The secret to egalitarianism’s success is that the superior people have been converted to egalitarianism. They can’t straight-up admit this, of course, since the content of their creed is that there are no superior people, or at least that it has little connection to social power. On the other hand, they don’t try very hard to deny something so gratifying to their egos. Officially, IQ doesn’t measure anything, but they make sure you know that theirs are higher than the conservatives’. Marriage is officially oppressive, but they like to remind us that they beat us on avoiding divorce and unwed pregnancy. These claims are all more-or-less true. Liberals dominate every profession because they are by-and-large superior.
Raw intelligence is only one aspect of their superiority, perhaps not the most important. They seem to have various dispositional advantages as well. I’ve remarked before on the apparently low sex drive of Leftists. That probably keeps them out of a lot of trouble. They may be less physically aggressive as well. At the same time, they have tremendous energy for their work, hobbies, and ideological policing. I sense that I am more sex-obsessed, shorter-tempered, and lazier than my liberal colleagues. Above all, liberals are formidable in the solidity of their faith, their complete inability to experience doubt. The Christian is always plagued by the knowledge of how implausible and wicked his beliefs seem to outsiders, but the Leftist lives completely within his belief system and cannot imagine seeing the world through any other. A Leftist doesn’t understand his enemies and sees no reason to try; we’re just mean, crazy, or stupid, that’s all. This iron certainty makes the Leftist shameless and fearless, not to mention fearsome to his enemies. Another remarkable fact about progressives is their ability to avoid complacency, no matter how total their dominance of a given field may be. They can destroy a man for the slightest ideological deviation, then shake their heads solemnly about “how far we still have to go” that they can still find people so obstinate as to “force” them to take such measures. Conservatives, on the other hand, are demoralized even more by success than we are by victory. Integralism disappeared with the death of Piux X, and modernism was then free to grow until it captured the Church. If conservatism held the allegiance of such men and women, our times would be different.
(Before anyone complains, notice that I have not made an exception for myself. I’m one of the timid, sex-obsessed dullards holding conservatism back. This is not one of those rants, of which we see far too many, against “those other conservatives who are holding the rest of us back.” And, of course, I’m speaking of aggregates. We have a few people as able as the liberals, just not enough.)
The Jewish problem is a microcosm of the liberal problem. It’s not just one small subset of very smart people against us. It’s most smart people against us.
Why is that? Some theories:
- Liberalism is the ideology that justifies technocracy, rule by smart people. It does this by delegitimizing any rival organizing principle as “discrimination”. It’s no wonder smart people support rule by smart people.
- Liberalism is established, and since man is a social animal, his proper function is to conform. A failure to conform is almost always the sign of some sort of defect. Since we are dissidents, most of us are defective in some way so that our indoctrination or social conditioning didn’t stick. Since liberalism is not difficult to understand, most likely nonconformism is found among the socially/emotionally defective. E.g., what must be wrong with me, that pictures of dead babies didn’t turn me into a socialist like it did my peers?
- Liberalism is a status marker of the upper class. Those who inherit it often make a great display of their contempt for their social inferiors in the countryside. Those who convert are desperate to prove that they fit in.
There’s probably some truth to all of these. A key test of any sociology of knowledge–one that most fail–is that it makes no exception for the theorist himself. The Marxist intellectual who claims that beliefs derive from economic interests implicitly makes an exception for himself and his theories. I went to school for a long time, during which I became much more conservative than when I’d left. True, I studied a weakly ideologized field, but I was certainly in an environment dominated by Leftists. What’s more, my parents and elementary-to-high-school teachers never said much of anything to me about politics, so I had little in the way of counter-programming. On the other hand, being a white Catholic from a small midwestern town meant I was clearly not part of the in-group Leftism serves to mark. I certainly could have converted, but I didn’t feel any strong alienation from my home community, so rationalizing my outsider-ness may well have been the path of least resistance. Perhaps if I were not so obstinate, which is if anything a character flaw, I would have conformed. I wonder if most academic Rightists were small town white kids like me.
What to do about our human capital gap?
- Solve it by conversions or self-improvement
- Rearrange society so that it doesn’t matter: Less power to professionals, more to hereditary nobles, or something like that.
Neither would be easy.
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Throne and Altar 
[…] By Bonald […]
RE: liberals’ low sex drive
Did you catch the This American Life (on NPR) episode where the staff all had their testosterone levels tested? The (uniformly liberal) men on the show’s staff all had preposterously low T levels.
