What About Wisdom and Morality?
by Hermes
The smarter people are, the more complicated the way they handle problems which would otherwise have a simple solution. They get lost in theories and analysis, and forget about real, harsh life.
People give so much importance to that almighty IQ, anyway. For them, only intelligence counts, whereas there are other elements which are even more important than intelligence, and these element are wisdom and morality.
Taking the oft-much mentioned example of Norway, people there may well be very very smart, but their level of wisdom seems to be extremely low. What is the advantage of having a high IQ if one is self-doomed to disappear?
Driving oneself into cultural — and eventually collective national suicide — does not seem to be a wise way of behaving, regardless of the given level of genius. Is this an intelligent/high IQish way of behaving?
So how many kinds of intelligence are there in the end?
What kind of profit do they get from their high IQ, if they doom themselves?
The members of the ant colony certainly lack a high level of IQ, or any level of intelligence measured by human standards at all, but perhaps this is why they will not indulge in a suicidal behavior by allowing other species of ants to mix with them, thus destroying the unity of the whole system.
What it is meant by this is that ants act in a logical way dictated by nature itself, and not by a high level of IQ. Ants act not according to intelligence, but to “common sense”, so to speak, which in their case could be translated as instinct. And this is what the West seems to lack: the very basic natural way of behaving, the very basic instinct of survival by which the human race survived through the millennia, which has been replaced by a thing called Political Correctness, an ill and demented social theory and behaving conduct completely opposed to nature itself and created by… well, by intelligent people, by thinkers.
And this was certainly not an intelligence pervaded by wisdom, but by madness. One becomes very curious about what level of IQ Adorno, Horkheimer & co. might have had.
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?
Very good point. Perhaps they have climbed so high that they simply cannot appreciate aspects which are a matter of common sense. They have gotten lost in their own worlds, they have missed contact with the real world, a world which we “poor ignorants” lacking Princeton degrees see clearly, because we live in it, we see things using common sense.
They live in a fantasy world in which everything becomes predictable, everything can be controlled, because this is how they have learned it at the university. Just as PMP stated in his essay about Malmö: “When an experiment or a medical trial is injurious and damaging its subjects and patients, one usually stops […] If the experiment continues, those responsible will likely face investigation and later prosecution. In Sweden, multiculturalism is a failing experiment, in which the Swedes and their country are constantly injured test objects […] Those responsible for this crime do further not face any official investigation, and they most definitely do not face prosecution”.
Well, of course they will not stop the experiment, as common sense would dictate. They are convinced that everything must, and will necessarily go as they expect to. This is strongly reminiscent of the communist “five-year-plan”, in which the government’s program virtually “foresaw” the quantity of goods the country would produce in the coming five years, regardless of anything that would happen in the meantime. The production goal had to be fulfilled at all costs, and if something went wrong, that was due to sabotage carried out either by a “fascist reactionary” or by a secret agent from the capitalist West, but never to a failure of the perfect socialist system. The more one connects the dots, the more frightening all this becomes.
Stupid is as stupid does, yes. They keep repeating the same action over and over again, expecting a different result, or, better said, the result they want to achieve, at all costs, because it is their goal, and the goal must be fulfilled, the goal is right, it is as it should be, it is what the elite dictates. And what the elite dictates, that simply cannot be wrong.
Intelligence is not everything. There must also be morality and wisdom, and these elements cannot be measured in a scale like IQ. Low-IQ groups are winning, and this is probably because those Westerners with high IQ in power suffer from a total lack of these other two elements.
They suffer from a total lack of wisdom because they do not see nor want to see nor want to acknowledge what we all see, that their projects are an absolute failure and a universal crime against their own nations.
They also suffer from a lack of morality, because they do not give a damn if Westerners get mugged, raped or killed during this multicultural process of theirs. They continue to pursue their fantasy goal, their own “five-year-plan”, the objective they think is good for everybody.
And if something goes wrong, well, we all know who will they blame for the mess… the reactionary Islamophobes, the nationalist saboteurs.
18 comments:
Ethics matter, morality matters. Having faith matters. Yes the latter is very important. It kept Europe alive and fighting when the horrific Turkish hordes were banging on Europe's back door and for 7 centuries before that.
The first two elements teach us about right and wrong. Forgot the Po-Mo relativism spewed in college by some Marxist idiot. That stuff is poison for a society that embraces it. It destroys the qualitative aspect of society and thinking. It banishes the good, the true and beautiful. It renders people defenseless argument wise in the face of evil and immorality.
