Tag: philosophy

Musing on meditations

Someone on Gab asked me if I would write a book of philosophy, and suggested something similar to one written by one of my intellectual heroes, Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations have been a significant influence on my thinking since high school, particularly this deeply meaningful piece of advice, with which he began Book Two in the Staniforth translation:

Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.

Those who have read Meditations can probably see how the very way I live has been influenced by them; it was somewhat startling to listen to a song recently and realize that I’d written these words with my friend Paul more than 20 years ago. Much to my surprise, it’s become one of my favorites in retrospect.

Over sea, under stone
I will find myself alone
All I’ve seen and all I’ve known
In a dream far from home
I still find myself alone


In this place there’s nobody inside
In this place there’s nobody outside
I find myself alone

It seems we really do shape our future through our imaginations. Of course, what the non-reader of Meditations might fail to understand is that this is not a mournful song about loneliness, but rather a contemplative one about the need to abandon the world and its deafening, disharmonious distractions in order to find oneself, or rather, to honestly face the truth about oneself and one’s place in Creation.

A man must be able to look honestly inside before he can look accurately outside.

I don’t think I am ready yet to take on the task of writing my own Meditations. But I do have the sense that one day, I will be able to do so, though whether it will be before or after I attempt my magnum opus of economics philosophy written in the Aquinan form, I cannot say. In the meantime, perhaps the following ten aphorisms may be of some utility to a reader or two.

  • Tell yourself the unvarnished truth, even if you cannot bring yourself to admit it to anyone else.
  • We are all being deceived, in some matters, by someone, at all times.
  • An unsound foundation will never produce a sound conclusion. When a conclusion strikes you as dubious, look hard at the underlying assumptions supporting it.
  • Evil existed in the past. It will exist in the future. You are not going to eliminate it. You are not even going to eliminate it in yourself.
  • No amount of pleasure will ever satisfy a man. No amount of comfort will ever satisfy a woman.
  • Status is a dangerous and addictive psychological drug. Be deeply wary of it.
  • Leadership requires a surfeit of ego, because the good leader must be able to sacrifice his own for the benefit of his subordinates when need be.
  • Never trust an insecure man. Sooner or later, his fears will cause him to turn on those to whom he is closest.
  • The weak will always attempt to outlaw the strong.
  • Never stay down. Even the dead can haunt their killers.

A failure of dialectic

This account of feminism perverting theology is an excellent example of the way in which dialectic is impotent when faced with a literally unreasonable opponent:

The meaning of head in Ephesians 5 is critical not for egalitarians, nor even for traditionalists.  Even if head meant “source” in Ephesians 5, the passage still tells wives to submit to their husbands, and it is merely one of many which does so.  Egalitarians are lost even if they win this argument, and traditionalists are largely unfazed even if they somehow lost it.  On the other hand, the meaning of the word head is critical for complementarians, because complementarians twist themselves into knots to avoid telling wives to submit to their husbands out of a fear of seeming harsh, demeaning, and male supremacist.  The only way complementarians can sound traditional while avoiding preaching submission is to focus all of their energies on the responsibility of the husband to act in such a way that his wife naturally wants to submit.  This is not the biblical model of marriage, it is the complementarian model of marriage.  The closest to a biblical justification for this invention is the word head in Eph 5.  This is true despite the fact that even the word headship is discomforting to complementarians, who have coined the term servant leader and focus on cartoonish chivalry.

Even so, Grudem has done a great service by vigorously refuting the spurious claim about head.


Why did I do this? So that commentaries, Greek lexicons, and Bible translations in future generations will accurately teach and translate a crucial verse in the word of God. If head equals “authority over” as has been shown now in over sixty examples, then the ballgame is over. And even today, twenty-four years after my first article, there are still zero examples where a person is called “head” of someone else and is not in authority over that person. Zero.

But as Grudem notes, despite the original claim being made without evidence, and having been thoroughly debunked, the Bible is not (and never was) the issue:


That kind of evidence would normally settle the debate forever in ordinary exegesis of ordinary verses.


