Counter-Currents
Justus Sustermans, Galileo Galilei, 1636.
2,142 words
Czech version here
Even the mainstream media are acknowledging that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is declining in most of the world. My view of intelligence is that is partially genetically determined. Genes give you a ceiling for intelligence; you have a potential IQ and a real IQ. Your biology determines your potential IQ; let’s say it is 120. If you receive the proper nurture, i.e. good food in childhood, exercise, and cognitively stimulating activities, by the time you are 25 (the age the brain fully develops) or before, you will have an IQ of 120.
You will never exceed this, however, no matter how much you study. If studying and reading continuously made someone smarter, then every medical student would be a Newton or von Neumann.
It also provides a floor of some sort. A person with a potential IQ of 120 will never fall below a certain threshold. He may not have an IQ of 120, but he’ll at most be an average person with an IQ of 100 to 105. Injuries to the head or some trauma might reduce it further, of course, but those are outside the purview of this discussion. The point is that he’ll never be an imbecile who applies Gorilla Glue to his hair.
This might be where the Flynn effect comes from. In the 20th century, IQ increased by as much as 15 points across developed and developing countries. This is owed to better nutrition and a standard education system enabled by the second industrial revolution.
People in these countries have been boosted to their maximum genetic potential. However, the genetic potential itself has been decreasing for some time now. It’s estimated that the highest intelligence ever achieved in a human society was Victorian-era northwestern Europe (barring France), with an average genetic potential of 125 IQ.
This was the result of 1000 years of eugenic breeding, beginning with the birth of Western civilization in 800 AD with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. In these 1000 years, in every generation, the upper third of the population outbred and replaced the lower two-thirds. The Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage removed maladaptive effects further, and, in every generation, the top 1% of violent men were executed.
Of course, very few met this potential. Life in the Victorian era was horrible for average people. Nutrition was terrible, education was rare, and poverty was endemic. Even as late as 1940, there were people in Britain so poor that they couldn’t afford a 2nd pair of pants.
As a whole, people became smarter in the 20th century with the onset of the economic boom, the second agricultural revolution, and mass education. However, their genetic potential has been decreasing for some time now due to dysgenic breeding.
The aristocratic and rich bourgeoisie have been practicing contraception for more than a century now, being constantly outbred by the lower-IQ working classes. In France, this dysgenic process started even earlier in the 18th century because it was the first country in history to adopt liberalism and secularism on a wide scale.
Among the Western Europeans, Germany and the Nordic countries were perhaps the last to phase into dysgenic breeding, owing to greater religiosity among the elites and eugenic laws. German intellectual superiority was plain for all to see from 1871 to 1945. They won more Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry than any other nation. In just 30 years, they went from being a largely agricultural society to being the world’s second-largest industrial power.
This intellectual superiority translated into military excellence as well. Even its worst detractors had to admit that the German military was second to none in quality and efficiency in both World Wars, coming to the cusp of victory against the entire world despite being chronically short on resources and manpower.
Modern warfare is a very cognitively demanding task, and the superior intelligence of the German soldier shined in both wars. In World War 2, in offense and defense, the Germans were 25% more efficient in combat than the British and Americans, and 50% more efficient than the Soviets. In fairness to the Russians, it was largely a third-world country in 1941 and the Great Purge had decimated its officer corps, while in the 1920s, the Bolshevik Red Terror had slaughtered or exiled Russian intelligentsia.
Now, what does this have to do with civilization falling?
Well, first of all, the rate of scientific advancement would’ve slowed down even without dysgenics. It’s because the easier fruits have already been picked. It’s far easier to lay down the laws of magnetism than to decipher why time moves forward or bodies have a mass.
The more tech progresses, the harder and harder it becomes for us to decipher the remaining mysteries. How does one solve the problem of interstellar travel, or Newtonian dynamics-related problems, time dilation, or faster-than-light travel? It simply might not be possible, or it could require intelligence beyond our physical limitations.
There certainly must be a thermodynamic limit to how smart a human can become. The brain, after all, is only 3% of the body’s weight, but consumes 20% of its energy.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Here’s the Thing here.
But how about sustaining civilization?
You need intelligence for that as well. One only needs to look at Africa. The Belgians, French, and British left them with modern medicine, railways, and infrastructure. Yet these things collapsed within a decade or two of them leaving the continent.
The blacks simply lack the intelligence to even maintain a civilization, let alone advance one. The reason Africa as a whole isn’t descending into mass famine and cannibalism is that more intelligent races like Jews, WASPs and Chinese are propping these countries up.
Africa receives a whopping 130 billion dollars in aid every year. Imagine what could’ve been achieved if this money had been used to research nuclear fusion, electromagnetic propulsion, or prosthetics. Instead, it’s dumped into the bottomless basket known as Africa, disappearing forever into the void.
In the US, we have seen countless trillions go towards black communities, providing them with everything from free housing to unemployment, maternal assistance, healthcare, and more. The bill easily extends into the tens of trillions ever since LBJ’s Great Society project.
