The Dependence Game
The Wrath of the Dominant Male

Why Dependence Games Matter

All male-male competition is a type of dependence game (see genopolemology). As such, dependence games provide mechanistic (and actionable) explanations for all real-world phenomena which are consequences of the outcomes of dependence games which have (or are) taking place. While dependence game strategies are most nakedly employed in academia, they are actually used in all contexts where a dependence game occurs. E.g. a military general improving on a military strategy, a lawyer applying a novel legal theory in court, an artist vying for cultural influence, a corporation engaged in market competition, or board games like chess.

Further to this point, a more existential example is that of state actors in a geopolitical context. Think about what it means to threaten to sanction a country: “you depend on me for X & I will withdraw X if you don’t do Y”. Also, think about armed conflict. Why do you think crippling various supply lines is of such strategic military importance? Even in combative sports, it remains of strategic importance to cripple the resources of the opponent, e.g. by not allowing the opponent the time he needs to think or catch his breath. Desperation is the path to submission. Indeed, the dependence game is the very nature of any conflict whatsoever.

If you care to understand and win at male-male competition, be it in the forms 1-vs-1 or tribe-vs-tribe, you should care about the dependence game.

In this essay, I cover the following phenomena:

  • Citation inflation;
  • The emergence of high-church & low-church;
  • The cost of specialization (Neolithic & modern structure);
  • The advantage of generalism (Yamnaya structure);
  • The myth of modern European weakness.

But first, I introduce the concept of the dependence game.

What Is a Dependence Game?

Note: by “game”, I am referring to a strategic interaction between individuals; see game theory.

Definition: The dependence game is the most basic and general form of male-male competition which consists of a game where the objective is to create dependence in the competitor(s). Here, dependence refers to a state of need and the one depended on has the capability to remove that which is needed from the dependent, thereby creating a relationship of dominance – the dominant male has the ability to say “do this or else”.

E.g. if you think the earth is flat, I don’t care about anything else you have to say. In this example, the dominant male effectively threatens to revoke sexual access because the marker of victory in male-male competition is the respect of other males and females use this marker (among other considerations) to determine whether sexual access should be granted.

The following is a disclaimer for classless woke people and similarly backwards narrow-minded religious zealots who are offended by science:

the terms “elite” and “commoner” are not used in a pejorative sense and are not to be interpreted as an indication of moral judgements or as insults against any particular group. Exceptional people – elites – are born good-looking, intelligent, healthy, wealthy, and capable of statecraft, innovation, and institution-building. Typical common people – commoners – are not born that way and this fact has no bearing whatsoever on their moral standing in society; as the research demonstrates, it does have implications for evolutionary outcomes, due to hypergamous female sexual selection – the female sexual preference of elite men.

Genes & Mating Systems Simulator

Key Principles:

  • Male-male competition is an attempt to communicate signals of genetic superiority to females;
  • In species where male sexual access requires victory in male-male competition, males evolve to better communicate signals of genetic quality and females evolve to be more positively responsive to those signals;
  • Signals are comprised of memes – the basic unit of cultural evolution akin to genes which are the basic unit of biological evolution;
  • The set of memes used in male-male competition is called the social antler;
  • The social antler is a phenotypic weapon that genes use in male-male competition;
  • Sex itself is an act of war, by virtue of the fact that women can only be pregnant with only one man’s child(ren) at a time;
  • The greater the K-selection of a mating system (e.g. serial monogamy), the greater the preclusion of the female from having sex with other males;
  • If one precludes another male from passing on his genes through female selection, the genetic consequence and evolutionary trajectory of the group would be the same as if the male were to simply kill the other male because in either case, the other male does not pass on his genes;
  • Thus, females are the ultimate eugenicists and are responsible for the systematic inter-generational genocide of non-elite males for almost the entirety of human history (see Genes & Mating Systems Simulator);
  • The more complex an organism, the less likely it is for intra-group male-male competition to be violent;
  • Human is the most complex specie and its intra-group male-male competitions mostly consist of conflicting ideas without direct physical coercion, e.g. religion, culture, art, science, technology, and economic activity.

