Against IQ Maximalism

Elite cohesion.

Roadtrip update: I got stuck in NYC, visiting some Sovereign House spin-off called “RAIN.” I don’t know what “RAIN” stands for, and if things blow up on me I will be issuing some kind of after-action report, but currently I’m in the thick of it.¹ This is what I could produce in the few hours of the day that I get to myself.

apparently the guy that runs it is famous, idk he was nice to me

As far as I understand it, these Sovereign House people are all right-wingers who support Trump — or they are Yarvinists who think Trump doesn’t go far enough? When they heard I was left-wing, they asked if I was a communist. Apparently when you’re in that scene, there is only MAGA or communism, and no in-between.

One of the things that came up was this concept of “elite human capital.” If you’re not a communist left-winger, you must be an EHC left-winger. Must I?

he always gets me to write

People assume I am “pro-EHC” for a few reasons:

• I call myself an “elitist.” People associate elitism with EHC.

• I am adjacent or friendly to the EHC people [Hanania and friends]

• I point out the way in which conservatism acts as a parasitic welfarism in favor of downwardly mobile white guys.

All of this is EHC-coded, indeed, but I would not define my philosophy or ingroup as “EHC.” Unfortunately, I have not done a good enough job of differenting myself from EHC philosophy, which means that people assume I share that ideology.

EHC isn’t exclusive to Hanania; in general, the term could be applied to a large portion of the rationalist crowd (Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky).

However, I’m not subscribed, at this point, to any rationalists. I tried to converse with Bentham’s Bulldog, and while we agree on many policy outcomes, our underlying aesthetic judgments are opposite. I once suggested to Bentham that we explore the purpose of aesthetic preferences in moral judgments, and he dismissed that as profoundly stupid.

My main purpose is to make Democrats aesthetically sexy again. I am a Joe Biden Democrat, and I support Talarico, Platner, and Mamdani as the future of the party. But I am not a rationalist, aesthetically or philosophically.

I already wrote an essay against EHC; I also wrote an essay on Aristo-Elitism. However, given the number of people who have mistakenly lumped me in with rationalists and EHC, it is incumbent upon me to repeat myself, and to simplify my position in a more easily digestible way.

Tribal Leadership.

Imagine a tribe of 200 people. The tribe can go in four directions: North, South, East, or West. Now imagine that there are four factions of elites within the tribe, each of which is dedicated to a different direction.

• The North faction has an IQ of 130, and they say to go North, because that is where the buffalo roam.

• The South faction has an IQ of 110, and they say to go South, because that is where the birds fly.

• The West faction has an IQ of 90, and they say to go West, because that is where the wind blows.

• The East Faction has an IQ of 70, and they say to go East, because that is where the sun rises.

Now each of these directions contains a percentage success rate. If the whole tribe goes North, the chance of survive is 90%; South is 80%; West is 70%; and East is 60%. Obviously, if you could, you’d be an IQ maximalist: we should all follow the Northern faction, and listen to what they say.

Unfortunately, however, the Northern faction is not very persuasive, and as a result, the tribe splits into four separate groups. A group of 100 go North, 50 go South, 30 go West, and 20 go East. Because the tribe is splintered into four groups, no one survives.

The point of this example is to say that it is better to be retarded and united than to be separated by genius.

In a market, where winners are rewarded and losers are punished, it is best to be an IQ maximalist. In academia and the world of finance, IQ sorting is quite strong. However, in politics, we cannot simply allow the state to fracture into a million factions and allow the losers to be “punished,” because separatism means civil war.

Even in the case of a microstate like The Republic of Venice, the ultimate decisions of the government must be decisive, they must come down on one side or another.