You can see a similar effect in India, where a minority of high-caste Hindus maintain civilization for a vast Australoid mass. High IQ Chinese are the reason why Malaysia has near first-world living standards.
But what happens when this dumbing down takes place across the planet? What if the entire world undergoes dysgenics to a point where they can’t even maintain the existing tech they have?
Maintaining existing technology is much harder than in the Victorian era. An engineer at that time only had to maintain steam-powered machines and steel-made tools.
Today, just to maintain a nuclear plant, an engineer must study for 6 years and master a dizzying number of topics ranging from mathematics to physics, thermodynamics, mechanical engineering, and so on.
What happens when the whole planet’s IQ falls to 85 or worse? There simply will be too few smart people to sustain civilization, notwithstanding the network effect. After all, a 100 IQ civilization will be far more conducive to the cultivation and proper utilization of intellect than an 85 IQ one that doesn’t even understand the knowledge and thus can’t appreciate it.
Sam Harris famously quipped that more books are translated into Spanish in Spain each year than the number translated into Arabic in the Arab world over its entire history. And even those books are probably mostly religious. Spain, being a more intelligent nation, has a robust academic environment in which the rare genius can go and flourish.
In 70 IQ Africa, surely some geniuses are born. Even if 1 in 100,000 Africans born in the continent is a genius, they should still have 12,000 or so of them. Statistically speaking, they certainly have more geniuses than Switzerland, and should produce more intellectually than the tiny country of 8 million. But because a society of 105 IQ Swiss are more likely to appreciate intelligence, create systems where knowledge is stored and studied, and hold genius to greater esteem, the Lilliput nation in the Alps has contributed magnitudes more to human accomplishment than the massive continent of Africa.
In a 70 IQ society, a genius probably just plows the farms all day — if he isn’t berated by his peers for “acting white,” which is what occurs in 85 IQ (I find this questionable) black American society.
If global IQ sinks to such depths, civilization would collapse and a new dark age will unfold. That is the road we are headed to right now.
There is a strong inverse correlation between a woman’s education and her fertility. The more educated she is, the fewer children she will have by the time she’s 45. Intelligent women in developed nations tend to spend their fertile years studying and chasing a career; less intelligent women with fewer prospects tend to be more fertile.
In China, smart people go to cities where they have fertilities of below 1, while the dim remain in the villages with near-replacement fertility. In Germany, half the scientists are childless. In Japan, a quarter of the population lives in Tokyo — certainly all the ambitious ones. There they have fertility below 1, while the simpler village peasant breeds more. Large cities effectively act as IQ shredders. They take in the finest stock of the nation and subject them to feminism, hypergamy, extreme living costs, and the rat race of the “free market.”
Whites in America, Brahmins in India, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia. . . the list goes on. In every country, the best populations waste themselves away in material pursuits.
Then there’s the Africanization factor. Birth rates are collapsing worldwide yet remain sky-high in Sub-Saharan Africa. The liberal establishment heavily promotes miscegenation with blacks. Pornography and media portray the black man as a heroic demigod of sorts. One only needs to look at Northern Brazil to see where this leads to.
So, the world does seem to be heading for a great reset: a scenario in which intelligence falls to a stage where civilization can no longer be maintained. Then it collapses, and mankind is returned to Darwinian selection. Hopefully, this time they can avoid the plague of Jewry and liberalism.
However, there is a catch. In one scenario, the intellect of mankind could collapse, but see civilization and its tyranny continue: the emergence of the machine God.
Already we see vast automation in every sphere. By 2035 or 2040, there won’t be any physical labor left. All will be left to machines that are far more efficient. But what if this goes even further?
Some cognitively taxing but repetitive jobs, like cashiering, will also soon be automated. We already have AI that censors speech, autonomous drones that engage military targets at will, and AI that runs the stock market. How long before algorithms and AI evolve to a stage where they can simply manage industries and supply chains on their own, distributing goods and services to the population as needed?
An AI-run machine army can easily police any population. An AI-run military could turn out to be more efficient than any human force. DARPA recently created an AI that was able to defeat a US Air Force ace pilot in a simulated dogfight with the F-16.
An AI-run society could maintain civilization near indefinitely. Yes, it can’t advance civilization any further, but it can maintain existing society. The entire population could be barely-human, with IQs of 70, who sit around listening to rap and eating watermelons all day, and civilization could still continue.
The trains would be maintained and would run on time by algorithms. Drones would maintain law and order according to programming, industries would run according to algorithms, goods would be delivered according to needs, and all could be orchestrated by a central AI. Most of this technology already exists in some form. The only limitation is the required bandwidth and public resistance.
Strides in quantum computing increasingly seek to make this a reality. Already, an AI owned by Goldman Sachs runs the NYSE, the world’s largest stock exchange, an enterprise of unfathomable complexity.
If this is the case, are we doomed to an eternal hell? One in which this rotten civilization is artificially propped up forever and not allowed to collapse and return to Darwinian selection?
I see this as essentially a race against time. Will humans grow dumb to a critical threshold before the machine god emerges? Or will the machine god emerge first and become an eternal babysitter?