Dependence Equilibria

Victory in male-male competition has no basis on the truthiness of a male’s ideas. Instead, the determinant of victory is the degree of dependence that a male’s ideas generate in his sexual competitors and the exact mechanism of dependence creation will be discussed.

Why does truth not determine victory? Because the evolutionary purpose of a male’s social antler is to pass on his genes and there is no de facto genetic incentive to accept a new theory that discredits one’s theory, no matter how true the new theory may be. In fact, to tarnish (or to assist in the tarnishing of) one’s theory is an act akin to cuckoldry; whether one engages in memetic cuckoldry or actual cuckoldry, the end result is to grant sexual access to a competitor at the expense of the cuckold.

At a group level, this same principle applies. Ethnic genetic clusters consist of an elite nucleus of culture creators and their downwardly mobile relatives (i.e. commoners). Assuming a close genetic distance between elites and commoners, commoners can pass on more copies of their genes by being servile to the elite, i.e. with positively ethnocentric behaviors. As their genetic distance increases, commoner servility becomes less evolutionarily beneficial for the commoner, resulting in a relaxation of selective pressures in favor of positive ethnocentrism. In turn, there is an eventual increase in populist / anti-elitist attitudes which provide moral justifications for anti-sociality, i.e. the rejection to defend and comply with socio-cultural norms. Culture, being the social antler of the elite, is what grants the elite sexual access and binds the ethnic group towards coalitional ends. When culture is undermined by populism, so is the coalition in its entirety. Therefore, populism and anti-elitism are inherently anti-ethnocentric, and ethnocentrism necessarily entails elitism and commoner servility. “Ethnocentric populism” is an oxymoron – incoherent nonsense.

Taking this principle to the extreme, one could correctly point out what might appear as a logical flaw: by this logic, no man should ever accept any other man’s ideas and no tribe should ever accept another tribe’s ideas. Yet, this is evidently not how the real world works, so how do we reconcile that with the fact that some ideas, be they true or false, come to be accepted?

The simple answer is submission: no male ever accepts a theory unless he has to because it is always better to have some credibility (read: sexual access) than to have none at all. Similarly, tribes must accept the ideas of a competing tribe when those ideas confer upon the rival a competitive advantage (see Western Genomilitary Preparedness) or else face defeat (and thus the loss of female sexual preference).

As such, ideas are accepted when the payoff of doing so outweighs the cost. In other words, it is the reputational impact of memes, rather than their truthiness, which determines their acceptance. To illustrate, evolutionary science is a matter of scientific consensus with the exception of human biodiversity (HBD) – here, humans are nonsensically assumed by consensus to be exempt from the same principles of biology due to the social repercussions of accepting HBD. The truth is always subservient to religious dogma.

Dependence Game Strategies

There are 3 possible offensive dependence game strategies which exist on a spectrum:

  1. Incrementalism: a strategy which entails contributing increasingly minute details to an existing body of theory;
  2. Revolutionism: a strategy which entails substituting an existing body of theory altogether;
  3. Unificationism: a strategy which entails proposing an integrative theory which better explains other more specific theories.

I refer to the employment of these strategies as memetic attacks. In response to an attack, intellectuals have 3 possible defensive tactics available in response to them:

  1. Refutation: bringing attention to the attack with a counter-attack;
  2. Avoidance: by omission, diverting attention away from the attack in hopes that it will lose its relevance with time;
  3. Reconciliation: reconciling the attack with your theory by responding with a revision of the theory which integrates the attack’s argument(s) and claim(s).

In total, there are 3 types of offender, 3 types of defender, and 3 defensive tactics. Depending on the offensive strategy and defensive tactic used, there are 27 possible equilibria to a dependence game, as I discuss later on. Below, you will find the payoff matrices for each type of defender.

