Counter-Currents
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Part 1 here
Richard Haier begins his fascinating 2017 work The Neuroscience of Intelligence with a question: Why are some people smarter than others? From this he brings the reader up to speed on what neuroscientists have discovered about the genetic and physiological underpinnings of intelligence. This seems like a vast topic, but it really isn’t given how many neuroscientists shy away from the “controversial” topic of intelligence. Thankfully, Haier does not, and in this slender yet tightly-packed volume he presents the broad scope of intelligence research from its pencil-and-paper origins in psychometrics over a century ago to the latest in brain imaging and mapping technology.
Most importantly, Haier does not pay homage to political correctness. He recognizes that intelligence differences among individuals coupled with the well-established heritability of intelligence leads inevitably to differences in average intelligence among races. He draws no moralistic conclusions from this and focuses more on with whether such a conclusion is valid based on the data. And, as he demonstrates, it certainly is. This above all else makes The Neuroscience of Intelligence highly valuable for the Dissident Right.
Psychometricians knew about the reality of IQ well before neuroscientists could prove it. As far back as 1904, Charles Spearman recognized that high scores in one mental ability correlate positively with high scores in other mental abilities. From this he conceived of g, otherwise known as the g-factor, which is a person’s general intelligence best estimated from a battery of tests through a statistical method known as factor analysis. These tests measure reasoning, spatial ability, memory, and other mental abilities. g captures what is believed to be the biological essence of intelligence, from which we derive IQ and other, broader intelligence factors. This is why tests such as the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), which eschew language, may get to g better than IQ tests. In these tests, a 3×3 matrix of shapes follow a left-to-right, top-to-bottom rule of progression, with the bottom right entry missing. The subject must then select the shape which completes this progression from a list of distractors.
Here is an example of a RAPM item (scroll to the bottom of this essay for the answer):[1]
The use in measuring concepts such as g and IQ comes in their predictive value. Like in the film Moneyball, if one can distill such predictive power into a single number, one can make fairly accurate decisions in real life. In the late 1960s, researcher Arthur Jensen proved that IQ and SAT scores were excellent predictors of academic success at the university level — regardless of socioeconomic status, age, sex, and race. Haier cites various studies which show how IQ predicts job performance, especially in jobs which require a great deal of training and problem-solving. Various longitudinal studies also demonstrate how high math SAT scores can reliably predict career success in STEM fields. In one shocking study from the 1990s, the Unites States Air Force showed that g accounted for nearly all the variance in pilot performance.
Many studies have shown IQ’s predictive power when it comes to everyday life:
Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low=75-90; high=110-125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 100,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s novel Charity’s Blade here.
Haier also reveals how no amount of environmental pressure, education, or social engineering has been found to raise IQ. In fact, individual genes have become associated with cognitive ability. A 1978 Polish study shows that despite the communists’ efforts to “allocate dwellings, school, and health facilities without regard to social class,” in Warsaw RAPM scores among children still correlated most with parental occupation and education. Haier even describes how multiple studies have now refuted the “10,000 hours” notion, which Malcolm Gladwell made fashionable in his 2008 book Outliers. The environmental impact on intelligence has been shown to be negligible — and this, coupled with mountains of psychometric data as well as numerous studies correlating intelligence variance with genetic similarity, has led Haier to assert that “intelligence is 100% biological.”
But how to prove it?
Prior to the days of neuroimaging, such assertions could be countered with claims of test bias, poverty, racism, and the like. With the brain and the human genome essentially being black boxes, who could know for sure? Further, after psychometrics trailblazers such as Arthur Jenson and Richard Herrnstein received horrendous criticism and abuse in the 1970s for postulating a genetic component of intelligence, few researchers wanted to find out. Fewer still could find the funding to do so.
