Imagine an ideal religious town where people follow God perfectly. This would be a utopia. Now imagine that something goes wrong with the water system in town and this poisons the brains of the people and makes them go insane. Because they are insane, they no longer understand religion well. A visitor to the town may see that they don't understand religion well, and assume that this is the problem, and that they just need to be taught religion better. But of course this is nonsense. The only solution is to fix the water system because this is the cause of the problem. Religion cannot fix this problem.
Adding to the story, a few people in town feel inspired by God to move out of town and they dig their own wells. So they recover and become sane. But they believe that their sanity comes from their religion when in fact it comes not drinking bad water. Living rurally, they don't deal with townspeople much and don't realize how completely crazy they are. Someone comes to these rural people and proposes promoting a water filtration system for the town, but these people reject the idea because they believe that the problem in town is bad religion.
This story is an analogy to what we face today. Instead of bad water, the problem is bad culture and bad genetics. Religion cannot directly fix these problems. But some religious groups have managed to avoid these problems by avoiding modern culture and not intermarrying with the dysgenic mainstream. And I expect that some religious groups will reject nonreligious solutions because they mistakenly believe that religion is the only thing that matters.
The Arkian idea is a general solution to these problems, a filtration system that filters people rather than water. This system can work for anyone wherever they live and whatever they believe. It does not change religion because religion isn't the issue. But it does need the support of religious communities to implement it because they are the only groups who can do it. Everyone else is just too insane.
The Arkian idea is to form a eugenic intentional ethnicity. Undoubtedly I have offended most readers already with this first sentence. But should you judge terms like "eugenics" based on popular opinion or based on truth? Clearly the starting point should be to define eugenics.
Eugenics means "of good birth" and was invented by Francis Galton in the 1800s. He was concerned about human genetics and wanted to make sure that people didn't decline in genetic quality.
"Genetics" is another term that upsets some religious people. They automatically assume that genetics assumes the idea of evolution. But this is simply not true, and whether or not you believe in evolution is irrelevant to my arguments here. Instead I would ask if you believe in breeding farm animals? If you do, then you believe in genetics. And if farm animals can be bred, why not people? We know that just like with animals, human children inherit the traits of their parents.
So now the question is do you support breeding people. For example, we know that there are many genetic diseases. If people with genetic diseases had many more children than healthy people, humanity would soon be overrun with genetic diseases. Wouldn't it be reasonable to do something about this by encouraging healthy people to have more children than those with genetic diseases? The current problem facing humanity isn't genetic diseases, but rather stupidity and bad morals. Stupid people with bad morals are currently having many more children than smart people with good morals.
But let me return to the history of eugenics and why it got such a bad reputation. This is described in the book Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction. After Galton, eugenics quickly became a progressive movement that pushed government eugenics programs that included compulsory sterilization, racial planning, pushing contraception, and pushing feminism (considered to be eugenic). Of course this contrasts with the current leftist position against eugenics, but this raises the fundamental question of what it really means to be progressive/leftist versus conservative/rightist.
I think the core difference between progressives and conservatives isn't so much their positions on specific issues as it is their general approach to thinking about issues. Progressives have infinite faith in human reason, so they have no problem using government programs and government coercion to pursue their "logical" goals. Progressives tend to be reductionist and will reduce an issue to a set of causes and then act on those perceived causes. In effect, progressives want Man to play God and to micromanage everything. In contrast, conservatives are more humble and more skeptical about human reason. Conservatives would rather trust what has proven to be true over time, and would rather trust God or the forces of nature than trust human management.
Now let's apply this to eugenics. Suppose you wanted to organize a running team. How do you select members? The progressive would study running in detail and find everything that may cause good runners, or at least what correlates with good runners. They may notice, for example, that blacks are faster on average than whites, so they would select blacks. They may look for genes that are found in fast runners and select people with these genes. All this fits the progressive approach that I just described. How would a conservative select team members? A true conservative would just time candidates and select the fastest ones without worrying about any other factors. The factors that cause fast runners can be left to God or nature, the conservative doesn't care and just wants fast runners. Jesus well expressed this conservative view in Matthew 7:16-20.
We can take this one step further and ask how can one breed a population of fast runners. The answers would again be like what I just described, with progressives using complex reductionist approaches, while conservatives would just add fast runners to the breeding group, and remove slow runners.