Click to Expand

dependence game vs incrementalist

Figure 1: Dependence Game Against an Incrementalist

dependence game vs revolutionist

Figure 2: Dependence Game Against a Revolutionist

dependence game vs revolutionist

Figure 3: Dependence Game Against a Unifier

Where a theory is a set of memes, the scope of a theory is referred to as its cardinality. The strategies above are listed by increasing order of theoretic cardinality. The more cardinal a theory, the greater the number of social antlers its acceptance will tarnish. As such, cardinality is inversely related to its default acceptance rate (DAR).

Figure 4: DAR vs Cardinality

I should emphasize the word “default” in DAR. The inverse relationship does not mean that cardinal theories cannot be accepted, only that the mere proposition of the theory is insufficient. Intellectuals will need to do more to offset the default incentives in order for a more cardinal theory to be accepted.

Conversely, the greater the cardinality of a theory, the greater its contribution to worldview, the greater the memetic footprint of its originator, the greater the formidability of his social antler, the greater the sexual access. Given that these factors are not exclusive to these positive associations, they are not to be construed as 1:1 relationships – there are other factors at play which can strengthen or weaken these associations. For example, social formidability is not the only consideration in female sexual choice (but it’s certainly an important one). Other considerations include physical symmetry, indicators of good health, assortativity, among others.

Incrementalism

The lower the cardinality of a theory, the greater its dependence on more cardinal theories, and, in turn, the greater the dependence of an incrementalist male’s social antler on that of less incrementalist males. Since males have a genetic incentive to welcome such a dependence, incrementalism is the least zero-sum of the 3 strategies. As such, incrementalist theories are more prone to being adopted by the dominant male and his dependents, even when the theory is demonstrably false and nonsensical.

Why is this the case? Because whether you correct or add to the minutiae of a theory, you’re still giving credibility to the assumed theory. Accepting incrementalist contributions is a win for both the originator of the theory and the incrementalist. As for the originator’s other dependents, they go wherever the wind blows.

This can be corroborated with a number of observations, starting with the famous Dr. Fox experiment. It is possible for one’s ideas to gain acceptance when they are presented with such a high level of confidence so as to give the audience the impression that to reject the ideas is an indication of their own incompetence (so the preoccupation is to not be seen as a dissenter, rather than being on the right side of science).

Similarly, it has been observed that there is an inverse relationship between the intelligibility of a research paper and its acceptability. Journals are viewed as more prestigious and researchers are viewed as more competent, the more nonsensical their papers are (e.g. with the use of jargon, non sequiturs, or deepities).

Essentially, incrementalism is the lowest-risk, lowest-yield strategy. It is most appropriate for those males who lack the intellectual capacity to make more impactful contributions to science. If you’re a mid-wit in the IQ 115-130 range, incrementalism is your best only option.

Here’s my reaction to the vast majority of incrementalist research: who cares. The minority of incrementalist studies which warrant my care are those which support more cardinal theories. In other words, incrementalism is a bare minimum and definitely not something to be proud of. It is of interest to the advancement of scientific progress that incrementalists humble themselves before their intellectual superiors. There are levels to this game and academia will continue to be robbed of its prestige, so long as the intellectual hierarchy is not respected.

Revolutionism

The greater the cardinality of a theory, the greater its dominance upon other theories, and, in turn, the greater the dominance of a revolutionary male’s social antler upon that of more incrementalist males. Since males have a genetic incentive to resist domination, revolutionism is a zero-sum strategy. In other words, both intellectuals cannot be right and the end result of such a conflict is that the winner takes all the credibility.

An example of a revolutionary theory is Professor Shi Huang’s Maximum Genetic Diversity (MGD) theory. The theory runs contrary to decades of genetic and evolutionary research which has assumed the neutral theory of mutation to be correct. The reality is that Professor Huang is right and the acceptance of his theory will tarnish the reputations of the neutralists. Predictably, the neutralists are clinging to their debunked theory with tired old argumentation (infamously, the incorrect use of homozygosity as an example of low genetic diversity).