But this is not an ordinary verse. Because the evangelical feminists cannot lose this verse, they continue to ignore or deny the evidence. I think that is very significant.


It now seems to me that, for some people in this dispute who have thought through the issue and are committed to the egalitarian cause and have the academic knowledge to evaluate the evidence for themselves, what the Bible says on this question is not decisive. And, sadly, InterVarsity Press (USA), in spite of being given evidence of multiple factual errors in Catherine Kroeger’s article on “head” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters,5 still continues to refuse to make any changes to the article.

Grudem goes on to recount his recollection of the founding of the CBMW.  I won’t summarize it here, but you can read it in the linked piece.  After the CBMW was founded, Grudem had his second major learning experience with egalitarians. Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) asked for CBMW leadership to meet with them in an effort to find common ground.  At CBE’s urging the CBMW created what they expected would be a joint statement on abuse.  The CBMW leadership did not seem to understand that feminists are very open that their focus on abuse is about eradicating headship, not on actual abuse.  Even worse, the CBE was merely trying to take the CBMW off message, and had no interest in a mutual statement:

As we talked, there seemed to be agreement that one thing we could do together would be for both organizations to agree publicly that abuse within marriage is wrong. So we agreed to work on a joint statement on abuse. After the meeting, Mary Kassian drafted such a statement, and we got some feedback from the CBE people, and we were going to issue it. But, then on October 10, 1994, we received a letter from them saying that their board had considered it, and they would not join with us in the joint statement opposing abuse. I was shocked and disappointed when the letter came. I wondered then if their highest goal in this issue was to be faithful to Scripture above all and stop the horrors of abuse, or was to promote the egalitarian agenda. We ended up publishing the statement ourselves in CBMW NEWS (later renamed The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood).

Even after this, Grudem seems to have still expected good faith from egalitarians.  In yet another incident, Grudem and the CBMW were assured that the gender neutral version of the NIV had been scrapped:


But just before the meeting began, the IBS issued a statement saying they had “abandoned all plans” for changes in gender-related language in future editions of the NIV. So we thought the controversy was done and the NIV would remain faithful in its translation of gender-related language in the Bible.


Little did we know, however, that the Committee on Bible Translation for the NIV had not “abandoned all plans”! Far from it! Unknown to anyone outside their circles, for the next four years the Committee on Bible Translation, apparently with the quiet cooperation of people at Zondervan and the International Bible Society, continued working to produce a gender-neutral NIV. They had publicly “abandoned all plans,” but privately they were going full-steam ahead. Then suddenly in 2001, they announced unilaterally they were abandoning the agreement not to publish gender related changes in the NIV, and they published the TNIV New Testament in 2001 and the whole Bible in 2005.

In his conclusion Grudem says he originally thought the whole feminist rebellion would blow over once he and others carefully explained the correct meaning of Scripture:

I am surprised that this controversy has gone on so long. In the late 80s and early 90s when we began this, I expected that this would probably be over in ten years. By force of argument, by use of facts, by careful exegesis, by the power of the clear word of God, by the truth, I expected the entire church would be persuaded, the battle for the purity of the church would be won, and egalitarian advocates would be marginalized and have no significant influence. But it has not completely happened yet!

Unspoken in this (and complementarianism at large) is an attitude that Christian feminists are not rebelling against God in a pattern that dates back to the fall, but are the natural reaction to a suddenly harsh generation of Christian men.  This is why Grudem and his colleagues repeatedly fell for the feminist ruses, and why to this day they are most concerned with showing how reasonable they are.

I have a simple and efficient metric that permits me to avoid such problems. Any time anyone relies on “equality” for any aspect of their argument, I assume they are, at best, deluded, and on average, dishonest. I take arguments that appeal to, or rely upon, equality, about as seriously as those that rely upon “unicorns” or “leprechauns” as their justifications.

I have yet to see anyone make an honest and compelling argument that utilized equality. It is an intrinsically evil concept that always leads even otherwise honest men astray.

