In her recent interview, HBD Chick doesn’t sound like a misanthrope:
You asked earlier if there was a single book or article that got me interested in human biodiversity, and I said that there really wasn’t, that it was more of a gradual thing; but that classic article of Steve’s — “Cousin Marriage Conundrum” — really set me off in one direction within HBD! It was that article, plus Stanley Kurtz and Parapundit’s writings on the issue, that really piqued my interest in cousin marriage (and mating patterns in general) and the effects that it can have on a society.
To sum up Steve’s article, he pointed out that, in societies with a lot of cousin marriage, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the extended family is much more important to people than here in the West, so it’s difficult to establish and maintain things like liberal democracy and a low-corruption, low-nepotism society, since everybody is more focused on accruing benefits for their respective extended families than on what is best for the commonweal. Which got me to thinking: if those societies don’t manage democracy and are corrupt because they have cousin marriage, perhaps we in the West have democracy and aren’t so corrupt because we don’t practice cousin marriage. Which, to make a long story short, seems to be the case — at least I think I’ve accumulated an awful lot of circumstantial evidence that strongly indicates this to be the case.
But when your liberal democracy, low-corruption, low-nepotism society becomes corrupt and infested with nepotism, what will you do then?