Smart people tend to think smart people are immune from irrational beliefs. The smart scale has belief at one end and rationality at the other. The conceit of smart people is that they populate the rational end, while dumb people are at the other end. This leads to hubris. Smart people often fail to examine their own beliefs, assuming their every utterance is the model of rationality. It also leads to blindly going along with the crackpot ideas popularized by pseudo-intellectual posers adept at playing the role of smart guy.
The fact is, that smart scale is a fiction. Smart people are just as prone to nutty ideas as anyone else. Belief as a stand-alone cognitive trait is largely independent of our ability to work the puzzles of life. History is full of examples. Francis Bacon dabbled in the occult and alchemy. Ben Franklin was a Rosicrucian. J.B.S. Haldane was the father of population genetics and a dedicated communist, then a socialist and at one point a fan of eastern mysticism. The most bloody ideologies were the invention of intelligent men.
Another consequences of thinking belief and rationality are mutually exclusive is the mistake of assuming a rational motive to the crazy actions of smart people. For example, Steve Sailer thinks people like Paige Harden are running a complex ruse when they go out in public and howl from the Progressive catechism. After all, Harden is a smart person who spends all day working tough problems related to human genetic diversity. Sailer jumps to the conclusion that she must be doing this to safeguard her research.
That’s comforting to a smart guy like Sailer as it appeals to his preference for a wheels-within-wheels explanation of the world. The truth is though, smart people are just as prone to group think and crazy talk as everyone else. Read Mx. Harden’s social media feed and you come away with the sense that she is every bit as nutty as the hormonal feminists from the womyn’s studies department. She believes these things, because these are the things her social class now believes. All of her smart friends hate white people too.
That’s the age old error regarding the Left. The default assumption is that they are acting as rational players. If they are rational, yet arriving at insane ideas like communism, egalitarianism and multiculturalism, they must have the wrong facts or a mistake in their reasoning. After all, they are smart people and smart people always seek the factually correct answer. Therefore, the only explanation for their mistake is they lack the facts or have a flaw in their logic. Fix that and the radical will embrace you as a brother.
The bourgeois Marxists of a century ago are now bourgeois anti-whites of today. Read old books from a century ago and it is remarkable to see how many smart people bought into fascism, socialism and communism. The New Deal intellectuals were all fans of European fascism and many were communists. The British ruling class was saturated with various forms of socialist. Today, you cannot be a Cloud Person without embracing some degree of anti-white hatred. It’s what’s come to define the Western ruling elites. It’s their religion.
Of course, most of the bourgeois socialists of a century ago were serious about their radicalism right up until it required sacrifice. It is the old gag about the pig and the chicken discussing breakfast. The pig is committed, while the chicken is merely involved. You see that with the modern anti-whites. They talk like MLK and live like the KKK. You can be sure that Mx.Harden makes sure to avoid the spicier parts of Austin like Montopolis, which is just seven percent white. She appreciates her diversity from a great distance.
Just as pointing out the outlandish contradictions between how bourgeois socialists lived and what they advocated had no effect on them, pointing out Mx. Harden’s hypocrisy is a pointless exercise as well. She’s not motivated in this area by rationality. In fact, she will hate you all the more for having tried to force her to focus on herself. The whole point of being an anti-white is to hide from her own whiteness. Her belonging to the anti-white anointed is all about self-abnegation. She hates white people because she hates herself.
Modernity is based on the false assumption that man is rational, at least in the general sense. That people wish to be satisfied in their material wants and at peace with their neighbors. The truth is, people are motivated by a quest for grace. Humans want to believe the universe cares for them and it has a purpose for their lives. Therefore they seek out some avenue to reach that state of grace, to give purpose to their lives. Ask Paige Harden about her research, and you will get some statement about social justice.
That’s the key to understanding the current crisis. Our ruling elites believe they are on the side of history, so the results of their actions must be the will of the heavens. They don’t measure the results empirically or think through the consequences. When they see white people complaining about anti-white rhetoric, the anti-whites see this as proof of their righteousness. Marxist said the recalcitrant working classes were suffering from false consciousness. Today’s anti-whites accuse recalcitrant whites of white privilege.
The quote “an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it” works well here. Not sure who said it but I love that quote because it explains so much about the world we live in, and strips away the pretense that intellectuals have much to offer in guiding us and setting policy.
White shabbatz goyim like Page Hardin are in fact motivated by a cold, though mistaken, calculation: they think that, if they collaborate with the Jews in liquidating White Western Civ and the White race itself, both projects well underway now, the Jews will let them survive.
“Some ideas are so stupid that only very intelligent people would believe them.”
— Jared Taylor
Smart people are capable of convincing themselves of anything. They can mold, develop, and contort crazy ideas at such length and complexity that those ideas no longer appear crazy at all. Intelligence can be one of the most impenetrable blocks to wisdom. That is why the average plumber is probably more earthy and sensible than the typical college professor.
Couldn’t agree more. Was thinking about something similar to this the other day but in relation to Sam Harris. Even though his solution to the problem of purpose is not self-hatred, I was thinking that for all the crazy things people believe in, the most irrational belief of all may be that we’re all rational beings. The evidence points seems to point conclusively that we’re not, we’re good at _rationalizing_. There may be a few exceptions, like Harris himself, but any attempt at building a system that makes this belief a core assumption is bound to fail.
What smart people are good at is steering things in the direction they want them to go. I had a student once, sharp as a whip, IQ of around 145. Her special joy was figuring out how to lie to people effectively and not get caught. As an artist, it was her true medium.
Her parents had her in all sorts of medical programs trying to figure out why their daughter couldn’t do this or that skill. Couldn’t seem to learn math. Couldn’t organize her homework or turn it in. etc. etc. I told them one day, “Your daughter is playing an elaborate game with you.”
I would set the kid up just to watch her fall right into the trap, catch her in a whopper, then turn it back on her. It was the best thing ever because it was truly fun for me. She had finally met somebody who had caught onto her game. That’s when she started refusing to come to attend my class, feign sickness, etc.