However, the female staffers all had extremely high T levels, for women.
Transcript here.
I believe that there have been other studies where high testosterone correlates with right wing politics.
“I wonder if most academic Rightists were small town white kids like me.”
I’m going to go ahead and say that I find that unlikely. My theory is that big, ultraliberal multicultural cities and universities ironically tend to be breeding grounds for disgruntled reactionaries. This is insofar as they prevent skeptics of liberalism from becoming complacent through constant exposure, which also might affect radicalisation via disgust. Don’t quote me on that, since it’s just a theory, but I’ve seen it voiced elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, I’m from such a place, and certainly within the expected in-group for leftists.
For most church goers and other conservatives out in the suburbs and sticks, they can live most of their lives blissfully free of the most egregious leftist nonsense, if they want. They have to pay a certain amount of Danegeld (taxes), of course.
People in any way associated with the academy or media or artistic circles, however, are bombarded with garbage on a fairly constant basis.
The Man Who Was: That is basically why I theorize that countryside conservatives aren’t nearly as radical as the comparatively urban ex-leftists one commonly finds in the internet “reactosphere”.
In my area, the countryside is populated by right-liberal “conservakin”. Go to the heart of the city, find the most loony-leftist arts department possible, find that one lonely dude there who displays insufficient enthusiasm, give him a six-pack and poke him. You’d be surprised at what comes out.
The ability to explicitly reason about things biases you towards explicit reasoning about things.
In my case, being in a Leftist environment certainly radicalized me. Knowing better what liberalism is and how deep is its rejection of my kind, appealing to yesterday’s liberalism clearly wasn’t going to work. I imagine I’m now pretty far to the Right of anyone who stayed in my hometown.
Testosterone, it would seem, is maladaptive in the modern world. Maybe I should have mine reduced. But wait, would that turn me into a liberal?
It is an interesting chicken-and-egg kind of question: do sociopaths develop wrongthink about liberalism because they are sociopaths, or does liberalism drive sane people to sociopathy? A bit of both, I imagine.
The tendency of smart people to conform to accepted ideas can be redirected to benefit our ideas in only one way, and that is to make our ideas acceptable (by changing what is acceptable, not by changing our ideas). Which also is a large part of what we want anyway.
If the gay putsch has taught us anything, it’s that the way to make an idea, that no one at present could imagine becoming acceptable, acceptable, it’s to forcefully push it into the overton window.
ArkansasReactionary:
Was it forcibly pushed, though? I mean, certainly there were various social forces involved, some of which could be characterized, as micro-currents, either as ‘pull’ or ‘push’.
But I think widespread acceptance of sodomy has been inevitable since at least the 1920’s and the Lambeth Conference where Anglicans accepted of birth control, if not since well before then. Sure the particulars of how various laws and such come about contingently is dependent on various battles, etc; but once birth control is accepted by a broad base of society, sodomy is sure to follow.
Related:
https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/the-suppression-feedback-loop/
I agree with Bonald and Senghendrake. Living in a leftist milieu often radicalizes a natural conservative. There are several reasons for this. One is simple anger at being an outsider and hearing one’s views denounced, often stupidly. Another is nothing-to-loose letting go. Once you are seriously over the line of crime-stop, you might as well go all the way. Another is the really breathtaking fatuousness of leftist complacency. This is akin to the young Christian who rejects the faith because he sees (or thinks he sees) the church is full of hypocrites. Leftist platitudes eventually grate on ones nerves.
When he isn’t radicalized, living in a leftist milieu turns him. He naturally wants to fit in–that’s one reason he’s conservative–so he’ll slowly evolve into a left-liberal.
There seem to be very few cases where a simple, low-key, natural conservative living in left-lib-land stays a simple, low-key, natural conservative.
[…] of life inside the mind trap and its padded walls. Others are endogenously sociopathic (HT: Bonald) and just happen to live outside of the padded walls for that reason. I don’t venture to […]
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Superior people dominate professions *because* they are superior. They are liberal *because* superior people are better able to read and emulate the signs of power. Therefore: Liberals are not superior; superior people are liberal.
Sure the particulars of how various laws and such come about contingently is dependent on various battles, etc; but once birth control is accepted by a broad base of society, sodomy is sure to follow.
