily the same thing;), and about people, friendship, ambition, and betrayal.
When you make such a decision as a 34-year-old woman, to offset a career so you can be the primary carer to your high-functioning autistic child for the next 18 years, you have no idea how it will look from the other end. You have no idea the effect of entropy on your body and spirit. You have no idea how much you will have changed and what experiences led to those changes. You have no idea what opportunities may be available and which may have foreclosed. The bigger world doesn’t stop madly spinning even as your small domestic world forever runs the economy cycle on the workhorse washing machine.
At 34 too, you still have beauty and relative fecundity. You aren’t in your evolutionary prime of course1, but you still have, what’s known as reproductive potential. Many people get remarried in their 30s and extend their families. I would have liked to have had another child to give my son a sibling, it was a real possibility, but the circumstances of my relationship with my son’s father weren’t ideal so I chose not to. With one child, there were already zero resources to facilitate my career or further education. With two children, the stress of finding any existential quality of life would have been intolerable. As it turned out, the last 20 years have largely been spent on the first tier of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs.
But this isn’t a sob story. It’s a new beginning, putting things in context and moving on to the next adventure. I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments piously reminding me that motherhood doesn’t stop once your child is at university. I’m perfectly aware of that. My job now however is to help him become an independent adult, knowing his limitations and strengths, and being there to support him unconditionally, in a way I never had. The way I never had. That has always been the number one priority, to give him what I never had. This corresponds to the first three tiers of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. I have succeeded in that. We’ll get to the next two in time as this is when peer support kicks in. We can use Maslov’s model as a way to gauge the sacrifices parents from underprivileged backgrounds must necessarily make for their children to reach higher tiers.
The sacrifice of self, of individuality, is what an evolutionary selection pressure demands. An idea very alienated from the current mindset today. In extremis, this is a father going out to battle a rival tribe because that tribe wants their land and their women. He risks his finite life, but he defends his eternal evolutionary legacy, including that of his ancestors. If he acquiesces to the successor, he dies anyway, and very likely, so does his offspring.
The minds of homo sapiens in the Pleistocene versus today have changed little; it’s the culture that has changed. And no, that’s not cultural evolution. It’s adaption, not adaptation. One mighty asteroid or thermo global nuclear war could turn the clock right back to the Pleistocene. And do you know what, we’d adapt. Well, enough of us would. The ability to adapt to circumstances is one of homosapien’s superpowers. If we lost that ability via actual evolutionary adaptation — that is change in gene frequency over time — we would not survive. That is not what out species is. So you can thank your lucky stars that we’re not as smart (or separated from evolution) as we’d like to think we are. (This is an easter egg — not a Shakespearian one as I normally do — anyone who grew up in the 70s get it?)
Were a global catastrophe to occur, the culture of self and individualism would disappear for most of us. We would need to cooperate locally to survive. The global village would become a hamlet. Millennials & Gen X & Z would have it worst because they have no concept of a world that is not at their beck and call. And they would have no one to blame, or excess calories to waste blaming imaginary superstructures.
The only superstructure that counts is Darwinian evolution, that is evolution via natural and sexual selection. There is not even a God of evolution, so we would necessarily begin to invent some to maintain some semblance of free will. Yeah, don’t scoff at Gods. If you do, it just shows you lack imagination. Sorry Richard Dawkins.
But, contrary to claims about the collapse of civilization, we‘re not there yet. Civilization, that fragile veneer that keeps chaos at bay, is under threat. But when, since its invention, has it not been?
Why do humans never learn from the past?
Simple answer: variation is one of the engines of evolution. And being master adapters (non-specialits| and individuals (non-clones) endowed with their own genetic & biological2 legacy, evolution just lets us fight it out. Why? Because we’re at war with pathogens who do the same. That’s why two sexes exist. It helps us beat the biggest net threat to all life: biological pathogens. This is called a co-evolutionary arms race.3 This is the evolutionary pre-conscious4 (ultimate) reason. There are different immediate, possibly cultural (proximate) conscious reasons that people usually fall back on and this makes up the majority of social science.
Why I wish Lamark was right.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could inherit the experiences of our close relatives? Not only could we be born multi-lingual, but be would not repeat the sins of our fathers and mothers. The world would be perfect!
Unfortunately, this would only apply if all other organisms had the same degree of consciousness and high moral hopes for a peaceful world. Pathogens, alas, do not.
I don’t want to run the risk of being pathophobic, or antipath, but these things don’t have individuality so can’t be offended. In fact, if you offend one, you offend ALL. Hmmm. What does that remind you of?
Anywayyyyyyyyy
We have inherited some of our past ancestors’ experiences, as evolutionary adaptations, but only over vast amounts of time, cooked in a brutal cauldron of human experience and sieved through the diabolical crucible of selection. The number of consciousnesses that were caught and discarded as flotsam and jetsam even before the crucible ore is obscene.
The key to unraveling the matrix
Ultimate and proximate causation. This is something all social science, feminism & the red pill community don’t get because it’s easy but honesty, it’s also HARD. So most can’t be bothered with it.
We’ll continue later. Leave your thoughts below. :)
Evolutionary prime relates to reproductive value and potential respectively. These are linked but not the same. The evolutionary prime is not the only prime of life. People have many other prime times, which I will get to later, either in this essay or another.
Biology INCLUDES environmental (from henceforth let it be noted that anyone who says “biological determinism” as to mean “without environmental input”, is a bonafide numpty. Or more harshly, an idiot about evolution, at least.
This is just an intro - I’m not going to go into detail here except to say, men and women also have one of these - as do women and the embreo in their womb. Bame that on the patriachy, feminism!
It’s not even subconscous. It’s lizard brain.