Against Elite Human Capital
meme vs theory.
I see Non-Zionism’s argument is as follows:
Left-Moldbugists support liberal technocratic governance
Liberal technocratic governance (LTG) is comically bad
Therefore, Left-Moldbugism is wrong
According to Non-Zionism, the “prime exponent [of Left Moldbugism] is my buddy DeepLeftAnalysis… the term applies to a lot of the work of Richard Hananiah… Another candidate is Anatoly Karlin.”
When I first tried to address Non-Zionism’s label of Left Moldbugism (ignoring my big, beautiful, better term of “Deep Leftism”), Hanania was still defending his vote for Trump, and I didn’t know much about Karlin. We’ve all learned a bit more in the last six months or so.
Given that there are only three Left Moldbugists in the world, it is incumbent on me, the Jew of the three, to engineer a Trotskyite factionalist split. I am officially denouncing the concept of Elite Human Capital from the perspective of Deep Leftism.
Liberal technocratic governance is comically bad, because it is run by Midwits. MAGA populist governance is also comically bad. Putinism is also comically bad. I don’t find China’s mass construction spamming during population decline to be very sagacious either.
All governing systems in the world are filled with frictional incompetence. My defense of the left isn’t that it is “elite,” or smarter, or more competent, or more efficient. Before I explain what my defense is, I should explain that EHC isn’t a bad theory of politics: it isn’t really a theory at all, but a meme heuristic.
What is EHC?
The 14% of Americans who hold post-graduate degrees are not elite — they are Midwits. This doesn’t mean they are inherently wrong, or that they are inherently right. Midwits are better than Dimwits at pursuing status points within a given socio-political regime — but this tells us absolutely nothing about the legitimacy of the axioms of that regime.
In Nazi Germany, the majority of “EHC” signed the loyalty oath to Hitler. Meanwhile, if you asked some 80 IQ German Gypsies what they thought about Hitler, they would have opposed him. This doesn’t tell us anything about the validity of National Socialism as a political or moral system.
Even if Democrats were dumber on average than Republicans (they aren’t, but pretend they were), this still wouldn’t change my political prescriptions. Political theory must be justified by reference to the effects of policy, not through appeals to authority or guilt by association.
I like Richard, on a personal level, and intellectually, I find him stimulating and fruitful to listen to. Ditto for Anatoly. I agree with them and learn from them frequently. They use the EHC meme to trigger conservatives and the dissident right, which is fun and enjoyable. But beyond the joy of trolling, I simply don’t ascribe to EHC as a political theory. It wasn’t what drew me to the left, and it isn’t what animates my leftism today.
Elite Human Capital, used colloquially, is not a theory at all, but a meme or slur. It’s either used by former Trump supporters to make fun of “Low Human Capital” on the right, or used sarcastically by Trump supporters to make fun of the left.
Behind the slur and the meme, there is an implicit suggestion that left-wingers are smarter than right-wingers, and that this explains why leftism is the “winning team,” or why the right-wing will always lose, or why we should morally support the left. While this makes people mad and is therefore very funny, it is not a rigorous moral or political theory.
Deep Leftism ≠ EHC
When I began talking about politics on the internet in 2018, I used the following vocabulary to spell out my worldview:
Deep Leftism: the belief that the left-right divide is psychological, religious, and cultural, originating with the birth of Western civilization. Underneath the superficial features of the left (BLM, LGBTQ, ableism), the deep left is not limited to modernity or parliamentary democracy, but is the seed of the Faustian or Promethean spirit.
Minoritarianism: the belief that political, economic, and religious structures are controlled by dedicated minorities rather than broad masses, even within so-called democratic or populist movements.
Tripartite class analysis: the belief that power can be divided into money, military, and media. The three classes which specialize in these sectors are merchants, warriors, and priests.
These three pillars have remained the foundation of my worldview over the last seven years. Insofar as I have evolved politically, it has been to eliminate vestigial teenage beliefs which contradict these principles.
Articulating dogma directly becomes tedious and can lead to an oversimplified, repetitive, or rigid way of thinking. I view this blog as a creative work of art, not as a utilitarian machine.1 But there is a season for everything.
In this post I will attempt to cut away the surface and expose the guts of my theory.