Ever see what Po-Mo did to architecture and art? It killed them. There is no place for a Michaelangelo, Da Vinci or Rembrandt anymore. Only for the Serranos of the world who pimp themselves out to some rich maggot.
Faith, if it is strong it powers the positive emotions and engages the heart. It holds people together while everything else falls apart.
After WWII, Europe lost it's faith, it's churches became museums and the Marxist professors put ethics and morality into a killing jar for the educated elite And what's was left of Christianity was infiltrated by Leftwing scum like that filthy Marxist Rowan. The state became the father, the mother.
It the place of traditional high European culture the Marxists gave us multiculturalism - a hideous offspring of post-modern thought whose only goal was to destroy pride and value in European cultures and Western civilization.
The state through it's massive welfare machine gave us hedonism, hordes of illegitimate children, sloth and vices galore. Men reduced to sperm donors. Where as before men worked in factories and shop and were proud of what they built. Now all they have is a monthly check for laying around and watching "bread and circuses" - organized sports and porn for the unlearned.
This is why the Left is relentless in its assault on traditional Western values, the arts and sciences in our colleges, Christianity, nationalism and men. It's no accident. They want to smash it all.
I've never put too much stock in IQ tests. It is amazing to see people point to all of Europe's achievements as essentially a product of IQ, and then say that its downfall is due to cultural decay. Here's a thought: maybe both were the product of culture to begin with.
If the West is to regain its pride, it should center it on things of real substance. The combination of nationalism and racial superiority has already shown itself to be extremely dangerous. Why let ourselves be seduced by a destructive form of collective pride, when we already know where the primrose path leads? If certain Mensa Narcissus types feel themselves the glory of the West encarnate as a result of their beloved IQ scores, why become fools drowned in vanity alongside them?
Yes, northern folk tend to show higher IQ tests. But to then say: "Well, it must be because we are from the north", is something so patently circular that only stupidity or foolishness can account for it. Since pride is involved, I vote for the latter.
Besides, the data from these tests is almost certainly misleading. The last few centuries have been dominated by northerners. Combine that with the Flynn effect, and it should come as no great shock that those who are most educated in the new modernized world, are the ones to tend to score the best. Do you really think the Flynn effect's increased scores in such a negligible amount of time is due to genetics?? Aaaah, we like to think so, don't we?
Hermes is right, we need wisdom more than brains. A shame humanity seems to be terminally deficient in it. I wouldn't bank Western Civ on a sustained cold front, that's for sure.
If you desire wisdom seek understanding, to understand one must be able to examine and contemplate, and to do that one must be educated(not in the modern sense but classical).
Education matters - a lot in what is wrong with Western people is due to it's education system.
The thing is, a high IQ can be rendered moot if, as children and young adults they are indoctrinated instead of educated. Indoctrination stunts them and makes them unquestioning. They end up embracing all sorts of garbage thinking from the Left without a thought to the consequence or even why they are embracing them.
How do you do it? You stuff their minds full of nonsense like Post-Modernism, feminism, multiculturalism, speech codes, destroy their ability to engage in operational thinking, to think inductively and deductively, hold and examine opposing points of view, etc.
It first starts in grade school and progresses from there. It not bad there, but the environment is so noxious it makes life hell on the smart kids. Who would be better off learning on their own.
The point in all this, is that all of this is deliberate on the part of Marxists. They know from the early Communists that in order to topple Western nations you have to indoctrinate their youth and by extension future leaders both political and civic.
This is why we're in the mess we are in.
And it is no accident that the humanities department are infested with Marxists and trying to push their way into the science and technology departments.
He who controls the education of the young controls society.
Refs:
Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt
Fear of Knowledge by Paul Boghossian
National Association of scholars PDF report at link:
http://www.nas.org/articles/politics_undermining_learning_scholars_warn_university_of_california
I feel very close to this topic.
In my opinion, IQ tests are very flawed instruments designed and delivered by very flawed people with limited imagination and intelligence.
Fundamentally stupid people with advanced degrees have convinced themselves - and pretty much everyone else - that the exercises on IQ tests measure 'innate' (aka FIXED!) ability.
Says who? Based on what proof?
I'll bet that, given enough time and incentive, I could teach most people how to master IQ tests which completely invalidates the 'innate' idea.
I am inherently a teacher - and I have taught community college - but I avoided the education major at my college because NO smart people entered that program - plus the college teachers graded college students on how to make pretty elementary school level posters which I thought was RIDICULOUS!