As for intelligence differences between the races, Haier does not deny it, nor does he dwell on it. He addresses it best when discussing Arthur Jensen:
Jensen was once asked directly if he was a racist. His answer was, “I’ve thought about this a lot and I have come to the conclusion that it’s irrelevant.” . . . I knew Jensen for many years and I understand his point was that his interpretation of data, even if it was motivated by unconscious racism, was testable and falsifiable by objective scientific methods. He was confident that future research could potentially refute any of his hypotheses.
After his chapters on psychometrics and genetics, Haier dedicates the remainder of The Neuroscience of Intelligence to neuroimaging and how this relatively new technology can pinpoint physiological functions and structures which correspond directly with pencil-and-paper intelligence test scores. The human brain is no longer a black box, and the claims made by Arthur Jensen and others many decades ago have now been vindicated.
Haier begins with Positron Emission Tomography (PET) studies, which use radioactive tracers to measure blood flow and glucose metabolism in certain areas of the brain while a subject is performing various mental exercises. Developed in the 1980s, this technology demonstrates the counterintuitive notion of brain efficiency to explain why subjects with higher RAPM scores showed less brain activity in crucial areas while performing mental tasks. One of these studies required subjects to play Tetris over a 50-day period (something I would have gladly signed up for as an undergraduate!).
Another thing PET studies reveal is how men and women process information differently. Here is an amusing paragraph to which I am sure many husbands and wives can relate:
In the 22 men, statistical analysis showed that high math ability went with greater activity in the temporal lobes . . . during problem solving. This was just the opposite of efficiency. In the 22 women, we found no systematic statistical relationship between mathematical reasoning ability and brain activity. How the brains in the high SAT-Math women were working to solve the problems could not be determined, even though they were solving the same problems as the men equally well. And the men showed the opposite of what we expected. And that is how research often goes.
This leads us to the following joke: Neuroscience has now proven that smart men often get flustered, and that the minds of women are a complete mystery! Perhaps the men and women were taking their exams in the same room simultaneously and could barely keep their eyes off each other.
Haier moves on to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). When used in conjunction with computer technology called voxel-based morphometry (VBM), three-dimensional images of the brain can be created and studied. A voxel is essentially a 3D pixel, and lowering the voxel level within regions of interest in the brain allows researchers to accurately correlate test scores with physical structures. Here is a brief list of brain structures which correspond directly with IQ:
- Cortical thickness and surface area (which correlates with the number of neurons in a major part of the brain associated with memories and reasoning).
- White matter in the parietal lobe (which corresponds to the speed of signals sent between brain cells).
- Gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex (which is associated with attention allocation and impulse control).
- N-acetylaspartate measurements (a marker of neuron density and viability).
- Shorter path length of frontal-parietal connections (a measure of communication efficiency between crucial parts of the brain).
- Inter-hemispheric connectivity between parallel brain structures (an inverse relationship with IQ).
- Basal ganglia volumes (subcortical nuclei associated with cognition and learning).
- Volume of the thalamus (“an important hub of brain circuit connectivity”).
In other words, ignoring all this empirical evidence and linking IQ to environmental factors such as racism, socioeconomic status, and historical oppression would be like saying a featherweight journeyman boxer would be able to defeat the heavyweight champion if not for his parents’ low income and his ancestors’ status as slaves. We know this because, as Haier states,
[a]ll these early MRI studies of gray and white matter were exciting because they found correlations between various psychometric test scores of intelligence and quantifiable brain characteristics both in specific locations and in the connections among them. This increased optimism for the potential of discovering not only “where” in the brain was intelligence, but also “how” intelligence is related to brain function.
And just when you think the horse is already dead, Haier proceeds to keep beating it just to remove any scintilla of doubt the reader might still have. By the time you’re done with the book, you almost feel sorry for the horse.