Deep Leftism
When agriculture was invented, it was not traditional. It required a new religion and the enslavement of mankind. The transition to agriculture resulted in a sharp decline in height and life expectancy, and an increase in cavities and diseases.2
If each new technology was put to a popular vote,3 agriculture and industrialism would have been voted down. I occasionally see polling data which claims that large pluralities think it would be good for society if social media was banned — while continuing to use it! I assume most of the conservatives pushing for a ban on porn are also guilty users. Despite the hypocrisy of these positions, they have a point.
Each new technology brings growing pains. These pains are concentrated within the lowest, broadest strata of society. Technological optimists claim that new inventions “level the playing field.” They claim that the internet is “democratic,” and that libertarianism is best for the little guy. This is a shallow and superficial analysis, made out of wishful thinking.
The internet, like agriculture and industrialism, is psychologically and sexually disruptive. Technology does not increase short-term human happiness for the little guy. It increases the productivity and power of elites, but for the majority, technological transitions are a net negative.
A moral defense of technology requires elitism. The masses must either be lied to or anesthetized to the point where they cannot resist. Marx was correct when he said that religion was the opiate of the masses. That was true in 10,000 BC, when priests convinced slaves that they would be sent to hell if they did not work the fields. It is true today, when Midwits go to college for the privilege of working from home.
The contentment and comfort of gardening in the Shire is right-wing. What makes people happy is doing the same thing that they have always done — sitting on the same porch, chewing the same cud, skipping rocks in the same pond. Change induces pain. In order for progress to continue, human happiness must be discarded. There must be a higher ideal than mere contentment.
For the right-wing, technology is scary, terrifying, grotesque, and anti-human. The human sacrifices of early agricultural societies were also terrifying; the coal mines were grotesque; the internet is anti-human.
As the caterpillar forms a chrysalis, it rips off its own skin and turns into a blob of goo surrounded by an austere green shell. The transitional chrysalis is shiny plastic on the outside, ugly and gross on the inside.
The right-wing is a democracy of the dead. Think of your ancestors! Think of how disgusted, shocked, afraid, bewildered, confused, and nauseated they would feel! Guilt! Shame!
When the human organism is viewed holistically, radical changes, and the pain that accompanies them, can be seen as healthy. The devouring of a corpse by maggots and mushrooms is healthy, as is the forest fire which leaves the earth charred and blackened.
The greatest technological breakthrough of the past 160 years, besides computing, has been the discovery of DNA. The discovery of DNA is not just another tool to augment the human, but a Promethean forge through which we must pass and be forever transformed. Should we succeed, Miescher, Altmann, and Kossel will become as tricksters who stole fire from the Gods.
All technological breakthroughs of the past required suppression, enslavement, or coercion against the masses to force their adoption. Technology wasn’t adopted by “voluntary free exchange,” but by religious indoctrination and the fear of hellfire. Populism is the enemy of progress.
Minoritarianism
Minoritarianism is the idea that small, dedicated minorities wield power and produce political change, except in the most archaic, chaotic, or minuscule social organizations.
“Mob rule” is the antithesis of minoritarianism, whether in the form of the pogrom, the peasant revolt, or January 6th. The right-wing is majoritarian in its idolization of the white mob. But the right-wing also idolizes the black and brown mobs of BLM in imagining them to be much more powerful and threatening than they really are. The right-wing fears Mexican migrants because they are many, adhering always to democratic logic.
In 1880, 80,000 white British troops ruled over 200 million Indians. This ratio of 1 : 2,500 speaks to the power of small, organized, dedicated minorities to rule over vast, chaotic, amorphous masses. Technological progress intensifies the advantages of competence. In a street brawl between mobs, intelligence is irrelevant. As tools become available for manipulation, the supremacy of intelligence is multiplied.
Minorities can be defined in numerous ways:
Religious minorities: Orthodox Jews, the Amish, Coptic Christians, Mormons
Ethnic minorities: Albanians, Ruthenians, Taiwanese, Boers
Ideological minorities: Effective Altruists, Bolsheviks, MAGA Communists
In reality, none of these categories can be neatly separated from one another. Each religion usually has an ethnic core with outliers surrounding it. Even if a particular ethnicity contains multiple religious traditions, one of the religions is usually more authoritative than the others. Ideologies can be thought of as “start-up religions,” more particular and narrow in focus, operating on a shorter time-scale, but with more precision and intensity.
