LGBT Sexuality
There is a reason why very few traditional cultures are “OK” with same-sex relationships (and not a single widespread long-lived culture is/was). When a culture tolerates openly gay relationships, its adherents produce offspring at a lower rate and it ends up being outcompeted, population-wise, by its neighbors. Even if you were to isolate a culture that accepted gay people on an island, a homophobic subculture would eventually splinter out of it and come to outnumber and overwhelm its parent culture in time.
Even today, cultural movements that are most accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual and other non-traditional sexualities (not to mention unconventional relationship formats) have a very low birth rate when contrasted with their more conservative counterparts. This is true not just within the United States but also within and between just about every other nation in the world. So not only do countries less accepting of gay people have more children, but within any given nation, the cultivars and regions less accepting of LGBT people also have more children.[[57]](#_ftn57)
While it is true that cultures accepting of LGBT individuals have enjoyed enormous success within the past couple of generations, they have done this without fixing their birth rate problem. More worrisome still, the memetic package that causes straight people to support the LGBT community also appears to correlate with lower birth rate per a survey we ran (0.6 children per woman). This creates huge negative externalities for the LGBT community over the long run.
Research on genopolitics shows us that political beliefs, along with our larger sociological profiles, have a large genetic component (for more info on this and citations, read the chapter: “Humanity’s Genetic Shift” on page 20). If you systematically hunt and kill all the elephants who are not afraid of people with large tusks (or otherwise sterilize them), eventually elephants’ tusks will get smaller and they will get more aggressive. If you sterilize everyone who supports gay people … well, we should expect a strong swing against the community a few decades down the line. As long-term supporters of the community, this is deeply concerning to us.
As we wrote earlier in the book: But surely this change will be slow … right? Actually, it is already measurable. Here[[58]](#_ftn58) is a paper quantitatively showing how differential fertility rate can have substantial impact on attitudes toward social issues. From 2004 to 2018, the differential fertility (more conservative, more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million. (Interestingly, because unmarried and childless people vote more liberally this change makes a population more liberal within a generation[[59]](#_ftn59) but more conservative between generations[[60]](#_ftn60).)
The only way to ensure a culture tolerant of gay people spreads and outcompetes its more traditional competitors on a multi-generational scale is to ensure that the culture finds a way to “use” gay people that does not lower its overall birth rate. The classic example here is the “gay uncle hypothesis,” which goes so far as to claim being gay is evolutionarily beneficial because gay men can dedicate themselves to their siblings’ offspring and may be associated with greater attractiveness in female siblings. As mentioned in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, this hypothesis is not well supported by data.
Note: There is one study a lot of talking head “internet intellectuals” cite these days when arguing that the gay uncle hypothesis may have merit, in which researchers found that Tibetan families who send one sibling to be a celibate monk have more more grandkids on average, but only when the decision is out of the parents’ hands.[[61]](#_ftn61) While this study is fascinating, the mechanism of action is a bit more nuanced and makes us doubt its generalizability. First, it does not control for religiosity (which correlates with both birth rate and sending kids to become monks). Second, it only affects the birth rate of brothers and only increases their birth rate by 1.7 (a family would need at least three sons for this to be effective). Furthermore, the way this practice appears to increase birth rate is by leading monks’ non-monk brothers to have their first kid earlier: “This result suggests that the benefit contained by men from their monk brothers is … achieved through earlier reproduction for their wives.” Given that the increase in total of grandkids is only 1.15, it feels very unlikely to be generalizable—or at least not generalizable enough to lead to gay individuals appearing at about equal rates in cultures all over the world in very different circumstances.
Also note that different cultures appear to be able to use “gay uncles” to their benefit at different rates. For example, while Latin American cultures are not overtly friendly to gay people, they do have a path to utilize them. One of the core problems of Latin American cultures is that their tight networks of family connections can reduce families’ social mobility. Because families soft reject their gay members, not offering them nepotistic opportunities as much as other family members, gays in Latin America are more likely to make their own connections and careers. This means that, while on average they do worse than other family members, they also have a higher probability of jumping up one (or several) social status rungs as they make their way in the world without as much family support. As many remain loyal to their relatives, offering them support and connections despite getting little support and return, they offer a high-risk, high-reward roll of the dice for their families, having the potential to pull relatives up in status if they do strike it rich and even be assigned family patriarch-like roles. This is why, of the hard cultures out there, those in Latin America are some of the most friendly to gays. This isn’t to say that they will be nice to gays per se; they just won’t light them on fire, drag them behind cars, or throw them off buildings at the same rate as other hard cultures.