Haier goes on to report findings from even more cutting edge technologies such as electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, magneto-encephalogram (MEG) imaging, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). He describes his Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (PFIT) and how it has been exonerated, with only minor adjustments, over the past two decades. He also communicates the excitement and optimism that many neuroscientists who study intelligence are feeling right now. Yes, The Neuroscience of Intelligence is highly technical and sometimes a challenge for the lay person to get through. One finds acronyms everywhere in the field of neuroscience, it seems. Yet, it is not as dry as all that. Haier’s enthusiasm for his subject matter is infectious, which will make the work engrossing for anyone with more than just a passing interest in the field. “We are light years past earlier controversies about whether there is a role for genetics for understanding individual differences in intelligence,” he writes confidently. How could anyone not be excited by this?
So confident is Haier in the correlation between g and IQ, on one hand, and brain structures and function on the other that he even proposes that one day, brain imaging could completely replace standardized testing. He argues this would ultimately be more objective, since imaging can rule out minor environmental factors such as motivation, anxiety, or someone simply having a bad day. It would be less expensive as well. His goal in neuroscience is to completely reverse what is happening now. Instead of using IQ to predict brain structure and function, he wishes to eventually use brain structure and function to predict IQ, and also find the holy grail of neuroscience: the ability to “manipulate brain variables to enhance IQ.”
When and if this ever happens, we will find ourselves in a science-fiction alternate reality where everything we understand about human nature will be tossed on its head. Enhancing IQ will likely enable us to reduce IQ as well. Think about it. Haier also includes the following chilling detail:
On a final note, genetic studies are logistically complex and expensive, especially when large samples are involved. DNA sequencing machines alone, for example, cost about $1-2 million each. Reportedly, in 2012 a single research institute in China, the Behavioral Genetics Institute, had 128 of them, along with super computers. Finding intelligence genes is a high priority. This one institute has over 4,000 scientists and technicians working there and a poster on the wall reportedly says: “Genes build the future.”
Until this dystopian future arrives, however, cutting-edge neuroscience has completely vindicated what race realists and racial identitarians have always known to be true: IQ is both real and heritable. From this, it is only a small step to conclude that IQ differences across individuals, groups, and races are also real and heritable — a fact Richard Haier does not deny. Given the dire circumstances of today’s white populations with regard to widespread, low-IQ, non-white immigration, the crystal clear messaging from The Neuroscience of Intelligence should be spread far and wide — lest the blunder of ignoring such messaging one day destroys the very civilization which produced neuroscience to begin with.
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Note
[1] The answer is 5. Each row and column contains twelve individual shapes, and no individual shape is repeated across entries. For example, the curved, vertical line appears in only one entry per row and in one entry per column. The correct answer must contain five individual shapes, all of which cannot already appear on the bottom row or on the rightmost column. This leads us to distractor 5.
25 comments
Nice article.
I couldn’t get the RPN question, however, after working on it for about 5 minutes. My wife said that perhaps if we could see everything at once on the screen, I could have gotten it. We had to scroll from the questions to the answers and in a paper test, I guess you don’t have to do that. I really am white and not stupid!!
Good high school friends of mine worked as janitors in our Catholic grade school and got into the office records where they could see our IQ test scores from years before. They said mine was 108. I was bummed. I thought it would be much higher and I told them what I would guess it would be. They told me they were kidding with the 108 number and the number I guessed was right on the money. About 10 years ago, I took an online test (I think the Stanford Binet test) and it was one point higher than the score I guessed in high school for the test I took in the Catholic Grade school.
I seem to remember that Jensen, Rushton and Lynn all thought the heritability of IQ was between 2/3 and 3/4. I just said “seem to remember” because I am not sure.
I think it would be terrible for imaging to replace achievement tests in academic placement. A large factor of success in life IS motivation and not becoming perturbed under pressure! And there’s always the question that some chemical je ne se quois is lurking that the imaging will not capture. My small hobbit legs have carried me very far through the American meritocracy!
Hmm, if you look at Jordan Peterson’s lecture on IQ, the third rpm question he presents, he gets the wrong answer. Last time I saw the comments, not one person corrected him. What do we learn from this? The dissident right is smarter than the alt lite!
