It’s not just white Europeans. The Japanese, who have an even higher average IQ than we do, are also non-breeding themselves into oblivion.And Ashkenazi Jews — the smartest people on the planet — are leading the March of the Western Lemmings over the cliff of history.
Stupid is as stupid does. Remember the definition of stupid — repeating the same action over and over again, expecting a different result — and consider this recent news story (“social exclusion” means “immigrants”):
New millions to troubled Swedish suburbs
The government has decided to award to 200 million kronor ($30 million) in performance based subsidies to boost fifteen of Sweden’s suburbs grappling with social exclusion.
And what about all those bailouts and stimulus packages? Trillions of trillions of dollars and euros pumped into a losing game, over and over again, as if the end result could ever be avoided!
I have no doubt that most of the bankers and economists and politicians who make these decisions are intelligent fellows. I’ll bet they scored really well on their IQ tests in grade school. They probably graduated near the top of their class at Princeton or Dartmouth.
So how can someone that smart be so stupid?
It’s a real puzzler, all right.
A regular reader and commenter who goes by “wildiris” sent us an email yesterday that shed some light on this topic.
He says the important distinction to make is between individual and group intelligence. The whole is greater than the some of the parts, and people in the aggregate can act more intelligently than any one person in the group.
Here’s what wildiris had to say:
Recently I’ve been working through a very interesting book, in which the author brings up a number of points that I find fascinating and very apropos to the discussions at Gates of Vienna: Computational Collective Intelligence, by T. M. Szuba. I think you’ll find some of these new results, coming out of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), just as intriguing and useful as I have.
An introduction
Because of its applications to swarm robotics, research into the area of collective or distributed intelligence is a major field of interest these days. Here are just two of the many examples of swarm robotics to be found on the web.
1. Nano-quadrotor swarm flying in formation:
2. Swarm-bots pulling a child
How to measure intelligence:
The classic example of a system with collective intelligence is the ant colony. But you can’t sit an ant colony down in a chair and give it an IQ test. So some other way must be found to measure this thing we call intelligence.
What the AI community is doing is what in lay terms one might call the Forrest Gump test for intelligence; that is, “intelligence is as intelligence does”. You start by defining what you mean by intelligent behavior, then rank a system’s intelligence based on the degree to which its behavior patterns match up against that which is defined as intelligent.
This is actually a rather straightforward task mathematically. First start with a set of tasks or problems. Define a “complexity” metric on them that will give you a quantitative measure of the complexity of their solutions. Next you set your system running and measure, in a probabilistic or statistical manner, the average time in steps or iterations that it takes that system to finish a given task or answer a given problem.
There is no reason that this approach to measuring the collective intelligence of a distributed system couldn’t and shouldn’t also be applied to individuals as well.
This Forrest Gump method of measuring intelligence brings up two points that I think you’ll appreciate.
First is the observation that when intelligence is measured this way, while it will certainly be true that a high IQ will correlate in a positive way with intelligent behavior, it will also be true that high individual IQ is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for an individual, when part of a larger system, to behave in an intelligent manner.I’ve noted often your frustration with commenters when the discussion of IQ comes up, as you rightly point out that high IQ and acting stupidly often go hand in hand. But I find this first observation above addresses this concern.
The second observation to note is that this way of measuring intelligence differs fundamentally from that which is used exclusively today in the psychological, social and political science disciplines. That is, what is done today is first define an intelligent person based on their IQ score, then, second, define intelligent behavior as that which is what an “intelligent” person does.
Contrast this with the Forrest Gump test, which starts first by defining intelligent behavior, and then — only secondly — ranks individual intelligence based on that standard.
What is the basis for intelligence?
The nature versus nurture debate over the source of intelligence raged for generations, only to settle down to what common sense suggested right from the start, that it is both heredity plus environment; gene plus gene expression. But research in the AI community is now showing that there is a third heretofore unrecognized component to this thing we call intelligence, and that is the collective or distributed intelligence of the community within which an individual operates.
One of the long-time valid criticisms of the Turing Test for Intelligence was that it was culturally biased. However, this is turning out not to be a bug of the Turing Test, but rather it appears that it is going to be a feature of any valid measure of intelligence.