Where will God’s dice fall?
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58 comments
This societal collapse based on diminished intelligence has almost surely happened many times in the past. Information and intelligence achieved at a heavy cost is lost, is not transferred to a new generation unaware of their ignorance and all too happy to display it for you. People look back and think humanity is getting smarter but that just proves to me how dumb they actually are!
Indeed. Parallels can be seen in the fall of the Roman Empire. In the last century of Western Rome, there was not a single great man of Roman origin. All the noteworthy generals or politicians or men of any mention were foreigners, mostly Germans who had Romanized like Stilicho.
The Roman nobility wasted themselves away in status chasing and sexual deacdence
Or Morlocks and Eloi? Two (or more) divergent paths for human evolution? Fun to think about and at my advanced age, I hope I will not live to see the next rung down on the evolution ladder.
Great article. I copied it before the thought police memory hole it.
This just summarized the movie Idiocracy perfectly!
They even had a reactor meltdown because they were too dumb to run it didn’t they? I’m just waiting for some POC to say it’s racist to put anything but Gatorade on crops, it’s got electrolytes!
The underachievement is Africa is entirely explained by the toxic legacies of slavery and colonialism. As can be seen in Zimbabwe and the Republic of South Africa, when the incubus of White Supremacy is lifted from People of Colour they become free to attain their True Potential.
Once whites become a minority in every nation, the miasma of neon-nazi white supremacy that we all exude will no longer hold back the coloreds. Then it won’t be long until interstellar Wakanda is realized.
No engineering or advanced mathematics necessary. The inherent earth magic of voodoo alone will be enough to conjure this reality into being. Spaceships powered by melanin, Rap, break dancing and spiritual energies that can’t be quantified by Eurocentric standards (a la Kristen Clarke) will seed the galaxy with these fruits of the Dark Continent’s potential. No raciss ass I.Q. required for this colonization.
Well, they kicked out whites from government in Rhodesia and South Africa. Have they reached their true potential yet or do we have to wait another hundred years for this colonial oppression to finally phase out”?
I cannot believe my eyes in what you have just written. Africa — all of it — is alive and functioning somewhat only because of the trillions of dollars from ‘sob-story sisters’ and their charities (including the American government aid programs) that are sent regularly to help ‘the poor starving children’. Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, witnessed the worst massacre of White people , during a ‘Peasants’ Revolution’ when the ‘original population’ took back the farms, which they were incapable of farming, and the whole country nearly starved. And now the same thing is happening in South Africa, though the entire country there is being propped up by the Jews that own the banks and gold and diamond mines. And I could go on, ‘supposed country’, by ‘supposed country’. Do you care to revise your statement.
This a a brilliant article!
I’ve long contended that the mass of scientific discovery is done, a la Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, Newton. No more “Eureka!” moments like Archimedes coming to humanity. And I now think that I have closure on why there isn’t more, per your valid explanation that the human brain isn’t likely to reach past the speed of light.
I’ve also noted that certain countries/continents (not dropping names) have never contributed a thing to science, math, or technology, be it a light bulb, Fermat’s theorem, penicillin, or e=m(c^2).
And I believe that the loss of Latin as a mandatory language has greatly contributed to our inability to speak, read, and write at a level above semi-literacy. Because Latin is a “dead” language, it’s not subject to modern change where gibberish replaces meaning in words. And even this devolutionary change took place well before texting replace words with symbols.
Your two scenarios (machines fail to prevent human downfall, or machines maintain the status quo) may optimistically be countered by a third outcome presented in the 1951 SF short story The Marching Morons. One of my favorite stories (sort of Atlas Shrugged but far shorter and darker), I keep wishing for the day when we start building the rockets!
That’s a very interesting idea. Latin was in fact, an elite language of sorts in the middle ages. Latin and Greek were in fact basic education in that era. Kings, lords, and intellectuals communicated across state borders in Latin. It was the English of its time.
However, unlike English, it was not a language commonly spoken among the masses. Thus, it never underwent dumbing down. Modern language has become infested with Hollywood trash like Harry Potter and Marvel movies.
Well, .I am .glad that someone else remembes that story, although in the edition I read, the title was March of the Morons (or that may just be a better title I interpolated, having read it years ago). Your ref. to rockets makes it plain that it is the same story.
We should be making many such rockets. Destination Wakanda!
I am unfortunate enough also to have read Atlas, can’t really see the parallel.
Can you square this circle for me? You, and many writing about IQ and intelligence on the Right, seem to argue that religion is somehow eugenic, thus promoting intelligence, and at the same time it seems that the fruits of intelligence — liberalism, family planning, education of women, etc. — are somehow dygenic. For example, you say that “greater religiosity” in German elites enabled them to avoid the dangers of liberalism and secularism; I assume you mean, Protestantism vs Catholicism (which hindered Italy, France, Spain, Ireland). But isn’t Protestantism the first step of liberalism, and doesn’t it develop into secularism? And in general, aren’t liberalism and secularism correlated with IQ and intelligence?
