Bill Whittle: How to Stop the Civilizational Collapse | Frontpage Mag

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Let me ask you a quick question.  This is an interesting question, and it goes to the heart of what's actually happening in the world.  Anybody know what the fastest land animal is?  Cheetah?  Anybody know what the deepest-diving mammal is?  Sperm whale, deepest diving mammal.  The highest-flying bird?  It's actually -- it's called a Ruppell's vulture, but geese fly at 12,000 feet.  But you'd be wrong about all of those.  Because the fastest land mammal is the human being.  The deepest-diving mammal is the human being.  The highest-flying animal on earth is the human being.  By far.  By far.

We eat everything.  We eat insects, tree barks, moss; we eat fungus, we eat cows, we eat mammals, we eat fish, we eat insects.  We eat everything.  And the reason that we're so successful is because human beings are programmable animals.  They're the only programmable animal in the history of the world.

That's why I can take a kid who was born into the heart of ISIS and raise them in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and they will turn into be perfect, wonderful, genuine American citizens.  And I can take the nicest, whitest kid from the most rich or most beautiful little hometown in America and raise them in Syria, and they'll grow up to be suicide bombers.  We are programmable animals.  And we have to understand that it's the programming that makes us different.  It's not the race, it's not the culture, it's not the class; it's the programming, it's the culture.

So what does that mean?  Here comes the science -- brace yourselves, I'll get through this as fast as I can.  When you look at any animal in the history of the world, any animal on earth today from a microorganism to a blue whale, what you find is that animals have developed strategies to maximize their numbers.  That makes sense, right?  Evolution says the genes that are successful are the ones that are pushed down to the next generation.

And as it turns out, there are two different strategies for pushing genes down to the next generation.  And what we're seeing in our society is this programmable animal, the human being.  The reason the society is collapsing is because we're changing from one strategy and we're going to another.

So let me tell you what these two strategies are.  If we're going to figure out how many different organisms can exist in a certain area, in a certain ecosystem, there are a couple variables that we look at.  And one of the variables is called R.  R is the reproductive rate.  The faster that animals can reproduce, generally speaking, the more they can fill up a given ecosystem.  R is the reproductive rate.

What kind of animals traditionally are R-selected animals?  Rabbits are a great example of an R-selected species.  Because rabbits live on a plain of infinite grass.  There's more food than any rabbit could ever eat.  Gazelles on the savannah, the same thing. You're never going to run out of grass if you're a gazelle on the savannah.  That's not the problem.

So a group of rabbits, a huge herd of rabbits, are in a big, big endless field of clover.  A rabbit is a very R-selected organism.  What do these things have in common?  What do rabbits have in common with each other?  Rabbits don't compete against each other. They're noncompetitive.  Rabbits don't have a threat assessment.  They're aware of predators, but if more rabbits come into where the rabbits are, the rabbits don't care.  They just move over a hop.  Because there's an endless supply of resources for them to eat forever.

Rabbits are promiscuous.  They have sex with as many other rabbits as they possibly can.  The male just has one encounter with a female, then goes onto the next female just as fast as he can.  Rabbits do not invest in their children, because there's no point in making a fit rabbit.  There's no actual benefit to making a healthy, fit, competitive rabbit.  Because there is an endless supply of food, and the amount of time you would spend raising a super-rabbit is wasted.  What you really should be doing is making more rabbits.

That's how rabbits succeed. They're selected by R.  And they have R-type behaviors for an advanced reproductive rate.  They don't have any sense of social structure, either, by the way.  There are no rabbit hierarchies, there are no rabbit leaders, there are no rabbit warriors, there are no rabbit teams.

(Laughter)

That's what rabbits do.  They select and survive and win by pushing out their genes, by reproducing as quickly as possible.

Now, what about the alternative?  What is the opposite?  Well, if reproductive rate is one way to measure how many organisms can live in an ecosystem, another way to measure the total number is by the carrying capacity of the land.  In other words, how much life can this area support?  That variable is called K.

