Why Not Polygyny?

A reader wrote, positing an interesting question. Why not polygyny?

There are two fathers I know that I am acquainted with that come to mind. The first is a guy who is a fairly wealthy self made man. He owns [multiple businesses] and turned $200k in profits last year and doesn’t even run them anymore. I’m not sure how many kids he has, at least 3, and I know his wife doesn’t work.

The second is a guy who is in the barely above minimum wage range and always has to work long hours and works most nights. His daughter is still young, but when she starts school that could be a problem. There are a lot of people in his position right now.

Anyways, I believe that under polygyny if the first guy had three wives and they had children together that he would be able to spend more time with every child individually then the second guy is able to spend with his children from one wife. There are a decent amount of wealthy people out there who make money from their businesses and / or investments who don’t even really have to work. They just look oversee their businesses. If polygyny was normalized, I predict that the overwhelming majority of relationships would end up like that and would be successful.

I have a very strong monogamy instinct, and yet I like to think I am also capable of some level of logical analysis – and I want to defeat r badly and see freedom established permanently.

The case he makes is strong. And yet a fundamental belief I have is that K is innate to the nature of the world. Those instincts are almost spiritual, in such a way that I am certain violating them is, over the long term, a losing proposition, no matter what logic would indicate.

Here, the question is should you, as a devoted K, seeking to advance K’s genetic drive to overcome the r-trait in our species, consider endorsing polygyny by K-strategists who would, as K-strategists, otherwise prefer monogamy. This raises a couple of interesting issues.

First, would polygyny, one man married to several wives, actually work?

I think you are running into the same problem you run into with Libertarianism. Libertarian beliefs are perhaps the most moral and logical. They should be the most easy to implement, because universally implemented, they inflict no pain. Everyone should love them, because of their utility. And yet…

Every time you attempt to advocate for libertarianism it fails in practice, in large part because the reality of people’s programmed, instinctual nature makes implementing it impossible. Hardcore K’s will always try to enforce high rearing and protection of young from sexual stimuli, as well as group-conformity to facilitate strong competitiveness. And r’s will always want those who succeed torn down, as they seek to enforce cultural degradation on the society, to prevent too much greatness from arising anywhere within it. As a result, Libertarianism always fails. It isn’t wrong, but it just can’t work because of who most people are.

In theory, polygyny might allow wealthy successful K-strategists to take mates who would otherwise end up with r-mates, and impregnate them with K-gene-carrying offspring. And they might be able to invest more time with those kids than less well off K-strategists.

But if implemented, I see many K’s unable to overcome their own drive to monogamy. Doing the Charlie Sheen, and deciding which wife you would be with each night, and seeing the jealousies and dispiriting effects on their other mates, and all the associated familial drama would probably end up driving most K’s back to monogamy. Meanwhile, numerous r’s would probably take advantage of the situation while pretending to be K’s, and that would be a net gain for the r’s.

A second issue I see is daughters, raised to expect a man in a family to have multiple partners. They’d be exposed to the kind of drama I would expect in a house with multiple wives, many of whom may often be broken and controlled into suppressing their own instincts to monopolize a male. Between the Dad with multiple mates, and the moms who tolerate something so irritating to them, it would seem a good way to train a daughter to accept suppressing her own instincts to monopolize a mate and thus become more likely to end up bearing the offspring of an r-mate in adulthood, and maybe he would marry her, maybe he wouldn’t.

Finally, there is the issue of daughters not having full access to their fathers due to too numerous offspring inevitably occupying his time. Some researchers believe it is the daughter craving her father’s attention when it is not available that develops that emotion in her brain and leads her to eventually compulsively crave the attentions of men who are distant and not emotionally bound to them. In this theory the periods spent wanting investment are what do the conditioning to desire a distant, uninvested male, while the periods of actual investment have less effect since they have less emotional impact. Thus, total time investment is not as important as small amounts of time investment when the child specifically needs it, to allay any emotional frustration that might end up being conditioned into the personality.