There are some minorities, like the Amish or Orthodox, who oppose technological progress, but this isn’t their primary concern. Their primary concern is being left alone. In this sense, the Amish and the Orthodox are a less hostile force to progress than a non-denominational QAnon cultist, or an agnostic MAHA fanatic. Populism is the primary opponent of progress, not minoritarianism.
In general, minoritarians are more in favor of technological progress than populists, because technology allows them to amplify their already existing advantage over majorities. Brahmins, Jews, and the European aristocrats have all been threatened at times by the specter of a populist revolt. Sometimes this comes in the form of a nationalist pogrom, and other times in the form of a communist pogrom.
The Paradox of Leftism
Communism, at one time, was a tool for some minoritarians to fight an existing elite by tapping into the power of democratic mythology. American Revolutionary propaganda appealed to “the people” while actually being led by a small cabal of Freemasons.
The hypocrisy of leftism isn’t a bug, but a feature. When an old minoritarian elite (like the British Tories or the Russian aristocracy) has become too degenerate and stagnant, a new minoritarian elite rises up to replace it by justifying itself on moral grounds, the defense of weak helpless victims and the rights of the majority.
The question at present is whether the Ivy League aristocracy of the west has become so degenerate and stagnant that it deserves to be replaced by a new crop of elites claiming to “defend the rights of the people.”4
Tripartite Class Analysis
There are three forms of power: money, military, and media. It is assumed that, prior to the rise of civilization, among the cavemen, military power reigned supreme in the form of brute force. This is a gross caricature, and an inversion of the truth.
In the jungles of the Congo, pygmy societies are controlled by elders. These elders are not the strongest men of the tribe, so they cannot rule by brute force. Instead, they threaten members of the tribe with curses, voodoo, and other superstitions to keep the community in line.
In deep leftist tripartite class analysis, the term media is used in the broadest possible sense to include all forms of communication, language, art, and religion. Media power is the first form of power which rules human societies, and the elders with curses and spells are the first priests.
The Vaishya Class
After media power comes the power of the Vaishya, translated as merchant. But the term “merchant” has a connotation of “one who travels from town to town selling wares.” This connotation distracts from the essential meaning of Vaishya, which is better translated as “landlord.”
The transition from priestly power to Vaishya power occurred during the adoption of agriculture. Instead of small pygmy tribes ruled by a priestly council of elders, a new form of government emerged in which the landlord ruled over serfs working the land. This transition to a Vaishya class was justified by religious superstitions, but these superstitions were not traditional — they were revolutionary and universal in scope. Whereas tribal elders could appeal to “the ancestors,” the Vaishya religion of agriculturalists appealed to universal Gods who ruled over the sky, the rain, and the Earth.
The secularization of the Vaishya occurred as agricultural societies grew in scale. Originally, every landowner was a priest, striking fear into his serfs with ceremonies and rituals of human sacrifice. Eventually, with the centralization and collectivization of farming settlements around a grand central temple, the Vaishya could focus on day-to-day managerial “secular” tasks, and leave the religious fanaticism to a specialized temple-bound priest class.
The Warrior Class
Military power as an independent class cannot emerge until a group of young men separate themselves from tribal elders and landlords. In Indo-European societies, this is referred to as the Kóryos band, or the Männerbund. In India, the Maruts or Rudras form a hunting party which doubles as a war-band. Odin in Norse mythology is said to lead the wild hunt. Zeus is the leader of the Olympians, and Cronus before him leads a revolt against Uranus.
The Indo-European myth holds that prior to the emergence of the warrior king, society was ruled over by primitive chthonian deities, referred to as Giants, Titans, or Dragons. These deities required human sacrifices, and were led by women, or men wearing women’s clothing.
In the myth of Snow White, a young woman is prepared for human sacrifice by an old witch queen (a priestess). Suddenly, a prince appears who kills the witch and rescues the young woman.
Why did warriors split off from priestly-landlord societies and form their own princely piratical order? As both pastoralist and agriculturalist societies grew larger, the incentive for pastoralists to raid and pillage agriculturalist settlements grew larger as well. As this raiding activity grew more profitable, it allowed for a warrior class to sustain and develop its own base of power outside of the control of a priest or landlord class. Eventually, the warrior class became powerful enough to smash the state and establish its own supremacy.
