One of the things that I keep harping on is that we're doing a lot of this wrong, which is clear from the results around us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made some interesting points about IQ testing, which are of course viciously rejected by those invested in the concept and system surrounding them:
Some of those objections are, I have to agree, valid. But, the fact remains: Something is manifestly wrong with how we're selecting, educating, and positioning the "elite" classes that run everything in our society. I think that the majority of the problem stems from the almighty IQ test, which everyone uses as a basis for selection and education. The whole world, these days, is built around the multiple-choice question and the people who do well at that sort of thing. To me, that's rather like saying "Yeah, let's base everything on how well you can do Sudoku puzzles and those Find a Word things..."
It's nuts.
And, before anyone tries throwing out the supposed longitudinal studies that show how much better high IQ types do in life, I'd like to also point out that they do so well basically because they did well on those tests, which primed them to go right into higher education and prestigious jobs. It's a circular reference; if you were to throw those high IQ types into the Amazon rain forest naked, I'd like to know how much better they'd do than your typical low-IQ backwoods rural type.
I don't think that the IQ test regime is necessarily identifying "smart people". I think it's identifying people who're really good at multiple-choice question tests, and that's about it. "Smart" implies a certain faculty that a lot of these "educated, yet idiot" types utterly lack, which is the capacity to observe the effect of their actions and learn from them. Most of the folks we've put in charge of things go into situations with pre-conceived ideas, and then when those ideas don't work, they ignore the evidence and double-down on their ideas. The things in their heads are more real to them than the reality ensuing outside the confines of their narrow little minds...
If you're unable to observe and react to reality, how smart are you? I don't care how beautifully constructed your cloud castles are, if they fall down when you try to build them, we've all got a damn problem when you're the guy we put in charge of building castles.
And, I fear, this is the critical problem in our civilization, world-wide. The inability to recognize reality and adjust fire to adapt to it. Look at the Communists; when the fact became clear that big-C Communism wasn't working, did they say "Yeah, you know... This ain't working out the way we predicted it would... Maybe we ought to try something else?" Ask any resident of the Gulag how much they believed in it all, after their time there.
Similar mindsets and mental straight-jackets exist everywhere we've put the "intellectuals" in charge. I think we might want to start thinking about whether or not these people are really as smart as they tell us they are, and maybe put a few simpletons in charge, just to see how things work out with their simplistic ideas being put into effect. Like, ya know, maybe prosecuting property crimes and jailing the perpetrators for their offenses?
There's a quote often misattributed to Hermann Goering, but which actually came out of an interwar play by Hans Johst: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" Translated, that would run "When I hear "Culture", I take the safety off on my Browning!".
Frankly, the longer I live, the more I begin to believe I ought to be doing exactly that, whenever someone tells me that they're "intellectual", or that an intellectual told them to do something. The "intellectual brand" is becoming irretrievably polluted; I'd be embarrassed to be described as such, myself.
After my second tour in Iraq, I went for my Masters at an Ivy. In a class, I recounted a story from when I was a new 2LT, where a young private, who wasn’t known as the sharpest knife in the drawer, helped us solve a problem in the field none of the NCO’s or officers had figured out how to fix. I relayed that I had a “ah-ha” moment and learned sometimes great ideas come from unexpected sources and not to discount someone because they lacked rank or a pedigree. This baffled my elite classmates. That was also an “ah-ha” moment for me.
I went through a similar experience, which was when I first started wondering about the almighty ASVAB test being such a good predictor of performance in intelligence-based areas.
What I came to conclude was that while it worked well enough for some things, it wasn't either infallible or all-encompassing. I worked with some soldiers whose ASVAB scores were abysmal, yet whose actual situational intelligence and ability to solve problems on their feet was far greater than mine. If you've got to stop and think about every aspect of what you're doing, working through a problematic situation, are you really that much smarter than the guy who can instinctively work his way through that same situation without having to stop and think about everything? Which of the two of you is actually more "intelligent", regardless of that test score?
We put far too much weight into the entire "test score" system. Actual intelligence ought to be assessed on one basis, and one basis only: Results. Performative results. If you're so damn smart, and do so darn well on the tests, why do all of your efforts result in utter debacles?
At some point, we're gonna have to acknowledge the fact that not only is the Emperor naked, he's been wandering around waving his wing-wang in all of our faces. Examine the results of all these brilliant intellects that we've put in charge of things in our major cities like LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle... Has any of their brilliance resulted in even slightly better results than when we had "lesser" intellects running things? Would the average person even propose some of the idiocy these fools have enacted, like zero bail and defunding the police?
We are very poorly served by our so-called "intellectual elite", and it's far past the time where they should have been held accountable for results, not aspirational intentions.
I've been observing this issue for as long as I've been aware of it, and that's been most of my adult life. Even somewhat before that, as I looked about at the people running my education.
I first began to really wonder about the whole thing once I enlisted into the Army back at the beginning of the 1980s. There, I discovered that the majority of the people running the institution were like my high school teachers and administrators, men and women who I'd come to identify as "obliviots", a word I coined to describe their oblivious idiocy about the world around them.
The sad fact is, most of the people we've put in charge of things really have no idea at all about how the institutions they run actually work. They think they do, but most of their ideas are purest self-projection: They imagine that the world is created anew each day through their words, and that their words make reality.
In it, we have a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel now working for the War College. He evinces utter surprise that the reality of daily life as an officer actually rewards lying to the institution, and that the cognitive dissonance that this creates has an impact on officer morale and retention. Observe the reaction of his audience, mostly officers and Department of the Army civilians. Few of these men are actually aware of the way the Army actually works; they have this self-created delusion that writing memos and policy letters actually solve problems. They've never, ever gone out and looked at the environment that they unleash these things into, and try to understand why they often don't work, and even make the problems they're trying to address worse.
They don't understand how the institution they run works, and they don't know how to make it work. Why? Because they've been trained not to look; they're taught, from day one, that the words they speak create reality around them. They're creatures of the diktat, and they never bother to examine what cues the actual environment is giving the men and women inside their institution; those cues are often in diametric opposition to the things they say as leaders and managers. When things don't align with their words, they are baffled; why won't people do as they say?
Life inside any institution (even all of life itself...) can be analyzed as an endless succession of Skinner Boxes: You try a behavior, it gets rewarded or punished. If it's rewarded, you keep the behavior up; if punished, you end the behavior. It's all about the situational reward; if you're getting one, you're going to keep the behavior up, no matter what some directive from a random jackass in an office tells you.
