House of Eratosthenes

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.

It hardly requires any mention at all, but: This bears the tell-tale sign of formulation in an echo chamber, likely with zero input from anyone outside of the desired ideological molding. Every conservative I know, to the last nose, would understand what’s wrong with this: “from somebody else” is missing from right after “larger proportions of private resources.” Experience bears out time after time the verity of the adage, “a liberal is someone so nice he’ll give you the shirt off someone else’s back.” Continuing…

Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of their deme or ethnic group. They are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily novel.

The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes.

Again, some conservative perspective would have helped here, as many conservatives have already learned from the experience of approaching & communicating with a liberal “tribe” from the outside of that tribe. No, modern liberalism offers no “evolutionary novelty” from the mindset that curtails the life-staples and other assets from traveling outside the village walls; it is, quite to the contrary, an acceleration of this. Whether it’s intended or not doesn’t matter. Right in the middle of repeating the mantra that they want healthcare for everyone, they want Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys to fail.

Tomato But, the comments about evolution are interesting. My reaction was:

This is actually a pretty useful article. It clarifies for me a longstanding question I’ve had about modern liberalism: How can it simultaneously cling to two extreme and oppositional ends of the “‘Let’s help out those who are worse off than ourselves’ vs. ‘Oh well, Darwin'” spectrum? Answer: Modern liberals do believe in, and support, both extreme ends of this spectrum. They’re being…what’s the phrase the article used…”evolutionarily novel.”

It makes perfect sense. Liberals cannot stand the concept of time. They can’t stand the idea that meaningful things happened before they were born, or that meaningful things will keep happening after we’re all dead. They live out their entire lives on a turning-point. EVERY moment between womb-and-tomb has to be “novel.”

When most people use the word “evolution,” and this includes liberals, what they’re talking about is the micro. It’s a point so broadly understood and so obvious that it is seldom clarified: We’re talking about a great many changes taking place across a vast expanse of time, each one by itself so insignificant to easily escape detection, granting that someone was around to do the detecting. Evolution, therefore, requires time. Lots of it. And this is exactly where today’s liberals stop believing in it. They seem much more fascinated in the cruelty aspect of evolution.

And, that’s where the “smarter than you” thing comes into play. I guess when you’re a one-trick pony, you’d better know the trick, right? After I did some skimming around about this person, I noticed the pattern held. Why intelligent people drink more alcohol. Why intelligent people smoke more cigarettes. And, uh oh, now he’s pissing off the wrong people: Why men are more intelligent than women. Oh, no he isn’t. “The answer is: They aren’t.” Notice the “they”; reminds me of that group-collective that used to comment on these pages, whom many of us started to compare to cuttlefish and mollusks because they made comments about homo sapiens as if they were outsiders. This is just one bit of evidence among many suggesting that liberalism, far from being a mark of superior intellect, instead indicates mental infirmity. M/M. Kanazawa seems to be an adult male, so why word things this way?

It reminds me of something someone said here, I think it was Nightfly but I’m not sure, and time curtails me from conducting a responsible search: Liberals evidently perceive an enormous gap in the intelligence spectrum plotted across the population, it’s not bell-curve-shaped for them at all. Everyone who is of like mind, shares the common sky-high off-the-charts measurement of intelligence. Any measured differentiation among that elite crowd, would be meaningless so why bother; functionally, they’re equals, with perhaps some superlative specimens who have established notoriety as political figures or other agenda-movers. And yet, out of hundreds of millions, the next-less-smart guy just beneath them is too dumb to tie his shoes.

It would be interesting to see if this actually works. But, I can’t find any comment section beneath Kanazawa’s articles, so there’s no test, not even any chatter. Just stuff written down, tossed out there and then protected behind an invisible “that’s all anybody has to say about that” barrier.

Which has caused some consternation in the past:

In response to ongoing controversy over views such as that African countries suffer chronic poverty and illness because their people have lower IQs and that black women are “objectively less attractive” than other races, he was dismissed from writing for Psychology Today. His current employer – the London School of Economics – has prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for 12 months, and a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled “Kanazawa’s bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology”.