Speed and capacity in working and long-term memory have to be relevant factors and sadly these are likely to be set and fixed by both genetics and early childhood brain development. IQ is a single parameter, like say temperature, and originates as a measure of the conjectured statistical ‘factor’ g underlying observations: a somewhat slippery epistemology. I would like to see the neural correlates of intelligence discussed in the article scored up and collated with IQ in a big study — then I’d have more confidence that this all-in-one index is the ‘be all and end all’ of measuring cognitive ability. By the way we can’t just pick up science when we feel like it: acceptance of the claims of neuroscience might have disturbing implications for personhood and agency that cut across transcendental narratives popular with the Right. We should reflect on that: I recommend the books of Raymond Tallis.
By the way we can’t just pick up science when we feel like it: acceptance of the claims of neuroscience might have disturbing implications for personhood and agency that cut across transcendental narratives popular with the Right.
Please elaborate on what you mean by this. Are you saying, rather esoterically, that neuroscience undercuts belief in God, and perhaps in free will (and even in any sort of “stable” self)? Or am I misreading your implications?
I dislike Tallis because of his ‘assumptive’ atheism. He merely assumes the non-existence of God without bothering to account for any counter-arguments (at least in what I’ve read of his). He’s a good, clear writer, however.
Yes that is what I meant: as usual I expressed myself poorly. Yes, I find Tallis irritating in some ways, but his skepticism of the claims of fMRI studies in cognitive science is worth attention.
First of all, I was born an orphan in 1943, when there were a lot of white orphans due to the war. I was adopted by a German-American woman married to an Irish-American man. Both were high-school graduates but worked at mid-level jobs. My mother remarried after his death to a German-American man who had been previously married to a Mexican immigrant who had died, and he was left with 3 mixed-race kids 16, 15 and 12. I was 11. Long story short, when my stepsister and I took the Iowa Tests in 1960 — which were disguised IQ tests at the time — I scored two 99 percentiles, and three 90+ percentiles, and dropped to 53 in the math and spatial test; overall score 91. I think that was pretty good, since I have never understood math, even to this day. However, my step-sister stopped me at the door that afternoon, and said “Please don’t mention the test results to our parents!” I asked why, and she said she scored 48 overall, and what did I get? I didn’t tell her, but I also never told my parents — and they never asked. My mother later scolded me for taking classes — which would be considered Advanced Placement classes today — which she considered a waste of time because they wouldn’t get me a good job. Since those classes in Literature, Art and Music Appreciation, World History and Foreign Relations did indeed put my brain in the clouds, I never did get a ‘good job’, because I thought they were above my abilities, and instead worked as a secretary and general ‘office drone’ all my life.
I did get to college after 6 years of taking undergrad subjects at night school while working, and then 2 years uppergrad at UCLA, studying — you guessed it — Art History, which also didn’t get me a good job, but satisfied my soul! And here I am today, studying World History and Foreign Relations in regard to White Nationalism these past four years. This is the best use of IQ that I can imagine.
At least at 78 your writing exhibits no evidence of senility (unlike the verbal meanderings of our 79 year old President). That is something to be satisfied about. Absent head trauma, it is unlikely you will ever go senile. My mother is 90, and still very sharp (despite being very physically decrepit and in a nursing home). And you’ve already lived a fairly long life. I have a friend near my age (60) who is struggling with cancer right now, and may well not make it. I worry about many future things, but not senility, as it doesn’t run in my family; I’ve always been fairly smart (Alzheimer’s is a terrible thing – cf. “Iris Murdoch”, but developing ordinary senility depends in considerable part on lifelong demonstrated intelligence); and, more grimly, my health is such that I’m unlikely to make it past 80 anyway.
Hi Alexandra,
Thank you for this. People have a way of maximizing their potential when they pursue things their minds are suited for, don’t they?