While having a gay sibling with no kids might make it slightly easier to raise four kids, the presence of a gay sibling is not going to encourage you to have eight kids instead (which is mathematically what you would need to see happening given the low birth rate among those who support the LGBT community). The reality is that such a strategy implied by the gay uncle hypothesis could only impact the birth rate of one’s siblings enough to make it beneficial if you essentially turned gay individuals into slaves for their siblings’ families or forced them to raise a portion of their siblings’ kids, which is patently worse than the situation we have now. (Note: If you are wondering why biologically gay animals exist in many species given the effect of same-sex attraction on fecundity, read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, in which we explore this topic extensively.)
But what if a culture’s gay members somehow increased the fitness of the culture at a more macro scale? Perhaps a culture could leverage the fact that gay individuals had kids at a way lower rate to put them in positions of power and administration and thus lower nepotism.
Humans naturally have a desire to benefit their own children over other people and some cultivars even frame doing so as perfectly acceptable. This is called amoral familism and is advantageous from a cultural evolution standpoint because one’s children will have a much higher probability of staying a member of their culture than … well, anyone else. Cultivars practicing amoral familism would benefit tremendously if they could maintain the practice while mitigating the corruption it causes by differentially putting gay people in positions of bureaucratic power.
Well guess what? We don’t need to imagine what would happen if we developed a cultivar that evolved to disproportionately place gay individuals in powerful, bureaucratic roles as we already have a great example of one: The Catholic Church. The Catholic Church more or less accidentally[[62]](#_ftn62) evolved a system that outcompeted its competitors by utilizing gay individuals disproportionately in their organizational bureaucracy in a way that dramatically reduced graft and corruption. After all, in a medieval context, if a local bishop had kids, they would be more likely to guide political intrigue in a direction that benefited their family than the Church. If Catholic bishops were able to have kids, the title would almost certainly have become hereditary instead of being rewarded on a pseudo-meritocratic basis.
Note: We are neither saying that all gay Catholics are in the clergy nor that all individuals in the clergy are gay. We are merely observing that if you were to compare the average sexual inclination of Catholic priests or nuns to that of the general Catholic population, the gay population will be higher among clergy. How can we say that so confidently?
A number of sources provide data supporting this assertion. Wikipedia[[63]](#_ftn63) has a fairly good page on the topic with estimates ranging between 15% and 50% of Catholic clergy being LGBT. For a specific example, Reverend Professor Elizabeth Stuart estimates 33% of Catholic priests are gay.[[64]](#_ftn64)
Outside of just data, we can also look at the queer community’s history for evidence. After the second Vatican council pushed nuns to live closer to cities, a large portion of lesbian advocates were ex-nuns. The urbanization of nuns led to former nuns having a large impact on the development of modern lesbian culture in the same way bikers of the same period had a significant impact on gay male culture. (If you find this topic interesting, check out the book: Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Nancy Manahan and Rosemary Keefer Curb.)
This system, while unintentional, was remarkably effective. As The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance shows, governance structures become more corrupt and bureaucratic with time and age—and while the Catholic Church did suffer from this, it weathered time better than any other institution we can think of. Ultimately and without intentionality, the Catholic Church found individuals to serve the role of “court eunuchs” at scale and without required castration.
If you are wondering why we are not talking about the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, recall that we already covered it earlier in the book. Suffice to say molestation cases in the Catholic Church (4%) are lower than they are in other large bureaucracies like the American Public School system (4%-7%)[[65]](#_ftn65) and the Catholic Church doesn’t go out of its way to cover them up or protect the perpetrators any more than its corollaries like the teachers’ unions. Actually, the Catholic Church is less effective at covering up pedophilia, as can be seen by the fact that you likely did not know about the school molestation crisis or the teachers’ unions covering it up despite problem being about ten times larger in the United States’ public school system (just due to the number of people involved) than it ever was in the Catholic Church.
Disproportionate representation of non-reproducing populations (including LGBT individuals) in bureaucratic positions of power explains why Catholic cultivars have been able to lean into amoral familism at levels much higher than other cultures could sustain. This explains in part why Catholic countries have much higher levels of corruption than others as only the priesthood has the protective mechanism in it—not the civil government. (For example, having lived in Italy and South America, we can say that to many cultivars in those regions, it would be actively immoral to not differentially hire extended family members should you be in a position of power, even if they lack competence or have sticky fingers.)
The Catholic solution to gay individuals may work should you create a culture in which individuals in the governing bureaucracy (both civil and religious)—but only individuals in the governing bureaucracy—can have same-sex romantic and sexual partners but not opposite sex romantic partners. That said, we don’t like this solution. The idea of essentially having a job assigned to you at birth is a culturally repellent concept to us and it is apparently distasteful to the Catholic institution as well—hence their refusal to accept that such was the pressure their “no marriage for priests” system created (it certainly didn’t come from the Bible).