Rather than distributed or collective, the robotics community is using the term ambient intelligence. Imagine sometime in the near future, you’ll get up in the morning and tell your personal assistant robot to make you Eggs Benedict for breakfast. Now your PA robot might not know how to make Eggs Benedict, but it does have a wireless Internet connection. So it goes on the web, finds a recipe for your breakfast, looks to see if you have the proper utensils and ingredients in house, then either makes breakfast for you or lets you know that it can’t find the things it needs to finish the task.
We humans work the same way. The ambient intelligence of a farming community in Nebraska will contain knowledge about things like growing corn or how to start an engine in cold weather. On the other hand, the ambient intelligence of a community in New York City probably won’t have any knowledge about growing corn but may contain knowledge about the best Greek restaurants in town. Often when we use the expression “using one’s common sense” what we are referring to is that a person is accessing the collective intelligence/knowledge/wisdom of the community or culture around him.
Now return to the PA robot example above. Imagine the mischief someone could accomplish by going onto the web, hacking into someone’s favorite cookie recipe and changing sugar to salt in the list of ingredients. A PA robot would have no way of knowing the difference and would go ahead and make the cookies anyway. Or worse yet, imagine someone hacked the ingredient list to include rat poison.
So here is the money quote: One of the major repositories of a society’s collective intelligence is its culture. And, like any system of collective intelligence, its intelligence can be measured and ranked against the collective intelligence of other cultures. This is why the psychological, social and political science disciplines will never ever let go of the individual IQ test as the only acceptable measure of intelligence, because as soon as they tried to adopt the Forrest Gump test, they would have to confront the fact that cultures could then be ranked by intelligence just as individuals can. At which point the whole edifice of politically correct Multiculturalism comes crashing down
Intelligence and the individual
As the author of the book points out, an IQ test is a one-time test, given in isolation, that only measures an individual’s ability to complete an artificial problem set. At best an IQ test measures the base intelligence an individual is given by birth and by life. I suspect that what IQ scores are an indication of is the density of neural connections that are present in an individual’s brain. But, can’t be emphasized enough, an IQ test does not and cannot measure an individual’s ability to complete real-world tasks and solve real-world problems.
If the fuel pump in your car needs changing, it doesn’t matter if the mechanic is smart enough to figure out how to do it without any instructions, or if he already knows how to do it from past experience, or if he looks up the instructions in a repair manual. When the Forrest Gump method of measuring intelligence is used, it doesn’t matter how the mechanic got the job done, only that he got it done correctly and in a timely fashion.
The higher a person’s base intelligence is, the more he can get away with ignoring the ambient intelligence of the world around him, while still being able to complete the tasks before him in an intelligent fashion. But if someone is not smart enough to figure out something for himself, he can always ask a friend for advice, find a book at the library that explains things, or go on the web and find an answer.
The point is that the further back on the Bell Curve an individual’s base intelligence is, the more he will need to access the ambient intelligence of the world around him in order to perform in a similarly intelligent fashion. But most critically for these individuals is that the instructions on how to access the ambient intelligence around them are contained in their community’s culture.
Corrupt the collective intelligence of a community’s culture and/or corrupt a community's ambient intelligence, and those individuals who depend on it the most will start acting in faulty, counterproductive, and self-destructive ways.
If one grants for the sake of argument a society’s culture is one of the repositories of its collective intelligence, then corrupting it by planting false memes is the societal equivalent to the hacker and the PA robot example from above.
What wildiris had to say was grist for my mill, and I sent him back the following thoughts:
As I have often said, IQ is overrated. By any empirical measurement, the much-vaunted high intelligence of white people is a failure. If you judge by results — the successful replication of their genome — the Arabs or the Bangladeshis are the most intelligent people on the planet.
We are busily making ourselves extinct — how smart is that?
As if the West’s behavior weren’t evidence of massive collective stupidity on the part of white Europeans, and massive collective brilliance on the part of those alien cultures who exploit us so shrewdly!
He added some further thoughts:
As a side note, you can’t really appreciate how destructive the forces of political correctness are on discussions such as this until you visit a forum like the LinkedIn group, “Artificial Intelligence Researchers, Faculty + Professionals”. I stop by there daily, and it’s amazing the wide-ranging and in-depth debates that go on there regarding the definition of intelligence, the concept of self, and the nature of human consciousness.
If I had any input to the “Race and IQ” debate, I would try and get participants to “grok” the facts that when dealing with groups, communities and societies, the whole will always be greater than the sum of the parts; that a collection of individuals can and will display behaviors that no single individual by himself ever would or could; and that individual behavior and group behavior are separate and distinct things and need to be analyzed as such.
