Romantic love began to appear in Europe at around the same time or after the Virgin Mary came to be more commonly depicted in art and prayed to throughout the West. It sort of makes sense from a logical and aesthetic perspective if people who were praying for the intercession of a sacred virgin all the time would come to value virginity highly.

But that would be a bit of a mistaken conclusion — virginity tends to be (and tended to be) highly valued almost everywhere, both civilized and non-civilized, throughout history. The particular character of romantic love, on the other hand, is close to unique, with all of its overbearing displays of devotion, exchanges of letters, singing of songs, and occasional self-mutilations.

When people in previous times venerated virginity, they did it in the service of other virtues — namely those of chastity, diligence, patience, prudence, temperance, self-control, and loyalty. It was also connected to religion, as it is today within more pious communities. That’s not to say that in the past there were no people who didn’t live up to those virtues. That’s why they’re virtues and not character aspects which we simply expect from everyone.

It’s common to say that romance is dead — in the real world — at the same time as romance explodes in popularity in the world of fantasy.

In fantasy worlds which are popular today, men are tough knights, space marines, grizzled cops, and Italian plumbers with incredible vertical leaps. In the fantasies of women, they’re virgins in the firm hands of a respectable billionaire pervert. While the stories might be a little odd, stories are always odd.

So, while Romance the genre remains the most popular Western genre of fantasy, romance the concept has come to be widely denigrated, almost universally so. I have trouble even thinking of a contemporary figure who’s not also ridiculous who argues for romantic behavior as it was once understood.

There is a veneration of romantic passion — passion has come to be seen the moral justification for sex — but romantic gestures have come to be seen as outmoded and ridiculous. Mostly, it’s men who are especially slow on the cultural uptake still make them, and they tend to earn mockery for it.

Romance simply makes no sense at all outside of the framework of virtue in which it was conceived, because a moral framework in which absolutely everything is permitted is one in which it loses all of its coherence.

Today, we tend to make fun of people who mistake the vestigial expectations formed by romantic fantasy tales for what should be expected in ‘reality.’ But still, people return to the stories, because they stir their hearts, only to have those same hearts bashed against a wall of indifference to virtue and worship of vice.

Part of the trouble that people have with romance — despite its enduring appeal — is that it tends not to get along with anyone‘s idea of what ought to be good and legitimate. Many romances which aren’t fantasies are tragedies, because they’re more true to life. Romeo and Juliet really can’t be together, and the conclusion of the play depicts the consequences of star-crossed love in a way that encourages pity more than it does imitation. Abelard and Heloise did not go to a good end, but the impression drawn from the story of what happened to them was not really supposed to be that the passions ought to be unleashed to run over every fixed institution.

Today, we tend to emphasize romance and romantic love far more than we do virtue. Some have attempted to tie the experience of romantic passions to the perception of virtue in another person, to limited success — after all, there are plenty of examples of people being overwhelmed by passionate affection for someone who is bad.

Anyway, the point of this wandering post is to say that because the cult of the virgin — and respect for virginity itself — has diminished, so has romance. Fantasy fiction takes on a more urgent role as people fumble at the hole that’s left behind. Their lives become dulled, with only pop fiction to make any sense of it at all.

Women and men alike also tend to want the rewards of virtue without really needing to be virtuous. Chivalrous gestures are inane when there’s no chastity or modesty. The left expends enormous amounts of effort on denigrating both of those things, and making them especially impractical for young people. Conservatives tend to demand extraordinary self-control from young people crammed together in co-educational institutions, and then became enraged when nature proceeds to take its course.

Social Pathologist wrote well on this the other year:

The continual conflation of physiological sexual attraction with moral parameters (either positive of negative) seems to be a problem of Christianity when it comes to an analysis of sexuality. Good Christian men can’t understand why they are not sexually attractive, despite living according to God’s law. Living in the hope that God will send them a good woman who will not be like the “others”. This deficiency in the understanding of the biological dimension of sexuality means that no practical advice is given on how to improve the success rate with the ladies, apart from pray. Most of the other advice is next to useless. On the other hand, due to this hostility to the “flesh” men and women who are sexually attractive are deemed to be morally bad. Amongst weaker minds there almost appears to be an associative incompatibility between being “hot” and being “Christian”. Drab women and grey men.