What happens when such observations are exposed to commentary from the not-necessarily-like-minded? CylarZ logged on and provided an answer:

It doesn’t take “intelligent” people to make good decisions, and in fact, a lot of really intelligent people do a lot of really dumb things. What a good leader really does is seek wise counsel, then make decisions with discernment. In fact, some liberals are so smart, that they put all their faith into their intellect. They become cocky and overconfident, believing they can think their way out of anything — and this is their downfall.

There is a saying: “Intelligence is knowing tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put them in a fruit salad.” See where I’m going with this?

So many names come to mind right now — Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Al Gore (yes, him) and many other brilliant minds of our time. Smart men…but also foolish, arrogant, and stubborn. CS Lewis on the other hand — widely considered one of the last century’s intellectual giants — was a humble man who realized he had a lot left to learn. He in turn became wise as well as intelligent.

It gets to the point where brainpower is valued over wisdom, experience, or what we’d refer to as “common sense.” Us dimmer bulbs don’t have this problem, as many of us are humble enough to realize we can’t figure everything out on our own. For that matter, many of us are also happier.

Us lesser lights often see wisdom better than really intelligent people do, as we have no reason to think we’re smarter than we really are.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. For all the effort we put into, and the “achievement” we get from, coming up with ways to “diagnose” highly questionable learning disorders as some sort of mental flaw or enfeeblement, we tend to do an awful lot of looking-away when the opportunity arises to define and diagnose mental enfeeblements that might very well be real, and undiscovered. This one has all sorts of tell-tales, there are so many functionally distinguishing ways to get it defined. There is a lack of curiosity about what could best be stated, in question form, as “What happens after my super duper bright idea?” We’ve seen it in our current First Holy President many-a-time: Everything worth saying, is a definitive statement, offering no questions anywhere save for the rhetorical ones. There’s nothing more to be said. Certainly — certainly — no tests to be done.

Which leads to a crisis, repeated over time, involving actual delivery. Would you want to live in a place liberals have been running for awhile? Would you want to live in Detroit, or Baltimore? How about the Obamacare rollout on 10-1-13, is that success? Is that the way we wanna see ’em go?

George Orwell had a great way of phrasing it: Where’s the omelet? This is the weak spot of modern liberalism. It’s asked after they’ve stopped paying attention, after the “look at my bright idea” phase of the project has been concluded. They’ve moved on to something else.

Maybe they’re trolling conservative blogs, in an office somewhere, on the taxpayer’s nickel. Maybe they’re right here! Nagging me about some spelling error, or “George Washington probably didn’t say that” or some such. The one answer I’ve offered that really confounds this is the answer any flawed Son of Adam would offer, who does not & cannot strive for perfection or godlike insight, and is merely in a daily quest for improved results: Yes, on a given day I make five-to-ten mistakes like that, before most people have gotten out of bed. And they have no idea what to do with that. This is a statement that simply has no rebuttal on their world, for it never would have been uttered on their world, their “Peter Pan” world where nobody ever grows up, and the day-to-day pursuit is for each individual to show how wonderful, amazing and perfect he is. In an enclave of forced equality. The irony.

But making mistakes is how it works on Planet Grown-Up. It is, in another irony, an absolute requirement that must be filled before any “evolving” can be done, with anything. Just about every effort made on anything, is a question and not a conclusive statement. Everything is a shot across a room, into a wastebasket; adults, no matter how practiced, keep watching the ball of paper as it sails toward its target, ready to get up and do the responsible thing if it’s a miss, because there’s a potential for a screw-up in every little thing we do. Everything’s a test.

Our friends, the liberals, seem to be mired in a self-defeating circuit of “Look how much I already know about nature and how it all works, for behold how unwilling I am to learn any more about it.” We have our disasters in Detroit and Baltimore because they never learn to keep the tomatoes out of the fruit salad. They don’t stick around long enough to watch anyone actually take a few bites out of it, let alone offer any feedback.

And yet…his ENTIRE argument is destroyed by study after study…all over the internet just for the searching…that clearly document self-identified conservatives give many, MANY times more than self- identified liberals. It’s not even close. I’m not even aware of a single falsified Soros study that tries to impugn liberals give more than conservatives.