I am purely a conservative and I detest the progressive approach to everything. The general view on eugenics is that the Nazis ruined the reputation of eugenics and this is why it lost favor. But my view is that the progressives had already ruined eugenics before the Nazis, and that the conservative opposition (especially Catholic opposition) to eugenics was based on eugenicists playing God. I don't think these conservatives opposed animal breeding and I don't think they would have opposed a conservative form of eugenics which would be similar to animal breeding.
But it was the Nazis who ultimately ruined the reputation of eugenic. This is because of their cruel racist authoritarian progressive approach. The Nazi approach was simply wrong and ineffective. The Arkian approach is almost the exact opposite of the Nazi approach. The Arkian approach is conservative with no compulsion.
An argument against eugenics is the position that nurture (environment) plays a much larger role than nature (genetics). The nature versus nurture debate is old, and I do not want to argue it here. The Arkian idea doesn't depend on this debate. The only assumption required for the Arkian idea to make sense is that children tend to have similar traits to their parents. Whether these traits as passed from parents to children by genetics or by upbringing makes no difference. So the nature versus nurture is only a debate about the means of transmission, not the question of whether a transmission from parents to children happens at all.
Let's consider again the question of how to "breed" good runners. Suppose that genetics plays no role in how fast people run. The above conservative breeding plan of adding fast runners to a breeding group, and removing slow runners, would still work as long as parents pass on running skills to their children by raising them to be fast runners. This breeding approach only fails if parents don't pass on running skill to their children by any means.
In this case, why is Arkian described as "a eugenic intentional ethnicity"? Because I think of it that way because I believe in genetics. But if you don't believe in genetics, you can describe Arkian as "an intentional ethnicity of good breeding" where "good breeding" can cover either nature (genetics) or nurture (upbringing).
The Arkian idea selects for intelligence and morality. While I personally believe that genetics plays a role in these traits, I also believe upbringing plays a role. Culture and religion are undoubtedly important factors. The Arkian approach selects for these traits regardless of their source.
Now I would like to discuss "ethnicity". According to Wikipedia:
This should contrasted with "race" which is only based on ancestry. So race only means a genetic group. This meaning of "race" is modern. In the past, the terms "race" and "ethnicity" were more similar. But the modern distinction is clear and useful. The Arkian idea is not concerned with race, but only with ethnicity.
For an ethnicity to form, the critical thing is for people to marry within the group. This is how the shared attributes are passed to the next generation. In general, any group that mostly marries within the group will become an ethnicity, while any group that mostly marries outside the group will not be an ethnicity.
The Arkian idea is to form a eugenic intentional ethnicity. For what purpose? To produce a group of people with high intelligence, religiousness, and ethnocentrism.
It is my opinion that these traits are being rapidly lost in the general population. The next section will go into details. But generally I would ask you to name one single area that has improved since 2010. I can't think of one. In modern culture, everything only gets worse. Areas that come to mind include music, art, movies, architecture, software, politics, conversation, science, customer service, etc. The name "Arkian" comes from Noah's Ark with the idea being that the Arkian ethnicity is designed to be a refuge to preserve what is good about humanity in the face of a global dysgenic culture that is making almost all of humanity go bad.
Most religions are independent of ethnicity and serve all ethnicities. What religion wouldn't benefit from adding an ethnicity that is highly intelligent and religious? This is the value that the Arkian idea has for religions.
Here I will describe cultural decay but not its root cause. One may say that children playing video games is a cause of decay, or a product of decay, or both. So one can't call this a root cause. It's confusing because cultural decay is like old age or a syndrome with many related factors. So here I will just be descriptive.
In The Fate of Empires Sir John Glubb gives an excellent summary of the life cycle of empires. And he points out that the lifespan of empires is typically 200 to 300 years. But anyone who has a serious interest in understanding how cultures rise and fall must read original source material from history. From this, it soon becomes clear that one usually can identify from the style of writing what phase of the civilization that writing came from. Writings from decaying cultures are generally stupid or reject reality. Writings from rising cultures are direct and try to address real-world problems.
Since the topic here is specifically cultural decay, I will mention some relevant descriptive writing from other cultures. The Old Testament does a great job in describing the decay of Israel/Judah from the beginning under King Solomon to the final fall of Judah to Babylon. Decaying Athens is well described in the comedies of Aristophanes. The beginning of Roman decay is described by Juvenal. Late Rome is described by Ammianus Marcellinus who I discussed here.