Thank you for your reply. I notice on the back of a book by Scott Howard “The Open Society Playbook”, that you wrote a blurb on the back of the book, pointing out its importance. I think it is — if nothing else — the best listing of all our enemies worldwide, by name, by affiliation, and by affiliation with other affiliations worldwide. Banks, Bankers and Financiers, Governmental Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations, etc., ad fin. And — not to be ‘racist’ by listing them — the religious affiliations of such. It’s mind-boggling and belongs in every White Nationalist’s library. You are the only person that has said anything about this book — my post on Amazon under ‘Patti’, another handle, is the only comment on the books thus far. Something’s going on here.
Hi Alexandra
Aside from from my CC Review, the Occidental Observer published chapter 1 of the OSPB:
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/01/18/the-open-society-foundations-and-the-soros-network-chapter-1-of-scott-howards-the-open-society-playbook/
They also reviewed Howard’s other book, the Transgender industrial Complex.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/11/26/review-of-the-transgender-industrial-complex-by-scott-howard/
You can also contact the publisher directly to find what other reviews there are or if Howard has done any interviews. Thanks.
I liked part 2 of this article better than part 1. I’ve watched several interviews with Haier on the internet and he’s a fascinating guy. I’m sure his book is amazing too. Thanks for publishing this. Really liked it.
Thanks, Don. Yes the book is quite fascinating. Haier’s website complements it quite well too.
I like the test thing, but I got the right answer looking at it a bit differently. Yes, each line, row or column, of three figures must have 1,2,3 horizontals and 1,2,3 vertical markings of different type. But then each diagonal line must follow a pattern 1,2,3, this time in strict numerical sequence, of empty rectangles- either 1,2,3 horizontal rectangles from top left to bottom right, or 3,2,1, vertical rectangles bottom left to top right, and always have 2 vertical or horizontal shapes of different type complimenting them. Therefore, the bottom right has to have 3 horizontal empty squares and 2 complimentary vertical markings which must be the straight line type. This is probably a more convoluted way of solving it than necessary, but they must have composed the problem with this beautiful hidden pattern in mind. Or maybe it is a trap to make you consider inessential things.
Interesting take. I didn’t look at diagonal sequencing at all.
I used approximately the same thinking as Nuthatch, although it was not that explicit and clear in my head, and got the correct answer, however it took me about two minutes to figure it out, so I guess it doesn’t count, IQ is supposed to be about speed, right? Is there a book you would recommend for these kind of tests, please?
I could have stared at that RAPM test above for an hour, and would not have gotten the correct answer. I had not the slightest idea what was even being asked for. Maybe it was the screen placement (which was annoying), but probably not in my case (BTW, I just discovered that by clicking on the test above, the test + answer selections can be seen together on a single screen. That makes it easier, though I still doubt I would have figured it out.) I’m terrible at IQ-oriented puzzles, which may indicate less than stellar IQ, or perhaps a tendency to find such exercises incredibly boring. If I can’t get an answer to something like this nearly immediately, I give up. If I don’t see value to or interest in something, I give up.
I’ve always been more respectful of the predictive validity of IQ (OK, in my case, standardized test) scores on the far left of the Bell Curve than far right – but there are exceptions. In the early 80s, I went to one of the most elite schools for my undergrad. I also had no test preparation for the SAT (in the late 70s, even in my urban, private school milieu, I can’t recall the SAT being that big of a deal, even though by then admissions had gotten very competitive compared to what they’d been in the 60s; at least there was no significant penalty for being a white man, though there most definitely was affirmative action favoritism, if not nearly as bad, I suspect, as today). I had a good buddy who was pre-med (and is a successful doctor today). He and I had an advanced calculus class together freshman year. I worked, suffered and sweated my way through that class (remember, this was one of the academically best schools, so there were lots of students with 750+ Math SAT scores; furthermore, this was more than a dozen years before the “recentering” of the SAT that logician Michael Levin, author of the very important book Why Race Matters, once told me derisively had taken place in the early 90s {you probably can imagine why}, after which median SAT scores had massively improved). My friend literally barely studied for that class at all, and aced it.