The Catholic position on birth control may be correct, but there is actually a natural experiment here: Islam. Islam has long accepted birth control, and, after 13 centuries, shows no sign of accepting sodomy.
There are also lots of pagan societies who accepted various perversions for a long time without fully accepting homosexuality in the modern way.
@Zippy
What I mean is, fifty years ago, no one in their right mind would have thought that a gay “marriage” was possible. Through steady and unrelenting activism, they managed to make that view not only acceptable but required.
The Man Who Was Thursday:
That’s a good point, but I wasn’t thinking at quite that level of abstraction. Once contraception was accepted by respectable Western Christian society, acceptance of sodomy by respectable Western Christian society was inevitable.
And there is this.
ArkansasReactionary:
I’m just fifty myself so I can’t speak from a first person perspective on social attitudes the day I was born. Like everyone else I’d have to glean perspective on that from cultural artifacts, stories, etc.
But I can speak to them first person over a thirty five year time frame or so (1980-ish), and from that perspective things haven’t really changed much culturally when it comes to acceptance of sodomy. The “marriage” business is just left liberalism doing what it always does: becoming impatient with the foot-dragging of right liberalism in terms of making the de facto reality de jure, and using positive law mechanisms to make everyone get with the program.
Enough palaver. When does the shooting start?
Liberalism is… The homosexual “nature.” A self-annihilating “nature.” The falsification of “survival and reproduction,” ie., the necessary precondition of “evolution.” What you inexplicably claim as “egalitarian superiority” is in ACTUALITY a FUNDAMENTAL anti-Supremacy… What is euphemistically referred to as “equality” and has practically meant the subordination of the average IQ white heterosexual to the high IQ “white” faggot. In your despair and ill-conceived phrase is seemingly your own submission to the “superiority” of the queer nerd… An archetype self-annihilator and “living” falsification of “evolution.”
These seem to me the most important ideas in the essay (which is excellent).
Peasants are easy to control and monitor. Do X or I will kill you, rape your daughters, and throw your sons down a well. The field, it is either plowed and planted or it isn’t, and any idiot can tell, at a glance, which.
Managers and especially “knowledge workers,” are less easy to control and monitor. Controlling them via the methods described above (in the presence of imperfect monitoring) induces extreme risk-aversion, desperate efforts to blame-shift, and consequent lack of production.
Similarly for military technology. If the critical thing is the possession of apex warriors, then you get feudalism. If the critical thing is disciplined yet flexible and autonomous mass infantry, then you get liberalism. Cromwell and the New Model Army are a commonly cited marker in the evolution from the former to the latter.
It’s not hugely important for Kulaks to be on board with the official ideology under feudalism. Loving their daughters is enough. It is hugely important for Kulaks to be on board with the official ideology under modern conditions.
Those guys with 115 IQs and high conscientiousness are the key resource under modern conditions. Just like broad, well-watered valleys were the key resource under feudalism.
If you want Kulaks, you can’t just grab some, torture them a little, and put them to work. Verner Vinge (sort of) explores this theme in A Deepness in the Sky. He imagines, in the Emergent civilization, what it would take for you to have a workable kind of feudalism which recognizes and uses this kind of human capital. Basically, the Emergents use a virus to induce a kind of autistic, ocd state in which the techno-peasants are incapable of paying attention to anything but their assigned task (which task may be intellectually challenging).
This virus is what the powers that be want to have. LIberalism/modernity is the best thing they have come up with so far. The critical resource, those guys with IQ 115 and high conscientiousness, are made to want to do the “right” thing.
As an aside, I disagree with this:
Generalized, near-universal sociopathy is the background condition of modernity. You can’t fuck 10 different people without breaking your ability to pair-bond. You can’t move from one neighborhood to another 10 times without breaking your ability to community-bond. The freakishness of modernity can’t be overstated. Everyone is a sociopath.
DrBill
Your aside is 100% correct.
Glad to see Dr. Bill commenting regularly again.
Dr. Bill is correct in saying that post-industrial corporations have a great need for intelligent individuals. Modern, meritocratic sorting mechanisms ensure that most of these intelligent individuals are swiftly shunted into a highly-insulated, upwardly-mobile career tracks. For instance, my children were separated from the general school population in fifth grade, and although we live in a very blue-collar town, are unlikely to spend much time with the working- and under-class in future. College students seldom take employment on road crews or factory floors nowadays, so their understanding of how the other half lives must come largely from the lips of their sociology professor. All in all, people of above-average intelligence lead very sheltered lives nowadays, and this may explain some of their liberal romanticism.