A more relevant example would be our policy in Ukraine. Either we should fully fund Ukraine, allowing them to defeat Russia and strengthen NATO, or we should abandon Ukraine and see raproachment with Russia. Providing a token or symbolic amount of support to Ukraine, but then ultimately allowing them to be defeated, would gain us nothing. Half measures are worse than bad policy, because even if a policy is bad, if it is coherent and consistent, it has a more reasonable chance of success.²

Charism and Myth

The central problem that I am describing is one of authority. Sure, IQ maxing is great in areas which we can delegate to markets, but when directing the monopoly on state violence toward geopolitical goals, it’s not possible to hedge our bets. Instead, we need to coordinate the populace, which requires something other than sheer IQ.

That “something other” can be approached from numerous angles: it can be called ideology, religion, charisma, myth, or identity. This is what I am interested in; this is primary.

The ideology of IQ maxing reminds me of looksmaxing. Yes, of course, making yourself look better will indeed help you out in the dating market, but the primary determinant is not physical appearance, but attitude and psychology. At the bare minimum, you need to want to have sex, and you need to be able to overcome hurdles and resistance; you need to be persistant. If every time a girl challenges you, you give up, it doesn’t matter how hot you are, you won’t make it.

Similarly, IQ maxing is one of those “necessary, but not sufficient” ideologies. Of course a high IQ elite is required in order to have a functioning society [I’m not denying that]. What I am denying is that the problem of our times is insufficient IQ. There are plenty of smart people — I’m smart, you’re smart, there are millions of smart people. As the late great Jeffrey Epstein said, we have goyim in abundance — brilliant WASPs.

The problem isn’t that government is a really complicated physics problem that we lack the “elite human capital” to “solve.” This was the DOGE mindset — send in the geniuses to cut federal waste, and they’ll find trillions of dumb money! Nope, wrong. The truth is that most of the waste isn’t secret or hidden — it’s a matter of political will, not a calculus problem. You don’t need to be smart to recognize the moral and civilizational crime of Social Security or Medicare spent on McMansion dwellers. It’s simply that our government is run by spineless cowards who refuse to stand up to AARP.

This is partially the fault of democracy, but authoritarian regimes like Russia and China also have their problems with gerontocracy.

The solution is simple: develop an aristocracy which is so thoroughly insulated from populists and lobbyists that it can act decisively. I said simple; I did not say “easy.”

Elite Cohesion

Populism is what happens when one faction of elites defects from the others. In 2016, supporters of Israel saw Trump as their best bet to disrupt “business as usual” in the State Department. Adelson, Mercer, and Thiel saw a Hillary presidency as unacceptable, because it would maintain the Iran deal, continue antagonism toward Russia, and pursue peace with China.

These elites had various motivations, ranging from the traditional goals of the military-industrial complex, to Zionism, to Russophilia, to Sinophobia.

There are many different directions in which we could examine the MAGA political complex. Here are two potential positions:

1. The shift from “traditional Republicans” (Romney, Bush, Reagan) to Trump was driven by Trump himself, and the Mercer-Adelson-Thiel crowd merely “went along for the ride”;

2. The shift was driven by a core Likudite faction, represented by Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner, who forced their guy through the primary.

Either way, in 2012, Trumpian populism was “on the table,” but it was obscured by the paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan and the libertarianism of Ron Paul. The sudden breakout of Trumpism in 2016 can be explained somewhat by the conditions of social media, but I would contend that none of this “organic” popularity would have been possible without elite support (donors). Additionally, I am highly skeptical that the prevelance of Pizzagate narratives and WikiLeaks itself were “organic phenomena.”

Epstein in particular deserves scrutinty, both as a “fixer” who influenced political outcomes, as well as a victim of a coordinated attack by Likud.

In any case, whether we blame Russia, Israel, the military-industrial complex, the Chinese dissidents, or some other shadowy faction, it’s clear that in 2016, the donors pushing for Trump were willing to abandon many of the civil norms that worked against George Wallace in 1972 in order to achieve their niche goals. They were “class traitors” who broke the unspoken rules of political discourse in favor of populism.

also consider the role of the gulf states. source

Populism is like mustard gas. When one side uses it, the other side uses it, and now a bunch of people die for no reason. One data point in favor of the “organic populist moment” would be the rise of Bernie, but of course WikiLeaks as an attack on Hillary benefitted Bernie and can be seen as part of the larger conspiratorial complex. All that is required is an openness to the idea that WikiLeaks was not just a bunch of “random journalists,” but was a front-group for foreign actors, or even agents within the “deep state” who opposed Clinton.

