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I'm not sure I buy that we need noble lies of this kind to hold society together.
Surely, we can acknowledge that different people have different natural endowments without setting up society for the masses to tear down the great and powerful? Why isn't the message, "You're almost certainly not going to be The Guy, but if you play by the rules, and work hard, you can enjoy a standard of living that is better than a medieval king, thanks to The Guy", not a winning message?
I just feel like we could cultivate the virtues of comparing down not up, of comparing to the past instead of the present, and cultivate civic virtue and trust within society.
Honestly, civic virtue is the thing I want in my fellow citizens far more than intelligence (though I like living in the country that brain drains all the other countries.) When I read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the thing that struck me was just his agency and civic virtue. There's no lending library in your region? Why not create one? The streets in the neighborhood are dirty? Why not knock on your neighbors' doors and get everyone to pitch in for a street sweeper? That level of agency is almost unthinkable in today's society, partially because the low hanging fruit of civic virtue has all been picked, but partially because of a learned helplessness in much of the population.
One thing I've found interesting is observing when non-Anglos are open and honest about ethnic differences. The two that come to mind are a (Romani) entrepreneur I saw on TV saying that he won't hire other Romani, only Romanians, because Romani will try and cheat him. The other were a group of (heavy drinking) natives in Siberia saying, seemingly without bitterness, that Russians were richer than them because they (the natives) drank too much. And the fact that the Russians were the sober party in that description tells you how much they were drinking. I think in both cases intelligence was mentioned but I can't be sure.
Mizrahi Jews in Israel also seem to be pretty chill with the fact that Israel has never had a non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister, and that the elite is mostly Ashkenazi.
Maybe the real toxic meme is the idea that we need a noble lie. But then there are too many examples of ethnic animosity against the higher performing groups for me to conclude that it's just a western/Anglo thing.
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Because homeless alcoholics will use it as a shelter (and possibly light it on fire)?
Because there's almost certainly some regulation that makes this illegal.
In the case of Ben Franklin's lending library, it was all handled via mail so this is less of a consideration.
I do agree vetocracy is a big problem. But I am still inspired by modern examples like the Guerilla Public Service guy, who made helpful improvements to some freeway signs in California, and his improvements followed the jot and tittle of the legal specs for freeway signs.
I think if more people imitated his example, or the example of Ben Franklin, the world would be a better place. Honestly, if we're talking about civic disobedience, citizens being willing to be arrested for improving public infrastructure is exactly the world I want to live in.
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I'm homeschooling my 2nd grade daughter this year due to her autism not being accommodated in the classroom in 1st grade.
Naturally a lot of curriculum is "conservative" and describes itself as "classical." One thing I notice is the emphasis on how little people in the past had. The capstone book of the year is "Little House in the Big Woods," which is basically a woman's memoirs of how she had to live as a little girl on a homestead where all the food had to be made, water brought in from far away every day, wild animals to contend with, etc. Before that was "The Courage of Sarah Noble," a story about a little girl who traveled with her father to cook for him while he build a house by hand on new land they bought from Indians.
Lots of the short stories cover living off the land, working hard, making gifts instead of buying them, being content with little.
If I compare myself with my parents I feel impoverished, but compared to my grandparents I'm ahead and compared to my great-grandparents I might as well be royalty.
There is a lot wrong with modernity but I don't have to haul water on a daily basis or make my own soap and that means I'm better off than so many people, both in the past and now.
I have the sense that conservatives are more aware of this than others (both liberals and moderates) though I don't have hard data.
Was Little House in the Big Woods the one where the neighbor woman tells a story about being almost eaten by a panther? At the time I read it I just thought it was an interesting story, but looking back at it it's a super-visible way to illustrate that these people lived like Indian peasants do today.
The whole series is very interesting because it covers a family going from being subsistence farmers where meat is a special, a few times a year, treat to being townsfolk who can do things like buy clothes(instead of handmaking them out of raw fiber) and ride trains, and they're... incredibly grateful in later books.
Yeah, Laura's aunt Eliza tells a story at Christmas:
Eliza was walking to the spring to get a pail of water. Her dog was with her and started growling and pulling on her skirt with his teeth when she got near the path. He tore her skirt and snarled. Frightened, Eliza ran back home and closed the door to her house, leaving the dog outside. All day she and her three young children were stuck inside, unable to leave the house. Every time they tried to open the door, the dog snarled at them. They had no water the whole day and were unable to cook or drink anything. In the afternoon the dog calmed down and acted like nothing happened. They walked to the spring together and in the ground Eliza saw large panther tracks.
The books are great because Laura realized that her life exemplified a lot of people's experiences, but also that the past was vanishing and very few in the future would understand what it was like. She's not the best writer, but her books have stayed in print for a good reason.
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There is an actual problem here: for the 99% of the population that isn't a weird semi-autistic high-decoupling rationalist (and I'm not sure about many of them either), arguments are soldiers, and it's guaranteed that almost anyone who talks about racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the idea to promote racial supremacy.
By the same token, anyone who tries to prevent mention of racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the implicit assumption that racial IQs are equal to promote disparate treatment by race.
That doesn't follow. All that follows is that they must be saying it for some policy reason, not specifically what the policy reason is. Thinking "there are a lot of racists and I need to stop them" is still a policy reason.
It doesn't follow logically any more than yours does. It's an observation -- those who suppress racial IQ are pushing for some sort of preferential treatment for a favored racial group.
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