There’s a comment by bgc at OneSTDV (the latter of whose insights I genuinely enjoy, and read daily). It starts out okay:
My guess is that the cause of Western decline is a later phase of the cause of Western rise—high IQ.
First high IQ gave us modernity (long term growth of science & technology, economic growth etc.)—then, in this complex new world, high IQ people progressively took over the ruling class (as described in the Bell Curve).
So far, so good.
But high IQ carries with it a bunch of personality attributes which tend towards political correctness (eg[a]litarianism, atheism, pacifism, lifestyle libertarianism etc).
Well, two of those four are absolutely good things, even if the other two (#1 and 3) are based on wishful-thinking which doesn’t work in the real world.
These PC tendencies are then amplified by the concentration of IQ in the IQ meritocracy (which is why it took until the 1960s for PC to do real harm—although the pacifism of the 1920s and 30s probably made WWII much worse than it otherwise would have been).
Of course, so did the racism and cruelty of the British who, when the Germans offered to deport (unharmed) a million Jews in return for a bunch of military hardware, responded: “What would we do with a million Jews?” Oh, I dunno, how about instantly upgrading your law and medicine, and being the undisputed world leader in science for the next half-century? Sort of like suddenly being given every first-round pick in the NFL draft in a given year: You’d go 16-0 every season for the next decade or two … and then even have the “rights” to the children of those all-stars.
Among the high IQ elite, there is now a great deal of IQ signalling behaviour—indeed there is not much else.
High IQ is biologically maladaptive—higher IQ equals lower fertility—and this sterility and suicide is chosen.
It is certainly chosen—by me and others. As it was during the fall of the Roman Empire, where the “barbarians” were welcomed, as warm bodies/immigrants. But it’s not as simple as that. The more relevant question is why earlier generations didn’t make the same choice as us high-IQ “nihilists” do.
A lot has changed in out society over the past fifty years. Consider just the farming sector, which used to form a major part of the economy and of job-creation. My mother and father were both from large families (i.e., 7 or more kids each), which simply needed to have that many children just to do all the manual work which a farm used to require.
By the time that farm finally got sold (in the late ’70s) to German immigrants who wanted to live a “Wild West” life, it was being run by a single uncle of mine, with help from a lot of new machinery/technology. Similar thing with the farm on the other side of the family: The two kids may still help out during harvest time, but there’s no actual “need” for them, in keeping the place going. (In the old days, kids would skip school to help with planting and harvesting; my mother made her first dollar [in the late 1930s or early '40s] manually “bringing in the sheaves” for a neighbor during harvest.)
Among my cousins, I don’t think there are more than four kids in any of the families. And this was in Mennonite households where a woman’s place was in the kitchen, subservient to her husband! That is, the wives didn’t have paying jobs—their adult lives after marriage were entirely devoted to the care of their children.
Obviously, none of that had anything to do with “high IQ elites.” (Equally obviously, there were good genes somewhere in my family tree, for me to wind up as a best-in-cohort software developer/writer/musician, etc. Yet, I am the smartest person in my family, and my family is the smartest unit among our relatives. By far: No one outside of my family has anything more than an education degree, for teaching. On my mother’s side, in fact, most of them are missionaries.)
Among myself and my siblings, none of us have any plans for having children: We all have too many other interests to want to give those pursuits up, in return for wiping runny noses. (Apologies to people who manage to both raise a family and have a career, without neglecting either; but I know for myself that I couldn’t balance those, and that it would be a disaster from every possible direction if I were to try. Plus, I can barely stand most adults, much less have any love for misbehaving kids.)
I also saw a study quoted recently (sorry, don’t know where) to the effect that prole and upper-class women actually give the same numbers for how many children they’d ideally like to have. It’s just that between the dumbfucks being too stupid to use contraception properly, and the educated ones putting off having kids in favor of a career, etc., the poor and uneducated people end up having more rugrats. But the desire for children is the same between rich and poor women.
That, too, is a simple question of compromises, not of high-IQ signalling (except in terms of attracting a mate).
When the lower IQ are correct, then high IQ people will nearly-aways be wrong about nearly-everything—because they just hafta be different.
That suggestion, I think, is just plain stupid.
The sillier the idea, the better an advert for high IQ, because only smart people can defend the indefensible (endless mass immigration, race preferences, socialism, political destruction of the family).
So you really think that academics wouldn’t expect to be thanked by the proles after the Revolution, given all that they (as eggheads) have done for the unwashed masses? You really think they’re supporting things like socialism and unrestricted immigration just because the proles don’t support them?
No, the academics defend those “indensible” ideas simply because the same notions appear to work in the sheltered, academic paradise they live in, every day of the week. Same way that underclass blacks who get their housing, security, childcare and food provided for them through no effort of their own, and with no idea of where the money actually comes from, will think that community organizing “works.” You don’t need class-warfare or IQ-warfare or conspiracy theories to account for any of that.
Solution? It has to depend on a Great Awakening, a Christian revival among the elite. A GA is not sufficient, but it is necessary—maybe something as radical as another Reformation.
Because, you see, only really smart people can defend indefensibly silly ideas! And Christianity, by contrast, is a Very Unsilly Idea!