Revolutionists can potentially find allies in other fields by demonstrating how a revolutionary theory can advance the work of intellectuals in other fields. They can also find some limited allies in their own field in the case where the ally in question would be listed as one of the authors of the paper. Once a critical threshold of acceptance is reached, revolutionary theories like MGD become consensus. Sources of influence, such as money, media power, and similar public relations (PR) avenues can be of great help in attaining victory.

As a higher-risk, higher-reward strategy, revolutionism is most appropriate for intellectuals in the IQ 130-145 range. However, this should not preclude a revolutionist from engaging in incrementalism to bolster his own revolutionary theory. Case in point, Professor Huang has a body of incrementalist work preceding his famous paper on MGD, much of which are precursors of his paper. His MGD paper is also postceded by a number of incrementalist studies, as well, much of which are centered around gathering empirical data which supports MGD theory.

Incrementalism of this kind is a necessity as part of a revolutionist strategy.

Unificationism

There is no more cardinal a theory than a unifying theory. Such theories have a tyrannical dominance on other less cardinal theories. As such, unifiers instill terror in their sexual competitors, due to their helplessness in the face of an intellectual who outshines and outclasses them, even in their own life’s work. Worse still, a unifying theory is usually inter-disciplinary in nature, often being a source of multiple revolutionary theories in different fields.

Unificationism is a reliable way of pitting yourself against almost the entirety of academia. Then again, that’s not much of a bother. In the end, PR is why lesser intellectuals reject more cardinal theories and PR is what can change that. Reminder that in order to get his pervert ideology accepted, Freud:

  • created a wannabe-snob cult for his (mostly) mid-wit followers to associate Freudianism with prestige;
  • benefited from his cult’s echo chamber with the use of circular sourcing, thereby artificially boosting pro-Freudian papers’ citation counts.

2 can play this game and there is a lot more from that came from as far as PR goes. It all boils down to carrot and stick tactics. Basically, there should be a true perception of a great upside to accepting the theory (i.e. submitting to the dominant male) and a great downside to rejecting it. Since unificationism requires an IQ well above the 145 mark, one can assume that someone that intelligent would be capable of pulling off such an elaborate PR operation, assuming its utility were known to the genius.

For reference, Charles Darwin was from an influential family where the family name was already of renown. The same applies for the Houses of Bourbon, Medici, Copernicus, Habsburg, Maxwell, etc. There would have been a social cost to going against their names. Also, “duh, they were wealthy.” is a fallacy. Value does not gravitate towards money, money gravitates towards value and value is conveyed with memes. In other words, they did not have their names because of their money, they had their money (in good part) because of their names. Money cannot take the credit for the name when the name came first.

From the perspective of an intellectual, the strategy with the highest reward is the one which yields the highest payoff. Higher-order geniuses (IQ 145+) have the most to gain from unificationism, whereas lesser intellectuals would rather not embarrass themselves in such an endeavor. Similarly, lower geniuses (IQ 130-145) have the most to gain from revolutionism because while they cannot afford to be unifiers, they still have bigger fish to fry than pure incrementalism. Lastly, incrementalists are the mid-wit bottom feeders that make up the bulk of academics. Ideally, science would be best served with the latter being interns or assistants for the real thinkers of the world.

Real-World Impact of Dependence Games

The dependence game explains a number of real-world phenomena.

Citation Inflation

The bulk of academics’ IQs are below 130. As such, incrementalism is the only thing they are capable of. Due to the low value of incrementalist research, mid-wits can maximize the formidability of their social antlers by making up for their lack of intellectual quality with the sheer quantity of their publications. Due to their lack of intelligence, their work is largely comprised of glorified book reports: gather data, make observation, and claim that your interpretation is correct because of your sources.