One common feature of all decaying cultures is feminism and family instability. This is related to promiscuity and I will discuss the dysgenic effect of promiscuity later. For now I will just describe what happens. Once punishment for adultery (sex between a married woman and man other than her husband) becomes reduced, it becomes in women's genetic interest to become promiscuous. I discuss why below in Genetic Decay - Dysgenics and also in my post In Defense of Feminism. But the result is feminism which is essentially a slut power movement. This feminist degeneracy is described in many decaying cultures. The Old Testament describes it in decaying Israel, Aristophanes in decaying Athens, Juvenal and Apuleius in decaying Rome, and Procopius in Byzantium.
Beside the dysgenic effect, feminism causes family instability which harms the raising of children. So this directly harms the culture. Also men without stable wives are less committed to their society and so less likely to contribute to society. So feminism is an example of both a cause of decay and a product of decay. It is a product of deteriorating religion which results in lessening punishment for adultery which results in feminism. And it is a cause as I described.
Decaying culture can be viewed through the lens of whatever field interests you whether art or architecture or literature or whatever. In all fields, one can see good work produced as a culture rises, and bad work produced as a culture falls. I would like to discuss historical cosmology and modern programming as examples.
In the 200s BC Aristarchus of Samos invented heliocentric cosmology which was simple and accurate. But this was rejected by the people of his time. Why?
The story of Greek science begins with Pythagoras who lived in the 500s BC. He was the first person to recognize the power of math to describe the world, and he applied math to many things. This inspired Greek astronomers to try to describe cosmology in simple mathematical terms. This was during the time that Greeks were a rising culture. They were highly intelligent people who respected reality.
Plato lived in the 300s BC by which time Greece was in decline. Plato was an ideologue who was in love with his own ideas and had no interest in reality. Plato insisted on a geocentric model of cosmology based purely on circles. Why? Just because this was the idea that appealed to him. Reality was irrelevant. Aristotle backed him up, and so this became orthodoxy. By the time Aristarchus came along with his heliocentric cosmology, he was violating orthodox ideas so the people of his time just ignored him. Then in the 100s BC Ptolemy created a horrible overcomplicated geocentric model based on the circles that Plato required. This became the standard for the next 1700 years.
Cosmology only changed again when Copernicus revived the ideas of Aristarchus. Why did it take so long? Because this is when the next culture that was as good as the Ancient Greeks developed, namely the culture of Reformation Europe. It is no accident that Copernicus lived around the time of Martin Luther.
Today's West is like the decaying Greeks. The programmers in Silicon Valley are like Ptolemy, able to construct and maintain horrible overcomplicated monstrosities, but totally unable to innovate at a fundamental level. All good programming ideas are rejected because they don't fit into current programming ideologies. Any programmer like Aristarchus who comes up with a good programming idea will be rejected and ridiculed for violating orthodoxy. Modern programmers are in love with their own ideas and love complexity. They hate simplicity and anything that violates their ideologies.
In Matthew 7:6 Jesus said "Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces." Jesus lived in decaying Rome and this is excellent advice for anyone living in a decaying culture. Members of decaying culture hate everything that is good. And of course modern culture is a decaying culture. So if you create anything good, you will be hated for it. In my case as a programmer, my software is pearls and modern programmers are swine, so I am only attacked when I present my software. And it isn't just my software, all good software is hated by modern programmers. I wrote more about this on my other website Reactionary Software.
In this chapter I just tried to describe decaying cultures including modern culture, and what practical impact decaying culture has on life. Next I will describe some of the possible causes of cultural decay.
The correlation between the decline of cultures and the decline or corruption of the culture's founding religion is obvious to anyone who knows history. But the religion declines first, and there is a long lag between the decline of religion and the outward decline of society. As a result, cultures peak in outward output after their religion has failed, giving the mistaken impression that secular societies are most productive.
The sequence is roughly this: Religion declines which causes morality to decline including a decline in effective prevention of adultery and this causes feminism and cultural decline which in turn is dysgenic and causes genetic decay. This long sequence explains the lag. This happened in Ancient Israel, Ancient Athens, Rome, Early Islam, and is now happening in the West.
Why does religion decline in successful societies? One can only speculate. I gave one possible explanation in my post Why Religions Fail but here I will give another. When society is poor then people feel a need for religion and intelligent people tend to go into religion as the only escape from the chaos of their world. Once a society becomes successful, regular people don't feel as much need for religion. But even more important is that intelligent people have many other options in a successful society besides religion, so religion attracts far fewer intelligent people. Some of these intelligent people become degenerates and attack religion. Since religion doesn't have enough intelligent people to defend itself, it either conforms to the degeneracy of its time or it simply closes its collective mind and becomes fundamentalist and rejects all reason. This happened most clearly in Islam where the Muʿtazila became degenerate in response to challenges from philosophy, and then there was a fundamentalist backlash led by Hanbali. Muslims have been fundamentalists ever since which is why they never produced anything comparable to the Islamic Golden Age again. Christianity is now going through a similar process. The end result is a loss of religious understanding as I described in my post Understanding.