Smart people, the ones who understand “Figures lie and liars figure” and deploy it to maximum advantage, are generally playing an elaborate game with everybody else. Most of the time they don’t even believe what they are saying. They are saying it because they want YOU to believe it, so that they can extract what they want from you. By the time you figure it out, they’re rich.
This story as somewhat of a happy ending for the parents. I saw them a few months ago as their daughter was getting ready to sign on the dotted line for college. I asked how she was doing, and the mom replied, “We just emancipated her. She signed all of her college loan paperwork, and we refused to co-sign it. So, if she screws up, we’re not financially liable.”
Smart is as smart does.
That’s the age old error regarding the Left. The default assumption is that they are acting as rational players. If they are rational, yet arriving at insane ideas like communism,egalitarianism and multiculturalism, they must have the wrong facts or a mistake in their reasoning.
Umnnhhh…yup!
In creation, God brought order from chaos (disorder.) Lucifer rebelled and prefers Chaos/Disorder. The “gender theory” pushers are the edgiest of the Disorder worshipers, but the Socialist/Communist bunch are right up there with their denial of property rights.
OT: Z-man, this is the first time I’ve been able to load this site since Friday. I thought you might be under a DDoS attack.
It’s a bit off-topic, but you do link to Malcolm Gladwell’s Wikipedia page under the entirely appropriate “pseudo-intellectual posers” red-link, and I can’t help pointing out that he’s even more dishonest than that.
I don’t know much about the guy, but I’m something of an NBA basketball fan, and it caught my eye that he did a podcast in 2016 called “Revisionist History- Ep.#3: The Big Man Can’t Shoot”. Here’s the spiel: “Wilt Chamberlain’s brilliant career was marred by one, deeply inexplicable decision: He chose a shooting technique that made him one of the worst foul shooters in basketball—even though he had tried a better alternative. Why do smart people do dumb things?” Gladwell claimed that Wilt had tried underhand free throw shooting, had hit 28 of 32 in his 100 point game, but had been uncomfortable shooting “granny” style and had given it up.
One problem. I started watching NBA basketball in San Francisco in 1964-1965, the year Wilt was traded to the 76ers. And I remembered Wilt shooting free throws underhanded. Badly. https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/c/chambwi01.html And the 100 point game was in 1962.
I went into details on a post on his YouTube page for the podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX2v9GDnmHw , but Gladwell or a minion deleted it and I didn’t keep a copy. But just looking at YouTube videos it was obvious that Wilt was shooting overhand in ’62 and had switched to underhand in ’63-64 through ’65-’66 when his free throw percentage had already fallen off a cliff, but it didn’t help, and he abandoned it. Gladwell came up with his cockamamie theory, and no doubt was able to get good gold turning it into a personal development spiel, and it was too good to check or, more probably, he figured out that it was nonsense (he talked to Rick Barry – a rookie in ’65-’66 – for the podcast, who talks about how bad Wilt’s underhand style was, but Gladwell doesn’t acknowledge the contradiction) but it was too good to stop cashing in on.
And, as I said, he’s deleted my rebuttal, which I only put up a few months back. A dishonest POS.
The following passage detracted from an otherwise excellent essay:
“The whole point of being an anti-white is to hide from her own whiteness. Her belonging to the anti-white anointed is all about self-abnegation. She hates white people because she hates herself.”
If this line of reasoning is to be taken seriously, for starters, it needs substantiation. None is given. It is speculation.
Perhaps there are people where this process occurs. But I know several people for whom it is not true. If anything, they feel they have become honorary people of color due to their superior wisdom, comapassion, and empathy. They are being irrational (to put it politely), but they show no evidence of hating themselves. In fact, they like themselves far too much.
So please, Z, get off the self-hatred-explains-it-all kick. It makes your excellent work less credible.
Hating themselves can be externalized, look at how they work so hard to tear down Western civilization, it’s people and values, attacks it’s leading figures, support importing the 3rd world into the West.
They are tearing down the very structure that supports them. This is self-loathing made manifest if not the actions of suicidal maniacs
Nothing about “the madness of crowds” has changed, whatever the makeup of the crowds..In 1700, the elites of Europe unanimously believed that killing witches was essential, and they killed hundreds of thousands…
They were on to something. Crazy cat ladies, old graying childless sucking on lemon flavored glass shards. Shrill and brittle straw haired prudes. Dumpy sacks of cholesterol and estrogen who think masculinity is measured in angriness.
Their vote matters. They’re destroying western civilization from within. They are drowning in their lives and they’ll use your body like a fucking water weenie and not think twice.
Something about Delenda Est.
Z, in addition to Gladwell you can add this smug clown to your list of a*holes to make an example of.
https://eand.co/how-american-economics-is-ruining-your-life-d66bcb4bac45
His bio :
Umair Haque is one of the world’s leading thinkers. A member of the Thinkers50, the authoritative ranking of the globe’s top management experts, he has published two books through Harvard Business Publishing, where he also authored Harvard Business Review’s top blog for several years, on subjects including economics, leadership, innovation, finance, and careers. Umair has held senior positions in finance and strategy, and holds degrees from McGill University and London Business School.
There’s a Canadian researcher who’s big on this, Keith Stanovich. Z Man, I’d thoroughly recommend his book, Rationality and the Reflective Mind. He’s got a term for being stupid despite having a high IQ: Dysrationalia.
Here’s an interesting article of his dealing briefly with the subject.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rational-and-irrational-thought-the-thinking-that-iq-tests-miss/
Yeah. The smartest, most successful people I know are far more likely to be left-wing nutters. While we struggle with the idea that smart people believe stupid things, they are happy that smart people have all reached the same smart conclusion.
One of the more interesting developments is that folks on our side have begun learning that facts don’t much matter in these sorts of discussions.
“Therefore, the only explanation for their mistake is they lack the facts or have a flaw in their logic. Fix that and the radical will embrace you as a brother.”
Jonathan Swift’s idea about that:
“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired…”
Too much Miss Harden, whoever she is.
