Why Are Cities So Decadent?

Recently, I was in Helsinki, the capital of Finland; a generally dreadful place full of materialistic people who vote for Woke political parties, meaning that the area around the central railway station increasingly resembles Mogadishu. Some days later, I was in the beautiful rural town of Naantali, famed for its ancient church and exquisitely preserved nineteenth century wooden buildings.

I got to talking to a local and he made a very perceptive point. He disliked Helsinki people because they were “superficial” and “snobs,” but he distinguished between the Helsinki working class, who had been there many generations, and everybody else; the latter being the ones he disliked. For, as with most large cities, every generation a certain kind of stuck-up, materialistic, ambitious person will move from rural towns like Naantali to large cities like Helsinki. And some fascinating new research has found that this process makes them more likely to be leftist; more likely to be decadent.

The new study, in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, has the superficially technical-sounding title of “Life History Strategy in Poland: Population Displacement as a Life History Accelerating Event,” but the point it’s making is beautifully simple. What is a Life History Strategy?

We all sit on a spectrum ranging from fast to slow. A fast or r-strategy develops in an unstable yet easy environment. In such a situation, you could be wiped out at any moment, so you evolve to “live fast and die young.” You invest all your energy in mating—in order to have as many offspring as possible with as many partners as possible in the hope that some will survive. You invest very little energy in nurture, because such energy could easily go to waste. Any individual child could be killed at any moment. This r-strategy is reflected in every aspect of your “life history”—you’re born younger (less developed), you reach developmental milestones younger, you go through puberty younger, lose your virginity younger, you age more quickly, you go through the menopause younger and you die younger. In such an ecology, where you could be wiped out any second, cooperation may never be repaid, so makes sense to be selfish.

As the environment becomes more stable and also harsher, the carrying capacity for the species is reached. So, its members start competing more against each other to survive, moving towards a K-strategy. In such a harsh but predictable context, if you invest all your energy in mating then you may find that all of your offspring die. Hence, you have fewer offspring and fewer sexual partners but you invest more in them; you “nurture” them. There develops an arms-race where the species becomes increasingly adapted to the (predictable) ecology. It does this by learning about the ecology and learning how to cooperate (e.g., via pair bonding), as you must to survive in a harsh ecology, and thus becoming higher in altruism, empathy, impulse control and mental stability.

The study looked at the results of presidential elections in Poland by region. It further argued that being left-wing is, in essence, a reflection of a fast life history strategy. Conservatives are concerned with operating as part of highly cooperative group that they expect will last far into the future as they pass on their culture via their descendants. They value obedience to authority, in-group loyalty and the traditions that hold the group together, such as religion. Leftism, though leftists may signal how group-oriented they are, is concerned with equality, the avoidance of harm, and it tends to dislike and wish to tear down tradition. It is individually-oriented, as “equality” means that he who espouses it obtains more, while harm avoidance manages to avoid harm to self. Also, it is a fact that the people who signal concern with these values—leftists—are low in Agreeableness, are mentally unstable and are low in impulse control. They are fast life history strategists, the abundant evidence for which I have set out in my book Woke Eugenics.

The study found that the region of Poland that was part of Germany before World War II was the most left-wing; something which is put down to massive population disruption. As the authors summarise: “This pattern could be explained by forced population displacement of over 1.5 million people that were resettled from USSR into Western Borderlands, thus replacing prior German inhabitants. Forced population displacement can be understood as a disruptive life event that accelerates life history strategy. This can have long-lasting effects, and the present study provides additional insight into the detrimental consequences of population displacement.”

In other words, if you stay in the place you are from, the world is signalling to you that life is predictable. If, for whatever reason, you move somewhere else, especially to a city full of strangers, then the world is telling you that it is unpredictable. This will calibrate you towards a fast life history strategy—towards selfishness—and, so, towards voting for left-wing parties that will tear down tradition. The study refers to forced migration but it could be argued that, with a lack of jobs in the countryside, people with certain skill sets are effectively compelled to migrate to the cities.

In addition, fast life history strategists, precisely because they create weaker social bonds and value community less, are more likely to migrate and even do so multiple times. A 2020 study in the journal Papers in Regional Science, “Interregional mobility and the personality traits of migrants,” found frequent migration is predicted by low Agreeableness and low mental stability; both of which are fast life history traits. Numerous studies have also shown that migration is predicted by intelligence, as I have explored in my book on this subject.

So, every generation, intelligent fast life history strategists make their way to the cities and the fact of being in the cities makes their life history strategy even faster. Consequently, they support left-wing ideas and make cities decadent, just as Helsinki so obviously is. No wonder, in 2016, the cities in the UK voted Remain while the rest of England voted Leave.