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Notes -
I think we are broadly in agreement, but this bit I think is important:
This is surely false on its face; at some point, your IQ is clearly too low to do anything but behave like a herd animal (at best!). I think what you might mean to suggest is that "a sufficiently high IQ is a necessary but insufficient condition to not being a slave," and I think that's right--that's why I pointed out that youth, drug addiction, or mental illness are also things that lead to "natural slavery" (Aristotle regarded even free children as essentially slaves, albeit temporarily).
Something I have seen happen a lot in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces is someone getting really angry (or sneery) about IQ discussions, because of a tendency to valorize high IQ in ways that might be explained as well, or better, by reference to conscientiousness, emotional awareness, family wealth, etc. But I suspect that the area where actual IQ tests have the most real world impact, at least in the U.S., is in the legal system--and it's not high IQs under discussion there! IQ is the gold standard for objective evaluation of whether a person can be made a slave, not in name but in the Aristotelian sense of being subject to the rule of another, because they are not intelligent enough for adequate self-care.
Yes, a high IQ person may also be in need of guidance, temporarily or permanently, as the result of other circumstances, and I agree with you re: etiquette etc. But a completely conscientious, totally decisive, utterly courageous person with an IQ of 50 would still be better off with a
masterguardian (which is, not coincidentally, the world Plato often used to describe the philosopher-king rulers of his ideal Republic).I think the way I’d put it is that it’s not just IQ, though sure, until you reach a reasonable threshold for IQ the chances you’d live independently go down to near zero. But I think in rational spaces especially, you end up ignoring the gifted Reddit user base who have decided to spend their lives in mom’s basement posting long paragraphs about things nobody cares about.
But I think the over identifying the idea with literal BCE slavery in whatever form is unnecessary, as other forms of control, and even relatively invisible and gentle forms of control are possible. You can use debt or consumption to get people to have jobs. You can enforce things through social structures (make it socially necessary to have a job). You can tie necessary services to jobs (like the USA does with health care.
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