This was a really good article and made some great points. The only thing that could be added is some more emphasis on the fervency of woke/progressive people's beliefs and values. Many have described it as religious in nature and it's hard not to disagree. I'm not sure what it would take to convince these people to abandon their ideology. What they would replace it with is another question. Advocating for an egalitarian world provides a sense of meaning and purpose. My assumption is that this would be very hard to let go of for many of these people.
Absolutely. I feel that most people on the left that are most vocal about woke beliefs need dragons to slay to find meaning. The Civil Rights era had laudable goals - and so many on the left wants to have their contribution to history. Fighting the Right is both easy and reinforcing - I believe if the meaning they search for can be redirected towards fighting divisiveness instead, there's hope.
The Equality Thesis isn't the whole story with Wokism.
For example, the US military has a problem with Chinese spying. One of the reasons is that the US military hires Chinese people with Chinese passports from China, believes they are 100% American if they've been in the country for 6 months, and gives them sensitive information. A Blank Slater would easily understand why a Chinese person who was raised in China might have some loyalty to China. Wokists are forbidden from understanding that.
In fact, logically consistent people who believe in the equality thesis should be MORE opposed to some forms of immigration than hereditarians are. If you really believed that culture is the only difference between Sweden and Somalia, then you would conclude that Somali culture is one of the worst, most destructive things on Earth, and ought to be eradicated. The people who really believe in the Equality Thesis are Sowellite conservatives.
Actually, I don't think that wokists would blame the condition of Somalia on Somali culture. Instead, they'd probably blame Somalia's lack of development on European colonialism, a lack of education, geography, and maybe some other things. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
The extreme wokists would parrot some nonsense about colonialism, but Cofnas isn't talking about the extremists, he's talking about the average smart urban democrat who reads the NYT. Those people know colonialism isn't the source of Africa's poverty.
But my point wasn't focusing on European colonialism in particular. My point was that when (intelligent) liberal elites (and wokists) assume the equality thesis, it doesn't necessarily follow that culture is responsible for racial disparities.
The liberal elites would blame environmental differences for racial disparities, not culture. Things like adequate food, water, education, safe neighborhoods, an unhampered past, geography, etc.
Geography is huge, especially since it makes the most sense out of all the things in that list. Tomas Pueyo's post was published 2-3 weeks ago and it instantly went viral because it offered an attractive environmental explanation for disparities between countries (and races). https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
For the most part, the audiences of those authors and video producers are very much apart of the higher-IQ liberal audience that Cofnas is talking about.
This is a fascinating and important debate. I feel a little awkward weighing in because I do not consider myself on the Right, partly for reasons outlined in this article, but I am strongly Anti-Left, so her goes:
I think that you are largely correct in the long run. The Left maintains its legitimacy because Anti-Hereditarian beliefs are the norm among college-educated professionals. The taboo against even considering Hereditarian is vital to keeping the educated in line.
The core identity of the Left is based in the belief that Inequality is immoral, and we will never get out of our problems until most of society gives up on the idea of creating Equality of anything beyond legal equality for individuals. This goal only seems possible if people ignore the science behind Hereditarianism and ignoring the continual failure of previous attempts by the Left to create Equality:
I also agree that convincing elites to give up on the idea of Equality must be a central goal. A modern society cannot function without merit-based institutions, which will inevitably be led by elites. The Right simply does not have enough social capital to staff millions of bureaucratic positions in all our institutions.
The Right should also not be attacking Science. They should be attacking the ideological distortions placed on science, partly by government funding. The Right should fund biological research that will help us better understand the link between genes and human behavior, particularly dysfunctional behavior.
In the short run, however, I think the Rufo/Trump strategy of radically undermining the power of Leftist activists in the federal government and Red state governments, K-12 education, and public universities along with abolishing DEI, transparency laws, and eliminating funding for Leftist NGOs is essential.
A little bit differently than most on the Right, I think this strategy is fully compatible with the Federalist principles in the US Constitution and a new Originalist major in the US Supreme Court Court is rapidly undermining the legal bedrocks upon which an expansive federal administrative state have been based for the last century will have powerful ripple effects. Together, I think this will be a powerful step towards radically lowering the influence of the Woke within our institutions.