The observations above are probably as old as humanity. But what is different now is that the field of AI has finally put them on a solid quantitative and mathematical foundation. And as a result, the concept of a society’s collective intelligence should no longer be neglected as a factor when questions of individual IQ and society come up for discussion.
I would grant the “race realists” the fact that the maximum complexity that a society’s culture can attain will be dependent on the average intelligence of its members. So it’s not unexpected that there will be a correlation found between the average IQ of a society’s members and its accomplishments on the world stage. But if I may quote my own email, “it will also be true that high individual IQ is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for an individual, when part of a larger system, to behave in an intelligent manner.”
So here is my money quote for this letter: from a societal perspective, the “secret sauce” that connects individual behaviors with corresponding group behaviors is the culture.
Two examples of how culture trumps IQ…
A society comprised of people with an average distribution of intelligence, but bound together by a culture that honors virtues such as honesty, integrity, hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, the sanctity of human life and a respect for private property, is a society that will prosper, last for generations and will certainly leave its mark on the history of mankind (think frontier America).
But a society comprised of above-average IQ college-educated individuals, bound together by a culture that holds the virtues listed above in contempt, is a society destined for a bad end (think contemporary Norway).
And my final observations:
It’s obvious that a high IQ population, with a relatively high incidence of genius outliers — e.g. Norway — was necessary to invent the components and build modern technological civilization. But here’s the rub: high IQ people are not well-adapted to maintain and live in the complex automated system they have created.A lower grade of intelligence, coupled with a limited amount of initiative and individualism, is what makes the system function best, once it has been fully established. That’s why we whites are being wiped out, and the low-IQ mixed-genome people are replacing us — they’re better adapted to be either drones, or ruthless predators who exploit the drones.
The paradigm of the perfectly adapted modern man is the one described in that old commercial for “The Future” by the Firesign Theatre: “We’re looking for people who like to live in tubes and push buttons!”
The only problem is that a certain number of intelligent people are needed to maintain, trouble-shoot, and adapt the system to changing circumstances. How low can our numbers go before the machine malfunctions and breaks down through lack of maintenance?
It may take a couple of generations, but we will eventually learn the answer to that question. If there are any of us left who are still capable of cognizing such complex concepts, that is.
23 comments:
Good article. It's simpler, it's animal group intelligence as opposed to the intuitive interconnectedness rare but in humans, especially in certain cultures. As humans, the problem is, as you are pointing out, we must have both.
I was in Nepal with a friend who was about 44. Oddly, he had to pay a toll to walk by the local monkeys in one area of Katmandu. Although he lived in the USA for years, the monkeys remembered him when he would return and block his way, at threat of injury or death. Others including myself did not have to pay.
See, when he was a kid, he threw stones at the monkeys, they never forgot. They work as a team. They threw him on the ground and bit him. After that he had to carry a stick and a piece of fruit so to pass.
Actually your statement about Ashkenazi Jews is incorrect (or at least incomplete). Israeli jews have highest birth rate of any developed country. Even Jews from USSR in Israel have generally gone from 1 kid per family to 2 plus.
Jewish population in US is low birth rate, but even here there is strong split between left wing/secular and Orthodox. Orthodox are rapidly gaining as share of population and it is only a matter of time (I estimate 10-15 more years) before Jewish population goes back to having positive growth rate overall. I am not an expert on Japanese population, but it is dangerous to draw long-term conclusions from short trend terms.
Someone smart can be stupid. It's the wise one who cannot be. You did well by stressing the function of culture, because wisdom is first, the accumulated cultural pereption of what makes life tick and humans spin; and second, it's personal experience.
Neither the first nor the second is available to Westerners anymore, no matter the IQ. Society's patterns and values have changed so much that a clever new 3-D computer game is an object of status and veneration, but what some dead old white male wrote or said 2400 years ago is considered utterly irrelevant. And we are obsessed with the young and have no use for the old -- where experience lies.
What we call "failed cultures" don't have all those distractions and distortions, becuase they can neither invent the new toys nor, except for freak cases like UAE-Dubai, generate the wealth to acquire them. But their loss is their gain, because their static culture relies on the old, tried and, very often, wise. And they have retained their respect for the old and experienced -- men, usually, but in Africa women too.
