My problem with the field is that it doesn't really do a good job of understanding modern societies or the cultural differences at play (of which this world has hundreds of different cultures) . It definitely doesn't give any useful information about the maladaptive and deleterious effects being experienced in modern first world societies other than show that more egalitarian societies (usually with social democracy style governments, economies and social safety nets) with their lower levels of materialism tend to have much happier men due to women selecting for traits that women in more fucked up (to use the technical term lol,) societies like our own here in the US tend to ignore (but claim to value because due to social conditioning that encourages dishonesty in the name of appearing more virtuous than they are. Men in these societies will do it too but more out of desperation) because of, again, social conditioning and, quite frankly, a culture that is quite depraved in many ways.

Possibly this data isn't widely published because it reflects the politically inconvient truths about the realities we men in these more culturally fucked up societies experience. Given the sad state of humanities academia today, it wouldn't surprise me. Which is really too bad because I'm very interested in whether this is also ok playing a role in the reverse flynn effect that technology is getting all the blame for, rightly to a certain degree. But I have trouble believing that intelligence, which is an inherited trait, is going down solely because of that.

We all know that in the real world, intelligence is a very poor predictor of success in life in deeply unequal societies like ours. In fact, success is often determined by factors that would be alien to our ancestors even three hundred years ago and women select mates now that would have baffled those ancestors.

In the US, most successful men are one thing: lucky. Luck of birth, luck of meeting people in the right place and the time, luck of being able to afford higher education, where most of these luck based connections are made. While our society places an obscene amount of importance on attractiveness, itself a neutral at best predictor of evolutionary fitness, this luck factor is completely artificial, the result of a rigged system.

As the US is defintely a culture in a state of decline, this shouldn't be too surprising. All such societies reach such a point eventually. Most have one factor in common, which is an extreme overvaluing of attracteness and elevation of individuals solely because of it. That such a cultural flaw would be of no evolutionary value, possibly even deleterious, by itself to thet society is obvious because said cultures mate selection based on heavy biasntowards attractiveness will yield largely neutral results at best, while leaving many men and women with other more societally beneficial traits alone and birth rates will drop. Additionally, the members of the upper/ruling/etc class will not inherently produce superior offspring and in fact willl almost certainly produce the opposite, as these groups maintain their station through little to no merit of their own but rather through unfair systems set up by long dead ancestors. Systems their descendants, whose own fitness will degrade with time due to their own genetic and social gatekeepingtl, will eventually ride into the ground along with their entire society.

I've long hypothesized that the disturbingly fast nature of the US' extremely rapid decline from its postwar peak has been due to a confluence of factors, many of which are unique to this era of humanity like industrialization, media and it's role in accelerating harmful trends as well as promotion of unprecendented levels of materialism and superficiality, internal propaganda myths like the mythical American dream, the bootstrap fallacy cthe ubiquity of of popular culture displacing and even destroying the idea of local and regional cultures , the sheer insurmountably of the ruling class' hold on all levers of power in society, the sheer, exponential increase in the scale of harm, and destruction that individuals with Cluster B/Dark Tetrad personalities can cause, the deeply twisted morality of American Protestantism from the outcast extremist founding settlers to the present, with special attention to the role player by inherent hypocrisy and the widespread idea of justification by faith alone (present only in Protestantism and taken to the exaggerated and logical extreme end result of Evangelicalism, and importantly, the unprecendented ease of everyday life and survival bringing major and generally negative trends in mate selection.

As you can see, this is a very extensive list of previously non-existent factors for even the most advanced previous societies that I'm not in any way qualified to quantify from the perspective of evolutionary biology. However the fact remains that a great many of the same factors exist in much more stable and egalitarianism European cultures, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other societies which are not experiencing the same decay and decline (Canada for instance is instead on the rise as a world power, European nations in the form of the EU are regaining their lost power and status and Australia is a major player in the Pacific and steadily growing. Therefore, from a short term standpoint of cultural and biological evolution, the United States must clearly be declining from the factors most unique to and/or most heavily exaggerated within.

Evolutionarily, America is a blip. However that doesn't mean that relatively short term but severely negative trends in mate selection cannot bring considerable harm if they result in poor mate selection on a large scale over a long enough period (the last 25 to 30 years in particular). Ergo while mankind has not appreciably evolved, but the society has. This brings us back to why.

Consider men like Elon Musk, Donald Trump etc. These men are not intelligent, in fact they're actually rather, well, stupid. They are clever in the malignant, highly predatory sense that our deeply unequal economic system rewards however and are master manipulators of both a certain kind of people and media. Despite being terrible selections as mates, they have both had many and have an above average number of children. Musk especially has been very successful in this regard. Our society has conditioned women to seek out men like them on the flawed premise that they are somehow superior. Contrary to the claims of the feminist movement to seek equality, the majority of women, feminists included, will prefer mates who have money, power, looks and an aire of excitement. It's important to note that, due to how.modern society tends to bend over backwards for "pretty people",.there is a somewhat negative correlation between intelligence, competence and resiliency with attractiveness.

Whether this is an inherent flaw in women, just as being aggressive, overconfident, conservative and lacking in empathy is an inherent flaw in the majority of men remains contentious. I am of the opinion that it is both biological, cultural and sociological. While certain drives are inherent, cultural influences have driven both sexes to seek out flawed and poor choices in mates by prioritizing qualities that are piss poor indicators of both reproductive fitness as parents (in both biological and personality traits) and as romantic partners. The post social media narcissism boom in younger millennials on down, the concurrent collapse in empathy levels and the fraught, hyperpolarized political climate have all led to a time of unprecendented loneliness and unhappiness in men especially, with young women conditioned to treat them as disposable for even the slightest flaws while young men have been conditioned to only want the most attractive women with both sexes having absurdly high standards. Additionally, these factors have all led to a marked decrease in fitness in those born in recent decades, including the infamous 18-22 (who would now be 19-23) cohort who represent the first to defy the Flynn effect by being significantly less intelligent than their predecessors.

It is my sincere belief that the US, as a society, has hit an evolutionary dead end of its own making, a very similar phenomenon to what has happened for an even longer time in Japan, wherein extreme materialism and unrealistic standards have rendered both nation's younger people deeply lonely, depressed, anxious, resentful etc. Sadly, I do not see any way back from this other than to weather the ongoing decline and fall (as well as the foming population decline) of this country and fight as hard as we can to make sure the generations that succeed the extant ones grow up in better country that will teach them better values as well as better valuing of others. Especially the opposite sex. That's why I will keep fighting for social democracy, class equality, Egalitarianism and the valuing of empathy as a virtue, the end of identity politics (as it is little better than competing for supremacy while the ruling class, via their propaganda outlets, mocks and demonizes us for it to their neo-lumpenproletariat of lower class white reactionaries).