Sixteen Volts

Every smart kid learned in school how dangerous it is to be smarter than everybody else. I find it amazing that most of the smart people who post here seem to have internalized this lesson so completely they don't realize it's an act.

Every organization that has to compete in the real world against objective standards knows perfectly well the value of intelligence, and aims to seek and promote it as well as it can. So it is always a funny sight when an intelligent person who knows perfectly well how important and beneficial intelligence has been for him or her goes to pretend in public that intelligence is not really that important. Anything to keep the hordes of marching morons from attacking you in their seething resentment.

Of course, this gets even funnier when the IQ deniers temporarily forget their act and start denouncing the intelligence of their opponents, that is, the people who explicitly point out that intelligence is important. In this case, it might be fun to ask the intelligent IQ deniers what was the IQ of the person with the lowest IQ who they considered to be their intellectual peer. Even professional bleeding hearts who try to avoid being judgemental will typically prefer to respect stupid people from a safe distance. Their actions and choices usually more than amply demonstrate that in reality, the intelligent IQ deniers absolutely despise people whose intelligence is significantly lower than theirs. Sometimes they even accidentally reveal this attitude explicitly when they think that nobody is watching, as in the post "Army Signs on Mouth-Breathers" at Pandagon, although now that I tried to link to it, I noticed this post has mysteriously vanished from the site. I wonder why, since especially the comments therein were full of such delicious mockery of people who can't get high scores in the Armed Forces standard test. (Which would be the majority of people.)

The Danimal once wrote that the funniest thing about "The Bell Curve" is the way that its vocal opponents implicitly validate its basic message by being college-educated whites whose IQ is over 125. After all, the main message of the book is that IQ essentially puts you in your place in a meritocratic society. I am not entirely sure how that is supposed to be controversial, and for the whole crapstorm of criticisms that this book fanned up, I doubt that anyone can point me to a valid and coherent criticism of the concept of IQ or The Bell Curve that was written by someone whose IQ was less than 85. Or even 100. So apparently IQ is not entirely meaningless, since a certain level of IQ seems to be absolutely necessary for somebody to be able to be a good leftist and denounce the whole notion of IQ and its practical importance!

But perhaps the book is opposed for its supposed moral implications. Such arguments, as Jamie Whyte pointed out in his little book "Crimes Against Logic", implicitly admit that the facts indeed do have those moral implications if they turn out to be true. Or perhaps the leftists just try to cope with their cognitive dissonance using the tacit assumption that intelligence really is important, but only the benevolent and enlightened elite should be allowed to know this, because if everyone knew this, the masses would engage in an orgy of destruction that culminates in the eerie smoke rising from the concentration camp. Or something.

By the way, about that moral superiority. I find it pretty strange that the people who are worried that admitting that intelligence is important and that different groups are blessed with different amounts of intelligence will lead to slavery and oppression, are the ones in this debate who are constantly saying that their opponents are "subhuman" (or some equivalent thereof) and using eliminationist rhetoric. Come on, just read through any debate about this topic. The frustrated leftist haughtily saying "If you believe that not all people have equal value, then you are subhuman scum" has a nice self-refuting Moorean ring to it, don't you think? Just like the other classic lefty favourite "If you believe that intelligence is important, then you are a stupid moron".

Curiously enough, leftists seem to have no compunctions in pointing out various ways that whites are deficient or inferior than other groups whenever they think that they have found some. This is especially true, as I pointed out in my earlier post "Inbred Jed", when it comes to the rural whites in the American South. Leftists will triumphantly announce and list the many ways in which the Southerners are inherently inferior as they are less intelligent, more prone to crime and violence, lazy, obese... All that you'd need to do is to substitute "black" for "Southerner" in these rants (and perhaps "watermelon" for "grits"), and the result would be something that you might only find in a neo-nazi website.

In any debate about IQ, the leftists are also practically guaranteed to use the strawman argument in which their opponents are supposedly claiming that all whites are smarter than all nonwhites anywhere. They can then triumphantly refute this argument by pointing out some successful and intelligent black man and mockingly ask their opponent if they think that he is stupid, uh, uh? Perhaps the reality-based side should also start using the exact same argument, in the spirit that TangoMan of Gene Expression suggests in "Liberal Duality on Lewontinism". So next time when some leftist claims that people of colour are "oppressed", just sneer how silly he is to think that all white people everywhere are better off than all black people, and triumphantly point out individual examples to trivially refute this. With suitable sleights of hand, you might even succeed in painting the leftist as the "racist" who doesn't believe that all people are equally good in everything.

By the way, sorry, did I say "black" and "white"? That was certainly very silly of me, since as we all have heard a thousand times, races don't really exist. What we call "races" are nothing but imaginary social constructs with no biological basis whatsoever. This is why it is so very strange that I have noticed, based on my observational experience, that whenever somebody says that races don't really exist, the person making this claim always seems to turn out to be white. This curious correlation makes me at least somewhat suspicious of the truthiness of this claim. I don't know if the proponents of this claim have tested it by, instead of preaching it only to each other, travelling to Latin America, Africa or Asia to see how this idea would be received there. Oh, I can already imagine the young leftist in his long hair and round glasses explaining to the oppressed people in Soweto how there are no real differences between them so that they are all brothers, united in the fight against the eternal oppression perpetuated by the straight able-bodied white males.

More seriously, as the frequent commenter Catilina once noted in his blog, white leftists rarely seem to realize that they are indeed white and exclusively products of the Western culture. After all, the Western leftist imagines that under all those superficial differences of funny hats, exotic food and different music that are ultimately just Disneyland, everybody already thinks just like him. In reality, even though all cultures are equal, no other culture on Earth has anything that ideologically resembles the modern Western leftist even for the slightest, a fact that the leftist apologetics cannot even begin to explain away.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, July 06, 2006 at 10:30 AM