[…] Bonald exposes The problem of egalitarian superiority. […]
“Liberals dominate every profession because they are by-and-large superior…”
What could this statement possibly mean when liberals, by definition, are psychologically rigid anti-Supremacists? In other words, a true liberal, no matter how “intelligent,” will not even conceive of “superiority” much less abide its imposition by self-negating “conservatives.”
So if one tells a liberal that said liberal is superior to thyself the such liberal MUST not only deny the assertion, but feign incomprehensibility at it OR CEASE TO BE a true liberal.
And in fact, “we” already witness this phenomenon in a roundabout way where liberals deny beings liberals when accused of being liberals (accused of “moral superiority). In an alternate universe, this might be recognized as cowardice. This cowardice would then being a degradation of any perceived notion of one’s superiority.
thordaddy@ “Superiority” describes the fact of higher quality or performance, as in “a Porsche is superior to a Trabant.” Liberals don’t deny superiority, although they often explain superior humans as the product of social privilege and advantages. “Supremacy,” and more especially “supremacist” are terms of political theory, and they indicate an opinion as to who should rule. Everyone (except anarchists) is a supremacist of one sort or another. Democrats are mob supremacists, some feminists are female supremacists, patriarchialists are male supremacists, etc. The concepts of superiority and supremacy come together in aristocracy, which literally means supremacy of the superior. The concepts are completely dissociated in a superior man who is also an anarchist.
“Superior” here means “most competent at the sort of jobs in the modern economy and civil service that bring power and status.” It means being intelligent (not necessarily wise), hard-working, prioritizing job over other parts of life, otherwise conscientious, and having weak impulses or strong impulse control (not given to outbursts of anger or lust). As I said in another comment, I would probably “superior” to my current self if I were to artificially lower my testosterone, although the qualities being suppressed in me might have been assets in another time or place.
Bonald @ That pretty much describes my junior colleagues. They seem to have gone from teacher’s pets to dean’s pets, without even a quick detour into the realm of enfant terrible. I’d bet against strong impulse control, though. Rage boils to the surface when all their grinding diligence fails to pay off. In the environment of institutionalized science, though, these guys are like some wildly successful mutation, altogether superior to a hopeless old triceratops like me.
Bonald…
You’ve dug even deeper into incoherency. You went from an unqualified statement basically asserting that liberals were “superior” to a qualified statement defining “superior” WAY DOWN to mean not much more than a “good” slave to the bureaucratic machinations of Liberal ideology to only still arrive at what amounts to a self-effacing submission to that which does not belong to the true liberal, ie., ANY notion of superiority. An engineer is not a superior engineer because he is liberal. An NFL player is not a superior NFL player because he is a liberal. An astronaut is not a superior astronaut because he is a liberal. A DMV worker is not a superior DMV worker because she is liberal. IN FACT, if all these individuals were true liberals FIRST then they would all be inferior to their workable ideals. THEY MUST BE.. They are true liberals first and foremost.
There is this crazy, habitual knee-jerk decision by the intellectual traditionalist to define Liberalism in the most exaggerated manner INSTEAD OF defining it in its basest sense. Er, define it in the manner that the most feel in “touch” with it… This would define liberalism as homo-sexuality… Radical sexual autonomy AND self-annihilation.
In short, in a fallen frame, Bonald has asserted the “superiority” of the self-annihilator. This is his sin of despair.
I’m super “aspie”, so that probably helped. I am almost entirely incapable of understanding social norms unless the rules is very specifically pointed out to me and defined clearly.
[…] DrBill writes […]
[…] It’s not hugely important for Kulaks to be on board with the official ideology under feudalism. Loving their daughters is enough. It is hugely important for Kulaks to be on board with the official ideology under modern conditions. […]
[…] https://bonald.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/the-problem-of-egalitarian-superiority/ […]
[…] https://bonald.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/the-problem-of-egalitarian-superiority/ It is. The secret to egalitarianism’s success is that the superior people have been converted to egalitarianism. They can’t straight-up admit this, of course, since the content of their creed is that there are no superior people, or at least that it has little connection to social power. On the other hand, they don’t […] […]