Mr. Grudem could have saved himself 21 years of pointless argument by applying this extraordinarily reliable metric. But at least he did the rest of us the favor of demonstrating that Churchian equalitarianism is every bit as evil and deceptive as its worldly counterpart, and that it is only a matter of time before Christian feminism drops the adjective as well as the concept of Scriptural authority.

What a pity that even Biblical scholars don’t know how to utilize the wisdom of Proverbs.

A continual dripping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike; Whoever restrains her restrains the wind, and grasps oil with his right hand.
– Proverbs 27:15-16

The Politics of the Possible

Classicist and historian VDH attempts to make sense of the Trumpist ideology, such as it is:

Tradition

Trumpism promotes traditionalism. Trump showcases “Merry Christmas!” because his parents did. He believes in dressing formally and being addressed as Mr. Trump. And he insists that his children be well-behaved and polite.

You might object that Trump is thrice-married, Petronian in his tastes, and ethically sloppy or worse in his own business dealings. No matter: Trump seeks a return to normalcy all the more. His personal excesses apparently spur his impulses for traditional norms.

Perhaps Trump is like many Baby Boomers as they enter their final decades: They look back at their parents and grandparents, and wonder how they put up with their offspring — and see how far this generation has fallen short of their forebears’ ideals, which in turn sparks a desire for a return to normalcy in the wayward. Deists were believers in the abstract who otherwise shunned a living Christianity yet thought that active religion had social value for others. Similarly, Trump is a non-practicing moralist who believes traditional morality can restore structure and guidance to society.

So Trump is foul-mouthed but wants a return of decorum; he has been conniving but thinks his own recklessness is not necessarily a model for the nation.




National Greatness 

Nationalism is another Trump axiom — the deliberate antithesis to the progressive and Socratic idea of being “a citizen of the world.” In Trump’s mind, the U.S. is a paradise thanks to its exceptional values and the hard work of past generations; the mess elsewhere (to the degree Trump worries about it) is due to human failing that is not America’s fault. Trump laments self-inflicted misery abroad but feels that he and his country are not culpable for it, and, other than Good Samarian disaster or famine relief, we cannot do too much about it in the long term.

If Mexico wants good jobs or Europe seeks to re-arm, then they can first make their own necessary adjustments to give them what they need without necessarily involving the U.S., whose first obligation is to make sure that its own citizens are well, secure, and employed. It seems that in Trump’s view, America’s poor and forgotten have claims on this country’s attention that far outweigh those of the illegal immigrant or the globe-trotting internationalist; the lathe worker in Des Moines and the real estate broker in Manhattan, by virtue of being American, deserve more of Washington’s attention than international bureaucrats or foreign royals. The least American is preferable to the greatest foreigner.

To the Left, this is xenophobic, nativist, and Peronist; in the Trump mind, it is a long-overdue pushback against 21st-centurty globalism. Good borders make good neighbors; illegal immigrants who arrive by breaking the law will certainly keep breaking the law to stay. Americans cannot pick and choose which American laws to follow; why would they allow foreigners to do what they themselves cannot and should not do?

I would describe Trump’s approach to governance, which is not an ideology proper, but rather an attitude more akin to conservatism, as the politics of the possible. Do what you can. Don’t worry about what you can’t. And always keep in mind that the best people, the very best, can accomplish more than anyone else thinks.

The God-Emperor Ascendant is the rare combination of ambition and optimism with pragmatism. It is, as we are beginning to see, a potent combination. And I, for one, will not be at all surprised if, eight years from now, he leaves the White House and enters the history books being widely regarded as a better and more popular president than Ronald Reagan.

That may sound absurd, but note that Trump is already showing signs of being much better at team-building, delegating, and holding his subordinates to high expectations than any president of the modern era.

He didn’t read Aristotle

From Gab:

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Had dinner with a political operative friend last night. He said “I had no idea that all it took to win was to call Democrats and media worthless pieces of shit all the time. I thought you had to be reasonably nice. Trump has shown me the light. Fuck the Left.” 


This is an exact quote. 