Clash of Classes
At the broadest level, the Neolithic contained two forms of society: agriculturist and pastoralist. Agriculturalist societies had a priest class at the top, followed by a Vaishya managerial landlord class, followed by a subordinate and obedient army of serfs. These serfs would be drafted at the margins to defend the settlement from neighboring settlements, and sometimes whipped up into a hysterical fervor to rape and pillage their neighbors.
In contrast to these agriculturists, pastoralist societies lacked a Vaishya. Pastoralists were migratory and had no use for serfs or slave labor. Pastoralist societies contained a tension between a priest class (shamans) and warrior class (raiders).
The specialization of classes emerged in parallel to general economic and epistemic specialization. In ancient Greece, natural philosophy made no fine distinction between theology, logic, rhetoric, biology, physics, or political science. All of these studies were interdependent. In the same way, in the ancient past, the distinction between a pastoralist High Priest and a Warrior King5 was not always clear, just as the distinction between a Landlord and a Priest was not always clear.
On the aggregate, agriculturalist societies were more dominated by Vaishya, while pastoralist societies were more dominated by the warrior class. As pastoralists raided agriculturalist societies, they eventually found themselves ruling as kings over the beheaded corpses of these societies.
Mario presents this myth clearly: society is ruled over by a dragon (Bowser) who is sacrificing a young woman (Princess Peach) in a lake of fire (the sacrificial altar). Mario saves the Princess, kills the dragon, stops the human sacrifice, and rules over the kingdom. The serfs (Toad) are subservient slaves who gladly accept the new rule of Mario over the old rule of Bowser.
The introduction of Indo-European rule over agriculturalist societies created tensions and transitions between classes. As the warrior class assumed ownership of the state, the descendants of knights, pirates, and raiders settled into comfortable new roles as Landlords. The transition from a life of adventure to a life of petty administration is sometimes referred to as “the degeneration of the aristocracy,” where it ceases to practice war-fighting, and becomes the very class that it once fought to destroy. Greece was subject to several cycles of raiding and decapitation, followed by the degeneration of leadership, followed by more raiding and decapitation.
The question in the present day is whether or not there exists a warrior class which is sufficiently powerful to replace the present Vaishya, the landowning class. “Landowning” in the contemporary context does not refer to physical land in the real world, but digital real estate in cyberspace:
The technofeudal lords bent on accumulating data don’t govern with the threat of violence… Instead, they govern through discipline… through your millions of everyday micro-interactions with technology… and in turn, you govern yourself for them…
Technology as Problem and Solution
Technology is both the problem which has concentrated power in the hands of a parasitic Vaishya and also the solution which threatens that same class.
The Ivy League aristocracy which exists today rules through a series of speech codes, formal and informal, which control thought and beat down any expression of the warrior spirit. Violence is evil; the victim is always right; the weak are moral; the strong are devils. Leftism is the religion of the underdog and the oppressed, not against the elite generally, but against the warrior class specifically.
This is why the term “elite human capital” is so imprecise, confusing, and ultimately annoying. It fails to differentiate between different types of elites. By reducing power to a single dimension, rather than seeing its three distinct forms, it obscures more than it clarifies.
When elites speak of “democracy” they are speaking of the power of the Vaishya. When elites speak of “fascism” they are speaking of the power of the warrior class.
An Aside on Nazism and Tolkienism
Having read all of this stuff about the warrior class and Indo-Europeans, radicals on the right might assume that the Nazis had the right idea. First, take over the state, then, run it as a military dictatorship. In reality, Nazism planned to empower a bureaucratic, managerial Vaishya which demanded ideological conformity and party loyalty. Had it succeeded, genetic research would have been declared “Jewish science” and the Ahnenerbe would continue collecting sticks, rocks, and skull measurements from the Tibetan plateau in search of Aryan mole people.
Hitler’s plan for Europe was to give all of his soldiers a plot of land in Russia to live out their lives as school teachers and farmers. In other words, Hitler was trying to speed-run the “degeneration of the aristocracy” by making all his battle-hardened soldiers into party functionaries and gardeners who would never question the regime with ideas of their own.6
The real model of a Kshatriya order is represented by Freemasonic involvement in the Dutch East India Company. Independent-minded men of loose dogma and questionable morals went east to pilfer and raid the lands of the east. Spengler was correct to compare the English to the Vikings.