Those perceptions and emotions, adopted and expressed so early in a childhood that the adult never knew a time without them, are what alter who a person is, and guide their emotions and desires through the rest of their lives. If a father has one daughter and limited time, but he makes small amounts of time when she wants it by structuring the rest of his life around her, I think it likely he would have a better outcome than he would have had if he had a slightly greater investment which could not be structured to the child because his time allocation involved trading off numerous sibling interests against sibling interests.

Now as with libertarianism, it is possible you could find selected K-strategist men who would tolerate such a scenario well, and K-women who would bear the emotional toll happily to help K. And logically it makes sense. But again you run up against the reality that most human machines are simply not designed for that, and how even if perfectly explained and advocated for, the vast majority of times it was implemented I believe it would likely fail in its objectives and produce a household of jealousies and drama, and sub optimal offspring who would be outcompeted by the lesser number of true K-strategist offspring raised according to the tenets of K.

In addition, I believe in maintaining the competitiveness of K-strategists for the real K-environment which is coming. I suspect monogamy actually beat out polygamy, in part, because it gave all men in the clan skin in the game when it came time to war. Had clans consisted of one man, monopolizing all the women, and twenty other men left to serve the clan with no chance of having families of their own, or worse yet, forced to marry the grotesque Rosie O’Donnells, or the ballbusters like Megan Kelly, why would any of those men go to war? So the one King can continue to bang his harem of sweet and considerate supermodels on the back of the hard work of all the men who had nothing?

Abandoning that monogamy may make groups less cohesive and less capable as fighting forces, and if the coming collapse is going to take out 90% of the populations, as some models have suggested is possible, it would be wise to keep your group as capable and motivated as possible, and you kids as absolutely optimized as can be.

But it raises another issue too. What are we protecting when we protect K? Is it a genetic structure in the genome that produces a noble trait, or is it the trait itself within our people?

If killing innocent children feels wrong, and you want to increase the percentage of people who have genes that make killing innocent children feel wrong, would finding children without those child-protective genes, and killing them before they can mate be right? What if it produced a society that genetically tested children and killed them, based on the results, and this yielded a society where such killing was accepted? Even worse, what if the genes were only a predispositioning element, and some of those killed children might have grown up to be noble? I suspect from a strictly scientific perspective, you would actually be selecting for a slightly more mercenary genetic variant of the trait, perhaps lacking somewhat in the actual trait of wanting to protect innocent children, and more concerned with fostering its own biological structure over that of others.

Likewise, what if the only way to create freedom was to create an all powerful government that forced people to adopt the ideal of freedom, under threat of imprisonment or execution? Would that be worth creating the genetic underpinning of freedom? Would it be freedom, if you practiced it under the threat of imprisonment or death?

It is possible the struggle, and the force which must be struggled against, are required parts of the world as it was created for us. Without evil, what does good have to test itself against, and what purpose does it really have?

So I too am tempted to look for the killshots, the ultra-extreme moves designed to re-engineer the system in a fundamental way and take out r once and for all. I suppose it is natural to our nature. But I suspect it is likely the only balance of fostering K and maintaining its goodness, may be to simply live your life according to the K-selected virtues as best you can, and strive to help others find their way to them as well. Let everyone compete, and let the K-nature of the world have its effects the way it seems designed to.

It sounds funny given the specificity offered by the pursuit of science, but it may just be that even with a full understanding of r/K and all of its biological and genetic implications, you cannot come up with a better way to live and to foster K than to simply follow the word of the Bible.

It is not impossible that is not a coincidence.

All of that said, I am of the thought that one reader’s idea of banking the sperm of war heroes who eventually die in battle heroically, and somehow encouraging the foster-conception and rearing of their offspring in stable K-families, to perpetuate their genes, might be a very good idea. But again, it is not so much an attempt at control and repression, so much as it is giving yet one more spirit the ability to jump into the world and get into the game.

There is something about that embrace of the struggle by everyone, free and unencumbered, with all it’s imperfection and risk, all while trusting in the ultimate outcome, which seems more K than anything.

Spread r/K Theory, because K is more than the genes