There’s a scene from “Band of Brothers” that I always think of when subjects like this come up. It’s the one where Winters and Welsh botch some first aid and Doc Roe lets them have it.
Welsh: “He was in a lot of pain. We didn’t know what to do.”
Roe: “Yeah, well you oughta! You are officers, you are grown-ups, you oughta know!”
That’s my attitude toward Harden and everyone like her. You’re an adult; you have a responsibility to know these things, instead of bumbling your way through life like a petulant child, waiting for your chance to get someone killed.
My own interpretation, though, is that Harden (and Marx and Freud and all the other civilizational pests like them) aren’t really smart. Or, they’re smart in the same way as Raymond Babbitt: there’s one thing they can do supremely well, and they suck at everything else. The problem is, what they do supremely well happens to be evil.
She hates white people because she hates herself.
It’s a common idea in right-wing thought that white leftists’ hatred of other whites is ultimately a form of self-hatred, but I don’t think that’s true. They’re operating by the same principle as Jehovah’s Witnesses (or anyone else with adamant religious views). They know the truth, which is that the “uninitiated” are godless sinners, but they themselves, being initiates in the “truth,” are in fact better than all those other idiots. So far from being a form of self-hatred, this sort of thinking is a form of separating one’s self from the stupid “common herd” and exalting one’s self for being “right.” In effect, you can have a universalist message that humanity in general is sinful, but you yourself “aren’t like that” because you’ve “see the light.”
And in this mode of conceiving of the world, the hostility of everybody else against is actually a form of confirmation of your own superiority. The JW actually likes it if you slam the door in his/her face. Just shows what a benighted fool you are, and how much better they are. So the leftists that you argue with just get validated in their self-righteousness when you try to point out to them that they are factually wrong. What a vile person that shows you to be, and how smug they feel at being a better person than you!
I’ve always thought that the moralizing tone of leftist politics shows it to be simply a replacement for sanctimonious religion that’s suited for the godless. And you’re no more likely to “argue” someone out of their leftist world view than an atheist is to convince a JW (or a hardcore Catholic or Baptist or whatever) that their view of God is wrong. If it were all a matter of logical argumentation, there would be no need for “faith.”
This is just a matter of “internal” group identity, which is why they basically compare themselves to other whites. The “other” that’s constituted by the “darker” races on whose behalf they leftists conceive of themselves as working are just props in this internal game of “I’m better than you.”
Replacing your own identity with a group identity looks to me like self loathing. Deviating from the group because you think you’re correct takes a certain amount of self confidence.
When trannies became the new thing to love, Democrats all fell in line even though none of them cared about the issue before. The signal was sent out, you are not part of the group if you don’t believe “this.” They cannot fathom not being part of the group. Without that group identity they don’t see themselves as having much value.
Sauron;
All very true. And, this is one of the best explications of the of the individual psychic rewards of tribalism that I’ve seen.
IMHO, this entire discussion has been deformed by the hidden assumption that the deep human instinct/desire for tribal affiliation is gone from the West. IOW, this phenomenon isn’t about self hatred at all, it is about a deep need to belong.
No different from Middle School: You know intellectually at some level that the mean girls clique is made up of really shallow a**holes, but you still long to sit at their lunch table and bask in the envious stares of your status rivals.
So the need for some ‘smart people’ to maintain tribal membership evidently far outweighs their demonstrably shallow allegiance to the principles of the so-called science that they just f*n love.
It is pretty easy to cite a pos-hoc Evolutionary Biology explanation. In the bad old days a man, much less a woman alone stood small chance of passing down their genes. So a deep seated inclination to join and be loyal to a tribe makes perfect survival sense.
Let me confirm this from close association with lots of progs. They don’t hate themselves, nor do they hate their culture. To the contrary: they think they’re just peachy. They love themselves, more than they ought to, and they love their gay parades, their numinous Negroes, their bikelanes, and everything else that is unmistakably theirs. It’s those other whites — Derb calls them badwhites — and their awful culture featuring patriotism, guns, and traditional Christianity that they hate.
In fairness to Leftists, quite aside from their bigotry, inhumanity, and the fact that they are human beings in spite of it all – They may be an expression of some ‘antigene’ in a species that is, after all, better-adapted to extracting root-vegetables, hunting mastodons and living in caves than operating nuclear power plants, building robots, living in high-rise apartments, working in giant government buildings processing records, watching free pornography on the internet and working out ‘vegan’ diets.
It’s anyone’s guess what the human race – or the natural world in general – will look like five thousand years from now. We know that the Earth is a kind of middle-aged planet, and that it has the ability to sustain life for millions of years to come. It’s true that there shall be no more industrial revolutions (all the readily-accessible materials for such a thing are stripped away, and their future development is well outside the human time-scale).
Forgive me, I’m just trying to work out why, in this late post-industrial interlude between stable periods, we are surrounded by fanatics who seem to want total annihilation of the human achievement, without knowing they want it.
A pathogen? Yes. A cleanser for future development – the way the Bubonic Plague was? Could be.
The U.S. is a Zionist petri dish and our people’s minds are the fruits of a decades-long propaganda campaign. A national PsyOp. Scarily successful. The perpetrators must be observing with amused satisfaction.
People are generally motivated by emotion, what ‘feels nice’ and has been rewarding for them in the past. Smart people are simply better at rationalizing their beliefs whether or not those beliefs are nutty.
Excellent essay, but the implications are tough. The sixth paragraph really brought it home to me, that we are locked in a room with people who hate us. The source of this poison in some way traces to the higher education system, and dismantling that might begin to heal the culture. But that’s a long way off, even if it could be brought off, and we have to live with this now. End well? Not likely. Tim
Steven Hawking was smart.
St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta was WISE.
There are many with 90 IQ who are wiser than the average Mensan
Tell us more on the wisdom of helping Muds.
I like this coupling of Hawking and St Theresa, because it leads easily to a point.
Every human being vaguely aware of the thought-clichés of our time, knows the mantra: Steven Hawking was smart and St. Theresa was wise.
