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This thought experiment is perhaps "overfitting to a desired conclusion," (and is certainly an unsubtle allegory) but I want to see what other people think. Where else has this comparison been drawn?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights. To minimize cognitive dissonance, we would notice that rulers and yardsticks are banned, or at least tabooed. The taboo of course has justification:
I think they definitely would not go around saying "tall people are morally better." And if you tried to gently tell them "Well you certainly act like they are: tall people make more money and have better life outcomes! And you don't call it unjust!" they will probably get angry and call you evil for suggesting that people have different heights. They will say, the injustice is that life outcomes are inequal among the abled and disabled; between men and women; between supposed racial groups; and so many other axes.
They seem to be making a category error. How can a fact of height differences be evil? So you smuggle a ruler into the room. And you point out that Alice is in fact taller than Bob. "It is just an empirical fact" you say. Of course the reply will be something like, "You think your words are disentangled from context, but the social function of your sentence makes a moral claim." This response is inevitable, even if you bookend your remarks with the notice: "THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THIS CLAIM IS TO POINT OUT EMPIRICAL FACT"
At first you think, well its society's social context that is smuggling in the moral "oughts." The problem is certainly not with reality. But then you realize they are kind of right? The social function of this claim, indeed has moral content. In this society, height simply is the gauge of moral status. Stating otherwise doesn't make it go away, just like saying 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't make it true -- that's reality for you. It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall. These arguments evolved in Tall Clubs around the nation and are handed down from the credentialed Tall to the less-credentialed mid-statures.
It makes you wonder why all of their interventions to the low-status involve treating symptoms and correlates, instead of identifying how to change the moral valuation, which is the root cause of it all.
So by now most of you are thoroughly short on patience, having realized immediately that "height = intelligence." But the real point: the academic and intellectual authorities that are loudest about the problem are the ones stringently enforcing the taboo holding it all up! Is that a coincidence?
This is why I am strongly against the laity getting too involved in anything intelligence adjacent, be it IQ head measuring or HBD "Race Realism":
At the end of the day, 50% of the population is going to be subaverage, and 70% of the population is going to get a failing grade, and 98% of the population will be locked out of the upper echelons of anything but lifting and dropping heavy rocks.
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
The purpose of society is to produce a stable living arrangement where as many people as possible feel that it is not worth it for them to for example, burn your shit down and then kill you, where you is every member of society. You can achieve this through force, but that is an unstable equilibrium. It is better to do this through consent.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
It behoves us all to preserve the fiction: most stupid people end up away from the controls (except when a populist spasm makes one president), generally only rich people get to be truly stupid and then they lose all their shit and are replaced; it's only our historically permissive state that allows the idiots of the world their power at the moment, it will pass.
Yes, I've always felt the race stuff is seriously burying the lede. What do you care how smart some other people you don't know (but happen to look like) are? What matters is how smart you are, and how smart your family is. (Your spouse and friends too, but you choose them.) And the fact that that is overwhelmingly genetic (if it in fact is) is what's truly damaging to the liberal order. If your family has been poor for generations, that's probably not going to change this generation and there's a limited amount you can do about that. Meanwhile, a rich family can lose everything and, by Clark, be right back on top within two generations. It's not that society is insufficiently meritocratic, it's that you in particular lack the sort of merit society cares about, and your children likely will too.
But -- and this a very important 'but' -- being poor is a vastly different experience today than it was in the past. Maybe you're twentieth percentile income and your great grandfather was too, but your level of material comfort would easily have been sixtieth percentile in his day. I'm not saying relative position doesn't matter, but it matters a lot less than absolute wealth on the low end. Not starving is way, way better than starving regardless of how well everyone else eats.
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but it's remarkably rare historically. Consider American chattel slavery: they were told the latter, and in far more absolute terms. It's always possible to get lucky and have an unusually smart child, or to gradually marry up, but the children of slaves were made slaves by legal fiat, not a lack of ability. And, obviously, slaves were treated far worse than... actually, just about anyone today, likely including death row prisoners. But certainly worse than people who are merely poor.
So... how many slave revolts were there? Well, some. Not that many. How many successful slave revolts were there? Zero. Slaves didn't play no role in their eventual liberation, but it was a comparatively small one; much less on average than white northerners. And it certainly didn't end in the mass slaughter of the slave-owning class (much to the displeasure of some, both back then and today).
I'm not saying slavery was a stable equilibrium -- it wasn't, obviously -- just that the mechanism of its instability was moral outrage among freemen, not workers rising up. Revolutions -- violent changes in policy -- are rare in general, and most revolutions are driven by the relatively well off. Which makes sense: ability matters in violence too. So do relative freedom to coordinate and wealth to supply the fighters.
When the lowest of the low lash out, as a rule they're easily crushed. The only example springing to mind where it actually worked out is Haiti. (For some value of 'worked out,' anyway; I do suspect the average Haitian benefitted substantially, even given their absolute-terms poverty.) In France and Russia the mob had some say, but not at first; only after the old order had completely collapsed and there was no functional system to oppose them.
All the above is to say: the threat of violent rebellion is not the limiting factor on repression. It wasn't two hundred years ago, and viable weapons systems have only gotten more expensive. Voting-as-a-proxy-for-war was never actually true, and it's only gotten less true over time. The truth is that incumbent systems have an enormous advantage over challengers in that they're already organized and funded and have used their position to attract and train capable people. A government established through force, once well established, is not nearly so easy to dissolve. Women didn't get the vote for their newly recognized capacity for rebellion and they didn't really get it for the pity of men either (as I've occasionally seen suggested here). They got it because of the dynamics of a system that no one truly controls, that had long since taken on a life of its own.
To reel it back in a bit: no, antiracism is not motivated by the fear of black power. Ask a thousand white self-described antiracists if that's their motivation, and you'll hear a thousand 'no's (and likely some much less civil language). And I don't believe they're lying or confused about their motivations -- black power has never been a credible threat, so why would they (or anyone else) fear it? Black power could be troublesome -- and I do believe that possibility played some role in the Civil Rights movement -- but actually killing a substantial fraction of white people? Not a chance.
Moreover,
is uncontroversially true and broadly understood for e.g. people with Down Syndrome, who are not brutally repressed and do not often lash out in rage at the unfairness of the world. Fetuses with Down Syndrome are preferentially aborted, but no one capable of understanding that fact has anything to fear from abortion. If anything's unstable about their treatment, it's the high-and-still-rising cost of the handouts they're given.
Consider long-term disability payments more generally. Lots of people sign up deliberately, announce to world that they're permanently incapable of productive work (sometimes on the basis of genetics, but not always). Tons of applicants get rejected because of how many healthy people decide that their pride is worth less than a small monthly payment. If ASI renders all human labor obsolete, I'm prepared to accept that neither I nor my descendants will ever be a tenth as intelligent as it is, and I'll gladly take any handouts on offer. (There could certainly be other problems there, but just the fact it's smarter than me and there's nothing I can do about it isn't a big one.)
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