It’s called “the art of rhetoric”. See Chapter 10 of SJWs Always Lie.

Left-wingers will only change their minds if they experience enough emotional pain to provoke the desire to avoid it. They are entirely irrational; the more intelligent they are, the more highly developed their facility for rationalizing away any logical inconsistencies is. And that’s why those on the Left are always calling people on the Right stupid, racist, and so on, because they are attempting to convince us by inflicting emotional pain and triggering aversive reactions. It may sound like insults, but in reality, that is how the Left makes converts.

Of course, their understanding of dialectic speakers is as poor as the average dialecticals understanding of rhetoricals. It really shocks them when their name-calling has no effect. In fact, that is a good way to discern a right-wing rhetorical; the more they are affected by name-calling, the more they are rhetorically minded despite their protestations.

I don’t care

For future reference, this will be my response to all future queries concerning whether I heard about X doing, or saying, anything, and what I think about X doing, or saying, Y, about Z.

I don’t care. I’m not interested.

My friends are my friends. Castalia authors are Castalia authors. I don’t give an airborne rodent’s posterior if they happen to do or say something that offends your ideological, religious, ethnic, national, or racial sensitivities.

I realize this won’t stop the occasional idiot running to me with “did you hear what X did” like a teenage girl who just heard the rumor that the head cheerleader cheated on her boyfriend with the math teacher, but for the record, that will be my response.

I don’t care. I’m not interested.

And if you have a problem with that, then please leave and find some other corner of the Internet in which to reside. It’s a big place. Take your crusade, whatever it might be, elsewhere. You’ve got no shortage of options. And I’m not interested in your opinion of me or anyone else. Talking about me, or about someone else, rather than the subject of the post, is an excellent way to get yourself banned here.

This is not, and has never been, a free speech zone. I’ll cheerfully ban you for annoying me or trying to waste my time. And I have a low tolerance for gammas, particularly gamma midwits.

I’m done trying to talk sense into the senseless, or to explain rationales to the irrational. You’d think I, of all people, would know better.

Thomas Sowell: 10 great quotes

1. “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

2. “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

3. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

4. “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

5. “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is: he confuses it with feeling.”

6. “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.”

7. “The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.”

8. “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

9. “No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”

10. “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”

Mailvox: get over your cognitive capabilities

Some Guy is trying to learn how to stop thinking that being smart is somehow worthy of accolades:

I am and have been in the VHIQ spectrum for the majority of my life. About 2 years ago a situation in my marriage sent me reeling into therapy and I have spent a little over a year in a special form of therapy.

The reason that I bring this up is that although I have a relatively high IQ, I naturally attach too much personal worth to my intelligence and the imagined respect that it brings to me. After having dealt with a few, but by no means all of the underlying issues, I am now at a place where (even though I still react the way a VHIQ would reflexively) I can at least back up and see the situation for what it is when I review new information.

In our therapy, we refer to these as “programs” that are installed at an early age, and that run without any cognitive thought occurring. These are mostly self-defeating tendencies that plague people like me our entire lives. It has indeed made a qualitative difference in my ability to understand information, because I am not emotionally invested in the outcome (although I have to try very hard for this to occur most of the time). Do you think this could account for some of the difference you are noticing between the two groups?

Nearly everyone wants to be smarter, better-looking, wealthier, healthier, more athletic, more popular, and sexier. (Virtually no one is willing to actually do much about any of those things either, but that’s neither here nor there.) And yet, for some reason, smart people seem to have an incredible amount of trouble understanding that the “respect” they are due for being more intelligent is about as significant as the amount of respect they harbor for someone else being more attractive, more athletic, or more popular.

My first piece of advice for anyone who is intelligent is this: get over it.

Intelligence will get you nothing but a free ride at a US university if you’re sufficiently good at taking tests. That’s it. It means that you’ve got a larger caliber intellectual gun than most, but if your ammunition (education) is deficient, you don’t know how to aim it (discipline), where to aim it (wisdom), or you’re unwilling to pull the trigger (laziness or fear of failure), your intelligence means precisely nothing.

