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Rajeev Ram's avatar

Hey Nathan, I don't know much about you, and I don't follow Aporia that closely – though I've read some of the articles, and I enjoyed them – but my friend sent me this article and asked me what I thought, so I thought I'd try to give a response.

I'd start out by saying that this post is excellent. There is a level of care, detail, mastery taken here is wonderful. Nothing you've said strikes me as wrong or insufficiently refined. There are two points I want to bring up, and I hope I communicate them to you with sufficient respect and clarity.

1. You briefly mention how power is necessary to make change, but ultimately this relies on the people who have power wanting that change.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the paragraph where you talk about power as a proximate cause. You seem to understand that power exists to launder consent for itself, and that it will take whatever system it can to generate that consent – whether it be the divine right of Kings, technical genius, military cohesion, or indeed, wokeness.

You explain this so beautifully, and then you kind of drop the ball at that; you don't delve deeply into why the laundering mechanism should change from wokeness to "race realism". Your argument is basically because "race realism" (your phrase, I would use a different one) is true and more adaptive/functional than equality, e.g., produces more great works.

I will point you to this tweet, by a right-wing goon who you might be familiar with.

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1539004402094297090

Darwin is obviously not at fault for the rise of Nazism by introducing natural selection – especially given the "world ice theory" situation. However, by introducing the concept of evolution into public consciousness, he did create a situation in which other morons could inject a degraded version ("social Darwinism") into consciousness and slip that nonsense in to justify the absolutism of the Führer.

If you want "race realism" over wokenness to be convincing to elites, you're going have to show them why it makes their job of stewarding the people easier, once its tenets is falls down to the imbecility at the bottom of the pyramid. Or else, why the imbecility of wokeness is worse than the imbecility of race realism; which is what you've kind of started to do here a little bit.

Which leads to my second comment...

2. There nothing here in your post that encourages elites to act at elites; that is to say, to act as stewards of the power and truth they possess.

Going back to that Tweet, part of what makes en elite is knowing that once they express truth and power (i.e., develop a dominant culture), they ought to take responsibility for the ways in which the masses will distort this culture in mind-numbingly stupid ways

You make a quick detour by mentioning Christ in the Roman empire. One of the reasons that Christ was so successful in deposing existing Roman morality is that he didn't just just provide a treatise of truth and then peace-out. He took great pains to cultivate disciples who could be sent to cultivate belonging and answer ridiculous questions such as: "If you are God, and you are good, then why did you let my mother die of cancer because that's evil?" in a compassionate and satisfactory way.

What answer are you going to give some poor sap who is IQ-limited and clumsy, but his neighbor and best friend growing up goes on to the heights of success and fame? How will you make him feel like he still belongs with race/IQ-realism?

Again, what made Christ divine (I'll stick with a lowercase 'd', I'm not about to get into a religious battle here), is that he said "this is who I am" and also (crucially!) "this is how you can belong to my earthly body if you join me." There is an element of stewardship. And, despite this, millions of blockheads have managed to tarnish Christ's worldly undertaking in the most heinous of ways.

I understand that you may not be trying to be political scientist or political operative here. You are likely trying to present a stack of proper, well-integrated facts that someone else (e.g., Rufo) can take and fit into the proper context of power politics. But in the interest of giving you larger voice and more impact over the elites (or elites-in-training) that are your primary audience, I would offer that you start putting effort into expanding on the nitty-gritty specifics of this:

"There will be a multidecadal transition period between wokism and a new, reality-based system, which will require various stopgap measures."

I think you have a responsibility – and of course you can disagree – to explain how the theses in this post will allow for elites to take more stewardship over the people they are accountable to, and who belong to them. Otherwise, ultimately to me (and I'm nowhere near an elite, but I could fit the mold), you are basically presenting ideas and praying that someone more magnanimous and competent and you picks up the crown and runs with your treatise. To me, that is feeble.

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Luke Croft's avatar

You're more likely to convince liberals of HBD than conservatives. If there's hope that things can change through things such as embryo selection then I can see liberals being more open to the idea of differences, maybe not group differences but individual differences. Conservatives, Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige. They would also be against any solutions like embryo selection due to their reactionary and theocratic tendencies.

Liberal multiculturalists can be persuaded to not record racial statistics, that's basically the situation in France. Racial division is seen as taboo and low status. A much more effective strategy would be to appeal to the ruling liberal elite by saying that the rising tide of right-wing populism is due to dysgenic fertility (which it partly is). You would get a much more receptive audience.

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