Institutions who are in a highly-competitive environment with merit-based hiring, firing and promotions simply cannot accommodate Woke demands without undermining institutional goals. Those that do will be steam-rollered by those that do not in the long run.
I also agree with what I think Rufo is saying that an excessive focus on race will help the Left and undermine both the Right and Hereditarianism. Genetic-based inequalities are far more pervasive than just race and even if everyone is convinced that racial inequalities are 100% caused by genes, this still leaves all the other 95% of inequalities. It also makes it very easy for college-educated to dismiss Hereditarianism as a cover for racism if Hereditarians largely focus on race. So a focus on race is self-defeating.
The focus should be on explaining individual inequalities WITHIN the same group (whether it is by race, gender, ethnicity or other) that should be the focus, because it is both more widespread and easier for elites and regular people to talk about.
There is also a very powerful argument against Heditarian Communism that you did not mention. A key weakness in the Leftist world view is their belief that the best way to help working class, poor, racial minorities, women, etc is with government programs to give them material benefits. In reality, long-term economic growth does far more to help everyone, including the working class, poor, racial minorities, women, etc. If the Right does not openly embrace that as a prime goal, it will likely never win. That is a goal that the vast majority of voters and elites can get behind.
So a winning strategy for the Right is a combination of:
1. Undermining the power of the Left with Federalism etc that I explained above.
2. A focus on Hereditarianism were the focus is on explaining all types of inequalities, not just race.
3. Promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth to give voters an incentive to vote for the Right, even if they are a little skeptical of #1 and #2 above.
"Institutions who are in a highly-competitive environment with merit-based hiring, firing and promotions simply cannot accommodate Woke demands without undermining institutional goals. Those that do will be steam-rollered by those that do not in the long run."
Up to now, the reverse has been true. How elite law schools have remained competitive while accommodating some amount of woke demands was shown in Richard Sanders' Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in Law Schools _chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/01/Sander.pdf) in 2004 (see esp. pp. 400-414). Basically, they took the strongest students they could get within each race, with de facto quotas for each race. Since 2002, affirmative action has been a condition of law school accreditation, but even before that, all or nearly all law schools practiced it aggressively. And as long as they all did it, none of them were damaged by taking a certain percentage of weaker URM students.
At the law firm level, there is a voluntary "McCormick" certification that a firm can obtain by hiring and promoting certain levels of women and minorities. It's voluntary, but just about everyone seeks it. Every elite law firm in America is committed to diversity.
Obviously accreditation requirements and certifications are a guard against cheating -- no school or law firm can boost itself by no longer admitting/hiring URMs. But it's not clear that the guard is even needed. If Harvard went to race-neutral admissions tomorrow, it would admit few or no black students, and I think there would be a huge backlash against that, not least among Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution. Efforts among conservatives to create competing educational institutions -- Bari Weiss's university, Rufo's New College -- have mostly been disasters, because the "conservative" brand is toxic in education. That's Cofnas 101.
Having gone to one, I don't see making any headway in changing elite private universities, which is why I did not mention them in my comment. It is much better to focus on other institutions, particularly the federal government and Red states.
You are correct about some of these details, but the competition within these organizations is more between individuals rather than truly transparent competition between institutions.
No, elite private schools imposed DEI rules that are not based on merit and are highly insulated by massive endowments. Plus, they receive billions of dollars in government subsidies.
The Prestige game insulates them from true competition. They are perceived as better, not because they offer better education, but because they can enroll the best students. They enroll the best students, because they are perceived as better (and round and round).
Plus, they thrive on a lack of transparency. They keep their admissions policies secret, while they claim to make decisions purely based on academics.
Voluntary DEI is illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and should be prosecuted.
Starting a new institution, particularly a university, is always hard. I would expect most to fail. UAT seems to be doing very well.
Why should I care if "Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution?"
Do you have an alternative that will work faster than the progress we have seen over the last 10 months?
"The Prestige game insulates them from true competition. They are perceived as better, not because they offer better education, but because they can enroll the best students. They enroll the best students, because they are perceived as better (and round and round)."