I distinctly remember one study that I had to do a report on in college. The average conservative that made over 150k gave 10-25% of their earnings to charity. The average liberal? 0-10% I recall John Kerry gave 4% However, both conservatives and liberals CLAIMED to give 10-25% When confronted with the factual evidence, liberals would both 1.) attack conservatives, claiming they gave “just for tax purposes,” and 2.) claim that they “gave” in other ways, such as protesting, social grievance-mongering, and “undeclared” donations. Not surprisingly, when these “undeclared” donations were actually tracked, they turned out to be falsehoods.
- P_Ang | 06/11/2015 @ 07:25
Oh, for an edit button. In 1.) and 2.) above, that’s “1.)…claiming they (conservatives) gave just for tax…” and “2.) claim that they (liberals) ‘gave’ in other ways…” Come on Mr. Programmer…give the people what they want!
- P_Ang | 06/11/2015 @ 07:32
Mr. Kanazawa’s whole argument is nothing but a gigantic begging of the question – by definition liberals already consider liberalism to be smarter than conservatism, so they will inevitably conclude that “liberals are smarter than conservatives.” It’s a further con game to craft the definition in order to include oneself and exclude as many others as possible – and the shame of it is, the con artist is his own mark; he’s trying to flatter his own ego. It’s Homer Simpson, thirty seconds away from burning down his own house, saying, “Everybody’s stupid except me” – only with much prettier words.

Their punishment is literally Biblical: by their own words they are convicted. In this case, as P Ang just said, it’s that conservatives donate tons more of their personal time and treasure to charity and philanthropy. Liberals cut their check to the feds and call it a day. (Which does at least explain why they attack conservative charity as a tax dodge – to them that’s pretty much the same as accusing someone of mugging the poor.) Even when they cheat, they lose under the terms they themselves choose… and they’re always cheating, even though they follow a philosophy that they simultaneously claim to be so self-evidently true and wholesome that opposition is not just misguided, but evil and malicious.

Maybe that’s how they justify the constant lies and violence, I don’t know. It just turns into a parody of the true principle of self-defense, that one is justified in defending oneself with force at great need, to prevent harm to oneself and those in one’s care. For the Left, the force comes first, and any resistance afterward becomes the thing that excuses their initial aggression – sentence first, trial afterwards!
- nightfly | 06/11/2015 @ 08:39
I believe Thomas Sowell wrote a book on that. 😉
- Nate Winchester | 06/11/2015 @ 12:31
Intelligence is great for rationalizing, though. If you need to produce a whole bunch of words on why tomatoes should be mixed into the fruit salad — for tenure purposes, say, or because you’re on deadline from Vox.com — nothing beats a high IQ. Wisdom has nothing to say on that score.

Wisdom would suggest getting another job, as you’re clearly wasting your life.
- Severian | 06/12/2015 @ 04:48
WOAH!
George Orwell had a great way of phrasing it: Where’s the omelet?
That’s usually after a “Here’s why “we” must share what “we” got of yours…”, like “Energy prices will have to necessarily go up to accomplish this…”, or perhaps “We MUST have sensible gun restrictions that will reduce violent crime in “our” cities….” stuff.
Could be wrong, I’m more familiar with Rand than Orwell.

“This is the weak spot of modern liberalism. It’s asked after they’ve stopped paying attention, after the “look at my bright idea” phase of the project has been concluded. They’ve moved on to something else.”
I call that more of a “belling-the-cat” thing. AKA NIMBY, or the union Public School (for the children) teachers that “collectively bargain” for enough cash to send their kids to private prep school. (Can’t remember who gets credit for the original-Aesop? Bros. Grimm?)
- CaptDMO | 06/12/2015 @ 13:02
I believe it’s mostly ego and elitism – mindset of “we’re so smart we DESERVE to run things, and since the rest of you are ‘people of Wal-Mart’, you don’t know what’s best for you.” There’s a ‘class issue’ of them thinking they’re the betters.

