The Silent Rape Epidemic

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The Silent Rape Epidemic - Edward Dutton

Dutton is an anthropologist associated with the University of Oulu in Finland. He's married to a Finnish woman. This book includes a lot of his own observations and experiences as an outsider among the Finnish people.

Dutton is also a “race realist.” He takes the controversial position that “races,” aka distinct human populations associated by geography or kinship patterns, have had evolutionary histories shaped by different environmental factors and therefore actually have different traits, including, depression, intelligence, etc. This book presents Dutton's approach as hard-core empirical; he substantially documents his claims with empirical data from social science, including IQ and other psychological tests.

Dutton's thesis is that the harsh Finnish environment natural environment has shaped the Finnish population into a genetic profile consisting of uniformly intelligent, highly cooperating individuals with a propensity to schizophrenia. I am not in a position to verify or dispute Dutton's support, but it seems that he has the data to make his case. Finns rank as having the highest IQ among European populations. They also have extra-ordinarily high scores of schizophrenia in their population. (Also, they have significantly low levels of left-handedness; left-handedness is associated with autism, which is the polar opposite of schizophrenia.) Dutton also supports the claim that both IQ and schizophrenia are substantially inherited (which seems true.) Interestingly, Dutton disputes the existence of the Flynn Effect - the effect whereby IQs have been increasing over the last century - for the Finnish population.

The net result is that the core Finnish population is stereotyped as:

“taciturn, emotionless, joyless, and superficially cold. However, there are other subtler dimensions that you would also expect to observe. Finns would be lower, on average, in systematizing than would people in countries with lower average levels of schizophrenia. As we have discussed, this would make them prone to jumping to conclusions, to being biased against ‘disconfirmatory evidence' and, in the face of signals potentially indicating something negative, to over-analyze and to become paranoid.”

And:

“Emotionally cold, joyless, and yearning to just be left alone, he manifested most of the symptoms of schizoid personality: an extremely mild form of schizophrenia.   After I moved to Finland, I began to notice just how common this kind of personality was, especially among men. To meet people like this was so unusual in England that it would be remarkable. But in Finland, it was me who, as a relatively outgoing and talkative man, was worthy of comment. Most men I met in Finland appeared to be these silent, unemotional types. Their symptoms were not as pronounced as those of the man on the plane, perhaps, but they were the type of men of whom I met very few in England: Taciturn, introvert, joyless, reserved, and perfectly happy to be solitary, engaged in pursuits that were absolute anathema to me such as hunting, trekking and cross-country skiing. Presumably their incapacity to experience joy rendered sport quite attractive, because it would elevate their endorphin levels. It also appeared to render alcohol extremely inviting.”

Is this a mere stereotype? We have been trained to think that stereotypes are by definition false, but, in fact, stereotypes of groups are probably true. We go wrong, however, in applying group stereotypes to individuals. Dutton observes:

“American psychologist Lee Jussim (2012), whom we met earlier, has shown that stereotypes have a very high degree of accuracy. Thus, if there is a commonly agreed stereotype about the average Finnish personality it is likely to be empirically accurate.”

These stereotypes are apparently particularly applicable to Finns from the Finnish interior. Finns from the south - more Swedish-Finns, and from the Karela region, are known to be outgoing. Dutton makes the interesting point that most - actually, all - Finnish geniuses and leaders have been Swedish-Finnas, which he explains on the ground that the highly intelligent Finnish population has very little population differentiation in order to maximize essential cooperation in the face of Finland's dangerous environment. Put simply, Dutton argues that the core Finnish population lacks the outlier type able to make the leaps of inspiration that accounts for innovation and genius.

Dutton interlaces this analysis of the Finnish rape epidemic. As is the case with many European nations, Finland has brought large numbers of Muslims into their country. As is the case with other European countries, some of these immigrants have been establishing rape rings which exploit Finnish minors, or they engage in freelance rape of Finns, who are used to a homogenous, high-trust population. The Muslim population has its own history that makes its strategy rational as an atavistic “reproduction” strategy.

Dutton questions Finland's commitment to democracy:

“Finns generally believe that their country is strongly democratic, but ‘Finnishness' is, in fact, not especially conducive to democracy. Democracy has been shown to be associated with a society's average IQ (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012). This is because democracy requires organisation, the delaying of gratification, cooperation and trust; trust that if your opponents take power then they will faithfully maintain democracy, for example. Intelligence predicts not just believing in democracy, and so voting for democratic parties, but, specifically, democratic participation. This is probably because the more intelligent realise that if people don't participate in democracy then it will stagnate and the freedoms and stability which depend upon it will be lost (Deary et al., 2008). So, to put it very simply, democracy requires a certain level of average intelligence.”

However, while trust is necessary for democracy, too much trust is a danger:

“I would argue that an optimum level of intelligence is necessary for sustaining democracy, in part because intelligence is associated with trust. Other factors also elevate trust, such as relative equality (Ulsuner, 2000) which, in Finland's case, is likely to partly reflect its narrow IQ and personality variability in personality. But if people are too trusting then they will be disinclined to hold their leaders to account, and this will damage democracy. Indeed, Jamal and Noordudin (2010) have shown that the relationship between democracy and generalized trust is quite complex and varies from country to country. They show that levels of generalized trust are linked to confidence in existing political institutions and, in democratic countries, these will tend to be democratic institutions. Accordingly, there is a tendency for high trust societies to simply trust their governments. If these governments slowly debase democratic institutions – such that it is not immediately perceptible that they are doing so – then it would follow that they would continue to be trusted and would not be challenged. So, too high a level of trust is bad for democracy.”

As is the case with many European countries, the powers that be have attempted to cover up the rape rings, leading to an almost inevitable reaction by the Finns, whose evolutionary history - and just plain history - has permitted them to define internal threats to their community as external threats to be met with the solidarity of resistance that ensured their survival. Dutton predicts that Finns will undergo a period of transformation to “negative ethnocentrism” as their formerly homogenous nation decays. This will produce “anxiety” which may reverse the movement away from Christianity that has been the hallmark of the last century:

“It is extremely stressful to live in a conflict-ridden, highly unequal society in which there are very low levels of trust. As we have already seen, stress – and also feelings of exclusion – are the key environmental factors behind religiousness.”

Dutton's book is nothing if not thought provoking and rigorous. We will be able to see how well it does with its predictions.