Well, yes. Having the best students makes you the best school. And that is rational, since the quality of its student body is the most important asset that a school can offer a prospective student. Right now, a strong and visible commitment to racial and ethnic diversity is a necessary concomitant to elite status.
Law firms are not insulated from competition, but they are as committed to diversity as any university, and broadly speaking the most prestigious and profitable firms tend to be the most visibly committed to diversity. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, including where the most profitable law firms are located, but one major reason is that incoming young lawyers demand it.
"Why should I care if "Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution?""
Because that attitude strengthens wokeness at elite institutions.
"Do you have an alternative that will work faster than the progress we have seen over the last 10 months?"
I'm more interested in permanent progress than headlines, and I don't like the administration's focus on antisemitism, a wasting asset. But I don't mean to carp, any progress is welcome.
I don't see you offering any solutions. You are merely describing the problem. We already have plenty of that...
Think of my proposal as a Containment scheme, like what was developed during the Cold War.
We can never eliminate dangerous ideologies, but we can contain their negative impact on society. If they cannot spread enough to eliminate transparent, non-violent competition, the ideologies will eventually destroy themselves because they cannot actually change material reality in their desired direction.
With the proper Containment policies, time is on our side.
I’m definitely not offering any solutions, because I don’t think they exist. But pointing out the flaws in others’ solutions is still providing a service.
> They should be attacking the ideological distortions placed on science, partly by government funding. The Right should fund biological research that will help us better understand the link between genes and human behavior, particularly dysfunctional behavior.
What do you mean by the second sentence there? If you mean rich Right-wingers should fund that science, I agree. If you mean the right should support the NIH funding said research, I disagree for the reason given in the first sentence above.
I don't know how I can rephrase the second sentence any better. It seems very clear. the Right should support via NIH and via other institutions.
The NIH should absolutely fund research on the genetic and other causes of diseases and dysfunctional behavior. The first and second sentences do not contradict at all. They reinforce each other.
I have no problem with other institutions funding genetic research, but it would be ridiculous for the NIH not to be involved. The NIH funding can be used to overcome the ideological distortions, particularly by eliminating DEI requirements and requiring datasets are available via open sources that any researcher can access, regardless of whether or not the government funds it.
In dependent of DEI having a single source dominate funding is not good for science. It tends to lead a premature forced consensus on a possibly false theory. See the Alzheimer's debacle for a recent example.
I never claimed that we should have "a single source dominate funding." The NIH funding something does not preclude other organizations from doing the same.
Prohibiting NIH funding on the genetic and other causes of diseases and dysfunctional behavior would be a great way to help the Left. They have already established many prohibitions on genetic research by labelling it as racist. Those should be repealed.
Funding of genetic research is the single biggest thing to forward Hereditarianism, if the theory is correct. And if it is not correct, then we can learn from that as well. But the Left is trying to shut down that research.
Why would you support their efforts?
And eliminating DEI requirements and requiring datasets are available via open sources that any researcher can access (both of which I already mentioned) is a key part of enabling other organizations to do so.
I’ve become more convinced to your view. One of my friends is like you in that he has the patience and focus to go through every single potential counter argument and rebut it in an engaging way. I would definitely get bored and, even if I forced myself, I would do crappier, less engaged work. I think there’s a bit of jealousy on the part of people like me towards people like you, so we cope by being overly skeptical of the battle of ideas.
Overall, Indian immigration to the US will lead to a strengthening of the left and development like in Canada.
In addition, the fact of "human biological diversity" is not only the difference in IQ, but also the innate ethnocentric nature of people, especially non-Western nations.
Therefore, it is quite rational for any political right-wing party that believes in social Darwinism, the free market, and love for white people to oppose mass Indian immigration to the United States.
I doubt there is some innate ethnocentrism. Clannishness, maybe, but the ethnic level is too high up and abstract. The most virulent ethnocentrist nation can become the most woke.
We must not essentialize EVERY human behavior down to the genetic level.
It is fascinating as a Singaporean to read this. As at 2025, Singapore is run by a high functioning cognitive elite, with some “woke” concessions of late. The late LKY was notorious for being an enthusiast for eugenics and “gifted” education programs (check out the “graduate mothers scheme” that he tried to implement in the 1980s). The current crop of elites who run most things in Singapore today are a direct product of his hereditarian educational and immigration policies, some of which are still in place. Really worth discussing if you have the opportunity, methinks!