I am fond, for instance, of a proverb that exists in several East African languages spoken mainly by semi-literates: "Even if a log bob on the water for 1000 years, it cannot become a crocodile." Show me one cabinet minister or public intellectual in the entire Western world who is more than a dumb bobbing puppet in comparison to that. Particularly when he or she opines on immigration, multiculturalism, Islam etc.
Takuan Seiyo
Anon @ 1:33 AM --
I wasn't referring solely to the breeding rate of Ashkenazi Jews. I know the birth rate of Israeli Jews is higher than in Western Europe -- near or above replacement level, if I recall correctly.
But their Ashkenazi cousins in America voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, and even now, after four years of undeniable signals that he is ushering Israel to its destruction, an overwhelming majority of them still support him.
All across the West, Ashkenazi Jews are prominent in the leadership of groups that advocate open borders, the elimination of national identities, "interfaith dialogue", and the accommodation of Muslims within Western society. This despite the fact that Muslim immigration will eventually be the literal death of the Jews.
It seems that to a highly intelligent Ashkenazi Jew, self-destruction is less important than dogged adherence to the trans-national progressive ideology that is hollowing out Western culture.
There is more to the Western lemming-march than a declining birth rate. And the most intelligent Westerners are leading the way.
Intelligence matters a lot and you certainly don't import hordes of lower IQ types with highly regressive cultures. 3rd world people can't build a Sweden or Great Britain.
The reason the West is imploding demographically has to do with several large scale social trends that appeared over the last 60 years.
1) The creation of the Welfare State which reduces men to sperm donors and is anti-family. Look at Northern Europe 50% of kids are born into single parent homes. The State is the Father.
2)Introduction of various Marxist inspired movements that have permeated through White society:
Feminism - the radical sort which teaches women to hate men, look down on stay at home mom's and worship the corporate life. Think Sandra Fluke or Gloria Steinem.
Post-modern art and architecture movements that have made a obscenity out of art(Piss Christ) and architecture - look at the difference at buildings built prior to WWI and now. Which is more humane and warm in appearance?
See Thomas Wolfe's two books for more on these subjects.
Modern art doesn't inspire, it degrades and makes a mockery of life, it's junk promoted by wealthy people. Think about it. That's how we went from Michaelangelo to Serrano.
Intellectual movements like Liberalism and secularism are utterly toxic for people who adhere to it. They don't have kids period. Hedonism and self-centeredness is the name of the game for those who embrace it and kids get in the way.
Loss of religion. The more secular a people become the less chance of them having a positive or neutral replacement rate. For example the Red States have more kids than Blue states. Religious families are bigger. It's also manifests with charity work. The more Liberal people are the less inclined they are to engage in charity.
Anon @ 1:26pm --
I agree: these are the major factors contributing to the destruction of the culture and the reduction of the birth rate in the West.
But you don't address the central question of this article: Why do intelligent people adopt such stupid ideas? Why do the highest-IQ people promote this toxic nonsense?
Stupid people don't adopt Marxist-PC-Progressivism. Smart people do.
For some unexplained reason, stupid people seem to know better.
The advantage of collective wisdom is lost when the culture doesn't respect wisdom, but gives their highest honor to fools, divas, and crooks.
All things being equal, a culture that valued intelligence would have their most intelligent members sought after as marriage partners. Instead, any dumb thug is more attractive to a young woman; such choices dumb down the population.
It is easy to confound intelligence and wisdom. Although correlated, they are not the same thing. High intelligence is a necessary condition for wisdom but it is not sufficient.
I know many very intelligent, very unwise people.
Remember the description of King James: the wisest fool in Christendom.
Our left-wing intelligentsia seem to be totally out of touch with man's biological nature. A great deal of polotical correctness consists in denying the realities of our biological natures. Did you hear Sandra Fluke at the Democratic convention last night? Absolutely unbelievable! A perfect example of everything that is wrong with the ideas that dominate in our universities and mass media. These people will never survive in a Darwinian race of survival of the fittest. They just won't reproduce themselves and thus take themselves out of the gene pool of future generations.
"But you don't address the central question of this article: Why do intelligent people adopt such stupid ideas? Why do the highest-IQ people promote this toxic nonsense?
Stupid people don't adopt Marxist-PC-Progressivism. Smart people do.
For some unexplained reason, stupid people seem to know better."