Part of the problem, I think, is that high intelligence manifests itself during the formative years, and therefore tends to become an intrinsic aspect of one’s self-identity in a way that pther characteristics that require more time to take shape do. I think of it in much the same context that the girls who are unusually pretty when they are little girls; they tend to still believe they are great beauties even when they are overweight or surpassed by later bloomers.

One of the most valuable things anyone ever told me wasn’t actually addressed to me, but to a smart girl I knew, who told another girl that she felt like she had all these great thoughts circling through her head, but she just couldn’t articulate them. The other girl told her that she didn’t have any great thoughts, she just had a feeling. One’s thoughts, such as they are, don’t mean anything and cannot be judged until they are articulated, preferably in writing.

So, no one should be enamored of one’s intelligence or proud of it. Be proud of what you have done with your intelligence, if you have actually accomplished anything, instead. That doesn’t mean one should engage in false modesty or hesitate to wield one’s intelligence as a weapon if the situation calls for it, only that one should be aware that it is nothing more than one of the many tools at one’s disposal.

As for programs, Mike Cernovich discusses this in MAGA Mindset. The self-narration with which provide commentary on our own thoughts and actions tend to have a powerful effect on the results we produce. Mike makes use of particular mantra he explains in the book; I don’t have a particular mantra, but I do have a set of phrases to which I turn from time to time when I need motivation. Mine probably would not work for most people, since I thrive on negative and competitive motivation, but they are a similar form of cognitive self-programming.

But no, these programs do not account, in any way, for the differences I have observed between the conventional high IQ mind and the unconventional high IQ mind. It’s akin to asking if someone who is color-blind can motivate himself into seeing green properly.

TIA in audio

On one side of the argument is a collection of godless academics with doctorates from the finest universities in England, France, and the United States. On the other is THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST author Vox Day, armed with nothing more than historical and statistical facts. Day strips away the pseudo-scientific pretentions of New Atheism with his intelligent application of logic, history, military science, political economy, and well-documented research. The arguments of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray are all methodically exposed and discredited as Day provides extensive evidence proving, among other things, that:

  • More than 93 percent of all the wars in human history had no relation to religion
  • The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over professing Jews, Muslims, or atheists, and executed fewer people on an annual basis than the state of Texas
  • Atheists are almost four times more likely to be imprisoned than Christians
  • “Red” state crime is primarily in “blue” counties
  • Sexually abused girls are 55 times more likely to commit suicide than girls raised Catholic

In the twentieth century, atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined. THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST provides the rational thinker with empirical proof that atheism’s claims against religion are unfounded in logic, fact, and science.

Now in audio from Castalia House, TIA clocks in at just under 10 hours and is narrated by Jon Mollison. You can listen to a sample from the audiobook at Audible. You may also wish to note that ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is also available in audiobook format.

Also, in case you might be interested in more Selenoth, THE LAST WITCHKING is free on Amazon today.

The IQ delta and the Last Man

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man helped me articulate the difference between the smart and the brilliant, or to use the terms that are less easily confused, the VHIQ and the UHIQ.

The Fukuyama text is in blockquotes, my observations are bullet-pointed.

From By Way of an Introduction:

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today’s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

  • Remarkable consensuses are reliably incorrect.
  • Liberal democracy absolutely does not constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution or the final form of human government. 
  • It would not be unreasonable to use “the end of history” to describe a genuine such end point and final form, given the Hegelian-Marxian context. Fukuyama is clearly using History in the progressive intellectual sense, not the prosaic sense. It’s actually a rather clever title in that regard.
  • It’s also a ludicrous and anti-historical idea, albeit one certain to prove seductive to men of influence for precisely the same reason that Keynesian economics and Ricardian trade theory have.

After dealing with the midwit critics who have had trouble dealing with the idea of a History that is not wholly synonymous with history, he plants his flag; an act I suspect he has come to regret.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article’s many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the “struggle for recognition.”