I think if this is really your belief, you need to stop talking about the meta argument (whether anti-wokists should push hereditarianism) and start creating as many high quality arguments that hereditarianism is true as you can. You seem to assume that any intelligent person would agree that hereditarianism is true if they looked at the data, but nothing I’ve seen has been that bullet proof. And there are plenty of good left wing arguments that at least add a considerable amount of doubt to the hereditarianism thesis. (Sasha Gusev provides some arguments for example.) I know plenty of smart people who are familiar with at least some of the data that don’t even think IQ is a very good measure.
Right now, the easily available evidence and argument online simply isn’t of a high enough quality (in my mind) to convince a committed leftist that hereditarianism is true. Moreover, it is not strong enough for someone who is on the fence or exploring these ideas to open themselves up to social banishment by even raising this type of argument with friends or family as a possibility, let alone raise it as true. Maybe if you considered both sides and had to choose in a safe environment, the evidence would fall in hereditarianism’s favor, but given the immense taboo around the subject that simply isn’t enough. If you want people to become hereditarians in the current social / political environment, you first need to work as hard as you can to craft a near bulletproof argument that hereditarianism is true. I just haven’t seen anything like that yet. Until someone can go into an argument where they know they will be branded an extreme racist safe in the knowledge that the facts are *definitely* on their side, your approach simply isn’t going to work.
The most high quality while concise summary of the evidence in favour of hereditarianism comes from this short paper https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2021-warne-2.pdf "Between Group Mean Differences in Intelligence in the United States Are >0% Genetically Caused: Five Converging Lines of Evidence " by Russell Warne.
Have you read it?
What do you think are the most convincing counter arguments from the left wing side?
Sasha Gusev only attacks one of the lines of evidence, namely the fact that blacks have lower polygenic scores for IQ than whites (and north east asians have higher) .
He generally steers well clear of talking about earlier research which contradict his favoured explanation for IQ gaps, that parental education and economic status causes the IQ gaps.
This is what people thought decades ago , but when they compared black and white people of the same socioeconomic and educational upbringing, they still found that blacks people had lower average IQ.
As a result , environmentalists defaulted to racism as an x-factor explanation for why blacks of equally affluent and educated upbringings did worse than whites, but an x factor would violent measurement invariance.which has been found, and logically, racism isn't like a magic spell that makes blacks perform worse. If racism does cause worse black IQ it has to cause it through proximate material causes like racism causing worse job opportunities causing childhood socioeconomic deprivation causing lower IQ. I think James Flynn made this argument somewhere against x factor "racism" explanations of the IQ gap.
I have actually read the Russell Warne piece before, but thanks for sharing again. I will look at the other pieces. I appreciate your engagement.
Maybe my complaint is that the debate generally ends up revolving around relatively complex statistical questions where it is hard for a layman to distinguish between the two sides’ arguments. Someone opposed to the hereditarian thesis can then cite a left wing academic who engages with the statistics in a way that is hard for the layman to refute, again opening them up to charges of racism without a bulletproof argument they can fall back on.
Yes, I think herediterians tend to overstate the strength of their case.
1) They have relatively strong evidence for American Black population, where I would say Occam's razor would favour the "mostly hereditary" explanation... but then they tend to make generic sweeping statements about Africans (and countries of the world in general) which are simply not supported by strong data at all.
2) Herediterians had hoped that genome-wide association studies would prove their case once and for all, but they did the opposite, they kind of contradicted them (missing heritability paradox).
3) In general, the fact that Africans have significantly higher genetic diversity than any other population group globally (due to founder effect) also makes it very doubtful to me that they can be so swiftly categorised under the umbrella of "blacks" with a (near) normal distribution of traits (such as IQ).
A rebuttal to your point 3 would be that while africans have high genetic diversity they share quite generally exposure to inbreeding historically and currently which is known to lower iq at the population level! There are also adoption research showing that biological parent iq but not adoptor parents predict child iq,there is all sorts of research strenghtening the view that race iq differences are genetic, academics claiming the contrary have either not seem it or they have a moral agenda which fears racism.Academic papers have been written openly about not letting the public know about group iq differences and for ceasing to research the topic!