I'll attempt to provide an answer: because many of the people with the highest IQs, like all humans, are wired in such a way as to obtain as much status as possible. Also, they possess the very human impulse to believe in some higher power or religion. The leftist liberals have abandoned classical Christianity and replaced it with something else, the religion of the Universal Brotherhood of Man. And they use their high IQs to rise in rank inside this Universalist church, the same way that Christians aim to regarded as the most God-fearing in their communities. For our Liberals, being the most anti-racist, tolerant are the virtues they use their intelligence to achieve, or at least to make others believe they have achieved.
Sadly, only a minority of high-IQ people are honest, rationalist truthseekers. But, it is these people that invent the kind of science and technology that made Western civ the most advanced in human history.
About group intelligence, I'm afraid I disagree: groupthink is very dangerous, or at least not useful. How many great inventions, scientific results or theorems were discovered by committee, and how many by lone individuals with exceptional genetic talent, living in good environments? (Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Edison, Tesla - they all worked alone) Also, it's worth noting that the vision of a half-Syrian Arab (Steve Jobs) for running a profitable company has proven to be superior to that of the committees at Google and Microsoft.
As my wife says, highly intelligent people tend not to have commmon sense. That is a part of the problem.
The second problem is that because the ordinary working man may have a lower iq but does have common sense and what is known as practical intelligence and because he voices opinions that are full of common sense but perhaps illiberal then the intelligentsia must reject such opinions even though they know they are correct in a bid to show themselves superior to the ordinary working man.
The fact that they are commiting racial and cultural suicide seems not to worry them, they seem to develop a masochistic streak almost begging to be done in by the vibrant and culturally enriching. A prime example must be those Jews supporting multiculturalism whilst ignoring the resultant islamic anti-semitism.
Fortunately, there are a few people of high iqs, perhaps even higher than the aforementioned who have retained the ability to use logic and common sense and do not think themselves superior to the ordinary working man. The supreme example was Enoch Powell who had one of the most brilliant minds Britain has every produced but also possessed a practical intelligence. Perhaps his intelligence was even higher than the so-called intelligentsia.
As for myself, I am an Oxford graduate but have been called extremely logical so can see through the utter stupidity of the liberal intelligentsia. It would be nice to think that these high iq masochists will just drift away on their clouds into the sunset. The truth is that in the end the practical intelligence of those with slightly lower iqs will have to save them and us from their monumental stupidity.
Baron,
Take a gander on the wild side. There is no mystery at all, none. This is group animal behavior. We are animals too, you know.
I've studied behavioral psychology for years, rat labs and all. Post-post modern psychology may not cover it as well as we once did thirty-forty years ago.
The modern Western mind focuses on the more abstract, this done excessively, which is what we do, destroys the instincts. This is also Taoist knowledge. I'd be glad to explain it more, but not now, a personal emergency is beckoning.
An example for starters though: Sigmund Freud recongnized this in himself he focused his mind in harsh conceptual thinking, and prematurely lost his own libedo. How cool of a story is that? Freud, like him or not, was a very smart guy and was a great critical mind. He could criticize himself, just as he could for thinking cocaine was so great at first.
In the same way we lose our other instincts to family, kids, social groups, the energy is drained, perhaps sublimated to, shall we say, less grounded, more etherial-utopian nonrealities, not to mention the pressures of hard learning, reading-righting- rithmatic and the strenuous higher end of the three.
I gave an example of monkey tribe intelligence. Our dexterity is nowhere near theirs, they are focused upon the physical and they are masters, we are not.
The answer to health and social sanity is balance as a thinker and as a human animal.
Great topic.
Anon, Great point about wisdom going beyond intelligence. True. I submit that, wisdom requires an understanding that doesn't merely transcend humanity, but includes his instincts, like our tribal one, our family one. A wise person doesn't lose their instincts, they only adapt them here or there to perhaps a higher good.
They don't squash them entirely, they see their place and allow them to exist. For example, the sexual drive, in most people it should not be overly suppressed, that would be unhealthy against instinct.
Extreme mental activity damages the instincts. Live in the dark for a good period, live in silence, your eyes and ears will become very healthy and strong.
Anon @ 3:40pm --
Yes, that's a good point. Man is a social animal, and social pressure drives status-seeking behavior.
I would expect that history is replete with examples of status-seeking political figures who ignored common sense to pursue narcissistic self-aggrandizing goals, thereby leading themselves and their peoples into ruin. Hitler comes to mind...
I just read my own statement to Anon, above, about wisdom, and it made absolutely no sense.
