Multibipolarity

Sex, IQ, and The Politics of Idiocy

If you’ve been on the internet for a while, especially in rightist spheres, you’ll be quite familiar with debates about the significance of IQ in pretty much every area of life. You’ll also no doubt have seen a good bit of commentary about sex (I’m not saying gender) differences, also in a range of contexts. Occasionally, people will detour from debating whether Jews are actually smart or whether the average intelligence quotient in Liberia is really 53, stop asking why it’s so hard for a young anon to get a date, and put everything together as one big question. In a way, that’s what I hope to do here.

It’s an established fact of social science that, while men and women in America have the same average IQ- 100- each category arrives at that number in a different way. Men’s intelligence varies more than that of women, while women tend to cluster more around the mean, such that the smartest and dumbest person you’ll likely encounter in a mixed group will be male. I say established fact, but by way of caveat, I’m terrible at math (I’m not a nerd), so I’m really taking this one on authority. But that said, it is certainly consistent with my experience and I suspect that of most others. It explains why physics departments and prisons alike are dominated by men, and places where a reasonable level of intelligence will suffice- like modern college or HR- tend to become majority female. There are other factors at play, certainly, but the respective skews in intelligence seem to me at least to track in real life.

From the link above, the blog of Russell T. Warne

Alongside this, there is the increasing tendency in modern times to sort out politically along sex lines. Although women are moving left a good bit faster than men are moving right, the gap is only widening. It’s not simply a second-order effect of Donald Trump existing either; its true worldwide, or at least in Western or Westernized countries. Domestically, if what was noted above regarding IQ is true, this will have important electoral implications. The Democrats will increasingly become the party of what Vox Day has termed ‘midwits,’ while the Republicans will become far more intellectually heterogeneous. This will be especially true within the right proper. For the first time, actual rightist thought, not mere right-liberalism, has entered the thought-world of American politics. Trump is not truly right himself, but he opened the doors for the rest of us. It’s interesting to say the least, to see who’s entered, and who has crapped on the floor and run out screaming.

In South Korea, there’s basically the Incel Party and the Girlboss Party.

You may have noticed this intellectual divergence online. When dealing with right-liberals, left-liberals, (both remnants of the old normative order) and actual leftists (newly ascendant, such at it is), you experience escalating levels of mental illness, but generally predictable opinions within an established range of respectively respectable boundaries. You know what Joel Berry or Ted Cruz is going to say before he says it; the average Kamala voter is the only Kamala voter. But of course, men and women not only differ in intelligence, but a host of other ways related to biology, emotion, and group dynamics. Leftists, the most feminized of the three categories, impose orthodoxy through intimidation, social ostracism, cat fighting, and occasional outright violence. The ideas the midwits advance are the sorts of things that reasonably intelligent people within their respective spheres think are pretty good, mostly because other reasonably intelligent people they know tend to think so. The main problem they encounter is that, to the degree that feminine social norms influence them, they are vulnerable to unstable hierarchy formation and emotional manipulation. The smartest among them- especially with the latter two groups- can influence the dumbest to scare the middle. That’s essentially what a university now does.

There are actual men who read something like this and think, “well, that’s what I’m voting for.”

It’s quite different on the right. Right-liberals have muh Constitution and live happily in an idea called America, an idea that came into being around 1965, but which they assume was instantiated by the Ancient Israelites. Left-liberals’ basic thought centers around crowd symbols like black people marching for things and telling them they’re some of the good ones. Leftists want a revolution that ends with attractive members of whatever group they fetishize desiring them. For rightists though, it’s complicated. In the first place, even defining what the right is can be, as liberals might say, problematic. On some level we all believe in order, hierarchy, and differentiation. People are different, and a just social order will reflect that. The significance to attach to those differences, though, is where the debate comes in. The fundamental divide is whether those differences reflect a transcendent reality or something transient and temporal. There is thus a religious right and a secular right. But among the former there are those who are Christian, some few pagans, and others who are some or another sort of ‘vitalist’ believing in a vaguely spiritual but impersonal cosmic order. Among the secularists are scientific positivists, race-firsters, and the like. Sometimes these categories overlap. The important thing to know is that there are smart and stupid versions of each- for lack of better terms, an intelligent right and an idiot right.

This is how liberals flex on each other- your anti racism isn’t as black as mine.