Could it be that Hawking was wise, and that St. Theresa was smart?
I’ve never cared for the mass-mythology that swirls about either of these people – not because of any faults they did or didn’t have – but because the celebrants of these “amazing people” never give a shit about what they said or worked for. They are “sympathy celebrities” added to our impoverished conversational arsenal to sound ‘thoughtful and caring’ at parties.
As for 90 IQ people, well, you know what Gandhi (IQ not known) said: What worried him most was the hardness of heart of intellectuals.
That’s from Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, by the way, if you don’t believe me.
Socrates was a rationalist. He couldn’t see that his nation was soon to be conquered by a tribe that thought it was descended from werewolves. Rationality comes at the end of a cultural cycle.
All of us actually experience less than 1% of what is really going on in the world. You have to figure out the rest of it from a distance, and through a prism or ten. It is not that we tend to believe false things, it’s that we hold them close and refuse to consider alternatives.
Trump might be who he says he is. He might be a pawn of the Russians, or the Israelis, or the Saudis. He might be the smartest guy to ever hold the office of the Presidency. He might be in it for us. Or strictly for himself. He might genuinely like the “little people”. Or he might tolerate them for political gain. He might be a lot less smart than he appears, and be really good at sales jobs. He may be in it for revenge. Or to settle daddy issues. Or some combination of these things. Very few of us have any insight other than our own eyes and ears, and everything we process, including those things said and done by the man himself, are pitches for us to think of him in a certain way or another. So what is the truth? Keep peeling that onion, and we will all get closer to the truth over time. But keep open the idea that things might be different than you thought they were. Calsdad’s points above, about facing reality, are very important to this way of thinking.
I think it is as simple as Trump looking at issues and thinking is this good or bad for anerica and acts accordingly.
The evidence suggests that, and I would bet that way. But we don’t “know” it. The longer we observe the man, his statements, and his actions, the better picture we get of what he is about.
That’s why Hillary’s “lying liars” and”Olympic sized lying machine” are so funny. Not only do our observations over a long time tell us that it is true, but in “polite company”, it is so verboten to say so. A “twofer” in my book.
Your last paragraph confused me.
Sorry about that. My point is that we need to observe and build a sense of what is true over time. Blind beliefs about Mr. Trump surround the man. To blindly accept what is said by someone about something or someone else is simply foolish. Most such statements are part of an agenda to make you think of things in a certain way. As in so many things, Trump makes an excellent example. He is a polarizing figure, so people often jump to conclusions about him, good or bad, based on about 3 seconds of determining whether he is “their sort of person” or not. The rest of it is defending the assumption, not searching for the truth of who he is and why he does the things he does.
Depending on where you stand with the man, certain things about him can be defended or criticized. Z’s point is that people blind themselves to the things that they don’t want to hear, creating a system of beliefs that can be wildly divorced from reality. A lot of that goes on, in all directions, in people’s evaluations of Mr. Trump. Absolutely everyone has an opinion of the man, often falsely claimed to be some sort of overarching reality, rather than a carefully cherry picked collection of rumors and tidbits of truth.
Thanks. I have to admit all I knew about him before election came from the media. Never watched his shows at all. I have to admit I was dubious of him but since assuming office I have been delighted with his job performance. Right man at the right time.
I’m going to guess that Mx. Harden’s book on genetics will conclude that Baby LeBron James can, with proper nutrition and education, become the next Einstein, while ignoring the fact that nothing short of a springboard could enable Baby Einstein to dunk a basketball.
I always wondered how people could deny the reality of racial difference when you just imagine such side-to-side comparisons, or see them in real life. I was watching an interview with Larry King and Snoop Dogg and thinking, the obvious physical differences between these two guys are starker than between alien species on “Star Trek” or between a terrier and a bulldog. How can anyone deny what anyone with eyes knows is obvious? Black people not only recognize the difference, but love and celebrate it. Even progressives celebrate the difference when it’s an area where they think non-whites have an advantage.
Have to share this cuz it’s funny. “Of course, since Hillary lies like a lying liar who just invented a lying machine for an Olympic lie-off, no one believed any of her lame excuses.” – John Hawkins, PJ
Can someone give me the 411 on PJ Media? I skimmed it about 5-10 years ago and it seemed like a mega Zionist site. Like a more casual Weekly Standard. But now I see PJ mentioned a lot on Alt Right sites. PJ cool or nah.
PJ has the occasional column that is quite worthy, but it’s one of those sites where the commentariat gets all over the writers for their slippage into prog bs. I have the sense that they are held back from their worst Jewicon instincts only by their fear of losing their readership and the potential monetary value that represents. They may lack significant sugar daddies and have to rely on readership as a result or I don’t think they would tolerate the comment push back.
All over the map. Doesn’t mean there aren’t flakes of gold on the beach full of pyrite. Most of he authors, I find, are best in small doses, and small doses are what you get.
I’ve followed Hawkins since the early 2000s. He’s a sincere Limbaugh conservative but nonetheless interesting. He sees the black crime in his North Carolina home and chafes under the yoke of affirmative action and speech codes but can’t quite free himself from his belief in the magical transformative powers of the Constitution/Christianity. After over a decade as a popular columnist for Townhall, he was let go for being too edgy. Last week in his twitter feed he hinted he was going to join the Proud Boys.
Once a year, I torment him with https://nationalpolicy.institute/2012/01/17/what-the-founders-really-thought-about-race/
Hawkins seems like a pretty cool and funny guy. The reason I signed up for The Weekly Standard is so I could read Andrew Ferguson. He and PJ O’Rourke were some of the funniest Cons ever. But it makes me kinda sick to think I’m helping to pay for Bill Kristol’s gardener. So I may not renew my subscription.