Tolkien, like Himmler, idolized the construction of a “knightly order” which would serve the interests of the state. Tolkien’s vision is even more bastardized: he reimagines the Kshatriya as agriculturalist mall-cops defending Hobbit Vaishya against Orcish raiders. Sauron and his Orcs more closely resemble the Indo-European ethos than the gerontocracy of Gondor and its obsession with obscure lineages.
What is to be done?
Vaishya power must be broken. It will either be broken by an invasion from abroad or a revolution from within. The managerial bureaucracy which rules the west is interested not in innovation, but rent seeking and parasitism. Their desire is not exploration, adventure, or risk-taking, but vampiric blood-sucking. The Matrix was a documentary.
Nazism or Tolkienism are not in genuine opposition to this system, but represent regressive forms of the same system with a racist or folkish veneer. Hitler and Tolkien did not want to smash the state; they were not anarchists; they wanted to save civilization. But in Spengler’s view, civilization is the pillow of old age which smothers culture and the barbaric spark of genius. What revival is possible under the crushing forces of bureaucracy?
The answer lies in genetic technology. One does not need to be a “eugenicist” or “race realist” to believe this. Selective breeding is slow, inefficient, and crude. Selective breeding is primarily a force of preservation, and it struggles to generate new traits without mutation.
Genetic engineering is dangerous, not because it’s a “pseudoscience” or “unethical,” but because it is the only plausible way out of the current spiral of parasitic bloat. The weak fear the strong. People fear genetic engineering in the same way that Hobbits fear the Uruk-Hai.
The Vaishya system relies upon fear. It appeals to man’s self-importance, his genealogical lineage, slogans of “blood and soil,” tradition, conservatism, and civilization. What is “normal” and “natural” is good, while that which is foreign and strange is the ultimate evil.
Against this tendency, victory is only possible through the left. The right-wing may provide some minute tactical victories — reduced regulation or tax cuts — but it will never address the deep ethical, moral, and spiritual impediments to progress.
The flaws of the left are procedural, while the flaws of the right are spiritual. The left adds friction to the system in the form of taxation. Detroit’s murder rate is high — this is friction. But whether or not black people shoot each other in Detroit has nothing to do with regulations on biotechnology.
At a spiritual level, the left is more open to new races, hormonal interventions, identitarian surgeries, and new religions. The right-wing is reactive, conservative, fearful, and anti-minoritarian. The right-wing wants to abort the creation of new species, while the left-wing fucking loves science and thinks it would be cool to have sex with aliens.
The right-wing version of technological progress is “going to Mars,” which is another Vaishya scam. It’s a PR-stunt with no material benefit, promoted to justify public spending on telecommunications and the militarization of satellite systems. No one is going to Mars. Mars is a code-word for faster internet porn in the Congo and space lasers for war with China.
The scientists who work in labs doing genetic research are mostly liberals and Democrats. Some have some libertarian economic ideas, but they are high in openness and few are truly conservative.
If there were to be a healthier form of the right-wing, it would have to be thoroughly Nietzschean, technocratic and divorced from conspiratorial, populist conservatism. That transformation, if possible, can only happen through the humiliation of defeat. If the Republican Party is rewarded for its current trajectory, the cancer of Qanon and Bannonism will grow more powerful.
What does this have to do with EHC?
So, what does any of this have to do with the theory of Elite Human Capital?
Absolutely nothing. That’s the point. I was a leftist before I ever heard of EHC. The poverty of EHC as a political theory has no bearing on my worldview.
Right-wingers aren’t necessarily dumb; they’re fearful tribalists who use their intelligence to fight for homogeneity, microwaves, and wheat fields rather than technological acceleration. That doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent, it means that their capacity for rational discourse is limited by moralistic hysterics about berry-pickers, pedophile cabals, and white genocide.
Left-wingers aren’t necessarily smart, they’re just more useful for my purposes. I want to reduce barriers to the genetic revolution. The left, as a more open-minded coalition, provides more opportunities. This would remain the case even if mass immigration lowered the IQ of Democrats below that of Republicans.7
I opposed January 6th not because it “made the right-wing look bad” but because the right-wing is bad in itself. January 6th wasn’t the Indo-Europeans coming to save us from bureaucracy — it was a mob coming to institute a stupider and more regressive form of Bannonist Maoism. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill includes more debt, more spending, more waste than ever before.
I welcome converts to my way of thinking, and sometimes that path is strange and twisting.8 I think that memes making fun of right-wingers are funny. But the idea that “liberals are smarter than conservatives!” just isn’t a load-bearing pillar in my ideology.