  • Fukuyama clearly declares that he believes in a specific, directional Marxian-style History which will eventually come to a predictable end. 
  • Given the context of the article, Fukuyama is definitely declaring that liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government”.
  • He’s wrong. I don’t know his economic reasoning or his “struggle for recognition” yet, but I know that he is wrong and I know that I will be able to prove it. I can even disprove the first prt to my own satisfaction: given that he is not an economist, his economic argument must be entirely based on 1990s economic orthodoxy, which is already in tatters and was insufficient to support the philosophical case in the first place.

And here is where the tendency towards binary, or at least limited, thinking on the part of the VHIQ betrays itself.

In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefnitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness, and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

  • A prediction about the future obviously revolves around both currently viable alternatives as well as potentially viable alternatives that are not visible today.
  • The deeper and more profound question does not concern the goodness of liberal democracy, but rather the existence of self-destructive internal contradictions in liberal democracy. Systems fail due to their internal contradictions; communism failed because the impossibility of socialist calculation slowed economic growth vis-a-vis capitalism. SJWism always fails due to the impossibility of social justice convergence preventing the converged organization from performing its original function. Liberal democracy – or as it is more properly termed – limited democracy – fails for much the same reason that communism does; it creates perverse incentive systems.
  • No, we cannot assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefnitely.
  • Yes, liberal democracy is not only prey, it is prone to internal contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system. Forget eternity, this is already visible everywhere from California to Switzerland.
  • Yes, these problems these problems are obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles. Not only that, but they are so serious that they will necessarily either lead to the collapse of liberal democracy or the collapse of society as a whole.

Keep in mind that these are my initial thoughts about the book by page xxi of the introduction. The clean room, as I have termed it, is already splattered with mud. Fukuyama is an erudite, thoughtful, intelligent and educated man. And yet, his enthusiasm for his potentially significant idea blinded him to its obvious flaws? This is the distinction between the VHIQ and the UHIQ. Compare this with SJWAL or Cuckservative, both of which are considerably more modest in scope.

How many potential errors can you find in either that even begin to compare with the obvious errors in this bestselling work of vast socio-political influence, which is so riddled with flaws that the author has, apparently, felt the need to blatantly lie about his original thesis?

The IQ delta

It has been observed that the exceptionally intelligent think differently than those with conventional minds, even those which most people would consider to be highly intelligent. The difference is qualitative, not merely quantitative, in nature, and is akin to the difference between the genuinely mathematical mind and the non-mathematical mind. It is, to use one acquaintance’s example, the difference between the minds that can ascend the mountain by the winding path or by climbing straight up, and the mind that takes a helicopter ride directly to the peak.

I have been asked on more than a few occasions to explain what the qualitative differences are and to provide some perspective on how the different thought processes work. Now, obviously I am somewhat handicapped in explaining this because I have never not thought the way that I do now, but I do have the advantage of observing considerably more conventional thinkers than any conventional thinker, no matter how intelligent, has been able to observe non-conventional thinkers. However, upon beginning to read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, I believe I may finally able to articulate a few of these differences.

There are a few observations I have made over the years that are of limited utility in differentiating between what I think of as “very smart” vs “brilliant”. The terms themselves are meaningless and entirely subjective here, to put it in terms the quantitatively minded can accept, let’s call them VHIQ vs UHIQ for the time being, with the understanding that what applies to the VHIQ also applies to midwits and average minds, whereas what applies to UHIQ does not.

And FFS, if you’re reading this and think something might apply to you, please understand that is not a signal to decide that you are an unconventional thinker or exceptionally intelligent and share that fascinating observation with everyone. That very reaction is a pretty reliable indicator that you’re not. If you can’t fathom that, go ask a very tall person how excited he was this morning about discovering that he was tall.

Keep in mind that these are tendencies, not iron-clad laws. If they don’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it. On average, the responses will fall into six categories:

  1. Huh?
  2. Hmm.
  3. Vox just wants to talk about how smart he is again.
  4. Vox is right/wrong because [x].
  5. OT: Something off-topic because IMPORTANT. Link goes to the Drudge Report, which no one reads.
  6. Hey, I can use this as an excuse to talk about ME!