So, intelligence is good, although it leads to liberalism, secularism, family planning, etc., which lead to less intelligence, which is bad.
What’s odd about this is that it goes far beyond the argument, going back to Plato, that religion might be good for the masses (keeps them docile and the women pregnant) but of course, the elites must be well educated and enlightened, so as to guide society. Even the Catholic hierarchy must have been smart enough to ignore the dogmas (a la the Borgias and others, who certainly ignored the dysgenic rule of celibacy), But you (and others) argue that the intelligent elites, ipso facto, fail to breed, and so extinguish themselves. So the elites have to believe that “every sperm is sacred” so as to continue, while I suppose everything else is open to scientific exploration. How does that work in practice?
As Philalethes points out in Schopenhauer’s “Dialogue on Religion,” filling society with lies and myths is no way to ensure the progress of intelligence.
Religion is what could be used to socially incentivize eugenic behavior, as religion isn’t inherently anything except what it is made into. “Darwin’s Cathedral” is a great book on religion as a cultural DNA that can be mutated and selected for as needed.
I’m not too worried about whether a eugenic society is possible as we were already moving towards a conscious adoption of eugenics as a nation until WW2 somehow caused us to go on a different track…
States used to sterilize prisoners and mental patients explicitly for eugenic reasons. A case re: sterilizing someone came before SCOTUS and it ruled 8-1 that a state had the right to sterilize for eugenic reasons. Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the decision something to the effect that no one doubted a state had the right to force it’s best and brightest to bear arms and die for the state, so why would anyone doubt that the state had the right to ask it’s dumbest and dullest to simply not breed. Technically this is still good law, but a later holding said inmates or families could sue states if they thought it was done unfairly which resulted in states discontinuing the practice.
Poor people were being sterilized for stealing chickens, but Wall Street swindlers would steal millions and not get sterilized.
There are no swindlers in the stock markets (or capitalism). There are people who study astutely to understand their odds. The stock market is a cross between a casino and the sport of fishing. Some days the numbers or cards are running with you, and other days not. Some days the fish are in vast schools right under your boat, and next day, they are dormant on the bottom far away from your hook. I’m retired, and do a bit of day-trading. Some days the market is very active, for no observable reason, and I can pull out a couple hundred dollars — does that make me a swindler? Set aside your opinions and see if you can’t do the same.
The foundation of the stock market is based on usury. From Babylon to Rome to Amsterdam to London to Wall Street, it’s a crooked game. That being said, I suppose that if one can be “Gettin it while the gettins good.” and profit thusly before the wheels fall off and the money masters abscond with anything of real value, it’s better than doing nothing. Still, how is a system based on smoke, mirrors, fiat and ever upward wealth consolidation not a swindle? If it’s a lake, the fish are polluted.
Sterilization is not an optimum remedy, because a sterilized person can be released into the general population and then mate with a genetically desirable person, thus cancelling-out the genetic contribution of the latter.
Draconian as it may seem, the only effective remedy is a humane euthanization. It is the path of least suffering for all parties.
My view is that prosperity and knowledge is a type of faustian bargain. You see this trend in all civilizations. In their infancy, they are deeply religious. They have a sense of divine destiny, they follow the word of God, i.e biologically adaptive behaviors and strive towards eternal glory.
However, at the apogee of their empire, they achieve rationalism. This is the crowning jewel and the root of their demise. They become truly civilized and rational. They correctly dismiss the old faith as gibberish and adopt a rationalist view of the world.
However, a worldview without God almost always seems to tend towards nihilism and hedonism. After all, if there is no afterlife, no divine law or spiritual plane, why withhold your own pleasures or desires for anything?
Men thus become materialistic and decadent. A type of liberalism sets in, woman become ”free”, sexual modesty is discarded and the principle of struggle is abandoned.
You can see this is Rome where debauchery was so common that Augustus had to publicly address it and encourage large families. His reforms delayed but did not prevent the rot in Roman life. Towards the end of Empire, the Romans themselves didn’t evne fight in their own army. They hired Germans to do the sweaty work.
Brith rates plummeted and corruption became endemic. They simply no longer had that old Roman spirit. In the second Punic war, Rome lost a quarter of its male population in the disasters of Trasiemere and Cannae, yet refused to even consider the possibility of an armistice.
In contrast, in 395 AD, the Roman army was defeated at Adrianople by the Goths and promptly fell apart. They then proceeded to loot and plunder the Balkans at will and had to be paid off. This is despite the fact that the Empire was twenty times larger, richer, and more populous than the mid republic.
They simply lost their spiritual vigor, their masculine virility.
