A wise government, dedicated to providing people with a social environment in which they will achieve optimal sexual experience and after that, have a gentle death, will have to engineer relative poverty.
Engineering poverty? For the benefit of the people? Isn’t a good government one under which people prosper?
The point is that the benefits of wealth don’t develop linearly. From the perspective of dialectical materialism, the concept is familiar. Dialectical materialism doesn’t expect linear developments, but development to some kind of a conflict. But even those with no background in dialectical materialism (or, for that matter, in Hegelian dialectical idealism) can, when confronted with some simple examples, grasp easily that more is not always better.
Take food. Everybody who lives in a rich society is aware of the fact that eating more food, even if we can afford it financially, isn’t the path to better health, and not even to more happiness.
More food intake makes us fatter, and less healthy, and leads to “premature” death. To be mildly overweight may be manageable, and the impact may be limited, but if we are grossly overweight, our mobility will be severely restricted, and our self-esteem will be at the bottom of the scale. Because of being grossly overweight, we count little in our social environment. Not only is our sexual market value near nil; we are also considered to have a weak character. It is clear that more is not better. While less and less is also not the ideal (we should not be starving), the linearity from nothing to plenty is not matched by a linearity from worst to best. The ideal always involves moderation.
There is a parallelism to the manner in witch societies develop. Oswald Spengler (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The Decline of the West, published 1918), and later Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History) have reasoned that societies develop like organisms, from spring (the nascent period) through summer (when a society, or empire, is at its full power) to fall (a period of prolonged decline, marked by decadence) and winter (when an old empire is conquered by a new, nascent one).
Just as being overweight is not conducive to individual health, and just as reaching the height of power draws an empire to its decline, we should understand that linearly increasing the wealth of a society will not make life better for its citizens.
When people are relatively poor, they have a clear vision in life. To manage the material basis of their lives, or, ideally, to become richer. After all, they can see that in poor societies, their rich neighbors have a splendid life.
But when all people in a society become richer, then people lack orientation. They no longer have a clear vision of what they want to achieve, and for those who are richer than the average (who are poor), the benefits of being richer vanish.
There are many facets to the problem of societies becoming too rich, just as there are many facets to the problem of people being overweight.
One, conspicuous consumption (Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class), is just like cancer.
But I want to concentrate on discussing how societies being overly wealthy relates negatively to the quality of the sexual experience attainable by those who live in such societies.
In economies of need, not only do we have a vision of a better life (and display positive character attributes such as being industrious and interested in education); we are also much more inclined towards romantic love. For both, the vision of a better life and an inclination towards romantic love, thrive on hope.
I have never been advocate of brainless promiscuity (quantity instead of quality), or sex without love. The point is: the sexual experience in a romantic relationship is so much better than the sexual experience in other settings. But romantic love needs to project into the future.
If we feel no necessity to hope for the future, because we don’t really know what to hope for, then we become disoriented, and feel empty.
One can easily observe the negative influence that affluence has on the young generations in rich countries.
In poor countries, young people often strive hard to acquire an education, and to find work, for noble causes, such as helping their poor parents. In rich countries, in which children do not experience their parents as struggling to get them through to adulthood, children are seldom committed to such ethical goals.
Worries about the welfare of their aging parents, or younger siblings, are displaced by concerns about the latest fashions, or what strange trends to follow in order to be “in”. Many of these trends (often associated with music genres) have a pronounced negative orientation, such as punk (no future), reggae (the music of Jamaican outcasts and Rastafariansim), or, lately, hip-hop (and rap, characterized by lyrics that worship violence).
Furthermore, during eons of our evolution, the females of the species have traded sexual gratification against protection and material benefits. This has left a mark on the way women function emotionally.
While for females who have achieved sufficient self-cognition, optimal sexual experience, followed by a gentle death, is the only sensible personal value system (just as it is for males), many females feel that they need a second reason to enter sexual relationships. And the second reason with which many females feel most comfortable are material benefits.
In poor traditional societies, young females want to marry rich. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t enjoy sexual conduct once they are initiated. In societies of affluence, those young females who are not involved with destructive protest subcultures typically postpone their sexual initiation, simply because they lack a compelling second reason. This is statistically most evident in the fact that they marry later and later.
Not that this would be doing them a favor. They waste years during which they could experience the pleasure of sexual contact, simply because they do not have an excuse for getting into it.
Another positive effect of non-affluent societies is that in such societies, the sexual market value of people is determined more by economic factors than by factors such as looks and youth.
Humans will always compete for sexual relationships. It’s part of seeking optimal sexual experience. However, the arena in which we compete may be more or less suitable for an optimal number of people achieving optimal sexual experience.
And, apostate and politically incorrect as it may sound, there are many good reasons why we may choose to engineer societies in which economic factors are a major aspect of sexual competition.
One is that when economic factors play a major role in competing for sexual relationships, then there will be less discrimination based on age. And this, again, is the same for men and women. Which is why not only rich men, but also rich women, have a much easier time achieving optimal sexual experience in poor societies, rather than in richer ones.
There is no way that weak governments in direct democracies could contemplate the issues raised above when deciding on the course, a country should take. Only a government formed by an intellectual elite (dedicated not just to let people become affluent, but to create suitable conditions for optimal sexual experience) could contemplate such issues, and come up with policies that circumvent the wealth trap.
THE BASIS FOR HUMAN SOLIDARITY
THE SIZE OF GOVERNED COMMUNITIES
CONTENTS OF PERSONAL FREEDOM: PRIVACY AND SECRECY
THE BENEFITS OF RELATIVE POVERTY