Why High IQ People Are PC

A couple of people have asked about my comment “high IQ people are by and large easier to brainwash.”  Is it really true?  I think so, and will explain why.

Let’s take feminism, which along with Marxism and racial egalitarianism is one of the “big three” evils that have cursed the modern world.  How might a smart person be easier to brainwash in a women’s studies course?  We can look at some feminist material to see.

The University of Maryland has an archive of women’s studies syllabi. Take this paragraph from one for a class taught at the University of San Diego.

The critique of the project of liberal humanism is now widespread in feminist theory.  Where liberal humanism centers on the rights-bearing individual who becomes equal insofar as she becomes like everyone else, and postulates the possibility of this individual’s achievement of “sovereignty, self-knowledge and self-mastery,” (Gross, (1990), p. 1) contemporary feminist theory has undermined this ideal of subjectivity and  the concepts (sic) of equality as differencelessness.  From different corners and with different effects, both poststructuralists and Third World feminists have contributed to this undermining.  But this critique of modernist liberal humanism has a history that precedes contemporary feminist variants.  So, in this class we will explore the tenets of modernist philosophy in order to set the stage for the critique of Enlightenment philosophy associated with both poststructuralism and feminism.  This, too, is related to the question of authority and the politics of representation: what texts have authority in feminist circles?  What writers represent (or can be made to represent) feminist interests?

I don’t know what your IQ has to be to understand that, but I would guess at least 110.  To make sense of the text you need to know what terms like “poststructuralists” and “liberal humanism” mean before you get to wrestling with the structure and made up words like “differencelessness.” And it’s not only hard to understand because it’s just simply bullshit, as I suspect Hegel and Foucault’s philosophies are.  That paragraph above has meaning and is written for the intelligent reader.  Kids going to the University of San Diego probably have an average IQ of 110-115, and those taking a women’s studies class are probably closer to 105.  They have no clue what any of the above means.  The teachers don’t dumb it down because they don’t believe in intelligence and expect the kids to try harder in order to internalize the wisdom of generations of “feminist scholars.”

Here’s a paragraph from a document I found on “critical race theory.”

Critical race theory along with related theories including LatCrit, Asian critical theory, Tribal critical theory, and critical race feminism (Bernal, Villalpando, Brayboy, & Thompson, 2003) drew from and extended the broad field of critical theory (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). Critical race theory explicitly focuses on social inequalities arising through race and racism. Initially developed by scholars of colour working in academic legal circles in the United States, critical race theory grew out of dissatisfaction with the extremely slow rate of real racial reform since the growth of the civil rights movement (Ladson-Billings, 1998). Critical race theory is characterised by four tenets. First, critical race theory works to name and discuss the daily realities of racism and expose how racism continues to privilege whites and disadvantage people of colour. Secondly, it legitimates and promotes the voices of people of colour by using storytelling to integrate experiential knowledge drawn from a shared history as ‘the other’ into critiques of dominant social orders. Thirdly, critical race theory insists on critiquing liberalism, particularly the notion that meaningful social change can occur without radical change to existing social structures. Related to the critique of liberalism, critical race theory questions the efficacy of much of the civil rights legislation enacted in the United States, arguing that, rather than reducing the effects of racism on people of colour, the primary beneficiaries of this legislation have been whites (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Nebeker, 1998).

In addition to the specialized lingo, there are a few phrases I think a person with an average IQ might have trouble with.  It also takes intelligence to connect what is copied above to other issues.  For example, when a smart person reads a story about racial differences in SAT scores after taking a CRT class, he may remember that “social inequalities” are due to “race and racism.”  A dumb person by the time he reads the same article has forgotten the CRT syllabus or never understood it in the first place.  He has the luxury of relying on Occam’s Razor to explain what’s in front of him.  Similarly, when our intelligent student reads about “the extremely slow rate of real racial reform since the growth of the civil rights movement” in passing he infers that racism is still holding blacks back.  This makes him friendlier to affirmative action and civil rights shakedowns.  The mentioned inference requires a minimum IQ.

There is a “default” way of thinking about race and gender.  Societies that haven’t institutionalized anti-racism assume the inferiority of blacks and sex differences, if not the inferiority of women.  It takes work to make people PC and a minimum IQ to internalize a plausible culturalist reason why we shouldn’t believe our own eyes.

On economic issues, it’s the conservative position that requires a high IQ to comprehend.  Why doesn’t government just give people free health care, education and housing?  Well, there are many good reasons why, but none of them can be put in a sentence or two.  You could say that “People should be free to choose,” but you need to explain why “giving” people things they can’t afford is an assault on liberty.

Why are simple theories true on race/sex but the more complicated theory correct on economics?  Probably because we’ve been thinking about the former for much longer and are fine tuned to deal with such issues.  We’re inclined to dislike homosexuals, distrust those different from us, treat boys and girls differently, and be loyal to our families first.  There are good reasons for each predisposition.  Homosexuals degrade the culture and spread disease, those outside the tribe probably don’t like us, men and women are made for different roles and those biologically close to you are the most trustworthy.  Taking these assumptions and applying them to social policy leads to good results.

But we’ve never had to think of macroeconomics.  People tend to see resources as unlimited and the recent invention of money as a magical substance that creates wealth.

Richard Dawkins once said that science can give you the tools to do almost unlimited good, but at the same time can be used for unspeakable evil.  High intelligence is the same way.  Having it is the only way to make any sense of the world, but it can also lead to you getting things wrong if you use your logic starting from false premises.  A high IQ person can accept silly ideologies that your average Joe can’t even understand.

Before Jews controlled intellectual discourse, most intelligent whites were classical liberals.  Nobody yet had the science to be a genetic determinist, but history was seen as progressive and the civilization that the white race had created was thought to be the pinnacle of human advancement. Black or female grievances were generally reasonable, not an excuse to endlessly complain and create an alternate reality.  When Darwin’s theory was discovered, many whites logically became eugenicists.  This is what one would expect in a world that made sense, where new scientific findings were allowed to inform us on public policy.  How much modern liberalism is due to an alien elite and how much it’s due to inherent deficiencies in the white race the reader can ponder.