As far as I know, the only Christians who retain a good understanding of their religion is the Conservative Mennonites. One can see the beginning of the process of religious decay in the Mexican Mennonites. Most of modern Christianity is too far gone to even be interesting. Modern Islam is closed-minded but still retains the potential for a reformation that could make it a good religion again.
One last point is the relationship between religion and science. Science only conflicts with fundamentalist religion, and in fact science depends on good religion, particularly good monotheism. I discussed this in my post Science Requires Monotheism.
The best introduction to the idea of dysgenics is the introduction of the movie Idiocracy. Edward Dutton has studied this issue and commented on Idiocracy. I agree with his criticisms and I think modern Liberia is a better model for the future of the West. His book At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future gives hard evidence for declining intelligence in the West. His reasoning really doesn't add much beyond what is in the introduction to Idiocracy. But he makes the point that this pattern has likely repeated throughout history, and that when selection pressure is eugenic then cultures rise, and that success tends to cause dysgenic pressure and so as intelligence declines the culture fails.
The widely held opinion on the cause of dysgenics is what is described in the introduction to Idiocracy. But I believe that there is another even more dysgenic force in decaying cultures which I will describe in some detail because it is a new idea. My idea is that female sexual selection in a promiscuous culture is dysgenic and leads to selection that favors stupidity and immorality.
Consider how male peacocks got their bright feathers. These bright feathers have no benefit for survival. In fact they are harmful for survival, being heavy and easy for predators to see. So let's start by imagining peacocks before they had big bright feathers. Since females can only have a limited number of children, females tend to be selective about which males they mate with. They should prefer healthy "good-looking" males since their children will inherit the male's genes. Those males with dull feathers may well have been poorly nourished and unhealthy. Bright feathers were probably a good indication of a healthy male. So females evolved to prefer males with bright feathers. But now it becomes in the male's interest to have bright feathers because if he doesn't, females will reject him and he won't be able to reproduce. So males evolved to have bigger and brighter feathers, not for survival, but for the sexual advantage that allowed males to have more children. At some point these bigger brighter feathers were no longer an indication of good health. So why didn't the females stop preferring such males? This is explained by the sexy son hypothesis. If the female mates with a male who is popular with other females, then her sons will likely inherit the male's traits that made the father popular and so her sons will also be popular and will have many children with many females. This will spread not only the father's genes but also the mother's genes. So those females who are attracted to popular males have an advantage. At this point in the story, male peacocks with big bright feathers are popular with females, so it is to each female's advantage to mate with males with big bright feathers. This is Fisherian runaway selection, a story of natural selection gone wild, and not doing what is in the best interest of the species.
It is in the genetic interest of females to mate with the best type of male for the current environment. Because this is so important, one can reasonably assume that a significant part of a woman's brain is dedicated to this issue. This means that women can intuitively determine which men are genetically "good" much better than men can using analytical reasoning. In other words, men have no right to doubt women's mating choices in terms of genetic suitability. When a woman says that a man is "hot", she is unquestionably correct that he is a good genetic choice in her current environment. And when a woman says that a man is a (genetic) loser, she is also unquestionably correct in her current environment.
So what type of man is optimal in a promiscuous culture? The answer is stupid immoral men. Immoral because that means that they will have sex with any women without restraint - other men's wives, underage girls, etc. Stupid because this means that they won't use birth control in the process. Such men can have a huge number of children, so these are the type of men that women are attracted to in a promiscuous culture. The political expression of this desire of women to be sluts chasing bad men is called "feminism".
This type of sexual selection in promiscuous cultures is far more dysgenic than the usual explanation of the lower classes reproducing faster than the upper classes. This force means that decent men will find it almost impossible to reproduce with women from their culture, but that the most stupid and evil men will have a huge number of children.
Now the question arises why this force didn't destroy humanity long ago. The answer is that human culture has generally punished promiscuity, and that those that didn't either remained as primitive weak tribes or quickly collapsed as a culture. In the book Sex and Culture anthropologist Unwin analyzes the correlation between female premarital chastity and the level of development in all known isolated tribes of his time. He finds that female premarital chastity perfectly correlates to the level of development, absolutely without exception. Unwin then turns to history and studies rising and falling cultures. Again he finds that all rising cultures require strict female premarital chastity (virgin wives) and that declining cultures typically don't enforce female premarital chastity. So it should be no surprise that all religious texts oppose promiscuity, particularly The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Bible, and the Quran. Religion has been the primary force in enforcing female chastity and thereby preventing dysgenic decay. But successful cultures tend to become less religious and this causes an increase in promiscuity which results in dysgenic decay. Any solution to the problem of human decay must address this issue.