And if you want to think of a K-selected species, a species that's selected based on the limitations of the environment, a great example would be wolves.  Wolves are very K-selected.  Rabbits are R, wolves are K.  They have almost exactly different behaviors.  What are some of the qualities of wolves?  Wolves are extremely competitive.  From the beginning, wolves will be in fights.  The males will be fighting constantly to see which is the alpha male, what dog is on top.  Wolves will be constantly having these battles because of fitness.  They need to be fit in order to survive.  That's a quality of wolves.

Wolves have a very strong group identity.  If there's 30 rabbits in a field and 30 more rabbits come in, the rabbits don't care, they just move over.  But if there's a pack of 30 wolves in a northern environment which can only support 30 wolves, if another 30 wolves come into that environment, pretty soon there's only going to be one pack left.  They are aware of external threats, and they understand that these threats are a threat to their survival, and they're ready to fight about it.

What else do we know about wolves?  Wolves pair-bond for life.  They pick a mate at their peak fitness, and they stay with that mate for life.  And that's important.  Because by pair-bonding for life, they have to raise fit kids.  Wolf puppies have to be trained how to hunt.  It's not as easy as just eating grass.  Hunting is harder than eating. It's harder than gathering.  I don't know how many vegetarians we have out here, but usually, you know -- the term means poor hunter in ancient Sanskrit.

(Laughter)

So they have that quality.  And wolves, because they have a large investment in their young, it takes them awhile to train their puppies how to hunt and so on -- they spend a great deal of time with their children.  And they want their children to be as fit as possible, because an unfit wolf will die in a world of limited resources, where an unfit rabbit doesn't care.  It doesn't matter, there's all the food it could want.

So finally, wolves have strong social codes.  Wolves form into warrior bands.  They form packs.  And when wolves start fighting, if one wolf throws his throat to the other wolf and gives up, the aggression on that top wolf turns off, because wolves respect the law.  They have a law, and they respect it.  They're wired to respect it.

Now hopefully by now, some of you may begin to realize some of these qualities between one group of people and another group of people in this society.  Right?

R selection is liberalism, what we call liberalism, traditional liberalism, classical liberalism. That's what we are.  But progressivism, that's a better word.  It is an R-selected philosophy.  It's a philosophy of there is no external threat.  It's a philosophy of communism and socialism, because socialism is noncompetitive.  They don't care if they all do worse, so long as they don't have to compete against each other.  Because none of them are fit.  They don't believe in fitness.  It's the philosophy of early promiscuity, it's the philosophy of abandoning your children, and it's the philosophy of lawlessness, where your only job is to maximize resources for yourself, because resources are endless.

K are conservative.  We're competitive, and we like to compete.  We'd rather lose to a better adversary than to win by cheating.  Everybody in this room feels that same way.  We're improved by competition, we're made better by it.  We like it, because we're good at it.  That's capitalism.

Wolves like us invest in our young.  We tend to be more monogamous, we tend to have honor codes and rules and laws that these rabbits are using against us, because they understand that we're bound by laws and rules and honor codes.

So what's happening?  What's happening to this country?  And what happened to the Greeks, and what happened to the Romans, and what happened to the Egyptians, what happened to the Babylonians, what happened to the French, what happened to the British, what happened to all of them?

It's very simple.  It's really very simple.  K-selected behaviors -- cooperation, discipline, warrior codes, law -- produce over the course of 300 or 400 years a civilization that eventually reaches the height of its powers.  And when it is the dominant civilization in the world, as the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians -- when they are absolutely dominant, you would think that that would be the point that that culture would go into space, that there would be nothing left to confront the Romans.  Once the Romans had completely dominated the world, you'd think we would've had Romans on the moon a thousand years ago.  Because what's going to stop the Romans?

But that's not what happens.  It doesn't happen.  It didn't just not happen once; it didn't happen ever.  Once civilizations get to the peak of their power, they collapse.  They collapse, collapse, collapse, collapse.  Why?

Because when a civilization reaches that level of prosperity and security and dominance, the people inside that civilization ...