The Cofnas model of the psychology surrounding this pretty much perfectly describes my social milieu. This may not be surprising, since we have a lot of overlap.
In particular, a lot of comments below take issue with NC's characterization of the elite, but I think he hit the nail on the head with the projection point. Contrary to what I see conservatives say in various forums, my experience all indicates that high trust, high achieving people are simply misled by their elders, and end up believing a (relatively) plausible story about history and race relations. In most cases, the elders themselves don't even know they are lying. It's not like the equality thesis was rare among elites 40 years ago.
Of course there is some room for conspiratorial suppression-of-information thinking here, since it is plainly true that people react stubbornly and confrontationally when you challenge their central beliefs. But "people are actually just sincerely wrong" is pretty obviously the main thing going on. I've frankly been confused that NC keeps trying to persuade people of this, but I guess it comes from my lack of contact with conservatives re this topic.
My experience with left of center people is that there are intelligent high trust people who have curious minds who get guarded by others. You challenge the view and the curious mind is listening, then the guard hears something wrong and they morally shame and start flinging shit all over and actually cause social trauma in order to shut it down and make the curious mind afraid of the topic so that they and everyone else try to avoid it in the future.
I also agree with the conservative story that the left is generally pretty neurotic, which I think plays a role in this type of thing. I'm not sure I have much of a theory for the "guard" role here beyond that, though. Immaturity, which obviously also afflicts many people their entire lives, seems to be a part of the story. But even granting that, the sense of threat from disagreement and the misunderstanding of how to respond productively still both seem strange to me. Maybe they're just manifestations of general social incompetence or underdevelopment or something.
I don't agree with everything that you write, but I would say that this is the best post that you've released all year. Well done!
You are right to criticize Rufo for not promoting hereditarianism. However, I think that he and his audience lack the cognitive capacity and desire to understand why hereditarianism is important.
Rufo is not an intellectual. Indeed, he lacks the ability to engage with ideas in a serious way. His response to his post was to hurl a bunch of ad hominems at me: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1976711214777745625
There's a chance you may want to skip existing elites alltogether. All the normie shows use ''had the highest recorded IQ in class or whatever" as a synonym for this guy's really smart and gonna be a big player. Just switch IQ for SAT. And make all SAT scores public and searchable. Do the same with at least all government employee salaries. On the same website. Everyone will search their classmates, notice the less capable ones that got further ahead for *reasons* and you'll have the energy needed to get something functional going.
Have a reality tv show where normie men with a week's training beat army women at airsoft.
Then do the same for high SAT v. low SAT (Is there data on the correlation between IQ (I mean SAT) and marksmanship?)
Normies understand that successful fighters are just better, in the same sense they admire Trump despite him calling himself better because, yeah lol he's rich and bangs supermodels, of course he is.
Then declare that for high IQ graduates batchelor's should really only be two govt funded years. But they must be psychologically healthy (ie. lift weights/do sports). And why can't you do law or medical school straight out of high school on the basis of your LSAT or MCAT again? Bring back LLBs. Also, any firm with government contracts MUST NOT DISCRIMINATE! Govt spending is 26% of GDP? Well, well, well.
----
A Loyal American Elite before the Trump admin is over. And one with the revolutionary zeal needed to overthrow the current order.
In GB, you go to lawschool directly from highschool. Law is a trade. I enjoyed it for that reason. College was directionless and kind of humiliating, being an average looking White male.
Firstly, I just don't get Rufo's opposition to what you're doing here. It's obvious that the war of ideas is the most important war to be waging, and it's also obvious to me that the war is being won slowly but surely. It will most likely be a generational thing, as you touch on in the essay. Most of my elite gen Z friends acknowledge hereditarianism is obviously true. We just don't talk about it openly because gen X elites wouldn't get it and millennial elites would pearl clutch and castigate us. But the ideas have seeded and will rise to the top over time. I guess we'd need to wait until "everyone knows that everyone knows", as Pinker puts it.
