Website Logo. Upload to /source/logo.png ; disable in /source/_includes/logo.html

Bro Kaizen

The young man’s growth mindset

Civilization as a Heritable Personality Trait

Some peoples have constructed high-trust societies with a middle class (henceforeth abbreviated to the slightly-less-unwieldy HTSWAMC), while others have not. For example, the Japanese, the British, and the Israelis have constructed such societies. Conversely, there exist no recorded examples of Africans constructing one.

Why is this so? We claim the answer is simple — civilizations are made of people, and not all people have the same characteristics. In fact, only some small subset of people have the characteristics necessary to construct a HTSWAMC.

I. A Thought Experiment

Imagine the following thought experiment:

Construct a diagnostic test which can evaluate a human’s personality characteristics. There are several implementations of this already, e.g. the Big 5, Hexaco, etc1. Different people will have different personality characteristics and will therefore receive different scores on your diagnostic test. While Alice receives one score, Bob’s personality is different and therefore he recieves some other score. Each person’s personality is influenced by both nurture and nature, e.g. personality characteristics are partially heritable. In other words, “People become like their parents.” (This last point is commonly denied by “Equalist” political factions). We can plot scores on some sort of chart. For example, Big 5 diagnostic charts look like Fig. 1; other tests are amenable to similar charting.

Fig. 1: An example of a personality plot from one popular test. 2

You can divide a population into subgroups and aggregate their scores within each subgroup, perhaps by e.g. averaging or similar procedures. Of course you can plot on a single chart either one person’s results or this aggregation of several people’s results.

There are of course an infinite number of schemes by which to divide the population into subgroups. For instance, you could group everyone who’s name starts with the letter “S,” and average their scores together. Or alternately, you could group everyone who enjoys ice cream, and average their scores together. Some of these grouping schemes are meaningful, and many others are not. The two examples given above are likely non-meaningful.

Within a given grouping scheme, each subgroup’s personality scores will in general differ from one another, some to a statistically significant extent, and others not. For example, we’d not likely expect to find significant differences between the personalities of people who’s names begin with “R” and “S.” But we’d be very surprised to find no differences between the personalities of a group of convicted serial killers and a control group of ordinary people.

Despite the relentless protests to the contrary by the “Equalist” political factions, race and gender are two highly-meaningful grouping schemes. Mens’ personalities differ from womens’, and Japanese people’s personalities differ from Somalians’. This underlying truth will be reflected in all sensible diagnostic tests.

Imagine we perform the diagnostic procedure above for everyone on earth, plotting everyone’s personality diagnostic results with a single polygon. For convenience, we could assign a color to each race — the Japanese might be represented by a blue polygon, Ashkenazi Jews by a green polygon, and White people with a red one. We’d then find the blue Japanese polygons clustered in one region of the chart, the Jews in another region, with White people in yet still another. Of course there would be outliers and perhaps even sub-clusters, corresponding to sub-populations such as Scandinavians or Irishmen.

Only a small subset of regions of the chart support the construction of a HTSWAMC; most of the chart by area does not support it. If your country’s population is clustered in one of the non-HTSWAMC region, odds are quite low that your country will spontaneously construct a HTSWAMC. You can either try to change your citizen’s personalities by overcoming nature with nurture, or you can import new citizens with personality characteristics more amenable to civilization. The latter is classical European colonialism, and the former has never been known to work reliably.

Currently many immigrants and refugees are being imported into HTSWAMC countries. However, the immigrants are invariably from non-HTSWAMC countries, implying that they themselves likely possess personalities in the non-HTSWAMC region of the chart. Imagine the cluster of polygons on the country-wide personality chart representing e.g. Swedes’ personalities. They’re of course tightly clustered in a HTSWAMC region of the chart. As we import people from non-HTSWAMC regions (say e.g. Somalia) with their corresponding non-HTSWAMC personalities, the country’s average polygon migrates towards a non-HTSWAMC area of the chart. After some critical threshold, the countrywide average polygon has migrated so far from its original position that Swedish society is no longer recognizable as such, and has instead become rather similar to Somalian society (which is to say, nightmarish in many ways).

When people warn of the downfall of Western Civilization, this is what they mean. Since a civilization is directly composed of the personality characteristics of its constituents, if you fill a HTSWAMC country with non-HTSWAMC people, your HTSWAMC country won’t be long for this world.

II. The Truth, with Reservations

This obvious and easily observable truth makes Bro Kaizen feel somewhat uncomfortable, since like you, we too have been socialized to believe that such ideas are “racist” and therefore evil. But the truth is the truth, and we follow it wherever it leads. Anyone sufficiently concerned with intellectual honesty to be reading this blog ought to feel an obligation to do the same.


  1. Note that none of the arguments here depend on the specifics of any one personality diagnostic. If you object to e.g. the Hexaco testing methodology, you’re welcome to replace it with your own preferred test, which will lead to substantially similar results.

  2. Image courtesy of personalityfactors.com