Sex, Genes, Politics and Company Law: Can Capitalist Democracy coexist with Human Survival? Chris King Aug 2013 – Sep 2020 Genotype 1.1.39 http://dhushara.com/sgpcl/ Fig 1: (Left) Mortal combat between the Bear and Bull stock market overlaid by the triple witching hour instability 2011. (Right) Fireworks over Lady Liberty, Ellis Island, NY. Contents 1. Twin Pillars with Feet of Clay in a One-Sided Love Affair 1 2. Sexual Conflict and Human Emergence 2 3. Urbanization and the Rise of Patriarchal Dominance 4 4. Democracy, Patriarchy and Military Alliance 5 5. Democracy meets the ‘Age of Enlightenment' 7 6. Capitalism, Patriarchy and Ecology 9 7. A Primer on Inequality and the Gini coefficient 14 8. The Rich get Richer: Is Capitalism the Democratic Complement? 19 9. Gerrymandering: Politics Cheating Democracy 25 10. The Harder They Fall: Global Financial Crisis 28 11. Quants and Light-speed: Testosterone meets Technology 47 12. Free Market Utopias vs Irreversible Tipping Points 53 13. Resilient Genetics vs Ephemeral Corporations 54 14. Corporate Killers and Downsizing Profitability 56 15. Political Genocide and Corporate Metamorphosis: Where have all the Cod Gone? 57 16. Hooker Chemical and the Rape of the Love Canal 61 17. Abysmal Discord: Deepwater Horizon 66 18. We All Fall Down: Ecological Economics vs Machiavellian Intelligence 75 19. Ecologizing Capitalism: Company Incorporation as a Conservation Investment 79 20. References 86 Twin Pillars with Feet of Clay in a One-Sided Love Affair The twin pillars of Western civilization are capitalism and democracy, but are these consistent with surviving in a living planet? Are they beneficent foundations of individual freedom and prosperity, or are they malign forces doomed to boom and bust instabilities that will carry us past tipping points into a hard landing for human survival? Could they, in the face of natural abundance, bring about economic collapse in a tragedy of the commons due to environmental disruption caused by the human impacts they have set in motion? While capitalism’s money-driven investment economy has a controversial name - a Jekyll and Hyde black and white character depending on one's pendulum point in the ever-smouldering 2 left-right political divide, democracy is almost universally anointed a saintly role in the preservation of civil liberties and freedom of choice of the people – the bedrock of Western civilization. But this is a little naïve? As Winston Churchill once famously said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Of course he said this ironically, after being defeated in a rebound election, having won the Second World War, but his point is not just about the electoral vagaries of democracy for aspiring leaders, but the intrinsic paradoxes of social government. George Bernard Shaw highlighted the skeleton in the democratic spin closet we have to be astute enough to see through: "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." This article investigates whether electoral democracy and corporate activity, lacking any real genetic stability and prone to winner-take-all exploitation, particularly of natural resources; able to change from a shark to a tiger by a simple act of recapitalization; and often short-lived in a predatory merry-go-round of relentless takeover and corporate cannibalism; driven only by the profit imperative and the vagaries of the free market, can provide any basis for long- term economic and ecological sustainability. We shall also examine how both capitalism and democracy are manifestly social products of the male gender to the exclusion of the immortal sex men live their lives to fertilize, unearth the inevitable Machiavellian strategies of deceit that coexist in any climax society and seek the keys to an ecological completion of the economic quest for a life of natural abundance. Sexual Conflict and Human Emergence We need first to take a step back and expose the sexual underpinnings of this entire process. In "Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence", we articulate the thesis that the emergence of human culture, super-intelligence and social complexity has come about through an irresolvable red-queen race of sexual selection, in which neither sex has had the upper hand, leading to strategic paradox and the runaway selection of genes favouring both male genius and female social and sexual astuteness, enhanced by mammalian XY sexual chromosome genetics. Fig 2: Human sexual dimorphism at the cellular and organismic levels. Central to this idea is the primary role of female reproductive choice, rather than the 'Flintstones' - man the hunter - view of male chauvinist warriors clubbing prospective partners, or abducting them, as still occurs commonly in some Amazonian warrior cultures such as the Yanomamo, and in Central Asian countries such as Kyrgyzstan. Intriguingly both evolution of humanity through sexual selection and the dominant role of women in choosing mating partners was recognized by Charles Darwin in his second work ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex’ after writing ‘On the Origin of Species’. 