Because of this, most of our officer class is ineffectual. They don't know what they're doing; they just know what they want, but have no idea how to make what they want a reality. They never look at the things the environment is rewarding versus punishing; if they did, they'd rapidly realize that to effect change, they have to actually address the environment, not write a memo or send an email.
This issue permeates our society, everywhere: The men and women in charge are the elite autist class that the current IQ testing and educational regime has been identifying and rewarding since the dawn of the 20th Century. None of them really connect with normal humans; they've no idea how normal humans think or behave... If they did, they'd realize that merely legislating something doesn't fix a problem.
What we have is an error state in our selection and training process for the managerial class. Few of them really have the first clue how to manage anything; they've been taught that the things in their heads are more important than the things out on the ground, and because of that, they think that reality is a construct. It isn't. You cannot impose your ideas on the universe; if you try that, the universe will delight in punching you back. Hard. See Portland, Oregon, for examples.
Just wondering: Who is more important or useful in today's America? Our elite graduates of our super-elite universities, or farmers, plumbers, and so on?
Especially the chattering 'journalists'? In a "crashed world" scenario, who do you want to save? Farmers, plumbers, carpenters, etc, or the BosWash elite?
A student of history would note a lot of correlation between today's self-declared "elite" and the similarly self-declared elites of the past. It is instructive to note the shared characteristics of those former "elites", and compare/contrast with today's.
In the Roman Republic, the Senatorial class destroyed the rural yeoman farmer class via incessant war, raking off the profit therefrom, and simultaneously buying up the rural lands that those dead yeoman could no longer cultivate. They replaced the yeoman small farmer with vast slave-operated latifundia, coincidentally manned with the slaves they took on those selfsame wars that destroyed the yeoman class so handily. Then, they found that making war without citizen-soldiers wasn't so easy, so they opened up recruitment to urban poor and former slaves, which solved that problem. Right up until it didn't, during the late Empire.
Note how our own elite has hollowed out the American industrial base in a similar short-sighted manner. Note how they have carefully discouraged the usual sorts of military recruits from joining the military, creating a recruitment crisis.
China established an elite based on something similar to our own IQ-tested path, only based on mastery of the Confucian classics. The mandarin class that that policy created used their power to do away with the treasure fleets of Zheng He, who might have shortstopped the issues of isolation and technical stagnation that left China suffering under foreign domination for over a century. All due to the "elite", who refused to adapt to change, even when it stared them in the face. They did not "manage" China for the benefit of the average Chinese person, but for the benefit of their class alone.
Which is precisely what our "elite" has been doing, since the turn of the 19th Century. I would submit to you that the rise of one Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency was the starting point for many of our issues today. He was a classic academic, president of Princeton. His policies resulted in so many destructive things, all in the name of "progress". Looking back, I see not progress, but actual regression to a standing aristocracy based on connections and heritage, not merit. I also see the imposition of an entirely delusional concept of "merit" deriving from educational credential, not actual performance. Under Wilson, they started using college diplomas as proxies for virtue, making men with diplomas officers in the military during WWI. The reality is that an education is not a marker of some sort of natural nobility, merely of a specific set of narrowly demonstrated intellectual capabilities.
You will note how many men without diplomas are actually successful, most notably in the tech industry. The examples are endless, and when you contemplate how many times you hear phrases like "Oh, forget everything you learned in school... We do it differently, here in the real world..." or "Yeah, I don't think I've used anything I learned in college during my career...", you'll begin to question the entire premise of how we've identified, selected, and then trained these so-called "elites". I'm afraid that what we've actually done is elevate a bunch of semi-autistic sociopaths to positions of high power, where their utter inability to identify their own mistakes and failures are literally killing the rest of us. The people we've put in charge of the world are narrow men, with no capacity for introspection, no real wisdom, and who are in possession of no form of self-awareness whatsoever. They're monsters of the id, intellects without wisdom or capacity for reflection, unable to recognize their own errors or work out effect from original causal factors.
Early on, a degree was harder to get and meant more. It was a quick screen for solid literacy and at least modest intellect- useful for finding the staff needed to stand up a new military. Today degrees are still useful for hard sciences/specific skills and those few who are genuine academics. Most of the elite schools however are clubs for the already elite to network and pick up a few skills incidentally. People don’t want their kids to go to Harvard because they will learn more but rather they will befriend and network with the very wealthy. That said, if Harvard didn’t exist, something else would take its place. After all, ambitious aristos in 17th century Europe didn’t go to balls because they liked to dance so much as they were exclusive venues to connect with other wealthy elites and create or affirm social connections that led to business deals. Harvard is like that, an absurd ball, and everyone wants to be invited
Precisely the problem... The institutions of "higher learning" are supposed to be producing these wunderkind technocrats, and what they're actually doing is creating networking opportunities for the careerist types that infest every organization we build.
Every time we do something, we need to have a statement of need and purpose, laying out what the thing is supposed to do. While setting metrics that we can actually objectively assess at the end of a set period. Thing ain't doing what it says on the can? Get rid of it, start over, try something else.
All too often, we fall for these nebulous ideas like Wilson's move towards technocracy. As a nation, we got sold a bill of goods that didn't actually have a real program or much of anything behind it but a bunch of good intentions. Actual effect, generations on? You have utterly incompetent government officials who're unaccountable to anyone anywhere in the system. I start to froth at the mouth when I remember that the entire crew of incompetent EPA officials that killed that river in Colorado were not only not disciplined, they were promoted and given performance bonuses for that period...
We went off the rails over a century ago, with the entire premise that "education credential=virtue", and that an IQ test meant something beyond academic curiosity. Actual performance? Pffft. That means nothing; if you do well on the tests, then you're golden.
I hate to use the coarse language of the lesser classes, but the problem with the self-anointed "elites" remains as it has always been: they think their sh*t doesn't stink. It's a laughable point of view, considering the major cities of America remain the homes of most of what is wrong in America. The people who preach environmentalism live stacked upon one another in concrete where their waste pollutes everything, as does their energy usage. The 95% of America they detest is where sound environmental policies are followed, where low-rise buildings are the norm, where people live on plots of land big enough to absorb the run-off attributable to their lives. The elites can't change a tire, drive a nail, hang sheetrock, plant food, harvest food, or make anything except their never-ending blather. Same as it's ever been. That component in America, and in the world, never changes. They fly private jets and use massive limousines to take them to their quarterly conferences where they can opine like gods about how they can make the lower classes use less carbon. The men who created the United States and who wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were smarter and better educated than any of the pusillanimous pontificators who spew their condescension from on high. They hate commoners and always have. Their contempt for Trump is about their distain for the working classes and the self-made successes who are the backbone of America. The elites despise people who make America great.
