This is great article by Bruce Charlton, a must-read, because it explains so much about post-America shitlibbery. (For a complementary thread on the topic, try here.)
Executive Summary: what liberals have in IQ they lack in common sense. It’s an evolutionary trade-off.
In short, it has often been observed that high IQ types are lacking in ‘common sense’ – and especially when it comes to dealing with other human beings. General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism. Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.
That description sounds precisely like the basis for the cognitive and social schisms currently tearing apart Western nations. Self-segregating and supercharged-signaling “clever sillies” are running their homelands into the ground with overbearing government interventions to “close the gap” and open borders to “create more gaps”. This stupidity of intelligence signaling would be funny if it weren’t also so damned threatening to the continued survival of the West.
The over-use of abstract reasoning may be most obvious in the social domain, where normal humans are richly equipped with evolved psychological mechanisms both for here-and-now interactions (e.g. rapidly reading emotions from facial expression, gesture and posture, and speech intonation) and for ‘strategic’ modelling of social interactions to understand predict and manipulate the behaviour of others. Social strategies deploy inferred knowledge about the dispositions, motivations and intentions of others. When the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic, abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ people, they are ignoring an ‘expert system’ in favour of a non-expert system.
For an immediately palpable example of SMRT shitlibs applying abstract and systematic reasoning to a social intelligence system, see their snarky “you’re more likely to be killed by falling furniture than by a Muslim terrorist” apples-to-oranges comparison. (Socially intelligent reply: “Sure but falling furniture isn’t getting on planes with me, patting me down after a two hour wait in the TSA line, or calling for death to all infidels.”)
Charlton goes on to explain why it seems like we are seeing more pajamaboy shitlib faces and cuckfaces in the West:
Indeed, I suggest that higher levels of the personality trait of Openness in higher IQ people may be the flip-side of this over-use of abstraction. I regard Openness as the result of deploying abstract analysis for social problems to yield unstable and unpredictable results, when innate social intelligence would tend to yield predictable and stable results. This might plausibly underlie the tendency of the most intelligent people in modernizing societies to hold ‘left-wing’ political views.
I would argue that neophilia (or novelty-seeking) is a driving attribute of the personality trait of Openness; and a disposition common in adolescents and immature adults who display what I have termed ‘psychological neoteny’.
Psychological neoteny is likely correlated, by the associative property, with physical and facial neoteny. Physiognomy is real, and it’s no accident that we often observe the silliest of shitlibs have very punchable faces devoid of any masculinity.
Shitlibs are, in essence, arrested adolescents, forever on the hunt for the next thrill to add meaning to their disconnected lives. Risk-taking and novelty-seeking are useful traits to have when one must impress a mate (usually a man impressing a girl) or broaden the pool of acceptable mates; but those traits are destructive when scaled up to the level of social policy and beyond the bounds of the life stage when mate acquisition is paramount.
In such an evolutionarily-unprecedented, artificial ‘hothouse’ environment, it is plausible that any IQ-related behaviours are amplified: partly because there is little counter-pressure from the less intelligent people with less neophiliac personalities, and perhaps mainly because there is a great deal of IQ-advertisement. Indeed, it looks very much as if the elites of modern societies are characterized by considerable IQ-signalling. Sometimes this is direct advertisement (e.g. when boasting about intellectual attainments or attendance at highly-selective colleges) and more often the signalling is subtly-indirect when people display the attitudes, beliefs, fashions, manners and hobbies associated with high intelligence. This advertising is probably based on sexual selection, if IQ has been a measure of general fitness during human evolutionary history, and was associated with a wide range of adaptive traits.
But we are now at the point when the libshit SMRT mate signaling has reached sexual market saturation; I predict, and in fact we can see it happening already, that deftly counter-signaling the leftoid equalism orthodoxy will be a powerful display of fitness, for what do women love more than a bad boy rule-breaker who can buck the system and not just survive, but thrive? As always, BALLS wins babes.
My hunch is that it is this kind of IQ-advertisement which has led to the most intelligent people in modern societies having ideas about social phenomena that are not just randomly incorrect (due to inappropriately misapplying abstract analysis) but are systematically wrong. I am talking of the phenomenon known as political correctness (PC) in which foolish and false ideas have become moralistically-enforced among the ruling intellectual elite. And these ideas have invaded academic, political and social discourse. Because while the stereotypical nutty professor in the hard sciences is a brilliant scientist but silly about everything else; the stereotypical nutty professor social scientist or humanities professor is not just silly about ‘everything else’, but also silly in their professional work.
I was convinced before reading this Charlton hypothesis that what’s happening in the AngloGermanoSphere is runaway “intelligence signaling”; that is, aesthetically disfigured and socially untethered White shitlibs of the West can only pride themselves on their abstraction smarts, and to stay ahead of their peers they have to signal hard against common sense, leading to xenophilia spirals (as well as degeneracy spirals and anti-White spirals).
(As a reader wrote, “Believing in a lie can require more intelligence; you have to know the truth to conceal it properly, plus the pleasing lie, plus the explanation why the lie is more true than the truth.”)
What’s happened is that common sense (or gut instinct, or mental sanity) has become associated with declassé opinions and flyover rubes. The cause of this association is complex, but it’s where we are today and it means that the shitlib clown-cognition signaling will continue until a cataclysm forces common sense on them. I doubt that increasingly insulated, credentialist suck-up shitlibs will rediscover the merits of common sense on their own.
Addendum: the Maul-Right is the next stage of human evolution: high IQ AND common sense. And that fact, more than any other, explains the hysterical response of the Left to dissident crimethinkers and to Trump; the Left knows a real threat to their rule when they see one.
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