This chapter is based on my earlier posts Human Evolution and In Defense of Feminism which go into more depth on this topic, and this is well summarized in the post The reproductive superiority of stupid assholes.
Here I will consider other possible solutions besides the Arkian solution. A solution means a sustainable group, and this requires that the group maintain the culture and genetics needed for its surivival.
The Benedict Option is a recent proposal to form Christian communities. This proposal has two flaws. First, it has no standards, as I commented in my review of this book. This means that it will not be able to resist the surrounding culture in the long run. And second, it makes no attempt to form a coherent genetic group, so it can never advance genetically.
These issues are intrinsic to the nature of earlier Christianity. Before Constantine, Christianity was just a religious movement. After Constantine, it became a centralized religion in the forms of the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. These centralized structures fundamentally didn't allow for meaningful communities to develop. The closest was the monasteries themselves which did have strict standards, but clearly couldn't become a genetic group.
Only after the Reformation decentralized Christianity did strong communities become possible. Early American towns were typically dominated by one church that set the moral standards for the town. This was early Protestantism, but Protestantism became increasingly individualistic over time until it became too individualistic to form meaningful communities. The Reformation movement that still has the capacity to form meaningful communities is Anabaptism. Of the Anabaptist groups, the one I know best is the conservative Mennonites.
Conservative Mennonite groups have clear standards for membership. And they mostly marry within their group, so they form a coherent genetic group. This is one of the most promising possible solutions to the problem of human decay. Whether it will work in the long run, I really can't judge. But obviously it can only work for people who accept Mennonite beliefs. As a non-Christian, I would prefer a solution that works for all intelligent religious people regardless of their beliefs.
Orthodox Jewish groups have much in common with Anabaptist groups. They have standards and they form coherent genetic groups as subsets of Jews. But ultimately they are Jews which takes precedence over their religious community, so everything discussed in the next section on the Jews applies to them.
Jews are an ethnicity, not a religion or race. I discussed the difference between ethnicity and race. A convert to Judaism like Ivanka Trump is Jewish. This conversion is like immigration into the Jewish people. The immigration process is through the religion, but a Jew doesn't have to follow the religion. Plenty of Jews are atheist and don't follow Judaism at all, but they are still considered completely Jewish. So Jews are purely an ethnicity.
The historical process that produced the Jews is described in the Old Testament. First there were the Hebrews who were a clan/tribe. They were defined by family relations. The Israelites began when they left Egypt as a "mixed multitude" of Hebrews and others. They were defined by religion. And then finally the Jews were defined as an ethnicity by Ezra.
Many would dispute what I just said, so I will provide evidence that Ezra fundamentally changed the nature of the group. Ezra introduced meaningful genetic separation by making it more difficult to intermarry with outsiders. Some would argue that Deuteronomy 7:3 already did this with "Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons,". But Deuteronomy 7:4 continues and explains "because they will turn your sons away from Me to worship other gods.". So the point here isn't ethnicity, but rather religion. This is a prohibition against marrying people from bad religions, not other ethnicities. And then there are Moses's wives. His first wife was Zipporah, a Midianite (not Israelite). And his second wife was a Cushite (Ethiopian). This is discussed at length in Numbers 12. And finally we have the conversion story of Ruth who joined the Israelites fairly easily after accepting their religion. Ezra overturned all this by sending away all the foreign wives who hadn't gone through a formal conversion/immigration process.
I used to be against Ezra, and I believed that a religious community is best. But the Old Testament itself describes how badly the Israelites failed as a religious community. It is very difficult to keep a whole nation unified based on religion since religious differences and degeneration will inevitably occur. It is better to unify people based on ethnicity and then hope that a good religion has a positive impact on the people.
On the plus side, Ezra created a group (Jews) that has managed to survive a very long time under different conditions. On the minus side, this group has had and caused many problems. I believe that what Ezra did wrong was to fail to define a sensible immigration policy, and so this was left to religion. And as the religion decayed, the quality of "immigrants" also decayed. The most productive group of Jews where the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. But their genetic improvements in areas like intelligence were largely the result of luck, of the selection pressures the European society imposed on these Jews. This lucky circumstance is now over, and so Jews are in rapid genetic decline. The decline in Jewish intellect in recent years is obvious and is even discussed on a Jewish website. I will continue with the history of the Jews since Ezra until I reach the present.