I really hope you're being sarcastic with your allusion to the "lesser classes".
If not, well... That's a huge part of the problem. There are no "lesser classes", in reality. Try to make do without the farmers, technicians, and craftsmen that actually make the world work, doing most of the manual labor and scut work the intellectuals so charmingly denigrate. The work that the vast majority of them don't know about, understand, or even recognize. The work that they can't do, themselves.
I'm reminded of a relative of mine, who was ohsoveryproud of his Master's Degree. Idiot couldn't do simple maintenance tasks around his house, and left his front door inoperable for months because he a.) couldn't figure out how to fix the doorknob, and b.) had pissed off every handyman he could find to the point where they flatly refused to work for him. His solution? Keep the door secure by piling furniture in front of it, and use the back door exclusively.
Took me about fifteen minutes with a Swiss Army Knife to fix that door; the issue was simply a couple of loose screws and some adjustments needing to be made.
I'm amused, vastly, by the elitist types that think there's some vast Elysian playground awaiting them in the uplands of the future, where the proles own nothing and they're in charge of everything. The likely end state for that elaborate pretension is likely to be what the Pilgrim types experienced when they came to the New World without any actual farmers or craftsmen among their number; all their lovely ideas caved in, and they nearly starved to death. The evidence for how the WEF will likely work out is there in that moldering grave they found that poor cannibalized servant girl in, there in Jonestown.
There are no "lesser classes". There are only those delusional sorts that think they matter more than the others.
Kirk, I have known Jim Moore for years and can assure you that he definitely was being sarcastic. I think his comment was consistent with my use of "lower classes" in my opening paragraph, which I noted was Brooks' view.
I should have put "lesser classes" in quotes to make clear I was being sarcastic, since I was criticizing those who appoint themselves as the elite. I find the actions of today's elite nothing short of wanting to return to pre Magna Carta times, where the elite own everything and the average citizen owns nothing ("you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" - WEF).
I figured that was the case, but... There are people who wouldn't have picked up on the probable sarcasm, so I felt the need to say something.
The real problem with any of the various social hierarchies that we implement, whether you're talking feudalism or Wilson's technocracy is that the structures inevitably attract the precise wrong sort of people to them, and then they turn the entire structure to their own benighted self-interest.
I'm coming around to a sort of Zen-like concept of these things, wherein the best sort of hierarchy is one that doesn't actually exist; an "ad-hocracy" that comes into being for a set issue, and once issue is dealt with, self-dissolves before the hierarchy parasites show up to take advantage of it.
If you examine the history of every human institution, what you'll find is that everything gets formed with "best intentions" originally, and then gets co-opted by the sort of people we term "careerists" today, who corrupt the institution. It's an inevitability, and the only way to deal with it is by not building these permanent social reef-structures in the first damn place.
Good God, my life experience has turned me into a damn anarchist... Never would have expected that.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Always true. Those who see themselves as saviors of society are usually tyrants looking to make everyone else toe their line.
“There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”
Sadly, an enlightened state, if there ever could be such a thing? It would collapse shortly after its foundation under the weight of well-meaning numpties saying "There ought to be a law..."
I put "enlightened states" into the same category as spherical cows; they're more fodder for gedankenspiel than they are potential realities.
People keep making the mistake of believing that civilization resides in the institutions we create. The actual sad truth is that civilization exists only in the minds of men; it isn't forced on us, it arises from within. And, if you have to force it on people, it isn't really real. As soon as you remove the force, it will collapse. Organically-derived civilizations exist no matter what happens in the external world. We posit a "Lord of the Flies" situation, when the externalities go away; in a real civilization, things like this ensue:
Who actually exemplifies "civilized behavior"? Those Tongan boys, or William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" English schoolboys? Not that we've ever actually run the experiment to see how English schoolboys might actually behave under such circumstances, but... My point remains.
I've always been a Thoreau guy. Which reminds me of Thoreau and his friendship with Emerson, who was loved by the ruling class. When Thoreau was in jail for civil disobedience, Emerson went to see him in jail and said "Thoreau, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied "Emerson, the question is what are you doing out there?"
The flaw in this low-grade credentialed poseur's thesis is this: For there to be such a thing as a "meritocracy"? Said thing must, at least occasionally, demonstrate actual "merit".
From where I'm sitting, out in the cheap seats? They haven't demonstrated any such thing in the span of my lifetime from the early 1960s onwards. As a matter of fact, what the <i>soi disant</i> "elite" has demonstrated is actual incompetency, sloth, and an utter failure to recognize and correct error on their own part.
Brooks apparently thinks his fecal product smells of roses, along with the rest of the people who he identifies with. Reality? LOL... Not so much. Witness what happened to the EPA officials that killed a thousand miles of river in Colorado, not so long ago. Were they punished? Were they fired? Did they suffer the least corrective action, for their rank incompetence? No. No, they did not... As a matter of fact, they were promoted and given bonuses.
Mr. Brooks thinks we're not watching, and aren't smart enough to recognize the charade. He'll find out differently, one day. I wouldn't be awfully surprised to witness Nemesis come winging her way in, within my lifetime. The "intellectual elite" ought to remember that they're a tiny fraction of the population, and once they convince the mass of the rest of us that they're actively inimical to our interests, all sorts of things become not only thinkable, but highly probable. Think Ceaucescu at Timisoara, or Pol Pot in Cambodia probable.
There are rather fewer "intellectuals" than there are actual people, so do your own math.
I don't mind having an elite but I want it to be both admirable and competent. Ours, sadly, is neither of those things. From my perspective, the rest of the world laughs at our elite and its "values" and almost feels sorry for the average citizen stuck with such a clueless ruling class.
The problem with examining your assumptions is that it means actually, you know, examining those assumptions.
And that is something Brooks and his elite stablemates can ever do. For one thing, they lack the requisite self awareness (note that self regard is not the same thing). For another, for the most part they lack the actual intellect to do so. Their entire adult lives are lived and built around a series of assumptions which are interlocking and thus can not be questioned without disastrous consequences.