Some liberal was droning at me about the Russiagate stuff, and I can usually listen to anything, but finally I turned to him and said, “You relished what you saw as the paranoia of these white working class people talking about Obama being a stealth Kenyan Muslim for eight years, and then for five minutes things didn’t go your way, and now you’ve concocted this crazy scenario that would have made a guy with a fallout shelter hunting out commies in the PTA in the 1950s look sane.” It isn’t so much that they’re always irrational, but how unhinged their irrational behavior is when things aren’t going their way, especially when they were convinced their wins were just going to inevitably follow one after another. And because of their pedigrees (Paul Krugman and Ruth Ginsberg have a lot more power than my cousin the drywall guy) lots of people can get seriously hurt. We were never on the edge of some dangerous conflict with Kenya because some over-the-road trucker read too much Jerome Corsi or D’Souza. A weepy, mentally-ill lesbian (by her own admission) constantly bringing people from the intelligence and defense community onto her show makes someone like Rachel Maddow not just a lunatic, but a dangerous one.
This is the PoMos’ one great insight, that in human relations, “reason” only works within an arbitrarily chosen framework. The Logical Positivists and (insofar as I remember Phil 101) Wittgenstein would reduce communication as close to math as possible; only empirically-verifiable statements or necessary truths count as communication. The PoMos saw the absurdity of this and turned it on its head — words don’t mean anything on their own; context is all. All that is a long way of saying that the most frustrating thing about Leftists is: By their lights, they ARE logical, reasonable, etc. You could plot their approach to any and every problem on a flowchart, and though it would look like a plate of spaghetti, you could follow it, and find their answer, every time. It’s just that the starting points are always changing, because nothing matters but the context.
You can’t put an attack by an enraged mother Grizzly bear into context. You have to deal with reality.
You can’t put problems met during construction of a home , like soil issues, weather interuptions – and danger of injury from falling – into context. You have to deal with reality.
A combat soldier cannot put incoming rounds into context – again, HE must deal with reality.
Leftists only get to put things into context when they’re allowed to swim in a sea of non-reality where nothing matters. In the organizations I have been involved in (as an example) – I have noticed a HUGE difference between the hard core engineers – and the marketing department. I have always attributed this to the fact engineers in most cases have to deal with hard core reality and rules – whereas “Marketing” is a very squishy area. With a good enough product – do you ever really know if people bought it because of the chick with big boobs in the commercial – or because the product was so good nobody really paid attention?
IMHO this is why civilizations being blown up lead to fixes. The overhead gets eliminated – and the base portion of the population that can deal with harsh reality is what gets left behind. From there things grow again.
This is why I am against ALL forms of welfare. It’s no good in the longer run subsidizing useless overhead. Some level of stress must be imposed on a society to keep the productive to non-productive ratio from tilting too far towards the useless eaters.
Right. That’s why I wrote **in human relations** right there in the first sentence. The PoMos say that we agree on arbitrary rules of language, then use them to express thoughts, conduct disputes, etc. They’re right, and because of that, cognitive dissonance, errors of fact and logic, etc. don’t bother them. And because they never have to deal with the real world — everything to them is “discourse,” because they never leave the seminar room — they’re free to preach their nonsense without worrying about the consequences. Z Man said “They don’t measure the results empirically or think through the consequences.” I was trying to explain why.
Interesting division between the fuzzy, artsy types and those from our intellectual class who routinely must accommodate hard reality . I think this is key. An engineer designs a railroad bridge made of popsicle sticks, believing his “will” or “inspiration” will ensure it holds together, and he suffers an immediate reality intrusion when the first locomotive crosses. An “artist” drops a crucifix into a glass of urine, and his properly enculturated peers declare it deeply meaningful and discriptive of …. something. I think what we’ve seen is that without that reality corrective — or limiting factor, recently referred to by others in previous posts — humans rapidly wander off into a set channel: It’s the delusion thing.
Ability of brain to conceive of things other than they are –> mind’s problem solving capability –> creativity –> fantasy –> art –> delusion –> MADNESS.
From among those creative / intellectual types who face and accept their particular reality corrective, or limiting factor, we might get our more sane intellectuals, few though they seem to be.
Otherwise, it’s all just Malignant Intellectualism.
… and obviously, there’s a compelling argument NOT to allow these people (i.e. the wack jobs) any access to the developing minds and character of our youth, and we’ve failed there dramatically. The 20th Century, I think was an intellectual and developmental disaster — perhaps not the idyllic place that still exists for some of us in the recesses of our individual memories.
Best education ever got for the business world was a couple of decades of Fire/EMS work. It’s 2:05am, you were sound asleep ten minutes ago and now you’ve got a rolled vehicle, one occupant, apparent arterial bleed from the right arm and not sure what else until you can get him out to evaluate. Figure it out. Now.
Excellent point. These ‘logical and reasonable’ people always reach a pre-ordained endpoint, the way Monarch butterflies all return to a specific woodland in Mexico.
Yup. You knocked it right out of the park Z, especially when you note that these people hate themselves. And they want, more than anything for you to hate yourself too. And you’re right about wasting your time reasoning with them.
I’ve been there, done that, got the tee shirt. Where I am at now is how to undermine and thwart them and having the means and a plan to kill them if and when the time comes.
Speaking hypothetically, of course. Violence is hatey and never solves anything dontchya know.
I would like to believe there is a way of recovering Western Civilization from the clutches of the SJWs without killing them all. But I haven’t figured that out.
First you have to ask yourself if it is even possible to un-corrupt their minds. Most of these people are well into their 20’s and even 30’s. After getting out of school in my early 20’s – I distinctly remember wondering why the world does not work the way I have been told it works. The harsh reality of having to earn a living and support myself – after being in school (I still worked my way thru college) – did not match up to the picture painted by all that schooling.
And this was 35 years ago. From what I can tell the problem has only gotten worse in the interim.
Now I’ve also read that the human MALE brain does not fully develop until age 25 or so. I’ve read some articles that say that many of a person’s viewpoints towards life are set in stone by their mid to late 20’s. Apparently female brains mature earlier – so you can expect that maybe their attitudes towards life are also set earlier.
What would be my takeaway from this? Well if you’re talking about SJW’s in their mid 20’s or older – then you’re likely dealing with somebody who is irredeemable. The age range might be younger for women. And given the level of leftist thinking injected into young minds these days – even a person who outwardly projects that he or she is “conservative” – is likely infected with dangerous left wing thought.