The strong theory of EHC is that “Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal.”
7 months later, the theory was weakened: “That said, not all Elite Human Capital is liberal.”
But now it is time to abandon all hope and enter the lifeboats:
This extended scholar-class, or clerisy, can be called an ‘elite’ in the sense of ‘ruling class’ – that is to say in the sense that it is distinct from the masses, runs most of the extended government, and is represented by the dominant political faction. We can also admit that it is highly competitive at the top, reasonably closed to the lowest human quality, and (according to Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve) more efficiently sorted for cognitive ability than smaller scholar-elites before it. Yet in terms of its ‘human capital’, and with an eye to the original definition of the word elite as the ‘cream of the crop’, this class is being so massively overproduced nowadays that it can only be characterized overall and on average by ‘relative smartness’ and ‘relative high status’ – in other words, by midwittery and mediocrity. Hence the term Mediocre Human Capital, which is admittedly polemical, but no more so than the terms thrown around by Hanania and Karlin.
The left is mediocre in every sense of the word. And so is the right-wing. Both sides are lame, and having a college degree is banal.9 Slave owners in the South were not “elites,” and neither are people with master’s degrees. Elites are far less than 1% of the population — but 14% of Americans have post-graduate degrees.
Midwits Still Matter
As current trends stand, two things are true:
The IQ and prestige of college graduates is decreasing as selectivity decreases
White college graduates are fleeing the Republican Party
The white college graduate is, on average, by definition, a Midwit. Now, in defense of midwittery, a nation with an average IQ of 100 can send a man to the moon; it can discover DNA; it can conquer continents and win world wars. A nation with an IQ of 90 can’t do those things. Midwittery isn’t bad. In fact, the difference between Midwittery and Dimwittery is quite important. The hatred that the online right has for Midwits is perverse in light of their moralistic glazing of Dimwits.
Still, Midwits are not elite in any genuine sense of the word. The above-average cognitive capacity of the master’s degree class is dedicated to filling out forms and complying with regulations. The bureaucratic mind solves complex problems of the most inane sort — creating more needless complexity along the way. These people have no intellectual curiosity; they have no passion; they are more akin to NPCs than elites. An elite has irreplaceable agency. Most academics and journalists do not.
In a world of billions of people, there are millions of elites: elite athletes, elite prostitutes, elite pianists, elite criminals. But in terms of politics, the number of elites can be counted in the thousands, and mostly reduces to the donor class of centi-millionaires and billionaires.
A bureaucrat cannot be elite — no matter how idealistic, hard-working, or literate that bureaucrat becomes. True elitism requires standards.10
Conclusion.
I get along better with gay librarians than West Virginian plumbers. This isn’t because gay librarians are “elite,” but because they are more androgynous, neurotic, verbose, and higher in openness. It is shared personality traits which connect me to the left; not elite cognitive capacity. Both the Alex Jones viewer and the gay librarian might have an IQ of 110, but I prefer the company of one over the other even controlling for intelligence.
I am an ethnic liberal. Ethnic liberalism isn’t a set of policies; it is a cultural hierarchy of mannerisms and social signals which precedes geopolitics or social welfare. It opposes ethnic conservatism, which is centered on sports, church, and trucks.
Personality traits inform policies through Moral Foundations. None of this has anything to do with intelligence directly. Indirectly, there may be some correlations between intelligence and openness, or between intelligence and academic achievement. But I don’t believe what I believe simply because liberals have a slightly higher IQ than conservatives on average. If you teleported me to an island with smart conservatives and dumb liberals, I wouldn’t suddenly change all my opinions to align myself with “the views of smart people.”
Should we believe something because it is popular among the educated class? Historically, educated people believed all sorts of things. This isn’t an epistemology or political theory: it’s a heuristic.
As a heuristic, EHC is superior to the anti-intellectual heuristic of the right: “if educated people believe something, it must be wrong.” When it comes to vaccines, climate change, germ theory, evolution, trade, and most conspiracy theories, the EHC heuristic that “liberals are right because they are smarter” works out just fine. But this heuristic cannot replace political theory.