I think that the problem is off-center from where you're placing it, to be honest.
The problem isn't that these people are lacking in intellect or the capacity for introspection, it's that we've fundamentally mis-identified what constitutes "intelligence" in the first damn place.
If you can't identify cause and effect with regards to your ideas and actions, and are unable to recognize and admit failures when they don't work when implemented, that's not an intellectual issue. It's more a psychological one, akin to autism or sociopathy.
Benet recognized that his ideas about IQ were fragmentary, and did not think that they should be used for anything other than academic study. He didn't even want them revealed to the subjects, for fear of the result. What we see before us in the world today is the end-state for the misuse of this narrow test, which I fear merely identifies people with a very narrow range of skills that can be tested in a classroom on paper. You can't test for wisdom; you can't test for judgment, either... About all you can do is observe and assess performance in the real world, in order to identify the truly intelligent, as opposed to those who "do well on the tests". Absent the actual feedback loop of performance and result, our system based on these things is spinning out of control, like any mechanism without a feedback loop will.
Regardless of how you define it, it is obvious that the people in charge are not very smart. One problem is that there are never any consequences (for them) of getting it wrong. Every one of them fails upwards, barring some extraordinary catastrophe, and even then what happens to them is not punishment but CYA for everyone else.
Oh, they're very smart. Just listen to them; they'll tell you so.
Fundamental problem is that we've badly mis-identified and misconstrued the true nature of this concept "intelligence". Benet started it with his ideas, that got glommed onto by everyone because they loved the idea that they did well on those admittedly half-ass classroom tests. The reality, I fear, is that those tests actually identify and then reinforce a sort of brittle quality about the human mind, that we can look at and think "intelligent". The tests don't address the qualities we might call "wisdom" or "judgment", merely the mechanical ability to do things. The issue of whether or not those things *should* be done? Left entirely unaddressed.
Let us use one Thomas Midgley Jr. as our exemplar; he was the engineer who developed tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive. When the first gallon of leaded gasoline was sold, he was convalescing in Florida. From the effects of lead poisoning.
He later went on to develop some of the first chlorofluorocarbons, and is held to be one of the most damaging human beings who ever existed, anywhere.
That he "did well on the tests"? Incontrovertible. The real question is, was his wisdom any good? His judgment? The man warped the world around his "intelligence"; we're still feeling the effect today from all those human brains exposed to high lead levels, thanks to him. The CFCs he pioneered are still decaying in the upper atmosphere and in our soil, with effects we still don't really understand.
So... Was Midgley really "intelligent"? Or, was he exhibiting something else, something that might be defined as "too smart for his own good", and which might further be described as "intelligence uncoupled with wisdom and due regard for potential consequence"?
I mean, seriously... If the man had never experienced the effects of lead poisoning, himself, I might say "Yeah, he didn't know..." He did, however, know; he knew personally, from experience. He still enabled putting that stuff into the atmosphere, to what effect we still don't fully understand, damaging millions of lives around the world.
Was he intelligent, in the fullest definition of that term? I'd say "Hell, no..."
We'll be saying similar things about all the sundry assholes responsible for pumping millions of tons of estrogen-mimics into the environment, and I'll lay you long odds that any future descendants of ours will be saying the same things about us that we say about the Romans and their use of lead in everything...
Intelligence is a brittle tool; it must be applied properly, in a balanced fashion with full view taken of potential consequence. Most of the people we've elevated above us are consequence-blind, and utterly unable to work out second- and third-order effects from putting their brilliant ideas into motion.
I believe that the people we have been speaking of are the "wonks." Take Hillary Clinton as an example - she could regurgitate endless studies and statistics on a topic, and then develop a program that... fails. It does worse than fail, it has the opposite effect intended. Many less "intelligent" people would say "that won't work because..." and be correct. The wonk will respond "No, it will work because (white paper/study/academic theory)."
Put simply, it's the old joke about the economist who exclaims "Well, of course it works in practice! The important point is, will it work in theory?" Or perhaps the other joke about the economist on a desert island with a pallet of canned food, who brightly announces "Assuming a can opener..."
These are people who can look at a problem and produce the "spherical chickens in a perfect vacuum" solution. People with less schooling and more practical knowledge then are inflicted with the end results of this kind of thinking, as are the rest of humanity who might not even be aware that the argument has taken place.
The "wonks" are a symptom of the problem. The problem is that we've elevated and ennobled this sort of abstract thinker, putting them in charge of everything in the name of supposed "meritocracy", calling them "technocrats".
The reality is that while this sort of abstraction is valuable in its place, it does not necessarily translate into the real world, where there are more variables than the spherical cow assumes.
That we put people in charge who can't see this? Our mistake. The one that is killing our civilization.
Simple men would never make the mistake of assuming that every criminal is just misunderstood. They've actually lived with criminals, and they know that they're morally deficient, and require correctives and/or isolation. Only an "educated-yet-idiot" fool would think that defunding the police and decriminalizing petty crime was a good idea, and then have the temerity to put those ideas into effect. Not to mention, operate in complete denial of the facts after the entirely predictable results ensue...
You really have to wonder about these types, when they have the clear evidence for their ideas not working in front of them, in the form of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle... And, they still want to enact those concepts across the nation in cities large and small.
Of course, it's all of a type with these people. They're also the ones who say that Communism works, it just hasn't ever been implemented properly...
John - - Your review of the Brooks article highlighted the total arrogance and snobbery of the elites. While reading, I realized that the attitudes of those who think of themselves as our “betters” mimics identically those of the elites in the Hunger Games movies.
Taylor Caldwell, a strong anti-totalitarian writer of the last century, described how we should understand the true depth of the elites’ disdain of our mere existence:
“As a peaceful person, I am willing to live and let live. But the Liberal will not, if he can help it, let you live in peace, or, coming down to the matter, let you live at all.”
Yet another along the same lines:
https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/the-technocracy-of-failure
I think there's a clear trend developing here; we're not alone in thinking the things we are.
Another worthwhile post, along the same lines as this one:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-the-incompetocracy
One of the things that I keep harping on is that we're doing a lot of this wrong, which is clear from the results around us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made some interesting points about IQ testing, which are of course viciously rejected by those invested in the concept and system surrounding them:
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
Some of those objections are, I have to agree, valid. But, the fact remains: Something is manifestly wrong with how we're selecting, educating, and positioning the "elite" classes that run everything in our society. I think that the majority of the problem stems from the almighty IQ test, which everyone uses as a basis for selection and education. The whole world, these days, is built around the multiple-choice question and the people who do well at that sort of thing. To me, that's rather like saying "Yeah, let's base everything on how well you can do Sudoku puzzles and those Find a Word things..."
