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Physically weak men tend to be socialists

Least surprising academic study of 2017

An academic study from researchers at Brunel University London assessed 171 men, looking at their height, weight, overall physical strength and bicep circumference, along with their views on redistribution of wealth and income inequality. The study, published in the Evolution and Human Behavior journal, ​found that weaker men were more likely to favor socialist policies than stronger men.

Now, I'm not exactly built like Arnold - I only occasionally visit the gym - but I can't fit into a modern hipster jacket.

Back when I lived in New York - it was 2011, a few months before I moved to Florida - I went shopping for a modern-looking microfiber jacket suitable for cool weather. I visited a dozen boutique stores in Manhattan, trying on a variety of nice-looking jackets. None of them fit me in the chest. Even if I was able to zip them up over my chest, I couldn't move my arms. And those that fit my chest were made for a much taller guy. But if I were that tall, the jacket probably wouldn't fit around my chest either. Eventually I gave up my search, and I'm still wearing my old jacket I bought at Costco ten years ago for $30.

That experience made me wonder if the jacket designers and manufacturers know something about their customers that I don't. That there has been a change in the human species and I didn't get the memo. That the newly bred males of homo sapiens (at least those in big cities like New York) are supposed to be uniformly weak in the upper body, with tiny concave chests and narrow shoulders, and the exceptions like me are so few that it is no longer economically feasible to make jackets with more room around the shoulders.

This anecdote confirms the above study - if your upper body mass exceeds the limitations of a hipster jacket, you are destined to wear a business suit with lots of room for your chest and shoulders.

It is a fact that most New Yorkers lean towards socialism, and their current fearless leader Mayor de Blasio may as well call himself a communist. De Blasio himself is a big guy physically, which makes sense - he is a leader of the puny-chested masses, not a follower. Socialism does divide people into leaders (business suits) and followers (hipster jackets), which also matches the body type.

One of the questions in the study was, "Are men who are naturally strong more inclined to hold capitalistic views, or are men with capitalistic views driven to go to the gym?"

What I wonder is, do fashion designers simply react to the increase in the puny-chested socialist-leaning demographic - or have they created an ideal puny-chested look that young people in big cities aspire to match?

Are those in charge of fundamentally transforming America purposefully using fashion design to create sluggish herds of anemic, sickly followers who would vote for socialist policies?

I'm sure this conspiracy theory is worthy of its own discussion thread.

Comrade Red Square, since you brought it up: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”


― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

An article at the WSJ last month Evolution at Warp Speed got me to thinking.

Bear with me.

The article is about taking wild foxes and trying to tame them over the course of many fox generations to find out how the modern dog came from foxes.

In the '60s, genetics finally re-assumed its rightful place in Soviet science. Belyaev became the director of a new institute in Siberia, and could, despite Cold War constraints, share his and Ms. Trut's findings with colleagues overseas. Ms. Trut built an experimental fox farm to take the project in new directions. She now had an increasingly cuddly bunch of elite foxes that enjoyed being picked up and petted and playing with toys. In the 1970s, some lived with Ms. Trut, acting like pets, even jumping into her bed. The elite foxes continued to change. They developed white spots on their heads. In the 10th generation, one was born with floppy ears that didn't straighten out, as fox ears always did within weeks. They had dramatically lower levels of stress hormones than the control foxes, and females became ready to mate out of season. Even the structure of certain glands, and their skeletons, was different. Researchers were witnessing evolution at “warp speed,” the authors write, and Belyaev's hypothesis being borne out.

The nagging question was why this particular suite of physical and behavioral changes occurred together. Research into hormones was fairly new, but Ms. Trut and her mentor had a hunch that they were the link. A change in the expression of a gene that affected the endocrine system could result in seemingly unrelated effects: the elites' white spots, for example, were found to result from differences in the timing of their embryological development. Belyaev came up with a broad theory to explain what was going on. Natural selection, the authors write, “had stabilized the hormonal recipe for building a fox and its behavior in the wild. Now the selection for tameness . . . was destabilizing that formula.”

Slowly over many fox generations certain genes that formed certain behaviors and even physical traits were turned off. Other genes turned on. The genes being turned off or on respectively due to stresses and habits no longer being necessary.

It occurs to me that this could work in reverse.

Civilized people have over the course of millennia had our genes altered by civilizing, affecting not only intelligence, behaviors, and dispositions that are part of a synergetic self-enforcing feedback system making us more and more human - as opposed to animal.

But suppose that by rejecting civilized norms that make us human beings [as opposed to just animals - such as individual rights and all that is necessary to self-govern our selves] but instead accept belief in a world view that we are little more than just animals in a collectivist jungle of no property rights and no discovered fundamental laws on which laws are derived, which is how socialism describes the human condition - very much the way an animal would describe the world as they don't have knowledge of human nature and individual rights - not only makes civilization impossible such as in Venezuela where life is being turned into an animals' existence - but if it also over time due to an altered and uncivilized way of taking on the world as if they are actually living in a lawless jungle where only the most vicious animals win, as socialism sees the world - perhaps things are happening to the very genes of these socialists.

In a very tongue in cheek way to describe it: perhaps like the man waking up and finding he's turned in a cockroach - perhaps we are waking up and finding many of the people around us are turning back into little animals.

Thus the clothing.

Grist for thought. Or a good short story.

The New Socialist Man:

By James Cahill.