After Ezra, Alexander the Great conquered Israel. This brought in the thinking of Plato. The Jews rejected the idea of absolute truth but embraced the idea of debate based on deductive reason. The ultimate result of this is the Talmud which has the most twisted reasoning I have ever seen. Talmudic thinking is compared to the Old Testament here and is criticized from a humanitarian perspective here. So now the original Old Testament religion was lost and replaced by insane rationalizing of whatever the rabbis wanted to rationalize. When Israel was under Roman control there were a number of Jewish sects. The Talmudic sect won out simply because it was the most ethnocentric. As the winners, they could determine the conditions for becoming a Jew which basically was following Talmudic nonsense for a few years.
After Rome fell, the Jews in Europe aligned with the aristocracy against the people. This is well documented in the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. But this didn't involve most Jews. People against the Jews point to Jewish bankers and Jewish rabbis who were generally evil. But the average Jew was typically involved in some basic trade and wasn't necessarily evil. Because monogamy was enforced by Ashkenazi rabbis and conditions were harsh, there was strong natural selection which increased Ashkenazi intelligence. An intelligent Jew of this time probably would have realized that the Talmud and the rabbis are insane, but he would have put up with them because this is still better than becoming a serf. So intelligent Jews remained Jews.
Jews lived in their own districts until Napoleon freed them to live wherever they liked. But this change was gradual. Europe had now left the dark ages and entered the Enlightenment. At this point European culture was much more attractive to an intelligent Jew than Talmudic insanity was. So Jews began to assimilate into European culture, but they generally did not intermarry with Europeans, so remained a separate gene pool.
After WW2, most Jews left Europe. The obvious choice for any intelligent Jew was to move to America. But in America, intermarriage was accepted. So basically what happened is that all the decent intelligent Jews rejected the Talmudic nonsense and assimilated into America. My family background is Hungarian Jews, specifically scientists known as the Martians. These people were assimilated into Hungarian culture, and rejected Judaism. Once they moved to America, they also genetically assimilated because their children (like me) did not marry Jews.
By now all decent intelligent Jews have stopped being Jews. The Jews that remain Jews are either stupid or they like the evil Talmudic nonsense. This is why today's Jews are generally evil. This is why Jewish intellect declined so rapidly. And this is why Israel implemented a covid vaccine holocaust on their own population, because modern Jews are too stupid to know any better and too evil to allow dissent.
I have described the Jews at such length because, in spite of their flaws, they are the closest to a general working solution to the problem of mass human decay. The flaws in the Jewish system may condemn them to be evil and stupid in the near future, but they are still likely to survive as a group. Since they are an ethnicity, they do not have the religious inflexibility of the Mennonites, so they can evolve as needed to survive, and anyone who is committed can join regardless of their beliefs. Their rules of genetic separation ensure that they will remain a coherent genetic group distinct from the doomed masses. The Arkian idea is inspired by the Jewish model, but is an attempt to do it right and avoid evil and stupidity.
After the South lost the American civil war, a number of Southerners (Confederates) set up communities in Latin America, particularly Brazil. What happened to them? According to Wikipedia:
The first generation of Confederados remained an insular community. As is typical, by the third generation, most of the families had intermarried with native Brazilians or immigrants of other origins. Descendants of the Confederados increasingly spoke the Portuguese language and identified themselves as Brazilians. As the area around Santa Bárbara d'Oeste and Americana turned to the production of sugar cane and society became more mobile, the Confederados moved to cities for urban jobs. Today, only a few descendant families still live on land owned by their ancestors. The descendants of the Confederados are mostly scattered throughout Brazil.
Here is this community today.
This story is an example of intentional communities. Intentional communities generally don't last long. They have no natural immunity to the surrounding culture, so they get absorbed by it. It makes no difference what the founding ideology is because there is nothing to ensure that future generations will keep that ideology.
Some may blame the outcome of the story of the Southerners in Intentional Communities on their genetically mixing with the local population, arguing that mixing with inferior races brings down the genetic quality of the population. They may argue that if they had practiced racial separation, they would have been spared this fate. Here I will argue that this is not the case. Racial separation may slow down genetic decline but does not prevent it. As discussed, race is not ethnicity.