It's nuts.
And, before anyone tries throwing out the supposed longitudinal studies that show how much better high IQ types do in life, I'd like to also point out that they do so well basically because they did well on those tests, which primed them to go right into higher education and prestigious jobs. It's a circular reference; if you were to throw those high IQ types into the Amazon rain forest naked, I'd like to know how much better they'd do than your typical low-IQ backwoods rural type.
I don't think that the IQ test regime is necessarily identifying "smart people". I think it's identifying people who're really good at multiple-choice question tests, and that's about it. "Smart" implies a certain faculty that a lot of these "educated, yet idiot" types utterly lack, which is the capacity to observe the effect of their actions and learn from them. Most of the folks we've put in charge of things go into situations with pre-conceived ideas, and then when those ideas don't work, they ignore the evidence and double-down on their ideas. The things in their heads are more real to them than the reality ensuing outside the confines of their narrow little minds...
If you're unable to observe and react to reality, how smart are you? I don't care how beautifully constructed your cloud castles are, if they fall down when you try to build them, we've all got a damn problem when you're the guy we put in charge of building castles.
And, I fear, this is the critical problem in our civilization, world-wide. The inability to recognize reality and adjust fire to adapt to it. Look at the Communists; when the fact became clear that big-C Communism wasn't working, did they say "Yeah, you know... This ain't working out the way we predicted it would... Maybe we ought to try something else?" Ask any resident of the Gulag how much they believed in it all, after their time there.
Similar mindsets and mental straight-jackets exist everywhere we've put the "intellectuals" in charge. I think we might want to start thinking about whether or not these people are really as smart as they tell us they are, and maybe put a few simpletons in charge, just to see how things work out with their simplistic ideas being put into effect. Like, ya know, maybe prosecuting property crimes and jailing the perpetrators for their offenses?
There's a quote often misattributed to Hermann Goering, but which actually came out of an interwar play by Hans Johst: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" Translated, that would run "When I hear "Culture", I take the safety off on my Browning!".
Frankly, the longer I live, the more I begin to believe I ought to be doing exactly that, whenever someone tells me that they're "intellectual", or that an intellectual told them to do something. The "intellectual brand" is becoming irretrievably polluted; I'd be embarrassed to be described as such, myself.
After my second tour in Iraq, I went for my Masters at an Ivy. In a class, I recounted a story from when I was a new 2LT, where a young private, who wasn’t known as the sharpest knife in the drawer, helped us solve a problem in the field none of the NCO’s or officers had figured out how to fix. I relayed that I had a “ah-ha” moment and learned sometimes great ideas come from unexpected sources and not to discount someone because they lacked rank or a pedigree. This baffled my elite classmates. That was also an “ah-ha” moment for me.
I went through a similar experience, which was when I first started wondering about the almighty ASVAB test being such a good predictor of performance in intelligence-based areas.
What I came to conclude was that while it worked well enough for some things, it wasn't either infallible or all-encompassing. I worked with some soldiers whose ASVAB scores were abysmal, yet whose actual situational intelligence and ability to solve problems on their feet was far greater than mine. If you've got to stop and think about every aspect of what you're doing, working through a problematic situation, are you really that much smarter than the guy who can instinctively work his way through that same situation without having to stop and think about everything? Which of the two of you is actually more "intelligent", regardless of that test score?
We put far too much weight into the entire "test score" system. Actual intelligence ought to be assessed on one basis, and one basis only: Results. Performative results. If you're so damn smart, and do so darn well on the tests, why do all of your efforts result in utter debacles?
At some point, we're gonna have to acknowledge the fact that not only is the Emperor naked, he's been wandering around waving his wing-wang in all of our faces. Examine the results of all these brilliant intellects that we've put in charge of things in our major cities like LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle... Has any of their brilliance resulted in even slightly better results than when we had "lesser" intellects running things? Would the average person even propose some of the idiocy these fools have enacted, like zero bail and defunding the police?
We are very poorly served by our so-called "intellectual elite", and it's far past the time where they should have been held accountable for results, not aspirational intentions.
I've been observing this issue for as long as I've been aware of it, and that's been most of my adult life. Even somewhat before that, as I looked about at the people running my education.
I first began to really wonder about the whole thing once I enlisted into the Army back at the beginning of the 1980s. There, I discovered that the majority of the people running the institution were like my high school teachers and administrators, men and women who I'd come to identify as "obliviots", a word I coined to describe their oblivious idiocy about the world around them.
The sad fact is, most of the people we've put in charge of things really have no idea at all about how the institutions they run actually work. They think they do, but most of their ideas are purest self-projection: They imagine that the world is created anew each day through their words, and that their words make reality.
For an example of this, please watch this video: https://youtu.be/BUhNIOGhPus
In it, we have a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel now working for the War College. He evinces utter surprise that the reality of daily life as an officer actually rewards lying to the institution, and that the cognitive dissonance that this creates has an impact on officer morale and retention. Observe the reaction of his audience, mostly officers and Department of the Army civilians. Few of these men are actually aware of the way the Army actually works; they have this self-created delusion that writing memos and policy letters actually solve problems. They've never, ever gone out and looked at the environment that they unleash these things into, and try to understand why they often don't work, and even make the problems they're trying to address worse.
They don't understand how the institution they run works, and they don't know how to make it work. Why? Because they've been trained not to look; they're taught, from day one, that the words they speak create reality around them. They're creatures of the diktat, and they never bother to examine what cues the actual environment is giving the men and women inside their institution; those cues are often in diametric opposition to the things they say as leaders and managers. When things don't align with their words, they are baffled; why won't people do as they say?
Life inside any institution (even all of life itself...) can be analyzed as an endless succession of Skinner Boxes: You try a behavior, it gets rewarded or punished. If it's rewarded, you keep the behavior up; if punished, you end the behavior. It's all about the situational reward; if you're getting one, you're going to keep the behavior up, no matter what some directive from a random jackass in an office tells you.
Because of this, most of our officer class is ineffectual. They don't know what they're doing; they just know what they want, but have no idea how to make what they want a reality. They never look at the things the environment is rewarding versus punishing; if they did, they'd rapidly realize that to effect change, they have to actually address the environment, not write a memo or send an email.
