Capitalism is for wimps

File under speculative.

In the days before capitalism (feudalism etc), productivity was static, the Malthusian trap operated and the economy was zero-sum. Basically if you could grab it, or could network well so that you and your mates (normally male kin) could grab it, you were ahead.

This placed a selective premium on males with superior aggression and leadership/followership qualities (such as loyalty) - and females who thought that men with such attributes were good prospects.

There were always wimps of course. Alleles which determine personality, body morphology and aggression are scattered across the autosomes (the 22 pairs of chromosomes which are not X or Y, sex-determining). Many men will have had more feminine bodies and less aggressive demeanour.

Undoubtedly there was also a measure of balancing selection. Wimp niches.

Nevertheless, on aggregate, these were very masculine-feminine gendered societies. Shakespeare's plays give us a clue. How uncomfortable they feel these days!

Don't get me started on the Bible.

Capitalism, dominant over the last centuries, lives in a world of contracts across time and space. Individual capitalists are quite weak: they can't force their customers to buy from them, they can't eliminate the competition by force. (That doesn't stop them trying sometimes, but the system depends upon the majority not succeeding and not even trying: three cheers for effective competition).

What does capitalism select for?

• Intelligence - the ability to conceptualise abstractions
• Affability - getting along with strangers
• Lack of physical aggression - can't do business with guys who beat you up.

Here is the real story of the so-called 'feminisation of society' which has been blamed on the women's movement and feminism. Capitalism's very requirement for feminine psychological attributes has called forth feminism to articulate the roles which women can - and are encouraged to - fill.

Gay men also find many niches, particularly in the media and in areas of high social-interaction.

As manual, blue-collar  work recedes to zero this trend will surely continue. I was looking at the candidates for the next Tory leader and prime minister: Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Rory Stewart.

They'd all be classified historically as wimps.

Has there been time for capitalism to have significantly changed allele frequencies (wimpier men, more assertive women) to optimise psychological fit to its functioning?

Hell, yes!

We're talking about the bubble here, the ruling elite. Not the whole of society. Offspring diffuse in or out.

Outside the bubble, the masses sometimes look like a different species.

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I'm using the term 'masses' here as a synonym for those people not part of the 'smart fraction' (qv). IQs less than 105, say, .. and not so prosocial. It's no accident that politicians such as Trump, Farage and Boris Johnson, who have some rapport with the masses, are never plausibly characterised as wimps.

Wimp-language, aka bubble-speak, characterises them as populists, monsters, unstable, anti-intellectual, uncontrolled.

Sadly, the masses don't seem that impressed by the blueblood wimps.

Will this toxically-masculine breed of populist politicians find a new incarnation of capitalism which can bind the Caliban-Morlock masses back into the fraying project? A new and more successful Blue Labour? Or a socially-conservative one-nationism?

It should be an interesting few years.

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Further reading: "The Office as Utopia".