This reliance on argumentation from authority requires that mid-wits engage in source stacking. In the absence of logical derivation from self-evident axioms, they must create the perception in similarly low-intellect peer-reviewers that the claims in the paper are popular and congruent with the researchers cited – an appeal to popularity. Finally, there is now an arms race for source stacking because, now, even higher-order intellectuals must appeal to popularity, given the low intellect of peer-reviewers (and the ridiculous peer-review process itself).

To add insult to injury, the Flynn Effect is a myth. People thought that intelligence was increasing with time but that’s only because primitive peoples got better at taking IQ tests by way of increased literacy. A more accurate proxy measure of a population’s historic average IQ is innovations per capita. By this measure, the Western IQ has declined by over 2 standard deviations since the Victorian era (and that’s despite accounting for group differences in intelligence). Yet, the pool of graduates has increased from 10% of the population to 50% and, with it, so have citations.

As citation quantity goes up, citation value goes down – law of supply. Since there is basically little of substance to these mid-wits, their reputations and credibility are entirely dependent on citations which are revealed to be of low value. They have built their identities on a foundation which has aged like milk, to the point where the peer-review process is treated as an unquestionable and “cite your source” has become the ultimate “own” – the desperate measures of a mid-wit faced with cognitive dissonance (see narcissistic injury).

What’s happening here is that these people are commoners masquerading as elites. They have the intelligence to look at what real intellectuals do and go through their motions. But they don’t really understand much of what’s happening, on any level (and they certainly don’t want us bursting their bubble). Basically, we’re dealing with a cargo cult.

Below, I include an internet meme to illustrate the point:

Emergence of High-Church & Low-Church

The thing about mid-wits is that they are sufficiently intelligent to see where the wind blows ideologically and to signal even harder in that direction. This is something you must do when you understand yourself as inadequate and lacking in the ability to gain status through intellectual prowess alone.

Those who lack that threshold level of mid-wit intelligence tend to cling to their old ideas. As such, the pattern of paradigm change looks something like this:

  1. Genius proposes cardinal theory (the new “current thing”) and asserts dominance over mid-wits;
  2. Mid-wits are like mindless robots who support the “current thing”, whatever it happens to be;
  3. Dim-wits lack the ability to comprehend anything too complex, so they default to rejecting the “current thing”, whatever it happens to be;
  4. The new “current thing” becomes the “official ideology” of the elite – the new High Church;
  5. The old ideology loses prestige and becomes associated with commoners – the Low Church.

The Cost of Specialization

The dogma in economics is that specialization allows for benefiting from competitive advantages and these permit the emergence of economies of scale. At a macroeconomic level, facilitating specialization is one of the tools state actors use in economic development. The argument goes that we can increase standards of living continually, so long as gross product outpaces population growth. But is this true?

In a reproductively healthy population, such an increase in carrying capacity leads to an increase in population size and, correspondingly, genetic diversity. With greater genetic diversity comes greater intra-group variation along a variety of morphological traits, many of which are maladaptive phenotypes. In the past, this wouldn’t matter because they would be weeded out of the gene pool. However, an entire market now exists known as the medical industry where the majority of its (well-intended) work consists of keeping genetic mutants alive.

This exacerbates the genetic distance between commoners and elites, leading to a deterioration of institutions. As institutions decay, so does the infrastructure which supports the carrying capacity of the population. The specialist social structure not only fosters its own degeneration, but its rigid and unadaptable foundation removes all resilience in the face of civilizational stressors.

This inherent trait is at the root of the liberal geopolitical argument in favor of global integration (a global order with decentralized control, aka the “international system”); the belief is that world peace and “human rights democracies” can be achieved by way of structural co-dependence – a weak form of mutually assured destruction. Ostensibly, war and tyranny can be deterred if everyone is hooked upon a foundation which can be damaged from war and tyranny; supposedly, even the baddies don’t want to end the world because, well, they live in it…

But this begs the question: do the religious adherents of cthonic cults like the Abrahamic faiths really have any qualms about going to heaven? A big chunk of them look forward to having heavenly orgies with 7 virgin teenage girls and another chunk are just looking to straight-up chill with jesus. This is like trusting the suicidal guy to not cut the wire you’re both hanging from. Yikes.