Where I am not that convinced here is that acceptance of hereditarianism will likely lead to more meritocratic societies. I really think that race communism would be the most likely outcome if it happened right now overnight. To me, the equality thesis isn't the stem of wokeness. I see the equality thesis as the motivated reasoning that upholds the equity thesis.
The deep desire is to not feel guilt and shame regarding one's own superiority. This is currently achieved by pretending that superiority doesn't exist (between groups, but also many liberal elites insist there is no such thing as talent or innate ability at the individual level even). It's also achieved by elites inventing ways in which groups are oppressed and then claiming membership of those groups.
If it is shown that superiority can be conferred genetically (I say this as if it hasn't been shown sufficiently ...), the desire to offset the guilt and shame only intensifies, providing more motivation to pursue equity unabashedly.
Hereditarianism is true, so it will naturally spread. Blank slatism will fade. But communism seems to be much more persistent. To truly win the hereditarian revolution we need to first ensure that communism is banished from elite circles, which requires that liberal, western, and elite guilt and shame are squashed. Otherwise this guilt and shame will just leverage race realism to enact harsher equity measures.
I suppose we just need to teach Nietzsche and Cofnas in high schools and we'll be fine.
In my view, the "communism" part is there because smart people recognize that avoidable suffering should be avoided. That is the point of "from each according to ability, to each according to need". The whole hang up occurs in negotiating the thoughts and feelings proximal to suffering. Resolving that might be tricky, but I don't see why we should deny or suppress natural human egalitarianism as a response, rather than finding ways to channel it more usefully and avoid its potentially harmful expressions.
To be clear, I am not a fan of actual communism, but in the essay, it was used to mean something more like egalitarianism. I am a fan of the latter, within reasonable limits.
As for all the shame and superiority stuff, in my experience, there are absolutely massive individual differences related to guilt and shame, and virtually none of the people I am close to who are woke or woke adjacent are doing the sort of quasi-sublimation you're talking about (although I have seen it). Most people I know have just been misled by educators their whole lives, are smart and high-trust, and never looked into the matter themselves, because the educators made a plausible case. I think you should update your psychological model in that direction.
The guilt and shame are subconscious drivers which make it much easier to adopt the views of woke educators. Admitting that guilt and shame are driving one's own wokeness is worse than not being woke at all (doing so reveals that wokeness is a self-serving worldview, which is the opposite of what it purports to be), so obviously it is suppressed and denied at the subconscious and conscious levels.
In other words, I think your friends that you think aren't driven by guilt and shame are just very good actors who fool primarily themselves and then you.
I reject your presupposition that unavoidable suffering should be avoided. That's utilitarian slop that is just accepted as dogma in elite circles but is clearly not true.
We evolved to minimise suffering among our close kinship. The "natural human egalitarianism" you speak of only applies to those with whom we share the most genetic material. Expanding this to all of humanity, or to all mammals/animals as some utilitarians do, is very far from being natural and is a distortion of our evolved morality.
If it is true that Norway, say, is not only richer in wealth but richer in beneficial genes than Somalia, what is the logical egalitarian response? If we reached the conclusion that Somalia, given every equal opportunity as Norway, will simply never be as wealthy or successful due to the genetic lottery, what is an egalitarian to do? It is avoidable suffering because Norway could just subsidise Somalia forever. Therefore should we implement said subsidy to avoid the suffering?
I take from your response that the things I think are "slop", that you understand the people I know better than I do, and that egalitarianism within "reasonable limits", "usefully channeled", and "[absent] harmful expressions" should be interpreted as Norwegians indefinitely subsidizing Somalians. I sincerely do not understand whether this was meant to be some sort of good faith engagement.
Okay sorry I’m being too assertive. Yes I do think utilitarianism is slop but it is the predominant ethic adopted by almost every westerner, particularly liberal ones.
I’m not saying I know your friends better than you do. I’m just suggesting that your friends are human—all too human. I may well be wrong here in my assessment of human psychology, as you suggest.
I think your worldview is a really good one tbh. But the problem I see is that the fundaments of it aren’t robust enough against slippery slopism and extremism. In my view that makes it not the optimal world view and a bit of a utopian ideal. I would love it if we could enact measured egalitarianism. The problem is that the guardrails that you and I would adhere to won’t be adhered to by everyone, and that your/our argument therefore becomes one of magnitude not of principle.