The distinctions are obvious without having to look hard. Go read something published by The Bulwark or Heather Cox Richardson or Don Lemon. You’ll see pretty quickly that the comments are pretty much entirely the tame products of mediocre minds. Then switch over to anything put out by someone on the right-sphere. Notice anything different? If you’re like me, you’ve experienced firsthand the much wider range of the right wing mind. Time was, on a typical piece, I would get a plurality of comments from people with very kind but largely ordinary thoughts on whatever subject I was discussing, sandwiched between professors and PhDs offering better insight than I could and people where I would have to read what they wrote several times to even grasp what they were trying to covey. It got to the point where I would have to look up what these people were talking about with “talmudic agenda” and “Jewish volcano demon.” It was like a vocabulary list of terms that were all synonyms for “I’m stupid, please block me.”

Again, I apologize for writing this; I was either taking too much or too little of my medication- I can’t remember. But this classic character is based on a slew of very real people for whom these sentiments represent their basic worldview.

The right is the most masculine of political alignments, and thus, per what was noted earlier, it attracts a disproportionate amount of both the smartest and dumbest people. As someone who writes within this sphere, I regularly deal with people who have studied advanced mathematics, Classical languages, sophisticated theology and philosophy, talented historians and artists, and many similar types. But this comes with having to regularly interact with some of the stupidest people imaginable. It’s astonishing how small the middle ground is compared with the other groups I’ve mentioned.

Given that that is the case, the question for those of us on the right becomes how to deal with this fact. We have, at once, an enormous advantage and a serious handicap. To maximize the potential of what we can do, it behooves us to think seriously about what intelligence can do for us, what those liabilities amount to, and how we can channel all that energy toward some positive end. And it’s important to be clear about what we mean.

The idiot right is conditioned primarily by fear. Like all idiots everywhere, they live in terror of what they don't understand, which is pretty much everything. Their first priority is to make sense of the world, which they generally do by way of simplistic conspiracy theories that schematize everything in existence into easy to comprehend categories. A tell with these people is the totalizing nature of their thought process- there are no nuances or subtleties, no outliers or counterexamples- everything in Column A is good, B is just pure evil. While the brighter sorts on the right might occasionally stoop to broad spectrum analysis like that for emphasis or humor, they are deadly serious concepts to the idiot. When they write or speak of “the Jews,” or “brownoids” or “Christfags” or even “Americans” it’s because they think that these and other designations actually correspond to expressions of Aristotelian ideals- single-purpose entities, that purpose being to destroy them. It’s less about actual hate than a life hack that reduces the need for thinking. If you say something like, “well I get that Jews are disproportionately represented among leftists, but that hardly means that all Jews think that way, and there is a whole range of opinion among Jews about all sorts of things,” they mentally short circuit, because they notion of a Jew who isn’t “the Jew” is just as strange to them as a first grader seeing his teacher at the grocery store- that’s not where that belongs!

Theodor Herzl was a Nietzschean.

Conspiracism comes naturally to them because it readily satisfies their emotional aversion to uncertainty. They view the world as aligned against them and work hard to make that a reality. Inherently suspicious of ideas, they tend to gravitate toward beliefs that people they don’t like abhor, like National Socialism, because if people who call them stupid don’t hate it, they can project it into relevance. This sort tends to become rightist in the first place because of a sense of inferiority and a consequent inability to empathize with others. You’ll often see, when they discuss coming to their beliefs, a profound sense of alienation resolved when they finally encounter some heuristic that explains why no one likes them- they’re just too independent for their peers. This is true for everyone on the right in a sense, of course; we all break with modernity on some level. But for the idiot right, the rebellion is an end unto itself, a way of rationalizing their unpleasant, antisocial nature, dissolving it in the ether of contrarianism.

It’s why, despite having the world totally figured out, they are never able to act upon it. You will never encounter people who valorize decisive action and the will to power so eager to do absolutely nothing and posit a universe where meaningful accomplishment is impossible. There is, always and everywhere, some malign force acting upon them preventing their Nietzschean ascent. Given that that is the case, it necessarily follows that everyone who does get somewhere is some sort of grifter or sellout or shill. It’s not simply their inability to cooperate or general personality disorders; the prospect of success frightens them, as it would elevate them into a sphere where they would have to think and act still more consequentially. If you gave one of these people a million dollars in cash, he would light it on fire and think himself clever for preventing the Jews from stealing it.