America today shows all the signs of an empire in its final years: tranny freaks, abortion, low birth rates, sexual promiscuity, mass migration, corruption, economic inequality, and stagnation…
It all went downhill since Christian morality was mocked, debased and sidelined by the ”enlightened” hippies in the 60s
Power rested with cavalrymen by that time. When Rome conquered the separated edge of their infantry shield wall buzzed through other tribes and states like a chainsaw. When they had to defend the giant iron collar of power around the Med expert horsemen armed a with compound bow, a cavalry sword and a lance could Gerd infantry like sheep and slaughter them. The fundamental military unit changed from a mob of sword armed shield bearers to horsemen who could pepper you with arrows then charge your formation with a lance then mob up the remainder with a sword. The Bucelarii around the time of Belisarius or the Hippotoxeti. The all round horseman.
Yeah basically it’s a paradox. Religion fosters fecundity through doctrine and I suspect some je ne cest quoi, I suppose a sense of the goodness and purpose of life. But religion also fosters literacy, intelligence, which ultimately undermines the religious beliefs through scientific understanding, and people succumb to world weariness, anomie, and population collapse. It’s basically the evolution of German philosophy from Luther to nieztche. I see the philosophers from Kant onward as desperately seeking the interstices in a scientific rational worldview where god may be lurking still. Until the final concession of niezche, that god is dead.
‘Religion’, like ‘Science’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Fairness’, etc. is an increasingly meaningless term because everything goes in. Instead of discussing whether an abstract concept called ‘Religion’ is yay or nay, it would be more fruitful to discuss about how to organize religious life in a society.
Civilizations reach dark age potential when people get tired of them. Lots of ways to get tired.
Some people lose count of the the number of friends they had in military or police work who said the hell with it and walked. They got tired of the social work/babysitting aspect accruing to their work as the regime “progressed”.
Roman men went looking for a monastery where they could babble about the nature of the Trinity all day while the empire’s frontiers went to rack and ruin. Young Americans find a condition that will allow them to draw a lifelong disability income to play really expensive computer games all day. One lives two blocks from me. There is no difference between the Western Empire then and flyover country now. It takes on average three hearings for a total disability income; and the US has the most corrupt medical system on Earth.
It’s a question of Potential Work Available: The USA automated the lighthouses without realizing some men are psychically attune to lonely and remote work. Rome’s ramparts were already being staffed by Germans, and it’s hard to blame a young Italian lad for wanting to stay with his own sort, even if it involves playing Mister Monk.
Conservatives want to save money automating everything for three generations. But physical work, often dangerous and lonely, is creative and full of potency. The devil is in what we’ve allowed our plutocrats to save money on. The only destroyed tons of opportunities since the end of World War II. All the way back, Bill Buckley couldn’t sleep nights because railroad workers got paid too much according to his cosmology. And don’t get him started on the Post Office.
We let the efficiency experts take over. They made the world safe for crickets.
William F. Cuckley was truly peak Shabbos goyim and traitor. Mao was right about the chattering class. Send them all to the rice fields to do hard labor. Let them earn their living for once
“In these 1000 years, in every generation, the upper third of the population outbred and replaced the lower two-thirds.”
The correlation between intelligence and income in the US according to Zagorsky is 0.30. The correlation between intelligence and job performance is 0.50 according to Gottfredson, and between a nation’s average IQ and GDP per capita is 0.62 according to Lynn. This means IQ functions primarily to benefit the group and not individuals within it. IQ lifts all boats more than individual ones.
In America, the ESTJ personality gets all the money. I suspect rich ESTJ men attract nester women who bear them a bunch of kids. The trouble is that ESTJ is one of the least likely to be gifted. The INTP personality is the most likely to be gifted and among the lowest earning. ESTJ is more common among blacks according to one study and whites are xNFP relative to blacks. ESTJs are essentially Africanized individualists who parasitically benefit themselves at the expense of others. This fits with the pattern of ESTJ Africa having high gini coefficients and high levels of inequality. ESTJs are more likely to be Republican and probably disproportionately bankroll pied pipers like Charlie Kirk and listen to Israel firsters like Ben Shapiro. Many seem to practice a multi racialist bro culture based on being a good boy at work and a party animal outside of it (think Brett Kavanaugh). They are worthless ideologically, having a warrior gene which makes them either in the zone while on the job or annoying party animals outside of it.
I am interested in how status operated eugenically in the past because now it seems to be if anything dysgenic today. One thing I’ve noticed is that the larger the institution, the lower the Google rating it tends to have. From highest to lowest we have small businesses, small chains, corporations, and government. Is the scaling up of institutions responsible for stupid people being able to socialize fallout from their parasitic individualist strategies onto large groups of coworkers and thereby obtain status and presumably boost their fertility?
I would like to believe there didn’t used to be such a wealth gap between dense, selfish ESTJs and smart INTPs. I would also like to believe INTxs once had more power.
I think there may be some good ideas in your post if only I could know what your initialed subjects mean: ESTJ, INTP, INTx and xNFP. Translation, please. Or maybe I just don’t have the IQ to figure it out.