Now I will enumerate the problems with racial separation. The first problem is that the gene pool of a race is not static even if it is isolated. The genetic composition of any group will change based on selection pressure. In modern societies, the main pressure is sexual selection and this is largely determined by culture. So if a community is genetically isolated but not culturally isolated, then the surrounding culture will seep in and this will result in the same evolutionary pressures being applied to the group. And this will slowly change the genetics of the group to resemble the people around them. Note that modern culture is highly dysgenic, so any isolated gene pool that has modern culture will genetically decline rapidly.
The next problem is the failure to attract good genes from outside the group. Successful ethnicities typically allow limited immigration which selects for high quality people who improve the gene pool. The racist may argue that members of lower races can never improve the gene pool. They often use the difference between animals as an analogy. But this analogy fails because for any important human characteristic, the average member of the best race is inferior to the best member of the worst race. This is not true for differences between animals. The point is that the differences between races is smaller than the differences within a race. Therefore attracting the best members of any race will improve the gene pool.
A related point is that a race must maintain enough genetic diversity to be able to adapt as conditions change. Limited immigration guarantees this genetic diversity, while genetic isolation threatens it.
The fundamental point here is that genetic selection is the key to success, not genetic isolation. I don't know of any historical examples where racial separation worked in producing a highly successful population, so besides the logical arguments I presented here, there is no empirical evidence to support racial separation. All of the remaining suggested solutions will have some form of genetic selection.
Finally, I would like to comment on the alt-right. This group is the major modern proponent of racial separation, and they are complete losers. I will leave it to white ethno-nationalist Varg to comment on the alt-right here and here. Note that Varg is primarily focused on ethnicity, not race, because he values religion and culture, not just genetics.
The most recent proposal to reverse the decline in human quality is modern eugenics using embryo selection based on genetics. This is clearly a progressive approach as descibed above in What is eugenics?. It suffers from reductionism and is extremely open to abuse. Conservatives shouldn't play God, and should only use natural selection based on results. This is the Arkian approach.
The Arkian solution to escaping from human decay is to form a new ethnicity whose membership requirements will select for high quality people. In particular, we want people who have traditional religious morals, who are intelligent and persistent, and who are ethnocentric. I will start by explaining the reasoning for the requirements.
The first requirement is passing a test on scripture. We currently only have an Old Testament test (for Karaites and others who follow the Old Testament). If a Christian becomes Arkian, he can add a full Bible test. And we will add a Quran test if a Muslim is seriously interested in joining.
The Bible and Quran are the fundamental religious texts of western culture. Knowledge of either book shows at least willingness to learn religion, but quite possibly is a result of some commitment to religion. Why not other scriptures? Because only these scriptures produced successful cultures in the West. But if someone provides a strong argument to add another scripture, we would consider it.
Note that this is a test of knowledge, not of faith. Since Arkians are an ethnicity, not a religion, there should be no requirements of belief. Passing this test just proves that one isn't ignorant of religion. But what conclusions one reaches from one's religious knowledge is a personal matter.
One may argue that an immoral person can pass this test by studying. But why would he bother? What motivation would an immoral person have to go through all this trouble to become Arkian? A moral religious person would probably already have most of the knowledge needed for him to pass, and he should have more of a reason to become Arkian, so I think this test is an effective means of selecting for religious morality.
The second requirement is passing a Go test. I was a fairly good chess player and I know most traditional games of skill, and Go is by far the best. Go tests for intelligence, judgement, perseverance to build a skill, and ability to prioritize. The typical modern person will not have the self-discipline to develop skill in Go, so this test eliminates such people. And of course the intelligence aspect of Go ensures eugenic selection to produce an intelligent population.
But Go is about more than intelligence. For critical thinking, intelligence is not enough. One must learn to be critical of all ideas including one's own ideas. This is only developed by experiencing the failure of ideas. Things like math and puzzles don't provide this. But competitive games are optimal for providing negative feedback for bad ideas, through losing the game. This forces skepticism of ideas which is required for critical thinking.
For such games, one can also read books to learn strategies. And playing games allows one to learn how to apply what one reads. This is another critical skill, learning how to apply what one learns passively in an active environment.
While this isn't a requirement, I would hope that Arkian parents teach their children Go. Video games generally destroy children's ability to concentrate while Go increases the ability to concentrate. I think Go is the best mental exercise for children, and would result in more intelligent adults.