Imagine my shock when much later I discovered that my Math SAT score had been 50 (or 60) points higher than his! What gives? Seriously. I knew some other guys in pre-med, all of whom sweated through organic chemistry (apparently a huge culler for pre-meds). At least two of these guys (one of whom remains a close friend today) had 750 or higher on their Math SATs. My buddy had an SAT score nearly 150 points lower – and yet he became the department tutor! His tutoring carried several future doctors through their premed chemistry requirements.
Oh, and later, guess what? My pal got a really crappy score on his MCAT. He had nearly a 4.0 pre-med GPA (and was Phi Beta Kappa, and just under summa cum laude overall) at a “name” school, but because of his crap MCAT, had to go to a very 2nd/3rd rate med school – at which, however, he ended up top of his class.
Conversely, I knew some genuine idiots (as I still think of them), guys who could not write nearly as well as most of CC’s authors, who actually got above 1500 SAT scores (which was very high in the late 70s). I was routinely shocked. And there were instances of wildly different performances by guys with the same scores in the same classes. I took a course in which I got paired up (for these stupid in-class “interpretations” of the reading material) with this little Jewish guy (to be fair, who was an admirable, and rare, at that place and for a Jew, Reagan conservative) who was the most studious dude I’ve ever met to this day (he ended up at Stanford for law school, and now bills just thousands of hours per year as a corporate tax attorney). He and I had identical Verbal SAT scores (I remember this very well), and while he was a much harder worker, I yet beat him on every single paper (and we had like five for that class), as well as the final exam.
Not sure what to make of all this personal experience. I know that assertions about IQ tests are meant to be accurate for large aggregates. But I think among those who are conventionally considered “intelligent” (would be so judged by similarly considered intelligent others, or by virtue of superior performance in cognitively demanding activities), there is a greater variety in test and IQ scores than the psychometricians suppose. And we must not fail to broach the most important question of all: what is the relation between tested IQ and originality of intellectual or scientific insight? I suspect the correlation is strongly positive, but nevertheless weaker than what IQ-fetishists would predict (ie, the best test takers are not always the best students, and the best students don’t always make the most lasting contributions).
Lord Sheng, that good comments.
The correlation between SAT score and college gpa is only about .2, which is a strong positive correlation, but not overwhelming by any means. Correlation ranges between 0and 1, with zero representing no relationship, and 1 perfect correlation. Correlations higher than .5 are rare in statistics for any variable. The argument you make is a common leftist one made in the Ivy leagues—“we see no recognizable pattern between sat scores and quality of student.” The key is that the more a selective criterion(here standardized test score) is used to select a body of students, the greater their variance within that criterion, ie the less predictive power it will have within that group. As a reduction to the absurd, suppose every student in a class had 1600 on the SAT. Then there would be zero correlation between SAT and GPA! Because the gpas would fall into a normal distribution, while the sats are fixed constant, of course. But obviously you would be dealing with a collection of smart mfs!
Med school does not require strong math skills, nor particularly high IQ in my opinion, to explain that one away.
What I talk about above is called a restriction of range effect. Now suppose you had a class of 1600 on the sat and another class with all 1200s. You would notice a huge difference between them! But then again SOME of the 1200 group would outperform those in the 1600 group in school and definitely later in life.
Because it is relevant (yet previously elicited no notice), I’m reposting part of a comment of mine from Part 1 of Quinn’s review:
Hasn’t a lot of this ground been trod already by the likes of Charles Murray, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, and Rushton? As Levin pointed out a quarter century ago, the main use of IQ for white preservationists is to undermine the obviously race-hustle element in the claim that black (and other nonwhite) academic (and other) failure is due to (white) discrimination rather than impersonal factors, like genetics.
Beyond that, however, IQ-realism will not win us our white homelands. At most it will somewhat increase the number of whites who can be expected to correctly conclude that they would be better off sharing the same homeland and polity only with groups who are at least of similar and thus compatible modal intelligence. The push for white separatism requires political shrewdness (in setting up, sotto voce, the conditions that will enable us or our descendants to win racial freedom and sovereignty when circumstances shall have become propitious), and a new ethics justifying such aggressive or coercive measures as may be necessary to achieve white preservation.