The issues which most deeply animate the right and left are of little consequence and serve as distractions. If anti-vaxers die of smallpox, an immigrant commits a crime, or black people shoot each other in Detroit, I am hesitant to drop everything and protect the proles from winning the McGenic Darwin Awards.11
My worldview does not revolve around the prospect of banning mask-wearing, diapers, strap-ons, or furry suits. My worldview also does not revolve around whether or not liberals have 2-5 IQ points on conservatives. Does the country of Armenia have a superior political theory to that of Georgia? Does Iceland have a superior political theory to that of Switzerland? Using the average IQs of broad masses in democratic coalitions as a heuristic for the correctness of policy cannot replace the deep, foundational work of political theory.
I could smarmily and smugly suggest that liberals are smarter than conservatives (as I regularly do for my own amusement), but this won’t convince conservatives to become liberals — except for the most shallow ones who simply want to be on the “winning team.” Conservatives can shout back race and IQ data to prove that the left is even stupider. But someone, at some point, actually has to discuss the telos of politics, rather than pointing out the mediocrity of crowds. What is it all for? What are we trying to do?
Is the goal of civilization to maintain a bloated bureaucracy as long as possible, even if that requires censorship, deportations, and pogroms? Or should the goal of humanity be to evolve, transcend, and innovate, even at the expense of humanity itself? My right-wing Nietzschean friends believe that their side fulfills this vision; I disagree. This is the debate which should be had — beyond the memes and petty point scoring about whose Midwits are midwittier.
In every work of art, there are elements of darkness and elements of light, positive and negative space. Rather than spell out the inner mechanics of my ideology in each post, I prefer to illustrate it implicitly.
Human beings had not evolved for a grain-based diet — humans were (up until that point) evolved for the consumption of fruits, nuts, root vegetables, and meats.
Agriculture may have been precipitated by climatological changes, but the sociological and climatological explanations are not mutually exclusive.
(assuming self-interested rational consequentialism on the part of the voters)
This is a silly thought experiment, because it implies that there would have been some democratic mechanism available to Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, or pre-industrial peasants. But morally, it illustrates the folly of populism.
MAGA believes so; but unlike the Freemasonic or Communist revolutionaries of centuries past, MAGA lacks literacy and ideological coherence. It relies mostly on hysteria and irony rather than offering a substantive, serious, or compelling vision. It wants to “go back” rather than going forward.
(Melchizedek)
This is an aside because even if we could spy on an alternative universe which would prove me wrong, the right-wing of today is a far cry from whatever techno-optimist neo-Nazis think “might have been.”
In any case, the effects of assimilation are such that Hispanics are becoming a centrist bloc rather than a leftist one, so even mass immigration probably won’t help close the left-right IQ gap.
I try not to punish people for their past beliefs, but the “EHC crowd” were cheering on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I was not.
This is not ancient Rome — it is not the Optimates against the Populares.
For reference, 10% of Evangelicals have a post-grad degree, and 80% of college educated Evangelicals vote Republican.
Before you hysterically shriek in the comments about how I am a sociopathic monster, please ensure that you are also equally caring about the kids in Gaza, and the Israeli hostages, and the child victims of Ritalin and SSRIs.
"The flaws of the left are procedural, while the flaws of the right are spiritual."
What do you say about the fact that leftism, at least as we see it most commonly manifested today, has at its core an ugly motivation of egalitarian resentment against those they perceive to be the strong, beautiful, powerful, and successful? I think that's a pretty important flaw that goes beyond procedure.
Also, “liberals are smarter than conservatives!” is just a fact and fairly important even if you don't think it's a loadbearing pillar for your ideology. In addition, EHC theory is not in conflict with minoritarianism, but complements it. Just because Karlin and Hanania often use EHC expansively (especially when describing midwit bureaucrat types) this doesn't therefore mean it should be disregarded completely.
Do you consider Ayn Rand right-wing or left-wing? I've noticed you define left and right differently from most people. I don't think right = afraid of technology.
Also I don't think defending technology requires elitism. It requires long-termism. Even if the poorer people are hurt initially, their posterity is usually greatly advantaged by being in the more advanced society. They are safer from invasion and wealthier than the poor in other areas.
I used to be into primitivism, and in some ways I still am. You can live elements of that lifestyle while promoting progress, though. It's better for everyone in the long run not to be hostile to technology, because being in The Tech Empire is infinitely better than not being in it. It may take generations to come to fruition though, and I guess you can say that having faith that your elite will be responsible with the technology and not use it against your descendants (even if they don't make it into the elite themselves) is its own form of elitism.