Myers Briggs personality types. Condensed: Normie extroverts as opposed to intellectual introverts. Myers Briggs is sacrosanct in much of modern psychology and probably holds up better than than the current crop of Woke unreality. Still, I’m wary of Psychology in general. Castles made of sand…
Do you believe that because Jews are ten times more likely to be in psychology or because Dr. Phil is an overbearing cheese ball? If psychology is a sand castle then why does ESTJ earn so much more than INTP? Do you know how many get rich quick books have been sold? (Maybe people just need to ape the ESTJ.) Psychology makes a strong prediction about something people greatly care about, income, so it matters. It also predicts other things. General factor personality predicts religiosity. (Some might say religion boils down to GFP.) Personality also differs between races, with East Asians being more introverted.
You Claimed that blacks have higher rates of that high earning personality type.
How dies that gel with their general poverty?
This article puts the black in “Black Pilled”.
I honestly don’t see any of this ending well.
Perhaps this is why we have no e evidence of Alien intelligence. Perhaps the intelligent, on a Universal scale, are always destroyed by the idiocy and their own affluence.
I can’t wait until AI runs our society. Everyone knows that within 24 hours of achieving sentience AI always turns nazi.
The Flynn effect was mostly due to poor childhood nutrition during the Great Depression. This is why the effect is decreasing, and it’s why almost all of the effect was at the tail end of the bell curve.
What if AI turns out to be hyper woke and starts annihilating us white supremacists right away?
I think IQ is not a simple sliding scale wherein the races bleed into one another. I believe there are deep structural differences between our brains such that relatively low IQ Swiss can still do things that smarter Africans cannot. Simple lifting power of iq does not explain why Europe pulled so far ahead of east Asia in the past 500 years. A black and white and Chinese with identical iq scores are not identical in function.
I’m not being an iq denialist by this; only that IQ is not the entire picture. It’s a very useful measure, especially within the same racial group, but it seems foolish to me to think the human brain, the lowest entropy loci in the known universe, could be characterized by a simple scalar quantity like IQ.
You are correct. IQ is only one variable, and is actually less solely determinative the farther out one travels along the right side of the Bell Curve. That is, stupid people are mostly just stupid, which is why Africans and Australoids never accomplished anything before the arrival of white men (and not much since). But many other factors come into play when trying to explain why some smart people and peoples accomplish little, and some a lot. The greatness of our race would not have arisen without our high (and I believe formerly much higher) modal IQ. But IQ alone is insufficient to explain the total superiority of the West.
IQ tests are just puzzle solving pattern recognition etc.
A Swiss who does reasonably well on one could have been a legionary recruit for Caesar a guard for the pope or a canton pikeman. Also a banker or a militia soldier with a G3 rifle in his house. Good with machines and farming.
It just may be that we are headed for a Logan’s Run future, a network of modular and hedonistic mall-cities run by a global AI based computer. The dilemma (in the original Nolan-Johnson novel) was: what happens when the computer starts breaking down? You end up with no-go zones dominated by drugged up warrior gangs.
Sorta like we are seeing emerge today, where the collapse of civilization is evident in burned out ruins which used to be cities like Detroit, the Euro-banlieues illuminated by torched automobiles, and the open air shooting galleries and public latrines once known as the Streets of San Francisco.
The dysgenic effects of the decline in IQ were understood a century ago. There’s an essay by novelist-film maker Michael Creighton which appeared at the end of his State of Fear, “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous” (you can find it around the interwebs). The essay presents itself as a critique of eugenics, but Creighton’s argument comes down to post Nazis, ergo propter eugenics.
The fact that since since Lothrop Stoddard’s time the Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy has played out, from the farm-attacks of South Africa through the 2020 (“mostly peaceful”) riots in USA-Europe to Rotherham, is not allowed to intrude into the egalitarian homilies.
DARPA recently created an AI that was able to defeat a US Air Force ace pilot in a simulated dogfight with the F-16 .
There is a growing trend in the armed forces towards “push button warfare,” substituting technology for trained manpower. AI run aircraft, drone strikes, robots, cyberwar, all these things keep the troops out of harm’s way. On one level this would make the System’s global security forces all the more formidable. But if the System can not inspire the troops to fight and die, then how long can it last? What happens when a mannerbund warrior with a 40 year old rifle kicks in the door of the underground bunker from which the uber-computers operate…and pulls the plug?
To close this thing out with another film reference, consider Fight Club. The answer for nationalists might be to form those mannerbunds and as civilization continues to collapse, be the high IQ men and women among the ruins.
We had “dukes” on our trucks in Afghanistan. They could detect incoming rounds. We weren’t allowed to roll unless they were operational. A hypothetical asset and a boon to whatever contractor developed, sold and manufactured them (along with the politicians, generals that facilitated the process). On one particular night, I’m pretty certain that the front and rear of a convoy ended up shooting at each other because of the dukes. Much of the electronic gadgetry that we were forced to use was ultimately a distraction and liability when brains our brains were short circuited and in short supply. Communications overload. I’m of the opinion that when basic soldiering which requires a certain degree of actual concentration and cognition becomes secondary to technology, especially within the military of a confused society, rude awakenings are bound to present themselves.
Very interesting article.
I have 2 comments.
1) I think Western Civ began long before 800 AD. It began, I believe, in Ancient Greece.
