[ExI] orwell quote

[Tara Maya]

Orwell knew because he was a communist and saw their despicable behavior during the Spanish Civil War in which they routinely betrayed their own allies. He also observed many women who sacrificed marriage and family to dedicate themselves to the cause. So this trend was already well underway during the 20th Century.

You can see it corresponds to the dive in birthrate in Western nations, which already started in the 20th Century as well although it wasn’t yet below 2.0 yet.

I see two possible scenarios (not necessarily exclusive). We could become a hive-like species where the majority of people exist only to work and defend the hive and enforce its rules. Only a few siblings from the hive reproduce, perhaps using artificial means to raise thousands of babies in machines. Most males and females would become asexual or else adapt sex for other purposes, like creating friendships with other hives, relationships that are cooperative but not reproductive.

Another alternative is that the pair bonded couple becomes even stronger as both males and females who care about children rather than sex are the only ones to survive. Males are more incentivized to devote equal child care because DNA testing gives them paternity certainty. Both males and females who become fanatical about natalism and fidelity would be selected for, first culturally and eventually biologically. (Monogamy leads to higher birth rates than any other marriage type because it doesn’t matter how many babies a man has, it matters how many a woman has.)



> On Nov 29, 2025, at 14:21, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”  George Orwell from Nineteen Eighty Four
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> Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and often comments on evolutionary psychology.  Heather Heying is also an evolutionary biologist and author, Weinstein’s spouse.  They comment:
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> For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented — sex and pair-bonding.
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> Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds.
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> Result? An entire generation of 18–35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing… but with zero actual children. That energy didn’t disappear. It got redirected.
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> Heather Heying’s observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is — it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think.
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> End of quote.
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> This commentary, particularly the one by Heather Heying, burned an image in my mental retinas.  Right after the 2024 national election, there was a protest on the Berkeley campus, but it was not about the outcome of the election.  Rather it was about Israel’s handling of the Palestinians.  Witnesses noticed that nearly all the protestors were women, but typically not students.  Rather they appeared to be 30-something to 40-something women, who were most disappointed that students didn’t come to join their protest.  The protest chants sounded entirely female in the recordings which made the rounds online.
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> Keith might wish to comment on this, being a local expert in evolutionary psychology.  My interest is not in the subject of the protest, but rather that it is elderly women protesting it (thirties and forties are elderly from the point of view of college students (particularly women (the protestors would appear youthful from my perspective.)))
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> What I don’t understand is how Orwell had the insight so long ago.
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> spike
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