The Effing A**hole Gene?

On occasion, writers defend the low activity variants of MAOA, the so-called warrior gene, a phrase they consider a misnomer because individuals with the low activity variants are likely to lash out at perceived wrongs done to themselves. (Since warriors fight both just and unjust wars, the phrase seems generous.)

Isn't fighting wrongs a good thing?

Yes. We shouldn't create societies riven with immoral cowardice, easy prey for egoism, including psychopathy. But often a chasm exists between a real wrong and a perceived wrong.

At least one study suggests individuals with a low activity variant are more willing to physically punish others for a "provocation." But the study doesn't measure whether these individuals might consider other acts, especially beneficial acts by political opponents, as provocations.

A study of New Zealanders abused as children by Caspi and Moffitt concluded that 80 percent of males with a low activity variant displayed anti-social tendencies, more than than twice the frequency (35 percent) of anti-social tendencies among formerly abused males with the high activity variant. Abused children are noteworthy because they inherit genes for aggression from their parents and they grow up in cultures extolling aggression. If you date someone who was abused by a parent and they claim they would never do what their parent did to their own children, yet display other character defects, you probably should be skeptical about their claim. When children start screeching or misbehaving, there is a good chance they will pound the hell out of them, forgetting their previous promises.

Unless Caspi and Moffitt use a bad definition of anti-social tendencies, it doesn't sound as if the low activity variants cause individuals to fight the right fights.

We should create individuals who respond correctly to wrongs, stopping and preventing harms by those committing them and sometimes punishing those committing them. We should not create more individuals with a general tendency to lash out at the world or ethical outgroups. Most of us have met individuals who believe they have suffered a wrong in one place, then decide to get drunk, drive drunk, and start fights elsewhere as a response. Hollywood audiences love anti-heroes with rotten causes.

We should have an explosion of research on MAOA, but studies on MAOA variants don't seem frequent in the past few years. Not surprisingly, social scientists are busy crafting and rigging studies on behalf of cultural Marxism. We must find out how beneficial or harmful the variants of MAOA are.

Groups more likely to have the low activity variants, including racial groups, have consistently supported one totalitarianism or another throughout their histories, no matter how IQ they are. They pretend to be opponents of totalitarianism mainly when it helps their agendas, then look the other way as their allies implement tyranny. Their intuitions of right and wrong on important political issues are wrong the overwhelming majority of the time, often thinking it right to assault anyone who tells a truth they don't want to hear, even while they support their own right to demonize others with scurrilous, fallacious language, not noticing or caring about self-contradictions. And if you point out the contradictions to them, they'll attack. They think it perfectly acceptable to have the entire mass media dominated by individuals in general agreement with their fallacious intuitions.

Now it could be the case that the low activity variants of MAOA are accidentally correlated with totalitarian behavior among those groups. But whatever the causes, we shouldn't be conducting experiments with the lives of billions in ways almost guaranteed to increase tyranny.

I sure would like to know whether the individuals who slur centrist nonmulticulturalists as Nazis, then then think they have the right to assault us and take away our rights, have the low activity variants of MAOA or what other genes predispose them to support totalitarianism.