Let me try to redeem myself:
This wisdom requires an understanding that INCLUDES higher intelligence, but ALSO can freely allow beneficial natural animal instincts, like tribal ones, family ones, societal ones. A wise person still has their instincts they can allow them to come through as need be and can also control them when they are inappropriate too.
And over-intellectualization damages some of one's natural capabilities. Everything in moderation.
Animals and bugs are much more socially adept than people, on a basic instinctive level.
If you don't want to talk about animal instincts, then you won't be able to have a very complete theory of human social behavior.
People want to be accepted by their peer group. If you are a university professor, even with tenure, you will be "shunned" if you go against the leftist crowd. Shunning is very unpleasant.
For an example of group shunning, see Renaud Camus, dropped by his publishers because he decided to support Front National. How many writers will now dare do the same?
http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.ca/2012/08/france-is-already-in-state-of-war-and.html
And on blogs, we're Anonymous, using a fake name, or just our first name? Why?
Thanks Baron. I never would have imagined that a simple email exchange would turn into a post with this much “punch” to it.
To anon @ 9/07/2012,1:26PM and similar comments. Your observations are perfectly correct, but what you are noting are symptoms not causes. I’ve been visiting Gates of Vienna for years. I long ago got tired of reading about yet one more outrage or yet one more example of western society swirling the bowl on its way down the drain. I want to do something about it.
As an engineer, my first instinct, when trouble-shooting a problem, is to determine what the problem is in the first place. Why is it that so many otherwise intelligent and good people can end up doing things that are so self-destructive.
Within the proper cultural setting, a spread in IQ points is a meaningless variable. My family and I attend a small rural community church. Within the congregation we have members that range from medical doctors, people with graduate degrees in STEM disciplines, farmers, truckers, construction workers, stay at home moms, and just a whole bunch of average working people There must be a 50-60 point spread in IQ within the congregation, but it just doesn’t matter; we all seem to function together as a big family just fine.
As long as the spread in IQ is a smooth one, then within the proper cultural context, individual IQ isn’t going to matter. What is happening in Scandinavia these days is that, by their immigration policies, these countries are creating a two-humped IQ distribution within their populations which is leading to a bifurcation of their societies as a whole.
Since I started my reading on collective intelligence, I’ve been meditating on the similarities between the concepts “collective intelligence” and “common sense”. Could they be one and the same thing? At the very least, they are first cousins.
If a society’s collective intelligence is going to be of any use to its members, then that intelligence needs to be packaged in a format that makes it accessible to its average members; a classic example would be Aesop’s Fables. But by its very nature, then, common sense wisdom cannot be worded in a sophisticated manner. So it will always sound uneducated to those of a more academic mindset.
Another challenging aspect to the concept of common sense wisdom is that sometimes it takes generations before the folly or the wisdom of a society’s choices becomes evident. But by then the original reasons why a society might have made those choices has long been forgotten. So, while the lessons learned get embedded into the common sense wisdom of the community, the original reasons why society went down that road in the first place remain absent from the narrative.
While relying on common sense wisdom can guide an individual of average intelligence to make good choices in life, it doesn’t leave them with the corresponding reasons why; which then leaves them unable to defend those choices when challenged by an educated academic. This explains the ease with which college professors can get young students to abandon the traditional values they grew up with at home.
The best inoculation we can give anyone against the assault on traditional values they experience at school, in the workplace, and from their friends, is to resupply them with the missing pieces of their culture’s common sense wisdom.
Historically, one of the main caretakers of Western Society’s traditional cultural values was the Christian Church. But the progressive side of the Church has embraced popular culture and has become an enabler to our current societal dysfunctionality, while the traditional side rejects the notion that scripture should be of practical value (*) and thus refuses to dirty its hands with the task of mounting a non-religious, practical and scientific defense of its own traditional values in the arena of academic debate.
(*As if having practical value somehow cheapens it or renders it spiritually invalid.)
The reason that the forces of politically correct multiculturalism dominate Western Society’s social and political narrative is that they have been able to command the academic and scientific high ground, while those entrusted with the preservation of traditional cultural values have either joined the other side or abandoned the field of engagement entirely.
The only way to win the cultural war that we are now in is to take it back to the arena of academic inquiry and debate and win it there. But in order to do that, traditional cultural values need to be put back on some kind of solid scientific foundation capable of holding their own in that arena. IMHO, with mathematically rigorous concepts like that of collective intelligence, it becomes possible to put not only the idea of common sense wisdom on a solid scientific foundation, but concepts that are implied by it, too.