Multiply that phenomenon by lots of students and years and years, and all of a sudden, you have NO smart people in the field of education! Just the leftover students who were unable to master the 'harder' majors.
Egghead
According to Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa ("The Intelligence Paradox"), intelligent people do many things which are not only unwise but harmful. Intelligent people are more prone to smoking, binge drinking, drug taking, etc. They are also more likely to be atheists, homosexuals, vegetarians and enjoy jazz and classical music.
Kanazawa's argument is that intelligent people are attracted to behaviour and thinking which is "evolutionarily novel". That is, they try and enjoy doing stuff simply because it is new and different. But, this is often also harmful and counter-productive.
People with higher IQ's are more liberal and earn more money, but also have less children and engage in lifestyles which harm their own interests.
It's not that liberals are immoral, I think its more like they have a moral sysstem which is so naive and open to abuse that it is self-destructive and ultimately self-defeating. Low birth rates, mass immigration, Political Correctness and a naive belief in the oneness of humanity (without struggle or competition) are just some of the "intelligent" ideas we have been exposed to which are utterly devoid of common sense.
This essay does comes in handy, now that NZ do-gooders have decided it is about time to gradually convert also this so far largely unspoilt country into a 3rd-world sewer, by promoting an invasion from there, and as usual based on 'humanitarian' grounds. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18rX4Z_OkBY . Feel free to comment, all you need is a Google or YT account.
Michael Laudahn
When I was a child in the 1950s there was something called received wisdom. It was the result of the experience and the common sense of my ancestors and was accepted by the bulk of the population. Over the last 1000 Britain had achieved homogeneity and everybody felt at ease with one another. It was 99.9% white British. We had absorbed a few thousand Huguenots and half a million Jews and a very few blacks who lived mostly in the ports. But basically as Mr Green of Migration Watch has said we were the third most stable population in the world and we liked it that way.
Then came the baby boomers who were the students of the 1960s and the early 1970s and they thought they knew best. They rejected received wisdom, in fact they rejected wisdom altogether which I see as a mixture of logic, common sense and experience.
The received wisdom which made British immigration policy restrictive as the country was stable and if it wasn't broke why fix it was overthrown by the immature who thought that because they had a university eduction they knew best, most of all better than their parents' and grandparents' generations who had fought two world wars to keep the country the way we liked it.
Coupled with them were the importers of cheap labour. The chief problem was the guilt of our colonial past and governments not strong enough to live with it. But of course Atlee's post-War government gave British passports to hundreds and thousands in the former empire. Whether they wanted them to come or were just too stupid to look to the future is uncertain.
Received wisdom is perhaps the best wisdom of all as it is based on centuries of experience. Despite the fact that I was of a later generation somebody called me very wise. Perhaps that is because I could see that such received wisdom was the repository of logic and common sense.
Sadly we allowed these intellectual idiots to triumph and that is why we are in such a mess.
There was a point to the European project and a coming together to try to heal the destruction of two world wars. But those involved were preparing to take to ridiculous lengths and now God willing the freedom loving people of the Netherlands are about to put the skids under it and take the first steps towards regaining their independence from this Marxist totalitarian superstate. Once this begins then people will begin to wish to return to the freedom, independence and stability of the countries they knew before the baby boomers won and hopefully will find the courage to stand up to these Marxist pygmies.
So you all admit that race-mixing with "low-IQ" races can have benefits?
The patriarchal system of Islam ensures meme-transmission if the Muslim is the father, but otherwise, the genetic damage shouldn't be exaggerated.
I just read comment 7, which I found interesting, also as a 'follow-up' (?) to my own at 6. And just as if to emphasise the point I tried to make there, I just found that the initiator of the pro-immigration action for NZ visible at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18rX4Z_OkBY - Tracey Barnett - has blocked me from posting further comments at her video.
Feel free to comment yourselves, all it takes is a Google/Yahoo account. You could also send her personal messages through her page at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLjWWIMmQkXLDXRB2QLC_Rw - that is, as long as you're not blocked yet. .)
Finaly, she can be reached via her website at http://www.traceybarnett.co.nz/ , or rather contact(a)traceybarnett.co.nz .
It isn't necessary to convert also NZ into a third-world-style, mohammedan-dominated sewer-in-the-making, just because this kind of people so wishes - is it?
Michael Laudahn
Anon @ 4:39pm --
I had to delete your comment because of foul language. Please don't do that again.
----
Anonymous said...