Another way to protect people born gay is to place LGBT people in necessary societal roles that make having kids difficult. A classic example of this can be seen with the Sacred Band of Thebes, a lauded all gay (or bi) military unit that played a key role in ending Spartan military dominance in the Greek world. In truth, we don’t have enough historical data to say how well the Sacred Band really performed in its larger cultural role (though studies show risk-taking is associated with being gay, so who knows).[[66]](#_ftn66) The prospect of giving same-sex people specific roles in society also runs into the same problem noted above: It forces people into specific occupations based on factors outside their control. Finally, just as most Greek city states that flirted with accepting gay people only lasted for a few generations, modern LGBT-accepting cultures will quickly decline should they fail to innovate a durable cultural solution.
Another (far more unethical) cultural “solution” to gayness is to force gay men to transition to women, converting them into heterosexual trans women. Switching out gay men for women somewhat lowers the “unpaired male” problem faced by polygynous societies (societies in which some men take multiple wives)—namely, by reducing the number of angry men who can’t find a partner, which increases rates of things like murder, rape, and dishonesty (for clarification, this policy reduces the number of “incels” circulating within society by artificially increasing the number of available women through forced transition).
Doing so also allows the benefits of polygyny, such as genes associated with high wealth and achievement being passed down at higher rates, and wealth being more evenly distributed among a cultivar’s child-rearing population (as wealthy people have and pay for more kids—for example, both Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and his successor Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had over a hundred kids).[[67]](#_ftn67) It should come as no surprise, then, that some Islamic cultivars that practice polygyny have evolved to do just that: Have gay men become women. (And to be clear, most of the people forced to transition like this in these cultures are not “trans” as we would understand it but gay men given the “transition or die” choice.)
People think of gay-male-to-heterosexual-female conversion as being a modern phenomenon localized to Islamic culture[[68]](#_ftn68) but it actually has fairly deep historic routes. In light of this practice, it is somewhat ironic that being accepting of trans individuals and not gay individuals is historically the more conservative position while in modern American society, the inverse is true. While this system wins points for creativity, forcing people to transition is an inelegant and immoral solution (at least from our cultivar’s perspective—but remember our culture is obsessed with individual agency to an extent that might blind us to the common good).
Perhaps you wonder why one couldn’t just create a culture that is both LGBT friendly and also blessed with a high birth rate more generally. As we keep saying, if an iteration of that same culture that was not tolerant of gay people enjoys even a slightly higher birth rate, eventually said iteration will splinter off and outcompete the parent group. This is why, historically speaking, periods of LGBT acceptance are so brief and more often terminated by internal cultural shifts than by outside conquest or cultural defeat by an outside force. Gay-tolerant cultures have evolved multiple times throughout history and—in city-based cultures—have always been quashed within just a few generations. A look at the relevant statistics indicates there is zero reason to think this time will be any different.
At the civilizational level, if you actually care about people being able to live their birth sexuality without oppression, then you must solve the birth rate problem. Lazy, indolent justicles can’t simply handwave away a problem because it is morally difficult to tackle. In doing so, they sacrifice the quality of life of the LGBT community two generations from now in the name of immediate convenience.
We need to craft a culture that accepts people of all sexual representations while strongly encouraging them to raise children and granting them access to the resources needed to accomplish that feat. When kids within our own House’s cultivar turn out to be gay, we will do what we can to support them in having as large a family as possible and we hope to pass this mandate down to future generations.
If you really wanted to build a durable culture that accepts openly gay members, you could leverage the fact that lesbians can give birth at twice the rate of straight couples and gay people are more likely to have larger, stable polycules to effectively create very large, co-parenting families. There is absolutely a path to some Index cultivars being gay at the core and still very fruitful.
This approach would, of course, require significant cultural tweaking as currently children who grow up in polycules have poorer emotional health than those who grow up in two-parent households. A likely factor undermining polycule kids’ mental wellbeing involves political infighting for resources among parents (e.g., Mother A and Mother B fighting for attention and extra help from Father X in raising Kids AX and BX). If children could be created with blended DNA—that is, DNA from all polycule members—competition might be reduced.[[69]](#_ftn69) Regardless, IVF, IVG, and artificial wombs play a critical role in the success of a strategy like this.
Perhaps you wonder why we care so much about creating a culture inclusive of the queer community given how little we care about human suffering.
- As much as we think suffering is not an intrinsic negative, we see no reason to inflict it upon anyone should there be no benefit. Groups are also motivated to tear down cultures that cause suffering to outsiders, hence it is best to avoid this if possible.
- The queer community has utility. For whatever reason, throughout history, the creative thinking bell curve of gay people has skewed to the right. Something about the gay perspective allows them to see the world differently enough that they are more likely to create high-quality cultural innovations and exports.[[70]](#_ftn70)
- Given our beliefs as outlined in the Life and Death chapter, it should be clear that we believe a diversity of perspectives and competing subcultures to be one of the highest orders of good in the great cycle. The more unique perspectives are silenced, the weaker we become.