On a different matter: I first became aware of contemporary Chinese eugenics from an article in the Times Literary Supplement (circa 1995), either by the Sinologist Frank Dikotter, or about a book of his. Imagine what progress they’ve made since then! Most of us recall Galton’s 19th century warning that the nation that first masters and deploys eugenic principles will eventually rule the world. China is ideally positioned for this. They are the world’s still most populous nation (though their population will decline over this century; however, perhaps it is also simultaneously becoming superior?), with a mean IQ higher than that of the white race, and with the West’s IQ continuously falling (due to intra-white dysgenesis; native nonwhite over-fecundity + similar nonwhite intraracial dysgenesis; and massive continuing low IQ, as well as high crime, immigration). The Chinese treat eugenics as the issue of national security and future power that is obviously is; the socialist West taxes the superior (thereby reducing their fertility) to subsidize the natality of the inferior. We erode national cohesion by inflicting divisive (and objectively useless) diversity upon ourselves. They stockpile missiles; we “wokeify” our military. They have used our insane immigration and antidiscrimination policies to honeycomb our national security apparatus with Chicom spies. We, OTOH, have literally no idea of their true defense budgets or the contents of those expenditures. They have an authoritarian political order, with a leadership capable of executing long range strategies. We have one man, one vote socialist mobocracies which obsess over power deflating wealth redistribution, and whose diverse electorates cannot agree on anything; possess no sense of national purpose; and have been conditioned to argue endlessly over matters of behavioral depravity, with no thought given to planning to survive in an overpopulating world in which the West alone (with our ally and fellow superior people, Japan) is shrinking.
Who are we kidding? How will 22nd century whites resist Chinese suzerainty? Securing white homelands, impossible as that dream seems, is merely the first step in white preservation. Even once we have racial sovereignty, our battle for survival in this Frankensteinian world our foolish ancestral kinsmen created will just be starting. The Ethnostate must be understood to be something far more than just “white folks living together in sovereign peace and harmony without nonwhites {and wokesters}”. We will be an orphan state, friendless and alone and surrounded by hostiles, even more so than Israel in 1948. There will be tremendous (moral, political, financial, professional) pressures of all kinds upon the pioneering ethnostatists to sell out (which will mean accepting Diversity and the death of the West and the White). How will our people find the strength – at once physical, martial, economic, and yes, psychological and emotional – to endure, to fend off the euthanasiastic temptations to “rejoin humanity”?
Hi LS
All of what you say is correct and depressing. There might be a little more to IQ, though, than you let on. One (and not the only) reason why ethnocentrism is so important is because populations have different average IQ and a different standard deviation for IQ. If they didn’t, the races would be much more compatible than they are now. But your point about the limitations of IQ as a tie that binds the WN platform to reality is well taken. One of the best uses of IQ remains its potential to red pill people out of leftist egalitarianism.
This is interesting. I’ve seen it suggested that one of the reasons that elites might desire the great replacement, at least from a more conspiratorial perspective, is because of the fact that IQ is, for whatever reason, relatively fixed in humans, thus difficult to tamper with. It follows from that this that if a ruling class does want a permanently more compliant, lower IQ populace, it can’t reliably and easily dumb them down solely through miseducation or environmental means.
While I believe there is a case for eugenics, and that a future society should prize intelligence, and at the very least avoid dysgenic outcomes, I now fall into the camp that IQ is mostly now irrelevant, if not counterproductive, when it comes to ethnonationalism and white identity politics, with the possible exception of demolishing certain left-wing arguments regarding racial disparities being caused by racial bigotry.