“Cracker?”
This means big restrictions on elite behaviour and lifestyle (including sexual freedoms)—which is why they will fight it tooth and nail, which is why it will not happen, which is why the decline will continue…
Restrictions on sexual freedoms? Legal restrictions? Oh, right: Sodomy. Gotcha.
If you detected more than a whiff of the wish for a return to good ol’ Christian/Puritan values there, you’re not alone. In fact, clicking over to bgc’s profile discloses that he also maintains four other blogs, including the very non-Dawkinsian Scientists considering Christianity, on which the most recent post concerns this question: Is it plausible that religions are evolved delusions?
It is pretty generally accepted (among secular evolutionists) that many kinds of religion are ‘adaptive’ in a biological sense; leading to improved biological ‘fitness’ (greater reproductive success)….
[I]n a pragmatic sense, in terms of the philosophy of science—there can be no such thing as an “adaptive delusion” because a delusion is an idea which does not work, a delusion is something which *cannot* be adaptive.
So (according to mainstream secular scientific criteria) if religion really can be interpreted as having evolved because it was more adaptive; then it follows that religion is ‘true’; or, more exactly, truer than no-religion.
Well, if you’re open to the idea (frequently tossed about by religious believers) that science is a religion for the people who practice it … then since science provides the most squared-with-reality, non-delusional and adaptive worldview we have accessible to us, it follows that science is the truest “religion” of them all.
So what is this “no-religion” of which you speak, my fellow, devout “believer”?
(No, science is not really a religion, although as with any group of human beings the scientific community does occasionally degenerate into displaying cult-like behaviors, as when Oppenheimer suggested that if the scientific community could not prove David Bohm wrong, they must agree to simply ignore him for his “juvenile deviationism”—the high-falutin’ way of saying that Bohm “just hafta be different.” Science does have more in common with religious faith than is generally appreciated, but that don’t make it a religion.)
Further, if “God” appears to you in a vision and tells you to “be fruitful and multiply” (or to keep your women chained to the stove, or to stone them to death for adultery, etc.), and that anyone who doesn’t believe in the same ideas will lose his eternal soul, you have just stumbled on a meme which will be adaptive in the sense of promoting the survival of your religion and its followers (and their genes), but which is clearly based wholly in delusion. It is not my job to square that obvious fact with “philosophy of science.”
Further, if you’ve read at all into this field, you’re already aware of religion being viewed as a “spandrel,” i.e., a by-product of genuinely useful adaptations, but not an adaptation itself. As such, there is no reason why it could not simultaneously be maladaptive, or even outright delusional (which it is).
Aside from that, just because social and cultural conventions may (or may not) also have positive effects on the biological adaptation of the species practicing it, doesn’t mean that philosophy of science should (or can) have anything to say about the “truth” of those conventions, except in terms of how the specific (e.g., religious) teachings fail (miserably) to square with reality.
Finally, if it took a Great Christian Awakening to save our civilization, it wouldn’t be worth it: As I’ve noted previously, what we now think is worth saving would already be lost in that very process, to the Bible-thumping, sexuality-restricting, get-women-back-in-the-kitchen-where-they-belong godbags. As I’ve also noted previously, it’s only genetic engineering (and things like requiring [reversible] sterilization in return for anyone being allowed to draw welfare, which I think is a damned good idea) that’s going to avoid the Idiocracy and preserve for us a civilization that’s actually worth saving:
I wonder every so often who will jump first when genetic techniques become feasible to alter human biology. And then I remember the extremes of cosmetic surgery—people sign up willingly, spending enormous sums and taking themselves away from their everyday lives for months, sometimes techniques that have very little objective impact on appearance.
I suppose I should just sigh and be glad there are so many willing guinea pigs for new surgical techniques. But I’m apprehensive about the herky-jerky pace of progress—fueled by anecdote-spreading networks of celebrities and idle rich people. Improvements in fertility treatments have largely occurred by this pathway, so there’s a very real prospect that other genetic techniques will as well.
Those changes are going to happen whether we want them to or not; and that’s a good thing, compared to the idiocratic/Christian alternatives.
The HBD/Steveosphere is thick with opinionated idiots (Ronduck, Lucius Vorensis, etc.) who would deny women the right to vote, who would prefer that females not have career options (being instead forced to marry and stay at home, barefoot and pregnant), and who can’t stop moronically shitting on the “nihilism”/atheism that results in people not reproducing at replacement level. “Better to live in chains than to die for freedom,” right? (Roissy and his “wild and crazy” ilk are just the flip-side of that “Christian” morality play—literal sociopaths who, as others have noted, have figured out a ["Game"] way to “loot the liquor cabinet while the Titanic sinks.”)
Fuck them: The homophobic, science-phobic, officially misogynistic world they’re trying to create wouldn’t be worth saving. Even a White Nation would just be populated with dumbfuck, too-stupid-to-live white proles—whose jobs can and should be done by machines instead—out-reproducing the smarter ones; which will get us to the same endpoint, just at a slightly slower and less-brown rate, with a better work ethic and less welfare dependency in the short term. It’s no solution to anything, unless you (as a whitey) moronically think that you have more in common with stupid white people than with smart non-whites.