The Trads seem to be unable to recognise that he attraction a woman feels for a man is involuntary, i.e. it is morally neutral. How she chooses to act on the attraction gives her actions a moral dimension. But they continually conflate the two. The fact that Jessica is attracted to Bill, the bad boy, does not mean she will be attracted to dweeby Ben, who is also morally bad but lacks erotic capital. Morals have nothing to do with the issue, attraction is decided by the flesh.

This tradition of conflation in my opinion stems of Christianity’s aversion to “flesh”. The overtly erotic was simply seen as the express route the Hell and Christianity did all it could to suppress it. As a result, Christianity developed a good tradition of fighting the flesh and neglected to develop an understanding of it or accord it any legitimacy. The result has been that Christianity can’t evaluate sexuality on the biomechanical level and insists to continually evaluate it on the moral one. The resistance to this common sense understanding is perplexing. It’s as if the Trads do not want to acknowledge a carnal nature to our sexual desires and instead continue with their understanding of human sexuality as if the mechanics of sexual attraction did not matter, only its moral evaluation; still, which they nearly always view in the negative.

This historical position has had practical real world sequelae. Admittedly, Christianity is not responsible for the excesses but it provided for a a cultural fault line which was waiting to be exploited.

1. For good or ill, the Church was the dominant cultural force in the West till about the end of the 19th Century, it’s suppression of the erotic, not procreative, component of sexuality, meant that as the Church lost power, the pendulum swung the other way. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of any theology of desire the world developed it’s own. Predictably it was stupid. Today’s sluttery is due to yesterdays prudery.
2. It has made a meaningful discussion on sexual polarity difficult since the spirit was more important that the flesh. Yet our sexual polarity is intrinsically tied to our carnal bodies. Gender equality/interchangeability is easy when the flesh is irrelevant. Cue feminism.
3. It has conditioned people towards evil by making sexual evil fun and virtue boring.
4. It has encouraged physical ugliness by neglecting or erotic complementarity. Desire is supercharged in bodily perfection and diminished in dysmorphia. The Fat acceptance movement is based on the idea that we shouldn’t be so “superficial” and judge people on appearances.

I get a lot of heat for taking this position, but here is an interesting question I’ll wish you to ponder: Why has “bad boy” become synonymous with sexual attraction and “good boy” with sexual repulsion? Perhaps it’s because contemporary Christianity lacks the capability to be sexy and good. The flipside to this is the notion that the erotic and good are incompatible. See what I’m getting at?

This tendency hasn’t really gone away. The differences between most contemporary conservatives and liberals in these matters is slight. We see similar tendencies in how they handle ‘supercharged desire’ and dysmorphia.

Via Bryce Laliberte comes a compelling article which argues that high IQ people are being systematically discriminated against within corporate bureaucracies and other institutions:

 In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.  This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource.  For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

The very limited research that has been done on this phenomenon has focused on possible flaws in high IQ people that might explain the exclusion.  However, the evidence that exists suggests that it is the result of inappropriate educational and productive environments within which the high IQ person must strive to succeed. Consequently, remediation should focus on creating more appropriate environments.

The data point he uses to draw this larger conclusion seems flawed (assuming that under-representation in what he calls the elite professions is evidence of exclusion), but anecdotally, it rings true for me, even though I’m at the bottom rung of the scale — perhaps even a bit under it — that he’s talking about, which probably helps to explain why I have an easy time relating to a range going from the slightly above average to the highly intelligent, but have a lot of trouble comprehending people on the normal area of the scale and below.

Erik von Kuenelt-Leddihn makes similar points in his books about the social nature of leftism in “Leftism Revisited” (p. 19):

The nonconforming person or group sinning against the sacred principle of sameness will always be treated as a traitor, and if he is not a traitor the envious majority will push him in that direction… Thus to be different will be treated as or made into treason. And even if the formula Nonconformist-Traitor will not always be promulgated with such clarity, it lurks at the back of modern man’s mind only too often, whether he openly embraces totalitarianism or no.

The American nation has a purpose, and that overriding purpose is equality. People who threaten that goal are excluded, because they can’t help but deflate the pretense that it’s possible.