"Common sense" is simply what you get from common experience, but so far the only thing approaching that might be all those people playing World of Warcraft or whatever's popular at the moment.
Actually, you'd probably have better results uniting Call of Duty or Halo players under common themes. Islam is basically a much less intelligent version of the Flood.
In any case, I'm rather hesitant to call a culture that produces such a wide range of options for its adherents a failure until such time as it actually dies. It's had to both pioneer and adapt to all of the technological changes and their unforeseen consequences in a very short span of time.
Calling one who's obviously fatigued after doing some great work a failure because he didn't respond to a threat by using a reptilian brain that never got trained or guided in the petty cruelties of tribal life just seems uncharitable.
Muslims will continue to be an "evolutionary success" right up to the point where a nation above them decides they're not worth keeping around. May be us or may be China or India. But sticking to the same group evolutionary strategy by refusing any change in its tenets is going to get it destroyed by the first ambitious civilization that wants to take advantage of a worldwide moral apathy spike. If someone nuked Tehran right now, who would respond militarily? To whom? For what reason?
One respects the existence and evolutionary persistence of ants, one does not admire them, or take any thought for their lives.
All very well Wildiris, but while you are trying to get enough people and contacts for support to 'take it back to the arena of academic enquiry and debate...etc' events on the ground will almost certainly make talk redundant. In other words,time is the most important commodity and it is drying up like paint on a wall on hot day.Something physical is needed and I am not sure us couch-potatoes in Western lands are capable of this anymore.
Anon:6:00am, sadly, you’re probably right. But the tragedy is that things don’t have to end that way.
I know you’re anxious for a fight, but do you have any idea the forces of destruction you’re going to call down on civilization once a war in the streets starts? You’re not up against just a few politicians and academics. You’re going up against a mindset that has infected major segments of the population. So please take this warning seriously, that parasitic meme-set called politically correct multiculturalism is not going to let itself die without taking its host, and everything else around, along with it.
If starting a fight is what you think needs to be done, then you better be prepared to take it all the way to the end. A long time Gates of Vienna poster, El Ingles, has written an excellent essay on the possible nature of the coming societal conflicts: “Surrender, Genocide… or What?” The link is on the side bar. It might help you visualize what will happen to society, once order starts to break down. Civilization is an extremely fragile thing. Once its broken, it could take centuries before life as we know it returns to this world.
well, i won't lack for statements to refute.
let me preface my remarks by pointing out that in spite of your preference for what amounts to white supremacy, you haven't really noticed we ALL get old, sick, and die. suffering is the one universal constant.
"Also, they possess the very human impulse to believe in some higher power or religion." nope. not true. my many buddhist friends and i are noticeably missing a higher power (well, actually, that's the point, we're not missing one at all)
"The leftist liberals have abandoned classical Christianity and replaced it with something else, the religion of the Universal Brotherhood of Man." yep. because in the long run, you're not actually better than anyone else. not a little bit.
please note: this is not an invitation to suicide - i heartily recommend personal and cultural self-defense, but only against individuals who pose an immediate threat to me or mine.
"Sadly, only a minority of high-IQ people are honest, rationalist truthseekers." true. but how is that any different from the rest of the planet? everyone in their own time.
i'm continuously amazed by this blog. although most of the posts are based in reason, many fail to notice that it isn't religion that got us here, nor is it logic. but rather it's compassion and wisdom. only when we think and act well towards others are we able to advance collectively or individually. this isn't PC nonsense. it's simply the basis for our current success. and also the failure of islam, as it lacks compassion for ANY. which is why it will lose and the west will win.
keep fighting - but remember, wisdom AND compassion.
"...the failure of islam, [is] as it lacks compassion for ANY. which is why it will lose and the west will win."
Did 'compassion' - really gross and irresponsible inaction against sheer evil - ever conquer any big bad guys in past history? Nope.
Westerners have been brainwashed to believe that we can seriously 'talk' violent and greedy people out of being our conquerors.
Meanwhile, our conquerors have been brainwashed to believe that our 'talking' shows our weakness, to ignore any 'talking' from us, and to violently force us to submit to their will and ways - with the first submission being that we absolutely STOP 'talking' to them about their violence!
This masochistic partnership sounds like a successful recipe for Islam to conquer the West in the same way that 1/4 (soon to be 1/3) of the world's peoples have been conquered.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Egghead
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