Depressed to read about New Zealand. I thought I read recently that one of their politicians had said that he did not want New Zealand to be converted into a multicultural [dystopia], or something similar, like Britain so I thought she was still untainted apart from fighting between the various peoples from the Pacific islands in Auckland. This will be a shock for many from Britain who speak of New Zealand being like Britain in the 1950s and the last place left we can flee to to escape the multicultural nightmare. To think that 50 to 60 years ago our kith and kin from the Old Commonwealth had no problem coming to Britain and vice versa. In a nearby town to me a teacher from New Zealand was deported recently for outstaying his visa requirements. Meanwhile those from the Sub-continent and Africa seem to be welcomed with open arms.
Sorry, Baron, was that my comment you deleted or edited? I am afraid it is the result of the company I have been keeping in recent years. Actually, I believe that perhaps that word might be more acceptable in Britain than on the other side of the ocean. I think I meant to say hell-hole, perhaps that is the world the Kiwi used. I promise to engage my brain next time, such that it is.
That´s not a ´reply´ - Thats a great stand-alone essay.
"Intelligence is not everything. There must also be morality and wisdom, and these elements cannot be measured in a scale like IQ. Low-IQ groups are winning, and this is probably because those Westerners with high IQ in power suffer from a total lack of these other two elements."
I think that is perhaps THE fundamental problem. There is a complete abscense of moral among many, many Westerners today. I bet there is quite a few ´rocket scientists´ out there who are very sharp when it comes to sheer IQ, but do not give a damn whether their people will survive or subdue to foreign occupation. It just doesn´t concern them (they have much importer things to think about - Themsvelves, namely). They are, simply put, products of a modern, individualistic Europe, where career, money and physical appearences are what counts. Not your family, your values or your people. People, what is that? "are you a racist or something?"
That is what we are told through the media. And every intelligent human being, now knows there are significant risks and pains involved in confronting the system. If you, however, get on top of this evil machinery, you will have many, many perks. Intelligence does not mean a person is good, has morals or cares for his country or his people. I´d swap half of Europes population today with ´less intelligent people´, if I knew they for a fact CARED for their countries. Because what we have lost, is our values, ideals and our morals. We have lost people who actually gives a damn about something larger than themselves. That is something IQ can never match.
Hermes, you wrote "The members of the ant colony certainly lack a high level of IQ, or any level of intelligence measured by human standards at all, but perhaps this is why they will not indulge in a suicidal behavior by allowing other species of ants to mix with them, thus destroying the unity of the whole system."
Actually, ants sometimes do commit suicide.
It's called the Lancet liver fluke, dicrocoelium dendriticum. You should Wikipedia it. It is an intestinal parasite that lives in the guts of cows and sheep and has a very fascinating life cycle that includes the suicidal behavior of any ant infected by it.
The reason that the Lancet fluke is of note is that it is one of the classic examples of a mind parasite that alters the behavior of the ant it infects so that the ant starts acting in a way that exposes it to be eaten by a grazing animal. That's how the fluke worm gets itself back into a cow or sheep.
The meme folks love to use this example as an analogy of how memes infect and alter a person’s thinking in self-destructive ways. Here is a YouTube link to a TED talk by Daniel Dennett on ants, the Lancet fluke, memes, terrorism and Islam, http://youtu.be/KzGjEkp772s. Personally, I find Daniel Dennett and his buddy Richard Dawkins rather shallow thinkers. But I find the concept of memes that they have done so much to popularize, to be the most useful paradigm there is to analyze what is going on in society today.
Thanks, Hermes! Great comments too.
The semi-intelligent DO have a special ability to construct idealistic thoughtforms, while missing the basics of the elements we all must deal with.
The order of destruction:
1) Utopian thinking is invented by SMART PEOPLE who lack wisdom, or training in culture, religion or philosophy, and cling to their invention. They cling because...
2) Their utopian idea structure gets BACKED BY THE MASSES OF UNTHINKING PEOPLE, who happily join in the thoughtform of the plentitude and efortlessness envisioned for them. Now we have the pro-agressive visionary movement with intellectual and aggressive leaders and passive-aggressive followers.
Both the masses and leaders become CO-ADDICTED to their utopian group idea. (At this point, why would they want deal with the yucky real world? Gross, man! Who cares about tradition now? To the future!
But the real world phenomena are still present. Things aren't going so well, the bills aren't paid, the nations default, the free utopia stuff never shows up.
Where is the DDL?