This is the best case scenario which assumes ecological stability. But the reality of the world is one of civilizational conflict, i.e. instability. What happens when there is an all-out cold, hot, or civil war with even one of the world’s major economies? It is not a question of if it will happen but when. And when it does happen, the very foundation of the specialist structure collapses along with the structure itself. Therefore, the only form of global integration possible is one where a global state entity uses lawful violence to enforce and conserve the underlying structure, i.e. a centralized global order, aka a one-world government (which is evidently a far more plausible proposition than the current global order).

This is corroborated by the demise of the Neolithic European farmers, whose relatively more egalitarian and specialist social structure closely resembles the modern global structure. Scary thought for mid-wits: what do you do when a rogue state decides to attack the internet infrastructure on the ocean floor or if foreign operatives sabotage the power grid? (Good luck.)

The Advantage of Generalism

In line with economic orthodoxy, generalism sacrifices economies of scale. Ostensibly, this is a bad thing because increasing the gross product per capita is (usually) the ultimate ideal for economists. But is the outcome of generalism really undesirable?

By foregoing economies of scale, generalism foregoes the higher carrying capacity of a larger population. In turn, a smaller population has less genetic diversity which allows for higher epigenetic complexity (read: higher average intelligence). Moreover, the less rigid structure permits higher status males to engage in more unilateral actions in a shorter period of time, thereby making the system more adaptable to instability and more resilient to stressors, like civilizational conflict.

The genosupremacy of the Yamnaya over the sexually inferior Neolithic European Farmers, which apparently was achieved by non-military means (i.e. sexual conquest), corroborates the advantage of a more hierarchical and generalist social structure. Note: the Yamnaya’s genetic invasion of Europe provides even more empirical evidence in support of genetic expansionism and the sexual displacement effect.

Generalism vs Specialism: A Case Study

The Myth of European Weakness

It has become an increasingly common trend among disgruntled, ostracized European academics to throw their hands in the air and express the helplessness of their plight: “isn’t it horrible that we can’t speak the truth anymore?”

First of all, I reject the notion that there is a magical entity that decides what is or isn’t allowable. As I demonstrate with the dependence game, the acceptance of memes boils down to one’s ability to make credible threats. If you have invested none of your time, money, and energy, into developing this capability, then what makes you think your grievances have any legitimacy whatsoever?

This is like signing up for a boxing match with 0 preparation, then claiming that you lost because the other guy was unfair with you. For those of you intellectuals who have this ridiculous notion that academia or any other institution is or can ever be a “free market of ideas”, I would respectfully ask you all to wake up and remove your heads from your anuses. There is no such thing as a free market of ideas, nor is its existence desirable.

The reality of academia is that it is a genetic warzone – a gladiatorial arena for intellectuals. And the dominant males of this arena are geniuses. I don’t see how the movers and shakers of science would be helped by the egalitarian cesspool that a “free market of ideas” is. I also don’t see why a genius in his right mind would ever submit himself under such rules which “equalize” his social antler with that of mid-wits and weaklings.

Lesser intellectuals should understand that male-male competition with a genius is like being locked in a cage with Brock Lesnar, if Brock had the skills of Georges St-Pierre and he’s looking at his opponent like it’s lunchtime. Academics will know what terror feels like when they go to sleep at night knowing what is about to become of their pathetic legacy and that their name is associated with it.

Secondly, anyone with an IQ above 130 is capable of developing the ability to make lawful and credible threats. Rather than whining about your plight, assert your dominance upon your intellectual inferiors. Put them in their place. You are the one in a position to judge their ideas, not the other way around.

If they do not speak your name with respect – whether in the form of fear, hate, or admiration – remove their access from whatever it is you have that they depend on. And if they do not reach out to you asking for mercy, you can start using the thing they depend on against them. Going against you has to hurt, just like it has historically been the case with the European Nobility.

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