This issue permeates our society, everywhere: The men and women in charge are the elite autist class that the current IQ testing and educational regime has been identifying and rewarding since the dawn of the 20th Century. None of them really connect with normal humans; they've no idea how normal humans think or behave... If they did, they'd realize that merely legislating something doesn't fix a problem.
What we have is an error state in our selection and training process for the managerial class. Few of them really have the first clue how to manage anything; they've been taught that the things in their heads are more important than the things out on the ground, and because of that, they think that reality is a construct. It isn't. You cannot impose your ideas on the universe; if you try that, the universe will delight in punching you back. Hard. See Portland, Oregon, for examples.
you aren’t wrong.
Just wondering: Who is more important or useful in today's America? Our elite graduates of our super-elite universities, or farmers, plumbers, and so on?
Especially the chattering 'journalists'? In a "crashed world" scenario, who do you want to save? Farmers, plumbers, carpenters, etc, or the BosWash elite?
A student of history would note a lot of correlation between today's self-declared "elite" and the similarly self-declared elites of the past. It is instructive to note the shared characteristics of those former "elites", and compare/contrast with today's.
In the Roman Republic, the Senatorial class destroyed the rural yeoman farmer class via incessant war, raking off the profit therefrom, and simultaneously buying up the rural lands that those dead yeoman could no longer cultivate. They replaced the yeoman small farmer with vast slave-operated latifundia, coincidentally manned with the slaves they took on those selfsame wars that destroyed the yeoman class so handily. Then, they found that making war without citizen-soldiers wasn't so easy, so they opened up recruitment to urban poor and former slaves, which solved that problem. Right up until it didn't, during the late Empire.
Note how our own elite has hollowed out the American industrial base in a similar short-sighted manner. Note how they have carefully discouraged the usual sorts of military recruits from joining the military, creating a recruitment crisis.
China established an elite based on something similar to our own IQ-tested path, only based on mastery of the Confucian classics. The mandarin class that that policy created used their power to do away with the treasure fleets of Zheng He, who might have shortstopped the issues of isolation and technical stagnation that left China suffering under foreign domination for over a century. All due to the "elite", who refused to adapt to change, even when it stared them in the face. They did not "manage" China for the benefit of the average Chinese person, but for the benefit of their class alone.
Which is precisely what our "elite" has been doing, since the turn of the 19th Century. I would submit to you that the rise of one Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency was the starting point for many of our issues today. He was a classic academic, president of Princeton. His policies resulted in so many destructive things, all in the name of "progress". Looking back, I see not progress, but actual regression to a standing aristocracy based on connections and heritage, not merit. I also see the imposition of an entirely delusional concept of "merit" deriving from educational credential, not actual performance. Under Wilson, they started using college diplomas as proxies for virtue, making men with diplomas officers in the military during WWI. The reality is that an education is not a marker of some sort of natural nobility, merely of a specific set of narrowly demonstrated intellectual capabilities.
You will note how many men without diplomas are actually successful, most notably in the tech industry. The examples are endless, and when you contemplate how many times you hear phrases like "Oh, forget everything you learned in school... We do it differently, here in the real world..." or "Yeah, I don't think I've used anything I learned in college during my career...", you'll begin to question the entire premise of how we've identified, selected, and then trained these so-called "elites". I'm afraid that what we've actually done is elevate a bunch of semi-autistic sociopaths to positions of high power, where their utter inability to identify their own mistakes and failures are literally killing the rest of us. The people we've put in charge of the world are narrow men, with no capacity for introspection, no real wisdom, and who are in possession of no form of self-awareness whatsoever. They're monsters of the id, intellects without wisdom or capacity for reflection, unable to recognize their own errors or work out effect from original causal factors.
Early on, a degree was harder to get and meant more. It was a quick screen for solid literacy and at least modest intellect- useful for finding the staff needed to stand up a new military. Today degrees are still useful for hard sciences/specific skills and those few who are genuine academics. Most of the elite schools however are clubs for the already elite to network and pick up a few skills incidentally. People don’t want their kids to go to Harvard because they will learn more but rather they will befriend and network with the very wealthy. That said, if Harvard didn’t exist, something else would take its place. After all, ambitious aristos in 17th century Europe didn’t go to balls because they liked to dance so much as they were exclusive venues to connect with other wealthy elites and create or affirm social connections that led to business deals. Harvard is like that, an absurd ball, and everyone wants to be invited
Precisely the problem... The institutions of "higher learning" are supposed to be producing these wunderkind technocrats, and what they're actually doing is creating networking opportunities for the careerist types that infest every organization we build.
Every time we do something, we need to have a statement of need and purpose, laying out what the thing is supposed to do. While setting metrics that we can actually objectively assess at the end of a set period. Thing ain't doing what it says on the can? Get rid of it, start over, try something else.
All too often, we fall for these nebulous ideas like Wilson's move towards technocracy. As a nation, we got sold a bill of goods that didn't actually have a real program or much of anything behind it but a bunch of good intentions. Actual effect, generations on? You have utterly incompetent government officials who're unaccountable to anyone anywhere in the system. I start to froth at the mouth when I remember that the entire crew of incompetent EPA officials that killed that river in Colorado were not only not disciplined, they were promoted and given performance bonuses for that period...
We went off the rails over a century ago, with the entire premise that "education credential=virtue", and that an IQ test meant something beyond academic curiosity. Actual performance? Pffft. That means nothing; if you do well on the tests, then you're golden.
I hate to use the coarse language of the lesser classes, but the problem with the self-anointed "elites" remains as it has always been: they think their sh*t doesn't stink. It's a laughable point of view, considering the major cities of America remain the homes of most of what is wrong in America. The people who preach environmentalism live stacked upon one another in concrete where their waste pollutes everything, as does their energy usage. The 95% of America they detest is where sound environmental policies are followed, where low-rise buildings are the norm, where people live on plots of land big enough to absorb the run-off attributable to their lives. The elites can't change a tire, drive a nail, hang sheetrock, plant food, harvest food, or make anything except their never-ending blather. Same as it's ever been. That component in America, and in the world, never changes. They fly private jets and use massive limousines to take them to their quarterly conferences where they can opine like gods about how they can make the lower classes use less carbon. The men who created the United States and who wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were smarter and better educated than any of the pusillanimous pontificators who spew their condescension from on high. They hate commoners and always have. Their contempt for Trump is about their distain for the working classes and the self-made successes who are the backbone of America. The elites despise people who make America great.