If you find yourself excluded because of intelligence, you might want to adopt a more taciturn personality around people on the lower end of the scale. Yes, it may be unjust, but it’ll help you adapt to the situation. Don’t show your cards. People can sniff out high intelligence no matter how hard you try to hide it, and you want to avoid obvious flourish unless you’re in a secure position. It’s rude, otherwise.

People with high intelligence will often find greater success outside of bureaucracies, also. Instead of complaining that bureaucracy treats you poorly, find a way to secure a position without relying on conforming socially to a dysfunctional, egalitarian society.

You might even want to pretend to be an affable idiot, like an actor playing a part.

Since the late 1960s and 1970s, a cultural stereotype emerged — the ‘nerd’ — which didn’t really exist to the extent that it once did. The intelligent were trained, rather than instructed to embrace the Aristotelian mean, that the highly intelligent were physically weak, socially maladroit, obsessed with fantasies, and low status.

Many unfortunate young men chose to embrace this ‘identity group’ — and identity is an attempt to achieve sameness, even if that identity group is one of being an outsider from the herd — in part because their existence threatened the egalitarian dream espoused by the new socialists.

The popular image of ‘scientist’ went from the suave, confident Richard Feynman to the popular portrayal of scientists today as effeminate hysterics on the sitcom ‘Big Bang Theory.’

Leftism by its nature is both narcissistic and herd-oriented. With a functional social hierarchy, the intelligent and capable can be put to work for the benefit of a given country or other broader social group which is internally diverse in terms of intellectual capability. When the herd principle dominates, the normal man tends to see the capable man as an active threat to his position, and works to displace him. They will clip the tall poppies to make the mediocre appear to be better and more valuable than they really are.

This tends to be the case in the majority of human societies. The majority of human societies are semi-functional, impoverished, and prone to routine catastrophe, causing mass death. The civilizations which value and reward excellence are rare and unusual.

Soft people attract crime. It’s less risky to beat them up, humiliate them, kill them, and seize their property.

There’s a theme in propaganda called ‘waving the bloody shirt.’ It works best when you’re demogoguing for war, or for some other action to avenge the martyrs. You do it from a position of strength, rather than one of weakness.

Outside the position of strength, moaning about your martyrs just advertises that your group is easy pickings.

The two best propagandists in the ongoing story about the suppression of reporting and accurate statistics about black crime in America are Colin Flaherty and Paul Kersey. Steve Sailer also comments frequently about this issue.

Flaherty and Sailer tend to be more even-keeled than Kersey, but Kersey tends to get into more detail about the long-term damage caused by Civil Rights, and how it has resulted in the ruination of over a dozen formerly world-class American cities.

The weakest part of their rhetorical stance is in setting misguided goals.

After the 1970s, American elites, especially in the surviving US cities that still have sky-high real estate values, engineered a concealed reaction against the crime wave related to the breakdown of segregation. Under the auspices of the drug war, the US locked up large portions of the dysfunctional underclass, imposing unequal enforcement of the law on those populations predisposed to unruliness.

This method has been expensive and corrupting to law enforcement, because laws that don’t match the reality of what’s going on encourages deception and misunderstanding. The destruction of free association has had deranging impacts, has caused incalculable damage to property, and generated ongoing public disorder.

There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out repetitively in an environment in which it has become forbidden to speak the truth about such things. What is a problem is in believing that complaining about it repeatedly will make the problem all that much better. There aren’t going to be legal reforms to restore freedom of association, because freedom of association runs counter to the ideals of equality held by most of the people with power in the US.

Repeatedly reinforcing images of weakness, vulnerability, and helplessness just reinforces those traits in reality.

This sort of learned helplessness is common to the democratic mentality, because people are accustomed to being unable to act without getting permission from some bureaucratic committee or another. The better way to go about it is to act like the committee doesn’t exist, and proceed until the committee is incapable of doing much about what you’ve already achieved.

The sensible way to handle this is to become a harder target, and to stop projecting an image of group vulnerability. You want to leave areas which are indefensible, governed by doctrinaire leftists, and inhabited by weaklings who won’t defend themselves or retaliate against attackers.

You don’t want to get people to believe incantations of “we suck, we’re weak, we’re helpless, the people opposing us are just so smart and great” — because it, in effect, strengthens the hand of the opponent, and encourages the same people you want to build up to go and prostrate themselves before the faction which you have depicted as superior.