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Notes -
Far Right HBD Civil War
Bronze Age Pervert recently xeeted on what he believes in the current infeasibility of HBD politically:
This was controversial with numerous pundits amongst the different spheres of the Right: with Woods, Winegard, and Fuentes having opposing views.
I think the question of politically feasibility of HBD is a point of discussion, in addition to—perhaps more interestingly—the timing of the xeet by Bronze Age Pervert—wat means? Is HBD the path forward? In the chaos of the Isreal-Hamas war and the current anti-woke backlash, is the vitalist Right looking to make themselves more palatable?
I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.
HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.
So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.
Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?
The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.
You seem to be under the impression that you’ve identified some previously-unexamined hypocrisy or blind spot within the DR, when actually this is a conversation topic that is discussed constantly and with great acrimony on both sides by different factions within the HBD-accepting right wing.
On the one side you have the populists. These people engage with HBD primarily as a defensive tool; if white people are being slandered as “privileged” and “systemically racist” because there are X number of white successful people and X> number of nonwhite successful people, being able to deploy scientifically-supported arguments to counter those accusations is invaluable. “No, these disparities are not because white people are doing anything wrong. They are a result of immutable realities which will not be ameliorated by your proposed corrective/redistributive measures. Therefore, it is illegitimate to discriminate against white people, to attack our civic institutions, to clamor for our replacement, etc.”
I think it might be fair to call these guys “soft HBD advocates” or “population-level HBD advocates”. It is not that they, as a rule, reject any intra-racial hierarchy of intelligence/competence. Most of them are happy to talk about “normies” and to discuss what rhetorical/political strategies are likely to appeal to the vast majority of people who are not members of the cognitive elite. However, they believe that the correct attitude for the white cognitive elite is essentially a form of noblesse oblige or paternal care. A 140-IQ white person should love and care for the white working class, and advocate for their interests, because they are basically family. Much as you wouldn’t abandon your family members and join a new family because the new family is smarter and better-looking and has a nicer house, you shouldn’t abandon your less-cognitively-gifted people to curry favor with a rootless cosmopolitan multinational elite. Consequently, these people also tend to be ethnic nationalists/particularists. “I love the Polish nation not because it has the smartest or most athletically gifted or most scientifically-accomplished people on earth, but rather because it is mine. This land is the home of my forefathers, whose blood courses through my veins.” A Polish nationalist would rather all of the doctors and engineers and politicians in Poland be ethnic/native Poles, even if that means Poland isn’t getting the tippy-top cream-of-the-crop most awesome candidates in the world; otherwise, what’s the point of having a Poland at all, as anything other than an economic zone?
On the other side of this debate, you have the “hard HBD advocates” or “elitists”. (The populists would use the derogatory term “IQ supremacists” or “IQ nationalists”.) These are guys like Hanania and Crémieux. For them, they really have internalized HBD - not only on an interracial level, but at the level of hereditary variation producing hierarchies of human individuals at any level of population granularity imaginable - as the key to understanding humanity. To these people, at the extremes, the way to maximize human flourishing is to unlock the full potential of the world’s elite human capital and basically let them remake the world in their own image. In practice, this means flattening and annihilating any and all regional particularities and communal attachments, such that a rootless high-IQ elite individual can set up shop anywhere and have maximum flexibility without needing to fear the interference of the ignorant and envious commoners who also happen to occupy that same location. Lest it sound like I’m being uncharitable, in this recent piece by Richard Hanania he says the quiet part at nearly deafening volume and makes this vision painfully explicit.
In this piece Hanania literally argues that the ideal society is one in which the common people - and by extension their elected officials - are so polarized and distracted by culture-war trivialities and general anomie that they are unable to coalesce around any shared goals or self-protective measures, allowing high-IQ cosmopolitan elites to essentially act unimpeded and not have to pretend to be responsive to the pig-headed superstitions and irrational communal attachments of the cattle-souled commoners. (Really makes you think…)
Personally, I, like most reasonable people, believe that there’s a middle path between these two extremes. I do agree that populism is doomed to fail because it demands that intelligent people cultivate an ultimately synthetic and unsustainable level of compassion and indulgence toward the great mass of people who are, by and large, not fully worthy of it. However, the hardcore elitists also fail because their ghoulish disregard for the basic non-chosen irrational attachments which make life worth living for the vast majority of human beings requires them to adopt a callousness and a siege mentality which puts them eternally at war against a population which massively outnumbers them and who could become awakened to that fact at any time. From the DR’s current acrimonious polarization is likely to emerge a healthier, more balanced synthesis that finds a way to help rootless cosmopolitans rediscover a natural and unforced love for the people over whom they rule, while also demanding in return that those people improve themselves and thereby make themselves worthy of love. (This will probably involve genetic engineering alongside a massive culling of the most dysgenic and unworthy elements of the population, both locally and on a global level.)
Excellent reply, but once again "well actually, we've talked about this" is being conflated with "well actually, you're entirely wrong." What you seem to be outlining is, HBDers can be split between people who answer the "Why do you want to stop at race?" with "Well actually, the whole thing was just a thin excuse for racial nationalism to begin with" and people who reply "Why would I want to stop at race?" Correct me if I'm missing some nuance here.
I admire, as ever, your effort at synthesis.
What you're missing is that society requires cooperation between classes of people. Neither flooding the country with masses of low-IQ foreigners or flooding the country with high-IQ foreigners who have no attachment or regard for the average person accomplishes that. Accepting intra-racial HBD doesn't change that fact.
Hanania is perfectly fine with a cognitive elite that has no attachment to and despises the average person, or even who views the average person as an ethnic rival. The DR recognizes that is not the formula for a healthy civilization.
What happens if you have a cognitive elite that hates the civilization it is part of and has a racialized antipathy towards it? Hanania doesn't care, as long as they have the highest IQ in the room.
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