I really hope you're being sarcastic with your allusion to the "lesser classes".
If not, well... That's a huge part of the problem. There are no "lesser classes", in reality. Try to make do without the farmers, technicians, and craftsmen that actually make the world work, doing most of the manual labor and scut work the intellectuals so charmingly denigrate. The work that the vast majority of them don't know about, understand, or even recognize. The work that they can't do, themselves.
I'm reminded of a relative of mine, who was ohsoveryproud of his Master's Degree. Idiot couldn't do simple maintenance tasks around his house, and left his front door inoperable for months because he a.) couldn't figure out how to fix the doorknob, and b.) had pissed off every handyman he could find to the point where they flatly refused to work for him. His solution? Keep the door secure by piling furniture in front of it, and use the back door exclusively.
Took me about fifteen minutes with a Swiss Army Knife to fix that door; the issue was simply a couple of loose screws and some adjustments needing to be made.
I'm amused, vastly, by the elitist types that think there's some vast Elysian playground awaiting them in the uplands of the future, where the proles own nothing and they're in charge of everything. The likely end state for that elaborate pretension is likely to be what the Pilgrim types experienced when they came to the New World without any actual farmers or craftsmen among their number; all their lovely ideas caved in, and they nearly starved to death. The evidence for how the WEF will likely work out is there in that moldering grave they found that poor cannibalized servant girl in, there in Jonestown.
There are no "lesser classes". There are only those delusional sorts that think they matter more than the others.
Kirk, I have known Jim Moore for years and can assure you that he definitely was being sarcastic. I think his comment was consistent with my use of "lower classes" in my opening paragraph, which I noted was Brooks' view.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
I should have put "lesser classes" in quotes to make clear I was being sarcastic, since I was criticizing those who appoint themselves as the elite. I find the actions of today's elite nothing short of wanting to return to pre Magna Carta times, where the elite own everything and the average citizen owns nothing ("you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" - WEF).
I figured that was the case, but... There are people who wouldn't have picked up on the probable sarcasm, so I felt the need to say something.
The real problem with any of the various social hierarchies that we implement, whether you're talking feudalism or Wilson's technocracy is that the structures inevitably attract the precise wrong sort of people to them, and then they turn the entire structure to their own benighted self-interest.
I'm coming around to a sort of Zen-like concept of these things, wherein the best sort of hierarchy is one that doesn't actually exist; an "ad-hocracy" that comes into being for a set issue, and once issue is dealt with, self-dissolves before the hierarchy parasites show up to take advantage of it.
If you examine the history of every human institution, what you'll find is that everything gets formed with "best intentions" originally, and then gets co-opted by the sort of people we term "careerists" today, who corrupt the institution. It's an inevitability, and the only way to deal with it is by not building these permanent social reef-structures in the first damn place.
Good God, my life experience has turned me into a damn anarchist... Never would have expected that.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Always true. Those who see themselves as saviors of society are usually tyrants looking to make everyone else toe their line.
“There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Sadly, an enlightened state, if there ever could be such a thing? It would collapse shortly after its foundation under the weight of well-meaning numpties saying "There ought to be a law..."
I put "enlightened states" into the same category as spherical cows; they're more fodder for gedankenspiel than they are potential realities.
People keep making the mistake of believing that civilization resides in the institutions we create. The actual sad truth is that civilization exists only in the minds of men; it isn't forced on us, it arises from within. And, if you have to force it on people, it isn't really real. As soon as you remove the force, it will collapse. Organically-derived civilizations exist no matter what happens in the external world. We posit a "Lord of the Flies" situation, when the externalities go away; in a real civilization, things like this ensue:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-16/tongans-say-shipwreck-story-not-lord-of-the-flies-tale/12249028
Who actually exemplifies "civilized behavior"? Those Tongan boys, or William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" English schoolboys? Not that we've ever actually run the experiment to see how English schoolboys might actually behave under such circumstances, but... My point remains.
I just saw this after I tried to rescue your reputation! (sarcasm)
I've always been a Thoreau guy. Which reminds me of Thoreau and his friendship with Emerson, who was loved by the ruling class. When Thoreau was in jail for civil disobedience, Emerson went to see him in jail and said "Thoreau, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied "Emerson, the question is what are you doing out there?"
Sorry about the typo on disdain. Saw as soon as I posted.
The flaw in this low-grade credentialed poseur's thesis is this: For there to be such a thing as a "meritocracy"? Said thing must, at least occasionally, demonstrate actual "merit".
From where I'm sitting, out in the cheap seats? They haven't demonstrated any such thing in the span of my lifetime from the early 1960s onwards. As a matter of fact, what the <i>soi disant</i> "elite" has demonstrated is actual incompetency, sloth, and an utter failure to recognize and correct error on their own part.
Brooks apparently thinks his fecal product smells of roses, along with the rest of the people who he identifies with. Reality? LOL... Not so much. Witness what happened to the EPA officials that killed a thousand miles of river in Colorado, not so long ago. Were they punished? Were they fired? Did they suffer the least corrective action, for their rank incompetence? No. No, they did not... As a matter of fact, they were promoted and given bonuses.
Mr. Brooks thinks we're not watching, and aren't smart enough to recognize the charade. He'll find out differently, one day. I wouldn't be awfully surprised to witness Nemesis come winging her way in, within my lifetime. The "intellectual elite" ought to remember that they're a tiny fraction of the population, and once they convince the mass of the rest of us that they're actively inimical to our interests, all sorts of things become not only thinkable, but highly probable. Think Ceaucescu at Timisoara, or Pol Pot in Cambodia probable.
There are rather fewer "intellectuals" than there are actual people, so do your own math.
Think the 1780s Bourbon aristocracy. Ever bit as meritocratic as our current elites. And ever bit as useful and aware.
I don't mind having an elite but I want it to be both admirable and competent. Ours, sadly, is neither of those things. From my perspective, the rest of the world laughs at our elite and its "values" and almost feels sorry for the average citizen stuck with such a clueless ruling class.
The problem with examining your assumptions is that it means actually, you know, examining those assumptions.
And that is something Brooks and his elite stablemates can ever do. For one thing, they lack the requisite self awareness (note that self regard is not the same thing). For another, for the most part they lack the actual intellect to do so. Their entire adult lives are lived and built around a series of assumptions which are interlocking and thus can not be questioned without disastrous consequences.