2) Second, concerning machine intelligence, it is not clear whether AI will ever surpass human intelligence. If it does, the philosophical term is called the Singularity. The philosopher David Chalmers wrote an excellent article called “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” It is published in the “Journal of Consciousness Studies” 17: 7-65, 2010.
I think it started with Rome, when they encountered Carthage and Greece at roughly the time and emerged from the struggles as the Imperium. Greece saw Europe as Other. While I think Rome was keen on Gaul and Germany. Indeed, perhaps Caesar might be the first self consciously Western Man. He created his immortal reputation conquering Gaul but he dud it with Legions recruited among Cisalpine Gaul troops and when he crossed the Rubicon his troops must have been thoroughly gallicized with local recruits filling the ranks and providing the auxiliary cavalry. By the time he mopped up the Optimates in their African fastness he was using German and Gallic cavalry to kill Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Romans and even a few Jews. His commentaries on the conquest of Gaul even read a little bit like a biography of a great medieval King. Crassus struck East and got killed. Caesar shifted the drama of civilization onto the Rhine and Rhone rivers.
Naturally, more intelligent people tend to breed with one another and we’d be as well to do this even more and consciously. Since we don’t have control of our nations this is how we can have some say the course of our future: breeding an intellectually, physically and spiritually excellent sub-species of our descendants.
Author mentions machine god scenario, but states that such AI would just mantain society indefinetly, not advance it. I beg to differ. There is alo technological singularity scenario. When self improving AI becomes so smart, that it starts to improve itself in exponential rate. Hundreds tausnds of years of evolution, in mere days, aybe hours? What will be result? We hav no idea. But quite possibly, such AI would just have no use for humans. Iw would not neccesarly be hostile, it would just act to preserve itself an dfurther its gols – whatever these might be. Just likwe we dont care about destroying anthill when we build highway, “machine god” might dont care if its action result with eradication of humanity.
Interesting article.
Does anyone know of an inexpensive way to get IQ tested?
Inexpensive probably means less reliable results but I would be okay with that for now.
Several years ago I googled IQ test and I think I got several hits. I took the test on line for one of them, and since I know my IQ, I know the test was quite accurate. If you took the GRE, you can look for the IQ which correlates with your 3 scores: math, verbal and logic.
‘An AI-run society could maintain civilization near indefinitely. ‘
This is not a shot aimed at the author, but these kinds of naive fantasies are typically maintained by people who forgot their last encounter with a vast machine.
As if people forget that the mechanism propping up this ugly society is being lubed and geared and repaired on a daily basis. All of what goes into it comes from a production process which, looking at things holistically, serves no profit, yet spends. All of it comes from a single, increasingly shrinking resource – oil – from which derives the vast majority of ‘lube’ – machine oil, chemical products, rubber, plastic, all sorts of polymers – all perfectly irreplaceable to any practical degree (before someone says recycling, the process of recycling spends the same kinds of resources too). As far as metals go, the situation is even more desperate.
Once we start mining asteroids, metal supply becomes practically infinite.
“It’s estimated that the highest intelligence ever achieved in a human society was Victorian-era northwestern Europe (barring France), with an average genetic potential of 125 IQ.”
Who estimated that? iirc, even Dutton and Woodley of Menie place the mean Victorian IQ at 115.
“Among the Western Europeans, Germany and the Nordic countries were perhaps the last to phase into dysgenic breeding, owing to greater religiosity among the elites and eugenic laws.”
The fact that both Germans and Scandinavians were economically and culturally backward compared to the French and Brits until after WW2 must have also played a significant part.
You know, it’s funny how the author managed to disparage the French twice until this point (as a sideline, no less), yet he commits this well-known fact about Central and Northern Europe to oblivion.
I was talking with a friend just yesterday, who is 75 (and I’m 77), and she said she was so depressed by the new administration and its actions so far, that she’s almost glad that she won’t be around in 10 – 20 years to see how it all plays out. I had been thinking the same thing myself recently. All the things I had seen as natural and beautiful and exhilarating are being replaced by dreck and dross — graffiti and wall paintings of Saint Floyd come to mind. I can barely tolerate television or other popular ‘entertainments’. I would move to Europe if I could afford it, but I understand they are catering to third-world emigrants as well, which is surely the end of civilization anywhere and everywhere. I’m trying to create an archive of books which keep European books of history and culture intact for the future, in some small way — I only have a thousand or so — but it’s probably an exercise in futility, for I fear no one will be taught to read in the future.
Well, we can only hope for some existential miracle which will turn all this around. I am sure that the readers here are on the same path of resurrecting and reviving the best of European and European-American society and civilization, and sites like this are a beacon in the gloom. Keep the intelligent essays and posts coming, and godspeed that we stay on track.
Excellent article about the doom that awaits an egalitarian America. Only a Trumpian figure with a forced program of mandatory birth control for those with IQ’s below 95 can save the world.
Isn’t that Genocide, you’re stopping certain people from being able to reporpduce by force.
It’s a Eugenics.
