The intellectual explanation for white supremacy, that I learned about through HBD Chick, is now settled science, according to Steve Sailer in “HBD Chick Vindicated.”

According to the settled scientists,

populations characterized as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual. People from these societies tend to be more individualistic, independent, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty.

And the reason is that, back in the Middle Ages

the Western Church (i.e., the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) transformed European kinship structures during the Middle Ages and that this transformation was a key factor behind a shift towards a WEIRDer psychology.

The mechanism the Church used to effect these changes was the ban on close-cousin marriages. The whole thing was a power project, because restricting close-cousin marriages made it so difficult for static populations to find an eligible mate that many ended up unmarried and willing their estates to the Church. The result was collapsed kin networks that set the stage for modern individualism and the market economy that rewards people that trust trustable strangers.

There’s a lesson here for all you power junkies out there. You’ll be amazed at the unanticipated consequences of your cultural and religious power projects. I mean, whatever the Catholic Church thought it was doing by banning first-cousin and second-cousin marriages, I bet that nobody at the Vatican thought that it would precipitate things like Newtonian mechanics, a scientific revolution, the global market economy, and the Death of God.

Of course, now we have a New Church, the left, with its own sacred scriptures, secular-religious schools and universities and its Cancel Culture to rid the world of heretics. Instead of banning close-cousin marriages we have the celebration of LGBT and childlessness. I wonder what the long-term result of that will be?

Okay. The result will be nothing good.

Then there is China, the emerging global hegemon, noted for its kin-based culture that was mitigated, at least in part, by the bureaucratic mandarin class selected by examinations in Chinese classics. I say “in part” because you don’t get to pass exams in Chinese classics unless your family has the money and power to afford an education in Chinese classics.

Now, I know next to nothing about today’s China, except that I understand that there are two factions in the Communist Party: populists and princelings. The princelings “come from families of veteran revolutionaries or of high-ranking officials” in the coastal cities. The populists issue from less exalted origins, often from the interior. I wonder what the unanticipated consequences of that will be?

Then there are the Tiger Moms in the overseas Chinese community that conducting their own populist/princeling experiment. I interpret the Crazy Rich Asians book and movie as a discussion of this issue, where a rich princeling wants to marry a Cinderella of shameful origins, and the mothers and grandmothers do everything in their power to stop it.

I wonder how all that will play out and how it will affect us as China makes its bid to become global hegemon.

But enough about the Chinese: what about us?

Our Lefty Church is not merely dabbling with cousin marriage, like the Church of Rome. It is actively blurring the whole culture of man-woman marriage as Sen. Warren (D-MA) approvingly tweets:

Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy.

Never mind whether you think this is a Good Thing or not, or whether the current fashion of gender reversals in Shakespeare with As You Like It’s Jaques and The Tempest’s Prospero played by women is just more of the usual stupidity. What will be the unanticipated consequences of Lefty cultural domination and hegemony?

I tell you what I think. I think this:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Lefty,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

For this is the basic error of our lefty friends. They do not gaze at the heavens in wonder; they complain that the arc of history has not bent to justice yet.

To make the point more directly, I would say that if you are engaged in a power project to bend the world to your will, you really don’t know what you are doing.

For when I talk about the Lefty Church as the Great Reaction, with socialism as neo-slavery, the welfare state as neo-feudalism, and identity politics as neo-tribalism, I am trying to suggest that what you lefties think as pure Progress is in fact pure reaction.

And the result of the power project will not be justice, but injustice.

And the lefty cultural hegemony will have unanticipated consequences just as unexpected as the Catholic ban on cousin marriage.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.