3 Although humans have strong pair-bonding partnerships associated with the long child- rearing times of humans compared with other primates, female reproductive choice remains paramount among mammals because they bear live young and engage lactation giving females a primary parenting reproductive investment and males a primarily sexual fertilizing investment. The evolution of female orgasm, concealed ovulation, counterpointed by menstruation, lunar menstrual synchrony, perpetual sexual receptiveness associated with sexual coitus as a social means of family bonding, the loss of the penis bone and penile spines in favour of a large tumescent penis providing a genuine indicator of genetic fitness in men, all point to a line of human evolution in which female reproductive choice has had a central role. A role in driving human language and cultural emergence, in which women gatherers chatting together in the field about their relationships, provided the central bulk of the subsistence diet, while male hunters' meat from the kill, gained in silent vigil, was a dietary supplement traded for sexual favours. Fig 3: Clockwise from top left: Nisa, Deep trench in mitochondrial DNA extending to 140,000 years (Behar et al), Menarche rite (Fulton’s Cave), actual eland dance for the menarche, cave with 70,000 year old paintings (Tsolido Hills) evidence of cosmetics and shell jewelry (Blombos Cave 75,000). The reproductive investments of the two human sexes are diametrically opposed, with males investing primarily in sexual fertilization by many means, from cut and run through faithful husbanding to the alpha male harems of Udayama and Ghengis Khan. Women on the other hand have a major investment in parenting and have to spread their investment over the relatively few children they can give birth to. Only three percent of mammals are monogamous because of the major polarization internal fertilization, live birth and lactation precipitate and humans stand at an extreme among mammals because of the massive nature of human pregnancy, the increased risk to the mother due to the large human head and the long period of vulnerability a young lactating mother faces protecting her family. Thus women's choices have been driven towards resource-bearing men who are also intelligent providers, gleaned through the social filters of good hunting, musical and artistic 4 ability, and good jokes and story telling around the fires during long discussions in the night about the affairs of the human grape vine, while occasionally outsiring on the sly to a stud with desirable genes as an insurance against putting all her eggs in one man's basket, something all men find a mortal threat of paternity uncertainty, but no woman faces. Humans, like several ape species are commonly female exogamous, with females moving to live with their male partner’s kin. Most cultures have had patrilineal kinship, rather than the matrilineal patterns of temporary sexual partnerships, or 'walking marriages', with uncles helping rear their sisters offspring. Nevertheless the social traditions of founding human cultures, such as the bushmen, show a pattern respecting a young woman's first pregnancy and delivery being with the maternal family, honouring the power of menarche as a sacred rite of passage upon which the fertility of the people depends, rather than regarding women as ‘unclean’, and allowing a degree of female choice about their partnerships surprisingly similar to the more recent achievements of modern Western cultures after centuries of male dominance, as illustrated in Marjorie Shostak's "Nisa". Urbanization and the Rise of Patriarchal Dominance As the gatherer-hunter way of life gave way to a combination of agriculture, invented by women gatherers, and animal husbandry and herding discovered by the men, the rise of great urban cultures was accompanied by a massive transfer of power over reproductive choice to male dominant coalitions. We can see in Sumeria the delicate association of planter Queen and shepherd King founding one of the greatest cultural flowerings in human history, ultimately giving way to male dominance, in favour of the trinity of male gods An, Enlil and Enki masturbating into the primal waters. Fig 5: Marduk slaying Tiamat the primal chaos Goddess illustrates the rise of patriarchal dominance