As for charity, I’ll take Nightfly’s paraphrase of P Ang’s comments, “it’s that conservatives donate tons more of their personal time and treasure to charity and philanthropy. Liberals cut their check to the feds and call it a day.”

Disagree with your assessment. There’s fundamental difference between the two – Libs don’t cut their check to the feds and call it a day, they are driven that the nature of government should be to right all wrongs and protect people from harm – and to that end they wish to use the power and authority of government to COMPEL everyone to provide money ‘for the less fortunate’.
I used to hear all sorts of lib complaints in the 80’s and 90’s about Reagan to the point of ‘he didn’t care about people with AIDS and didn’t fund any research, which is why many of them died.’ I pointed out that it’s not the government’s JOB to do this, and asked why they don’t complain about Muscular Dystrophy research not being funded either. Jerry Lewis got off his ass every labor day weekend to hold a telethon, so what’s stopping anyone from doing the same for AIDS? I might as well have asked that question in Swahili, it was like it never occurred to them that the private sector could do anything here.

Onto the main point. I think they’re more akin to short term thinking – if results are bad, therefore ‘someone else didn’t implement it right.’ It’s blame of execution, as opposed to checking premises. The war on poverty hasn’t solved poverty yet, but yet the lib solution is to double down since we didn’t put enough money at the problem.

Since they deal with non-elite people who don’t think like them, it’s easy (and lazy) to blame them for anything that didn’t go well, and then advocate to get them out of the way – think Paltrow’s comment about it would be nice if Obama was unimpeded (i.e. if it weren’t for those meanie conservatives, we’d be in utopia!) Just let him enact his vision unchecked.

They certainly show a lack of 2nd and 3rd order analysis. One major fail I’ve noticed is that they don’t anticipate what a group of system will do when a change is introduced. Policy change that are enacted on a closed system, but the lib making the change thinks there’s no effect or only a single effect, sort of like squeezing a balloon, and not expecting the balloon to pop out somewhere else.

Go back to Rob Reiner’s First Five proposal – we’ll tax cigarettes, and use the money to fund pre-K education. Never goes to a 2nd order analysis – what happens when we raise taxes? People do less of that. Next year everyone’s in a panic since less smokers mean less money to keep the pre-K classes going, and the solution is again to raise more taxes (on a smaller tax base of smokers) to keep the funding steady. Maybe every politician should take a class in recursion. Libs think that one change to a system will make everything right again, and when it doesn’t, they react but never anticipate.

Lastly, as stated by Mr. Freeberg, they live in a world where there’s no consequences – see my earlier point about someone else messing it up, it wasn’t done right. On Planet Grown Up, when the Obamacare website came up (or more accurately, DIDN’T come up) there wasn’t much consequences for that fail. Now compare the average lib to Carly Fiorina, tech CEO, she (as would I) have called the vendor working on the site, and told them they have 48 hours to fly the company tech leads to my office and explain in detail what went wrong, and how they were going to fix it and how soon that would be done. If they’re incapable of repairing the damage, rescind all money paid to date, fire them and send them the bill for whoever ends up doing the job right.

Basically, it’s that thought process that they’re the smartest folks on the planet, and with that assessment comes some hubris of the idea that as long as their intentions are good they can do no wrong.
- Wamphyr | 06/12/2015 @ 13:23
By “call it a day” I should have clarified that it was the end of their own ‘charity,’ not the end of their efforts to make this charity mandatory for all. Thanks for the assist.
- nightfly | 06/12/2015 @ 14:32
Wamphyr-
“Since they deal with non-elite people who don’t think like them, it’s easy (and lazy) to blame them for anything that didn’t go well, and then advocate to get them out of the way – think”

Well correction, education, history, and requests for focus, don’t seem to work.

OK, we’re all going to have to have a discussion on what “elite” actually means. Modern “usage”, and ironic ridicule aside.
OTish, And while we’re at it, podium and lectern !
- CaptDMO | 06/13/2015 @ 02:59
[…] blog of the day is House Of Eratosthenes, with a post on what intelligence […]
- If All You See… » Pirate's Cove | 06/13/2015 @ 10:01

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Thursday, June 11th, 2015