When I say that I am in favor of the deep state, I am speaking of deep state cohesion. Having a divided deep state is bad. Our deep state is currently in a civil war, split between China hawks, China sympathizers, Russia hawks, and Russia sympathizers. The only way to heal this split is for one side to decisively win. This is the sense in which I support Talarico, Platner, and other left-wing populists: they can provide the people welfare in exchange for a mass expulsion of the pro-Russia shills from our government. Total purge.

This has nothing to do with “elite human capital.” The Russia shills, like Nick Land or Curtis Yarvin, probably have high IQs, and some I assume are good people. I am not trying to replace Land and Yarvin with Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander on the mere basis of IQ scores. I don’t share Yudkowsky or Alexander’s secular atheism. I am a globalist Platonist who believes in friendship toward China and hostility toward Russia. We have entirely different reasoning processes for supporting Democrats.

On a certain level, I do sympathize more with Land and Yarvin for acknowledging the power of story-telling and teleology. Reddit atheism is indeed cringe because it is hollow and empty. I am provisionally woke, not because wokeness is a stable ideology, but because it is, at the very least, ideological. I prefer a bad ideology to “pure rationalism.”

Conclusion

The problem of American elitism is not increasing IQ; the problem is increasing cohesion. We already have plenty of smart people — what we lack is clarity of purpose and identity.

The American elite has gone through nine stages of consolidation and conflict:

1. Colonialism (1619 - 1772): Tensions between English aristocracy and colonial merchants

2. Revolutionary War (1773 - 1783): Freemasonic Whigs compete with Tories

3. WASPism (1784 - 1828): 44 years of westward expansion

4. Civil War (1829 - 1865): split over slavery, Indian removal, and free trade

5. Progressivism (1866 - 1931): eugenics, rise of the Ivy League establishment

6. FDR (1932 - 1946): Social Security, WWII, Desegregation

7. Cold War (1947 - 1991): Civil Rights and NATO

8. Unipolarity (1992 - 2013): War on Terror, NAFTA

9. Trumpism (2014 - 2026): split over Israel, Iran, Russia, China

The American elite was profoundly united between 1866 and 2013, not because it was higher IQ, but because most geopolitical questions were able to be resolved decisively in favor of a definite course of action. There were disagreements and disputes, but these did not drive a wedge between elites far enough to cause “defection.” This unity allowed America to become a global power.

The current tension represented by Trumpism threatens to neuter American power projection by creating disunity and internal negation. If one group of elites were successfully able to crush and purge the other faction, we could move forward. Even putting aside the morality of a war with China, it seems much easier to change the president (Trump) than to change the institutions (Harvard).

The Magna Carta originated as a contract between the king and the barons to limit the power of the central executive. America might need its own version of the Magna Carta to limit the power of Yarvinism and return power to Harvard.

None of this has anything to do with IQ or EHC. Harvard students are quite smart, so it may appear that I am defending Harvard as a matter of IQ maximalism. However, on a deeper level, my sympathy toward American institutions has nothing to do with IQ, and more to do with maintaining elite cohesion. Trump’s war on institutions divides the country and makes us impotent, regardless of the IQ composition of our elite.

Ted Cruz and Hegseth are both Ivy League educated — Platner and Talarico are probably less intelligent. But I favor the latter over the former.

My ideal elite would be selected for openness, risk-taking, creativity, and disagreeableness. Of course there needs to be an IQ floor (around 120), but IQ maxing is not ideal.

1. view from the window as I type this

2. As it stands, we have aggravated Russia enough that it makes no sense to pull back now and seek rapproachment. Ukraine is ours to defend.