In the Old Testament, Amos 5:15 says "Hate evil and love good, and establish judgement in the gate.". Hating evil and loving good are not enough. One needs to have the judgement to distinguish between the two. The game of Go is fundamentally about developing judgement using analysis, experience, and study. The reason that children play games is to develop skills, and the skill that Go teaches is the skill of developing judgement. I believe that judgement is critical for correctly understanding and applying religion, so children who play Go will have a better understanding of their religion as adults.
Most Go resources advocate playing Go for all ages. I personally do not. I think games are mostly for children, while adults should focus on more practical things. So then why have a Go test for adults to become Arkian? Because the Go test just isn't that hard. A reasonably intelligent adult should be able to study Go and pass the test after a few weeks of serious study. Passing the test proves that he is serious about joining and that he is reasonably intelligent. Once he passes the test, he can forget about Go except for teaching it to his children.
The previous two tests are to become Arkian. But one can also be born Arkian if one is born from an Arkian couple.
An ethnicity must have shared attributes including things like genetics and culture. This is achieved by marrying within the group and so passing on attributes to the next generation. This is why it is very important to have an incentive for an Arkian to marry another Arkian. Most ethnicities are land-based, so they marry within the group naturally. But when an ethnicity becomes too successful and so attracts many immigrants, they have a problem. Pericles solved this for Ancient Athens by requiring that both parents are Athenian citizens for the child to be an Athenian citizen. This is the source of my idea on this. Judaism is not optimal in only requiring one parent (mother for Talmudic, father for Karaite) because this allows untested genes into the gene pool.
One other central reason for this criteria is that it selects for ethnocentrism. An ethnicity that doesn't have its own land must be strongly ethnocentric to survive. Those who are not strongly ethnocentric must leave. Someone who is ethnocentric will try to marry within the group. I think Jews have benefited a lot by selecting for ethnocentrism. Since I am racially Jewish, I think I inherited a strong ethnocentric instinct but unfortunately there is no current ethnicity (including Jews) worthy of being ethnocentric towards. Arkians should be a worthy ethnicity with a strongly ethnocentric population.
Also note that the parents must be married for the child to be born Arkian. This is to select for monogamous traits and to select against promiscuity. Children born outside outside of marriage are not automatically Arkian.
Ulul Albab are people of intellect as described here, here, and here. The whole point of the Arkian idea is to produce people of intellect or Ulul Albab.
I assume that the primary identity of Muslim Arkians would be Muslim, not Arkian. But being Arkian would be a secondary identity, just as one's profession could be a secondary identity.
The Muslim community needs Ulul Albab to help guide them. As intelligence drops throughout humanity, including among Muslims, the number of Ulul Albab is dropping, and this is a serious problem. This means that Muslims are likely to be poorly guided. Muslim Arkians could solve this problem.
Everything I have written so far is just theory. How can the Arkian idea be implemented? Certainly it cannot be implemented by secular people. Only religious people can implement the Arkian idea.
A religious community, church or mosque, should already have half of the Arkian requirement covered. A church should teach the Bible and a mosque should teach the Quran. What is missing is learning the game of Go. The solution is to offer Go classes in the church or mosque. This would mostly be aimed at children, and I would expect that children are the best prospects for becoming Arkian. I personally hope to move to an area where there would be a number of churches and mosques that may be interested in this, in which case I could teach the classes myself.
I have already mentioned the long term benefit, namely adding an ethnicity that is highly intelligent and religious. But this is largely speculative, not an immediate benefit. So what is the immediate benefit?
The only immediate change would be adding the Go class. And this has the immediate benefit of being an additional service that the church or mosque can offer for its members. This service is of high value because it will make the children more intelligent which will raise their grades and generally make them more successful in life. This is something that members of the church or mosque will appreciate.
I think that an additional benefit is that raising the intelligence of children will give them a deeper understanding of scripture (Bible or Quran). And this will make them more resistant to the bad influences of modern culture.
The obvious benefit of becoming Arkian is that your descendants have a chance of escaping genetic decay. Given the current dysgenic culture, you can be sure that your descendants will decay genetically if they remain in the general gene pool. The only way to avoid this is to join a separate gene pool like Anabaptists, Jews, or Arkians. Of these options, only becoming Arkian allows you to keep your current religion. You can continue attending your church or mosque for a good religious community.
How would this work in practice? Your children should be Arkian either through the tests or by birth. You should explain to them the importance of them marrying Arkians. They can either marry a current Arkian or someone willing to join. The Arkian tests ensure that they will marry quality people. So this is a good filter to help your children marry good people. And hopefully the same process will continue throughout the generations of your descendants.
I would love to discuss the Arkian idea further with anyone who is interested. My email is fschmidt@gmail.com.