Centering society on meritocracy and IQ alone simply means that large number of high IQ Asians and Indian immigrants will be championed by the establishment, as a new overclass, instead of low IQ immigrants. It’s also easily used to justify Jewish nepotism and overrrepresentation, in all elite institutions. In fact, one could even argue that IQ-denial is simply one tool of the establishment, rather than the driving force. And lets not forget elite institutions are hyper-meritocratic and that the worst politicians and other elites of the establishment hardly lack in IQ.
Its also likely unattractive to white “normies,” not always unrightfully, when it seems to mechanically rank unearned intellectual caliber, as the sole measure of one’s worth to society. (Incidentally, it may be somewhat of a Judaic notion, putting an outsize value on wittiness and being able to outsmart others).
I could be wrong, but it seems we already have far more than enough intelligent white people, at least in terms of raw biological potential. For instance, many younger whites are now extremely capable, but can’t reach their potential due to sheer demoralization, economic immiseration, and affirmative action. I don’t see a literal denial of IQ as playing much of a role in our current predicament. Again, having a higher IQ population may in fact be a worthy goal in and of itself, but there’s likely little to be gained now by vigorously championing IQ realism and meritocracy.
Nice to have this discussion here. There are limitations. There is no universally accepted test of intelligence. The Raven’s Progressive Matrices has its merits in being testable across cultures with different languages, but verbal intelligence/learning is an important metric (ex for writers/readers of texts). There are validated versions of the WAIS IQ test in other languages. While SATs are not the same an IQ test, it does test across a broad range of topics, more so than the Raven’s. Hence I wouldn’t be surprised if it predicts success better.
Neuroimaging is a useful tool to confirm or refute hypotheses, but looking for giant regions of increased BOLD signal, oxygen or glucose metabolism is a pretty limited blueprint of how the brain works. This isn’t going to replace cognitive tests any time soon, but insightful findings occur when different brain areas light up for different tests. I think your paragraph showing the differences between men and women being inconclusive shows how lots of preliminary findings are hard to reproduce, especially as there are a lot of mathematical assumptions that have to be made in the multi-tiered statistical analyses.
IQ isn’t everything. There are plenty of hard working illegal guests earning more than college educated women (and men) who aren’t so motivated.
“The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.” – Laurence Peter
It is the combination of cognition + temperament, and their complex interaction, which contribute to net individual behavior. Not each alone. Both are genetically determined.
“Blank Slate Man” is the fundamental axiom of the Left. Their indispensable First Premise. Thus they will to fight like cornered rats to prop up Blank Slate Man because if it is refuted, the credibility of everything they promote disintegrates.
And it is being refuted, daily, as it becomes evident to all that, in the U. S., after 3+ generations of Great Society poverty-programs, desegregation, bussing, affirmative action etc., no improvement has been obtained in any racial metrics, but rather the complaints and demands from negroids and their Jew-led spokesmen have increased. If All Men are in fact infinitely-malleable Blank Slates, why is this?
So “Blank Slate Man”, the First commandment of the Left Religion, is wearing thin in the popular mind, and a credibility crisis worries the Left.
Which explains the Left’s recent urgency: they MUST seize permanent political control before too many people conclude that Blank Slate Man is a hoax. Once in irreversible political control, the Generals of the Left will not have to worry what anyone thinks about their phoney theories.
Irreversible control is what migrant-invasion + the “voter suppression” hoax is about: flood the West with millions of 3rd world negroids while corrupting the voter ID apparatus so the Left can herd them to the polls and fraudulently vote them.
I believe that the Left today is facing a situation identical to that faced by the 1630’s Catholic Church vs Galileo. The Church claimed that their phoney doctrine of an earth-centric universe was the “word of God” and thus a heresy to challenge. Galileo challenged it.
But note: The Church’s objection to Galileo’s challenge was not about the technical correctness of his claims, but rather that his challenge threatened the Church’s credibility among the faithful.
Blank Slate Man is the “earth-centered universe” of today. A doctrine that cannot be allowed to be questioned, lest Leftist heads explode.
And like the Catholic Church before them, it is loss of credibility over their phoney Blank Slate Man doctrine which is motivating the Left’s actions today.
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