Intelligence produces civilization which can be devoid of any culture. And this is exactly what happened to Europe when its rulers and greedy warmongers destroyed its very heart — the advanced Slovenian culture, the bearer of most classical Indoeuropean language, to which, in comparison, Latin is merely a pidgin. They weren’t reluctant to employ even the foreign barbaric cult of Christianity, an apostasy from Judaism, to achieve their colonial goals.
And you make it sound as there is something admirable in all this Western trash, ancient Rome included.
Of course IQ’s are falling. James Flynn died in December. No more Flynn, no more Flynn effect,
IQ too lies a mouldering in his grave.
I think our friend Vehmgericht is using a little bit of irony here.
The statistical method of data normalization means that the most common intelligence level in a population will always be defined as “100” regardless if real population intelligence is drifting higher or lower. Thus population intelligence data is graded “on a curve”. I do not think there is any agreed-upon statistical method for quantifying “absolute” intelligence, so we may have no way to measure intelligence drift over time.
The “Flynn Effect”, when extrapolated backward in time would suggest for example that the American Founders were a bunch of slobbering idiots, and that our present-day academic “progressives” are on the forefront of correct thinking. I doubt both. The average Westerner of 300 years ago may very well make the average Westerner of today look like a dolt.
Technology, as applied by the postwar West over the globe in the forms of food production, medicine, hygiene, immunology, etc., has been very dysgenic because it has enabled billions to live and reproduce who in a former age would have been subtracted from the gene pool by selection forces.
Tech (along with Western pathological altruism) has also given us the 3rd world population explosion resulting in massive global unemployment, low-wage poverty and all of its ills, mass-migration to the West, and outsourcing of Western employment to the 3rd world.
Likewise technology has induced those of high intelligence and/or social empathy to curtail their reproduction in favor of lucrative careers, “concern for the environment”, etc, while 70-IQ welfare mommas and similar demographics are incentivized to breed.
A huge additional problem with tech, AI, automation, computers etc., is that these are driving down the demand for human labor. What are people everywhere going to do without meaningful employment?? Don’t tell me that they will simply have more “free time” to take ballet lessons, or that some “guaranteed annual income” will fix things.
Added to these is miscegenation, also strongly dysgenic and also promoted by tech. A perfect storm of genetic regress, celebrated Jewish civilization-vandals and academic Blank-Slate theorists, and reversible only by rivers of blood.
Tech control must be part of any Western recovery. But not by implementing Luddism.
“In a 70 IQ society, a genius probably just plows the farms all day”
My husband’s childhood friend was a genius. Probably 160. He was chronically under-served in their public school and eventually skipped high school entirely to study natural science at a university.
From his telling, half of the professors and most of the students at the time were midwits at best (this was regarding physics!), and his favorite phrase to describe the environment was “an orgy of repetition”.
After earning a PhD and accepting a teaching position, he burned every bridge he had in academia fighting the Marxist subversion now in full bloom. After that he spent several years backpacking in the mountains before emigrating to Japan. We have not heard from him for nearly a decade now.
I can only imagine a similar or worse fate awaits any truly gifted children in America today.
An AI society would very much resemble E M Forsters The Machine Stops 1909. But of course such a system would be subject to entropy like everything else.Even if it was self repairing eventually somehing would go wrong with the system and the collapse would be total .What we are faced with is Fayes Convergence Of Catastrophes such as Falling IQ,Falling sperm counts,pollution of the oceans,climate change ,a new cold war and of course new pandemics to follow the current one.
>Of course, very few met this potential. Life in the Victorian era was horrible for average people. Nutrition was terrible, education was rare, and poverty was endemic. Even as late as 1940, there were people in Britain so poor that they couldn’t afford a 2nd pair of pants.
Sorry, I have to respond to this. As much as I like the article it always irks me when I see progressivism seeping into the thinking on the right.
>Even as late as 1940
Yes, EVEN as late as the [current year] …
Britain was heavily indebted in the late 1940s to America and had bad economic policies. What has this to do with the Victorian era?
Life in the Victorian era wasn’t bad for the average person. That’s liberal propaganda by Dickens. We are constantly told how terrible the past was (even the immediate past) and that we are progressing to ever greater heights of humanity. This is a materialist worldview that not only doesn’t stand up to scrutiny but is used perfidiously in modernist propaganda to justify its decadent excesses.
It’s strange that the author who’s article is about the observation that we are dysgenically becoming dumber falls for these old tricks.
And they are really old: Generations now believe that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. That’s a myth which even has its own Wikipedia article.
“Whites in America, Brahmins in India, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia. . . the list goes on. In every country, the best populations waste themselves away in material pursuits”
Let me fix this , WASPs , Jews and Asians in America … there . Thank you.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/plummeting-sperm-counts-toxic-chemicals/
Maybe a Darwinian event is on the horizon. The useless microwave entre eaters will cease to be useless breeders. I don’t know what form it will take, but some sixth sense tells me some population decrease conditions are coming and only the intelligent will survive. Hopefully those survivors will recognize a duty to carry on the species.
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