If any little Muslim scumbags were threatening and accosting my relatives, they would find themselves talking to Mr. Glock.
The police aren't going to protect us, they work for the multiculturists.
Muslims like to make a lot of noise and show off, but one on one they are generally cowards who can't fight and don't know very much about the weapons they like to brandish. That's why you never see them alone.
Only the fact that Europeans have become such emasculated weaklings allows these Muslim idiots to get away with their BS.
Don't be a victim. Fight back.
The poster Hermes makes the implication that it is a society’s members, acting as individuals, that are responsible for a society’s downturn, but I will have to respectfully disagree. Rather, I will assert that no individual or group of individuals has the power to commit cultural suicide; only the culture itself has that power.
Once one takes the point of view that being intelligent and acting intelligently are two separate and distinct things, one then is faced with the question “what defines acting intelligently?” But the obstacle to any discussions of this type is that, what we define as “acting intelligently”, will always be culturally dependent (*).
As an engineer, when confronting a problem that I see no immediate solution to, I look for a simpler, already worked example I can use as a starting point. In this case, I look to the AI community and ask what are the minimum requirements the AI folks place on a definition of collective intelligence. One of the zeroth-order attributes that must be assumed before any system can be considered intelligent is that it doesn’t self-terminate. That is, committing suicide is cause for immediate disqualification from the roster of intelligent systems.
By this measure modern western society currently isn’t qualifying as intelligent at all. But if a society starts acting in ways that cause its demise, then who or what exactly is doing the self-terminating? Is it the individual members committing cultural suicide, or is it the culture itself? .
If western society is circling the drain, it’s not because of any one individual’s choices. It is because something has already gone wrong within its cultural DNA. If intelligent people act in ways that bring on the destruction of their own society, it is because that is what the collective intelligence of their culture is telling them to do.
Nietzsche, over a century ago, made exactly this same observation about the world of his time. What he would say to us today is that our mistake is to reverse causes with effects; that our society is not crumbling under the forces of politically correct multiculturalism, but rather, it is our society’s culture that was already broken in some way, and that the forces of PCMC are simply an opportunistic parasite invading a host whose cultural immune system was already too weak to fight back.
I’ll go further and assert that the reason that PCMC was able to take hold of the Scandinavian countries so quickly and completely was that there was no indigenous culture there to start with. Coincidentally, commenter Anon: 8:30 PM on the post “The failure of Social Democracy in Norway” has made exactly this same observation concerning Norway.
Judeo-Christianity is ideally suited for a pioneer people facing a new frontier and a life of uncertainty. But when that spirituality gets exposed to our modern western world of certainty, security, safety and material abundance, something goes catastrophically wrong. Politically correct multiculturalism is not something foreign to traditional western values; rather, it is the product of our own Judeo-Christian culture.
To explain this observation I’ll start by noting that just as being intelligent and acting intelligently are two different things, so too are individual and group behaviors two separate and distinct things.
Whether it is an ant colony, a Game-of-Life (*) simulation, or any system having collective intelligence, it is never possible to determine ahead of time, just by looking at the simple rules that individual members are given, the richness of the group dynamics that will arise out of them. And likewise, just knowing a group dynamic of a system tells you little about the individual rules that its members operate by.
Is it possible for individuals, acting intelligently but separately, to make choices that end up having disastrous outcomes for the group has a whole? Not only can this happen, it happens so frequently in human history that our culture’s common sense wisdom contains it in the saying, “The road to disaster is paved with good intentions.” For this reason, healthy cultures contain in their collective intelligence a number of “thou shall not’s” that are there precisely to prevent toxic group dynamics from manifesting themselves. For much of western history the place where many of these “braking rules” resided was in the “Judeo” side of its Judeo-Christian heritage.
That toxic mindset we call politically correct multiculturalism has its origins in the Christian notions of equality of all people in the eyes of G-d, and a Christian’s obligations of charity. Sometime during the 19th century, mainline Protestant denominations warmed up to the idea of using the power of the state to further ‘good works.” It all seemed like a good Christian idea at the time, since the government could do a lot more to help society’s members than any individual charity could. What could possibly go wrong?
But once Christian charity crossed-wires with politics, it lost its spiritual and moral anchors and became a bondservant to the political class. Fast-forward five or six generations, and what started out as a sincere attempt to use the power of the state to help people less fortunate has mutated into the monster of PCMC. And tragically for western society, our cultural immune system is rendered impotent against the mindset of PCMC because it recognizes within it, its own cultural DNA.
(*)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
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