The egalitarian agrees with the communist in principle, but realises that in practice there are bad consequences if egalitarianism is taken to the extreme, so adheres to arbitrary rules of practical implementation. All I’m suggesting is that the superior worldview would not require such arbitrary guardrails to buffer extremism.
Re. utilitarianism, I think it mostly emerges among elites as a natural Schelling point morality, because it is universalist and pro-cooperation, and because elites are to some extent defined by the recognition that cooperation is generally positive sum. Maybe there is also an additional piece here that elites are rare and therefore must be cosmopolitan to coordinate in any number. In any case, I'll agree that neuroticism plays some role too, but we may disagree on the centrality, unhinged people on the internet aside.
I think utilitarianism can be pragmatically combined with your views about human nature by incorporating limits to the expansion and depth of ethical consideration of others, and by explicit negotiation of the social contract. That model turns public or political ethics into a primarily technocratic social engineering problem (which I'm a fan of, because I think we can solve technical problems), with the main alternative appearing to be the existing system of socio-political factionalism (which I am not a fan of). As for the slop, I'm not a shrimp-welfare proponent or a racial reparations proponent, but I think I'm a utilitarian in good standing nonetheless. Every ideology has its fringe. Do you especially disagree with any of this?
As for your observations about guard-rails and adherence, I agree, but I don't think they mean we need to rework the basic set of principles. Maybe we do. But usually, if one can convert a big problem into a series of incremental ones, and convert the incremental ones into technical institutional issues, rather than cultural issues, one can do a lot more to solve them (I'm almost sure you agree on that, so I'm saying it because I'm a little confused about your notions of arbitrariness and slippery slopes here, and where the conclusion to basically throw this stuff out is coming from). Here I'm channeling a bit of Scott Alexander's "Biology is mutable, culture is fixed" essay, which I agree with, and which is related. I tend to think that social and cultural phenomena are pretty much over-determined compared to everything else, so they provide a poor surface area for interventions. Granted, the science of institution building barely exists, but in my view, we have more serious knowledge on that matter (and it's more buffered from participation by bad actors and non-elites) than on social interventions or moral engineering at large (under which I'm including convincing people not to have egalitarian leanings, or convincing people who are not naturally egalitarian to be more so). Here, too, I'm curious if we're actually more on the same page than I initially thought?
Lastly, you could definitely object that there is an "adding epicycles" quality to the things I've said, and I would agree with you that a satisfying worldview would not ideally require a ton of this stuff. But I think that either "reality has a surprising amount of detail", as they say, or I'm just really bad at seeing the elegant solution here.
I'm not sure if I agree that cultural interventions are so unrealistic. I haven't read that Scott Alexander essay, but will. I might argue that widespread egalitarianism is a consequence only of constant and widespread social engineering. So I'd be calling for less social engineering, not more.
Regardless, you reasoning is tempting. Plenty for me to wrestle with there. Thanks.
“This looks bad, but the hereditarian has at least two aces up his sleeve.”
Hereditarianism has another third major ace up its sleeve: deep down, most people know, through lived experience and intuition, that the equality thesis is false. Liberals can claim otherwise all they want but when they move out from diverse neighbourhoods to more homogeneous ones, they know why they are doing it, at least sub-consciously. I am also always surprised by how candid many of my fellow French expats are - many of them from working class backgrounds - on why they left France (hint: it has nothing to do with high taxes), or how many feminist women who suffer from street harassment do not hesitate to clearly identify who is the typical harasser. There is a sizeable portion of the profesional-managerial class which dwells in an uncomfortable position of cognitive dissonance regarding this issue, and hereditarianism would scratch an itch most of them seem to feel acutely. These are the people you probably should target first, rather than college professors and NYT journalists.
This essay is a bit confusing. At the beginning, you present the "logic of wokism". Later, you talk about how many beliefs are not based on rational thought. Clearly, wokism falls into that category. So, wokism isn't based on that logic at all. It is a religion that is spread by indoctrination and protected by censorship.