Maybe this explains all the right wing cucks ZMan talks about?
So what’s my long story short? Maybe it’s time to embrace the fact that the only real solution may revolve around killing them all and stop worrying about it and instead start preparing for it.
I have yet to meet a real life person who strongly believed in one thing while he was in his twenties, and turned his thinking around as he got older.
It seems the lefties have figured that one out and have exploited it pretty well.
I was a borderline commie in my 20’s. What woke me up was working in New York City in the ‘80’s, the height of the Dinkins terror.
What happened that caused you to reject communism?
I loved the endless corruption of the later Koch years. I ended up with a rent controlled apartment on Fifth Ave. for a $3k bribe. Bobby Flay opened his Mesa restaurant next door a year later and that became the local diner for a while.
I share the same opinion but the way I figure it so long as me and mine don’t end up on the skull pile, its all good ether way.
My ancestors went through worse than this and got along fine.
As to carlsdad’s points, all true.
I’d really like to restore the Republic but I have no idea who such a thing could be done.
In the end , if the good guys win the US or whatever remains will be a Right wing state and neither SJW nonsense or Economic Liberalism will be able to be tolerated
Its going to be clean, quiet , homogeneous, peaceful and orderly and with an economy that doesn’t concentrate every gain in the hands of a few and cripple fertility or else
This sounds honestly like Fascism to me
Wikipedia
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce
This isn’t awesome but the original US was made for a homogeneous, moral and religious people which we don’t have .
That type of state will probably suppress the SJW’s and done right most of the people with the tendency to that mindset will just end up party loyalists or shot.
Its not the future I’d want for kids if I had any but its a damned sight better than the Los Estados road we are going down or Leftism
However we won’t get a shot, no pun intended at that till the end of Boomerdom which is a decade and a half out or so.
There is a punishment worse than death. New rule (enforceable by the Joseph de Maistre rule of execution)–you talk the talk you must walk the walk. Love Section 8? You will re-locate. Love illegals? You will be made personally and legally liable for one. Permanently. Hundreds of tasks out there to keep Utopians occupied. Occupied people are never troublesome people.
Also, if you want to do missionary work abroad, you must stay there. If you convert the heathen, you must remain among the heathen. That’s only fair.
This is a minor pet peeve of mine. I can think of plenty of areas within driving distance of my neck of the woods that could use an injection of the Lord’s Good Grace, yet all the local churchies believe they must jet off to Central and South America to do their vitue signalling.
Proselytizing neighbors like the L.D.S. and J.W’s do is hard work and not that great for virtue signaling.
Nah. Can’t contain Zommbies. “Only prepare for what comes after “
“Our ruling elites believe they are on the side of history, so the results of their actions must be the will of the heavens.” Nice touch with the “will of the heavens”.
Perfectly done, Z. Although smart people are just as prone to nutty ideas as anyone else, it might be said that their nutty ideas are nuttier than others. It takes true intelligence to create ideas and then sustain them in the face of their consequence.
There it is. I’m trying to think of a prominent Commie who ever held a real job. Marx? Failed philosophy professor (who sponged all his life off Engels, whose Daddy actually *owned a factory*). Lenin? Failed teacher. Stalin? Failed priest. Mao? Failed teacher. Ho Chi Minh? Failed lawyer. Che Guevara? Failed out of medical school. Your really 3rd tier guys — Lumumba, Nyerere, et al — went straight from school (in Moscow) to dictatorship. The worst Leftist murderer, in ideology if not body count (and against truly world-class competition) actually was a philosophy professor, Abimael Guzman (founder of Shining Path). Hell, Orwell nailed these guys in the 1930s — in The Road to Wigan Pier he described the typical Socialist not as a workingman, but as a prissy little civil servant, a secret teetotaler who in ten years will marry bourgeois and convert to Roman Catholicism (or Fascism). Get woke, go broke, amirite?
Bernie Sanders couldn’t even pull off being a carpenter.
Carpentry used to be a basic skill needed to just get by – apparently Bernie completely sucked at it so he turned to politics. That alone should tell you something.
I don’t trust the opinions of anybody who wants to opine about a subject from the sidelines and has never had to deal with harsh reality of actually having to be a productive individual.
Carpentry is real work. Nothing about Bernie has ever suggested any skill beyond running his mouth. Hell, I think he got thrown out of a commune for laziness. That’s an achievement. Of sorts.
Lumumba and Nyerere had dealings with Western institutions and people, not Russian, but made the mistake of believing all the anti-imperialist western teaching. Guzman followed Mao’s China, not Russia. Can we stop with the Russian hysteria, speaking of smart people susceptible to nuttiness?
Dunno, Nancy Pelosi has never done a days work in her life and in 40 years of never “earning” more than $200k has somehow amassed $200 million. As for the Clintons…….
That is an example of our great moral issue to get behind. We should focus our energy on the crooks in dc.
Smart people tend to be articulate. They’re aware of their thinking and speech galloping along with fluency and easily mistake it for substance. As do most people. All the common man can say is “aww you’re full of shit”. And common man is probably right. It’s strange how the articulate can almost cast spells. Has there ever been an inarticulate cult leader? If I were at a bar arguing with a smooth talking moon landing denier he’d probably demolish me in front of everyone.
Smart people believe in and are swayed by magic.
Specifically, magical incantations – the right combinations of words spoken in the right cadence changes their reality, usually for the better, but occasionally for evil.
Intelligent people are better at rationalizing things, for the obvious reason. Once settled on an idea, a really smart person can generate an unending list of reasons it works/makes sense, regardless of how insane it might actually be. I’m no slouch re smarts, and I’ve caught myself getting into crazy over the years. Fortunately, nothing ever came of any of it, and my reputation is (relatively speaking) pure.) I have an acquaintance who scored in the 160 IQ range – the local college did a student documentary about him in middle school – who was – and presumably still is – into all kinds of nutty beliefs (for whatever reason, an awful lot of it had to do with math/numbers), and he would NOT be talked out of any of it (you just didn’t understand what he was saying, couldn’t understand the complexity, etc.). Last I heard, he’d served some time for DUI and was gambling on sports for a living.