This is a shame, because there has never been a time where the right in the West has had better prospects. We have youth and force behind us. Donald Trump is a boomer in the truest sense, blasting a great hole in the wall of liberalism. He’s not going into the breach himself, but the way is open. Ideas like remigration- the endorsement of which would have gotten one banned from social media during the Biden interregnum, are now official government policy. There’s a healthy masculine optimism being projected in all directions. There are people writing about health, history, science, aesthetics, pop culture, and everything else from an intelligent rightist perspective. There’s more than a lifetime’s worth of brilliant work out there waiting to be explored. It’s a great time to be active.

Donald Trump is celebrating diverse holidays and you’re black pilling?

I should make two things clear. First, I am not accusing everyone who disagrees with me of being an idiot- far from it. There are plenty of people far smarter than I am who are far less sanguine about success in Iran, or more concerned than I am about the pace of deportations, or the long-term viability of the economy. Just the other day I saw Prof. Adrian Vermeule on X saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to own machine guns; I respectfully dissent on the grounds that they are awesome.

QED

Second, while intelligence is important, in many ways it is less meaningful than certain aspects of temperament. The idiot right is dumb, but what makes the intelligent right intelligent is less their mental ability and more their willingness to act upon their beliefs in a systematic, thoughtful manner. One is intelligent not because of what one knows, but because he has the habits of an intelligent person, cultivated over time, tempered by humility, guided by hope. Every idiot is necessarily a pessimist, because he lacks the imaginative faculties to conceptualize anything better, but knows from bitter experience what it’s like to lose.

So what is to be done? The cynical among us have always had a protocol for dealing with idiots, which is to string them along and rip them off. Even as we speak, there are people getting rich telling the idiot right that Charlie Kirk was killed by some combination of Mossad, Mormons, the French Foreign Legion, and probably space aliens- the final proof set to be revealed very soon. The Democrat Party would not exist without being able to mobilize the benighted denizens of inner cities around similar ideas, so exploitation of the dim and emotional is quite bipartisan, and indeed, an intrinsic feature of democratic governance. But is there a better way?

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. On one level, intelligence is inborn and isn’t especially malleable, but then, I hardly think that everyone, idiot or otherwise, is currently being pushed to his full potential. Modernity does, in one sense, conspire against us; it’s never been easier or safer to be an idiot. But, paradoxically, it’s never been easier to improve. You no longer need a university to get a thorough education. You can get fit without specialized trainers. You can build wealth without connections. If, as I’ve offered, habits are more important than innate problem-solving ability, a great deal of improvement is possible for anyone.

Slow down there, bro! Save some learning for the rest of us.

My solution to the idiot problem is thus a kind of program of eliminating idiocy. On one level, I think there’s a lot of progress to be made there. On the other, I’m under no illusions that idiocy will not always be with us. I think in that regard, the best, most practical thing anyone looking to improve things can do is work to create a program with something for idiots to do. Right now, a big part of the problem is that the focus of the idiot right is mostly trained on other rightists. Looking at any of their feeds and you’ll see they hardly ever argue with leftists or liberals or anyone other than people who seek largely similar social and political outcomes. That can and should change. Gamergate is a great example of a movement dominated by smart rightists that nonetheless found a way to harness manic idiocy to its advantage. Every effort should be made to direct idiots toward the opponents of people able to effect real change. In other words, we need a kind of Operation SS (Storm of SPEDS) to harness, coordinate, and deploy the idiot right appropriately.

How could that be done? I’d be interested in the theories of others, but I would begin by seeding the comment sections of idiot rightists with links to pieces inimical to rightist thought, with quotes highlighted to maximize their desire to engage. Obviously, I’m not calling for any kind of brigading or swarming here, just a desire to bring to their attention the fact that there is a great rainbow of ideas out there, and they should explore something other than the Librarian’s essays. What I hope for here is that the idiots will peacefully and respectfully make their way over to non-rightist outlets and engage in a meaningful dialogue with them. All encouragement should be given to this endeavor, with the hope that we can really build some bridges, a type of labor that will hopefully have the effect of tiring out said idiots so as to preclude their bothering other rightists.

This was the Millenial Trojan War. Unfortunately, that’s the new Helen.

Will it work? One can’t know until it’s tried. But it’s better than doing nothing. Even as I type this I anticipate many of this sort will shortly show up in my comments to tell me what a Jew I am. To them all I can say is, “have you ever read Adam Kinzinger?