Commentator’s Disease
10th June 2010
Fred is a populist, which means he thinks with his heart rather than his brain. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….
The exceedingly intelligent form a social class seldom mentioned but inordinately influential. They are not recognized as what they are because they do not append IQs to their by-lines. As a quite ordinary example, consider the magazine The American Conservative, with many of whose writers I have some familiarity. The publisher, Ron Unz, studied theoretical physics at Stanford after graduating from Harvard. Bill Lind, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, John Derbyshire—I doubt that there is an IQ below 140 in the bunch. The same could be said of many other political slicks, left or right.
The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.
They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.
Populists are good at whining but they don’t have any solutions. As Jerry Pournelle points out, ‘Compassion is all very well but it doesn’t actually change the way things work.’