I think that the problem is off-center from where you're placing it, to be honest.
The problem isn't that these people are lacking in intellect or the capacity for introspection, it's that we've fundamentally mis-identified what constitutes "intelligence" in the first damn place.
If you can't identify cause and effect with regards to your ideas and actions, and are unable to recognize and admit failures when they don't work when implemented, that's not an intellectual issue. It's more a psychological one, akin to autism or sociopathy.
Benet recognized that his ideas about IQ were fragmentary, and did not think that they should be used for anything other than academic study. He didn't even want them revealed to the subjects, for fear of the result. What we see before us in the world today is the end-state for the misuse of this narrow test, which I fear merely identifies people with a very narrow range of skills that can be tested in a classroom on paper. You can't test for wisdom; you can't test for judgment, either... About all you can do is observe and assess performance in the real world, in order to identify the truly intelligent, as opposed to those who "do well on the tests". Absent the actual feedback loop of performance and result, our system based on these things is spinning out of control, like any mechanism without a feedback loop will.
Regardless of how you define it, it is obvious that the people in charge are not very smart. One problem is that there are never any consequences (for them) of getting it wrong. Every one of them fails upwards, barring some extraordinary catastrophe, and even then what happens to them is not punishment but CYA for everyone else.
Oh, they're very smart. Just listen to them; they'll tell you so.
Fundamental problem is that we've badly mis-identified and misconstrued the true nature of this concept "intelligence". Benet started it with his ideas, that got glommed onto by everyone because they loved the idea that they did well on those admittedly half-ass classroom tests. The reality, I fear, is that those tests actually identify and then reinforce a sort of brittle quality about the human mind, that we can look at and think "intelligent". The tests don't address the qualities we might call "wisdom" or "judgment", merely the mechanical ability to do things. The issue of whether or not those things *should* be done? Left entirely unaddressed.
Let us use one Thomas Midgley Jr. as our exemplar; he was the engineer who developed tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive. When the first gallon of leaded gasoline was sold, he was convalescing in Florida. From the effects of lead poisoning.
He later went on to develop some of the first chlorofluorocarbons, and is held to be one of the most damaging human beings who ever existed, anywhere.
That he "did well on the tests"? Incontrovertible. The real question is, was his wisdom any good? His judgment? The man warped the world around his "intelligence"; we're still feeling the effect today from all those human brains exposed to high lead levels, thanks to him. The CFCs he pioneered are still decaying in the upper atmosphere and in our soil, with effects we still don't really understand.
So... Was Midgley really "intelligent"? Or, was he exhibiting something else, something that might be defined as "too smart for his own good", and which might further be described as "intelligence uncoupled with wisdom and due regard for potential consequence"?
I mean, seriously... If the man had never experienced the effects of lead poisoning, himself, I might say "Yeah, he didn't know..." He did, however, know; he knew personally, from experience. He still enabled putting that stuff into the atmosphere, to what effect we still don't fully understand, damaging millions of lives around the world.
Was he intelligent, in the fullest definition of that term? I'd say "Hell, no..."
We'll be saying similar things about all the sundry assholes responsible for pumping millions of tons of estrogen-mimics into the environment, and I'll lay you long odds that any future descendants of ours will be saying the same things about us that we say about the Romans and their use of lead in everything...
Intelligence is a brittle tool; it must be applied properly, in a balanced fashion with full view taken of potential consequence. Most of the people we've elevated above us are consequence-blind, and utterly unable to work out second- and third-order effects from putting their brilliant ideas into motion.
I believe that the people we have been speaking of are the "wonks." Take Hillary Clinton as an example - she could regurgitate endless studies and statistics on a topic, and then develop a program that... fails. It does worse than fail, it has the opposite effect intended. Many less "intelligent" people would say "that won't work because..." and be correct. The wonk will respond "No, it will work because (white paper/study/academic theory)."
Put simply, it's the old joke about the economist who exclaims "Well, of course it works in practice! The important point is, will it work in theory?" Or perhaps the other joke about the economist on a desert island with a pallet of canned food, who brightly announces "Assuming a can opener..."
These are people who can look at a problem and produce the "spherical chickens in a perfect vacuum" solution. People with less schooling and more practical knowledge then are inflicted with the end results of this kind of thinking, as are the rest of humanity who might not even be aware that the argument has taken place.
The "wonks" are a symptom of the problem. The problem is that we've elevated and ennobled this sort of abstract thinker, putting them in charge of everything in the name of supposed "meritocracy", calling them "technocrats".
The reality is that while this sort of abstraction is valuable in its place, it does not necessarily translate into the real world, where there are more variables than the spherical cow assumes.
That we put people in charge who can't see this? Our mistake. The one that is killing our civilization.
Simple men would never make the mistake of assuming that every criminal is just misunderstood. They've actually lived with criminals, and they know that they're morally deficient, and require correctives and/or isolation. Only an "educated-yet-idiot" fool would think that defunding the police and decriminalizing petty crime was a good idea, and then have the temerity to put those ideas into effect. Not to mention, operate in complete denial of the facts after the entirely predictable results ensue...
You really have to wonder about these types, when they have the clear evidence for their ideas not working in front of them, in the form of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle... And, they still want to enact those concepts across the nation in cities large and small.
Of course, it's all of a type with these people. They're also the ones who say that Communism works, it just hasn't ever been implemented properly...
It's illustrative of Orwell's quip, to the effect that some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
I'd say almost all of them are prime examples of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
That reminds me of this one Substack I read not too far back:
https://millennialwoes.substack.com/p/the-midwit-menace
Very insightful.
Ben, that post is a gem! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, a well argued piece.
Reminds me of the joke: The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is that you do not know you're in Dunning-Kruger Club.
Sorry. Posted before seeing this. I think we're in agreement.
Stephen, both penetrating and profound
John - - Your review of the Brooks article highlighted the total arrogance and snobbery of the elites. While reading, I realized that the attitudes of those who think of themselves as our “betters” mimics identically those of the elites in the Hunger Games movies.
Taylor Caldwell, a strong anti-totalitarian writer of the last century, described how we should understand the true depth of the elites’ disdain of our mere existence:
“As a peaceful person, I am willing to live and let live. But the Liberal will not, if he can help it, let you live in peace, or, coming down to the matter, let you live at all.”
Good article & Cheers,
A Zooian