Modern progressivism is a fundamentalist religion that puts the most zealous King James Only Primitive Baptist in Kentucky to shame with its fervency.
They’re actually quite sane in comparison. The Primitive Baptists, I mean.
Yep – that’s how I view the adherents. I do think some of the political leaders know how ridiculous their ideas are.
The Left, *as a collective*, is extremely rational, cold and calculating. It knows exactly what it wants (power) and has a highly elaborate strategy for obtaining it.
But we can’t confuse the swarm with the individual. Bird migration is all about maximizing energy efficiency, but no individual bird really knows what it’s doing or why it’s doing it when the flock starts to move. Like a duck, the individual leftist is simply responding to the rest of the group and her own primitive impulses.
Conservatives and reactionaries aren’t wrong to analyze the left from a rational perspective. They’re just prone to the Fallacy of Division when they apply the same logic to individuals – as they are wont to do because of their own typically hyper-individualistic philosophies.
Heraclitus:
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”
Has anything changed in 2500 odd years?
Doesn’t sound like it:
http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm
” In a squad of 10 men, on average fewer than three ever fired their weapons in combat. Day in, day out — it did not matter how long they had been soldiers, how many months of combat they had seen, or even that the enemy was about to overrun their position. This was what the highly regarded Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, better known as S.L.A. Marshall, or ‘Slam,’ concluded in a series of military journal articles and in his book, Men Against Fire, about America’s World War II soldiers.”
If people on the right are individualistic – I would argue that’s because they’re more grounded in reality. Communism, socialism – any sort of collective thinking is just a methodology that the 80% use to hide behind the efforts of the higher achievers. The current anti-white hysteria just looks like another variation of that , especially when you look at the loudest proponents of it – who seem to be black women. The virtue signalling cucks in the white establishment maybe be jumping on board but I don’t think it originated with them.
Ever worked in a large corporate organization? There’s loads of people hiding in corners here and there who could be eliminated without any real detriment to the overall productivity. I have worked in both small start up companies and large corporations: there is a DRASTIC difference between small focused and highly motivated groups – and large groups that are overloaded with non-doers.
This is an effect that even carries over to personal relationships – which is something the MGTOW crowd and people like Stephan Molyneaux address when they’re talking about how women relate to men and why women support the nanny state when they can’t get what they perceive to be sufficient support out of men in their personal relationships.
If Western civilization has gotten anywhere – it’s because it at allowed INDIVIDUALS to pursue their goals without being unfairly burdened down with the grasping of the rest of the population who only wanted to hold out their hands and be supported in some form or fashion.
Somewhere in my travels I ran across an accounting of what many African societies were like. It might have been something linked to out of the comment section on one of ZMan’s posts. In any case – the lesson of the story was that one of the reason why Africa is such a shit hole , is their culture. Any time a member of the family has any sort of success – he is expected to share it with the rest of the family. This is such an inherent thing that the net effect is that anybody rising out of the mass – is pulled back in like the guy trying to escape the guy trying escape the underworld in one of those Brendan Fraser “Mummy” movies.
There is of course a ruling class – there always is. The mass of people largely take care of keeping themselves down by accepting their dis-functional collectivism.
I don’t trust anybody on the “right” side of things who makes arguments FOR collectivism of any form. I think they are dishonest with their reading history at best – and at worst are fifth column leftists.
This is a very long-winded explanation of the Pareto principle, or informally the “80/20 rule” (it’s actually a square-root law). The problem with your version is that the distribution persists no matter how many times you try to trim the “dead weight”; there is ALWAYS an 80/20 distribution, even among the top 20%, and among the top 20% of the top 20%.
I’ve worked in very large corporations, and most of the history of management – as well as government – revolves around figuring out what to do with the bottom 80%. Of course, with over 300 million people now living in the USA, it’s actually the bottom 99% or even 99.9%.
People like you need to drop stupid words like “collectivist”. It’s the cuckservative’s version of “racist”. All governance is inherently collectivist, whether you partition the worker bees into separate identity groups or treat them all as a single collective. And just as McDonald’s would be stupid to give complete autonomy to all of its employees, Balkanized empires full of internal political conflict, such as the USA, can’t afford *not* to impose a single perspective and culture from the top down.
The problem with your explanation is that dead weight has some relativity. What we’ve got these days is dead weight that is not only absolutely non-productive, but is sucking up productivity from that top 20% of the Pareto distribution.
Not everybody can be Superman, but not everybody has to be an overweight black welfare mother raising 8 illegitimate future prison residents. We used to have a society where the bottom of the distribution might be living on the outskirts of town in a lean-to and living hand to mouth – they might have violated the “upstanding” part of society’s sense of propriety – but they didn’t have the government as their own personal mugger stealing from the productive sectors wallet. Their non-productivity was relative to the rest of society. What we’ve got now is that the left has pushed the curve to the point where the non-productive end of the curve has hit an absolute if not a negative.
I agree – the distribution will persist – but you can push it back towards the productive (right) side of the scale. That’s where the distribution used to reside back before the the FDR administration got hold of welfare programs and dragged it leftwards
Yep. No asymptotes for liberal parasites.
Joshinca: Welfare programs may have enabled and encouraged the worst traits, but that pales in comparison with the tens of millions of low-IQ third-world peasants brought in over the past 50 years.
The hyperindividualistic society you want where the bottom 95% are at least civil and functional, especially if you want it to be democratic, can only exist when the average IQ is above 120 (yielding a -2SD floor of 90). That has not existed since the 18th century and possibly ever. We’re not even within 1SD of that, let alone 2.
What magic do you think someone is going to perform in order to push the average back up, which I assume must be what you mean by “pushing the curve to the right”? Your best and possibly only chance to achieve this Utopia is a secessionist and isolationist movement of the highly intelligent. Define that however you like, but there’s no non-“collectivist” solution.