Regardless:

  • VHIQ inclines towards binary either/or thinking and taking sides. UHIQ inclines towards probabilistic thinking and balancing between contradictory possibilities.
  • VHIQ seeks understanding towards application or justification, UHIQ seeks understanding towards holistic understanding.
  • VHIQ refines the original thought of others, UHIQ synthesizes multiple original thoughts.
  • VHIQ rationalizes logical conclusions, UHIQ accepts logical conclusions. This is ironic because VHIQ considers itself to be highly logical, UHIQ considers itself to be investigative.
  • VHIQ recognizes the truths in the works of the great thinkers of the past and applies them. UHIQ recognizes the flaws in the thinking of the great thinkers of the past and explores them.
  • VHIQ usually spots logical flaws in an argument. UHIQ usually senses them.
  • VHIQ enjoys pedantry. UHIQ hates it. Both are capable of utilizing it at will.
  • VHIQ is uncomfortable with chaos and seeks to impose order on it, even if none exists. UHIQ is comfortable with chaos and seeks to recognize patterns in it.
  • VHIQ is spergey and egocentric. UHIQ is holistic and solipsistic.
  • VHIQ will die on a conceptual hill. UHIQ surrenders at the first reasonable show of force.
  • VHIQ attempts to rationalize its errors. UHIQ sees no point in hesitating to admit them.
  • VHIQ seeks to prove the correctness of its case. UHIQ doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the jury.
  • VHIQ believes in the unique power of SCIENCE. UHIQ sees science as a conceptual framework of limited utility.
  • VHIQ seeks to rank and order things. UHIQ seeks to recognize and articulate concepts.
  • VHIQ is competitive. UHIQ doesn’t keep score.
  • VHIQ asks “how can this be used?” UHIQ asks “what does this mean?”

This obviously doesn’t explain how a UHIQ thinker thinks per se, but it might provide some perspective concerning the qualitative differences between conventional high IQ thinkers and unconventional high IQ thinkers previously observed by others. For example, when I read something, even something about which I am inherently dubious, I do so in what is essentially an intellectual clean room. I am not merely open to being persuaded, I am, in the moment, fully believing whatever the author is saying.

However, upon encountering an obvious falsehood, non sequitur, bait-and-switch, or erroneous leap of logic, the clean room is muddied. The more mud that accumulates, and the more rapidly it is accumulated, the more certain that I am of the text containing errors. I don’t know exactly what they are yet, because I’m not reading critically, and I don’t retain more than a general sense of where on the page the mud is, but I know where to go and look for it, and perhaps more importantly, I know with almost 100 percent certainty that I will find something there. Every now and then I pick up a false reading, but that doesn’t happen more than 2-3 times per year.

I’ll demonstrate this in action in a longer post about Fukuyama’s book, specifically, the introduction, in a few hours. In the meantime:

The topics of genius and degeneration are only special cases of the more general problem involved in the evaluation of human capacities, namely the quantitative versus qualitative. There are those who insist that all differences are qualitative, and those who with equal conviction maintain that they are exclusively quantitative. The true answer is that they are both. General intelligence, for example, is undoubtedly quantitative in the sense that it consists of varying amounts of the same basic stuff (e.g., mental energy) which can be expressed by continuous numerical measures like intelligence Quotients or Mental-Age scores, and these are as real as any physical measurements are. But it is equally certain that our description of the difference between a genius and an average person by a statement to the effect that he has an IQ greater by this or that amount, does not describe the difference between them as completely or in the same way as when we say that a mile is much longer than an inch. The genius (as regards intellectual ability) not only has an IQ of say 50 points more than the average person, but in virtue of this difference acquires seemingly new aspects (potentialities) or characteristics. These seemingly new aspects or characteristics, in their totality, are what go to make up the “qualitative” difference between them [9, p. 134].

Wechsler is saying quite plainly that those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human being.