Yep, Pareto distributions are inescapable.
However, good management can lead to a higher quality 80% than would occur in random distribution.
And conversely bad management will lead to a lower baseline.
Marshall has been proven to have falsified his claims.
https://www.military-history.us/2011/09/s-l-a-marshall-men-against-fire-and-whether-men-are-conditioned-to-kill-in-combat-or-not/
This is pretty interesting stuff. After WWII they discoved that only a few % of soldiers shot to kill so they changed their training method. Already in Korea, 5 yrs later, results were better. But it’s pretty complex. Turns out it is easier to kill if you are part of a crewed weapon, even if that is something as ‘simple’ as a GPMG w just a crew of 2 or 3. Dave Grossman wrote an interesting book on that.
I read several places that man for man the German army was more combat effective than the British or US armies in WWII. This was ascribed to the usual platitudes of ‘Nazi fanaticism’. I dont really think a random ‘Hans’ drafted from out of his local beer hall was much more ‘fanatical’ than the average Tommy or GI; I think none of them really wanted to shoot it out in France. But then I discovered that the German infantry squad was centered around GPMGs, w riflemen in support role and carrying ammo for the MG. Whereas the American and British squad was centered around the rifleman, w the GPMG in support role. I think that accounts for the difference.
http://www.milsf.com/psychology-of-killing/
What is an ISIS squad centered around ? G
Low IQ inbreeding, drug use and auto response results from brainwashing.
Grace, it’s centered around the butthole of the nearest goat
Here’s another essay that casts doubt on S.L.A. Marshall’s *Men Under Fire*
S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire
History, Interpretation, and the Canadian Experience
Yeah, Im having doubts about the % shooting to kill now. It did seem weird to me that men being shot at by German troops didn’t shoot to kill.
The article you linked to goes on to say that statement was shown to be false.
I’ve just spent some time with a Nigerian guy … an Obstetrician who is over here, in England, for a while. Always attentive to his mobile phone; one might say, ‘obsessively so’.
Anyways, he was explaining to me his amazement at how insular are Western people; how they focus on their immediate family. If I understood him correctly, then in his society, a man doesn’t make any big decisions without the input of the wider community and extended family. And such a man would be expected to share the proceeds of his success.
Put me in mind of the Borg.
The perfect social structure for the encouragement of “free-loading”? It would explain an awful lot about Africa.
This was the norm in the past of the West as well. Extended families are the human norm as is some degree of community involvement.
And while some freeloading in the certainly going to happen, communities punish people who do and in any case Africa being like it is doesn’t need to constantly prepare for the future the way European do It would make little sense to do so in that environment
Its arguably smarter than the way we do things in the West where a ethos of muh rugged induhvidualism which makes good sense on a frontier is being applied to areas with 1250x the population density!
That makes no sense to me.
Trying to change that is a millenniums old project though, I’ve seen references to encouraging individualism in the Norse Havamal and of course much modern texts
This has much to do with economics and social control and nothing with morality.
Largely clannish societies are quite difficult to government by outsiders like a church or king expect by costly brute force and they don’t produce as much wealth which means those outsiders can’t tap nearly as much wealthy that doesn’t belong to them. It also lowers population density and stability as well.
The nuclear family though, its easy to control having limited resources and can be functional . Its the minimally functional system.
The problem is that its fragile and it took no more than changing divorce laws and encouraging women to work to destroy it and society with it.
We’d be far better off with clans and tribes and community input than some think as we’d be able to control our women, encourage reproduction and ensure outsiders can’t distort or destroy our cultural legacy except by brute force.
The trick though is being big enough and strong enough to have atomic bombs . Dune style family atomics combined with hundreds of Snow Crash style mini states would be a fitting survivable replacement for dying Westpahalian States and Modernity
The system we have now is probably a gonner no matter what. I doubt Christendom will return and the current arrangement of nations is not a good one. Also even areas with racially stable mixes, cultural diversity is huge.
This isnn’t new though. Its a return to human norms though it won’t be pleasant.
The most dangerous person around is usually someone who has worked out a system for handling everything as he has everything figured out.
It’s like Dirty Harry said, a man’s got to know his limitations. The corollary I would add is that if you don’t know yours you aren’t fully a man. And how do you know your limitations if you haven’t pushed yourself, and aren’t doing a bit of that now just to keep up with how things are going?
“Smart people are just as prone to nutty ideas as anyone else.”
As I like to point out, smart (snark) Ivy League Lawyers playing politics have brought this country to near ruin. Well granted they don’t give a carp about the dirt people, its all giving fancy speeches to point fingers and then sit back and do nothing while blaming your opponents for getting nothing done. No sense in pointing out the massive corruption that keeps them all in power and wealth at our expense, we’d spend years typing it all out.
Then we have these political intellectual geniuses in San Francisco that defied the laws of economics, who ruined the restaurant biz with $15/hr minimum wages. Then to compensate, they say that local businesses can no longer offer free lunches to their employees. The nutty thinking on their part is that without free lunches from their work place, the employees will head out into the dung infested, discarded heroin syringe laden streets to give these failing restaurants much needed business.
Just another case for the pile.
The really repulsive thing about arguing with leftists is that they refuse to empty their drool cups during their “discourse.”
My English teacher in high school would literally froth at the mouth when she talked about Nixon, which she did rather than teach most of the time.
My wife and I had to listen to a priest like that; he was ordained back in the 60s, under a hard-core communist bishop, and would launch into diatribes about the bombing of civilians in Hanoi, the evils of missile deployment in Europe under Reagan, the persecution of homosexuals – not in places like Iran, mind, but in the sleepy towns of America… without any hint that he recognized the malevolence of the ‘other side’, or without taking note that 30-40 years had passed; here he was, the old fool, still worked up about the certainty of ‘nuclear war’ under Reagan when Obama was President… poor guy; he’d been programmed and, like an old Atari computer, you just couldn’t do a memory upgrade.
He’s dead now – I wish him well in the afterworld, where unicorns and raindows prevail, and there are no Republicans.