I don't think most wokists even have those premises. They're not interested in equality. That's why "all lives matter" and "it's okay to be white" are hate speech. Wokists don't care about equality of outcomes on the basketball court. They don't mind that men do most of the dirty and dangerous jobs. Wokism is all about having fake empathy for the correct "victims". The "intellectual" elites are usually just surfing the crowd. Everyone has easy access to the evidence and arguments about race realism, but it remains a heresy.
The taboo on biological realism goes beyond race and sex. The rejection of eugenics is an example. Dawkins once made the obvious point that eugenics would work, and he got a huge backlash. It's even more taboo to say that eugenics is good or necessary to have a sustainable civilization. It's an obvious implication of evolutionary theory, but it's also a heresy.
The falseness or even absurdity of a religious belief can be feature, not a bug, because it sets apart the believers from everyone else. A Christian has to believe that God begat a son, who died on the cross for our sins. A wokist has to believe that a man can be a woman. A weird belief is like a funny hat or a dietary restriction: it defines a community of people who have adopted that meme.
Obviously, something has gone wrong if you believe (1). But *given* belief in (1) and (2), (3) follows logically. To make it analogous to wokism, both mainstream liberals and conservatives say they believe that all men are immortal, but conservatives deny that the man Socrates is immortal. Conservatives came to the right conclusion, but their beliefs are inconsistent.
Wokesters have a double standard: you can say "black lives matter" but not "white lives"; it's okay that blacks are overrepresented in the NBA but not that whites are overrepresented in hockey; etc. But there's a rationale for this. Blacks (or other underrepresented groups) deserve compensation for the injustice perpetrated against them. If they are overrepresented in a few areas, that makes up for being massively underrepresented in others. That's not a crazy position to take if you accept woke logic.
Yes, but they are deriving (1) from (3) and (2), not (3) from (1) and (2). And there is a (4) upstream.
It's not a chain of logic. It is a chain of motivation.
They need a moral emergency to signal virtue. So, they invent a moral emergency, using a standard formula, to justify their virtue signaling.
If you expose that their moral emergency is based on lies, they will get mad at you, because you are undermining their claim to virtue. They will say that you are part of the problem, because you are denying that the problem exists.
The mass graves hoax in Canada is a perfect example.
Wokists wanted something to signal about. Some "researcher" found anomalies in the ground near an old residential school (boarding school for native children, used for a long time to encourage assimilation). These anomalies could be tree roots from an old orchard. They could be old graves that have lost their markers over time. The former is more likely.
This information was reported as the discovery of a "mass grave of indigenous children", despite there being no evidence to support that claim. Years later, no bodies have been dug up. They have not excavated even a single anomaly, because they are afraid that they will debunk the hoax.
Now, the hoax is sacred. People have been fired from their jobs for questioning the existence of these supposed graves. It is called "residential school denialism". There was even a law proposed to make this "denialism" a crime.
I mean, even Wikipedia states that "As of September 2024, no human remains have been excavated or confirmed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site." which seems to indicate to me that this "hoax" is not as sacred as you suggest.
Flags were flown at half mast, a day of mourning was declared, churches were burned down. All because of anomalies in the ground, which are probably tree roots.
I don’t see that ‘eugenics is good’ is an obvious implication of evolutionary theory. Our uniquely social species evolved a repertoire of traits that exist on bell shaped distributions. In our highly cooperative species, it is the distribution of those traits that is adaptive. It seems more likely to me that eugenics would be similar to contraception, an example of evolutionary decoupling.
You have a false conception of eugenics, as selecting for a single trait (usually IQ), or selecting for a "master race". Eugenics is artificial selection to regulate the genome, and it selects for traits that make civilization work.
The simple implication of evolutionary theory is that selection is necessary to regulate the genome and the population. Normally, selection involves excess reproduction and premature death. In simple terms, it requires most children dying before they can reproduce. So, if we want to maintain a civilization with low child mortality, we need to regulate the population and genome ourselves, with selective reproduction.
Society does need people with different abilities, but having, say, more blind people, would not benefit society. Higher IQ is generally better, but we don't need everyone to be high IQ. So, we need eugenics that is based on social productivity and responsibility -- not selecting for a single type, not maximizing for a single trait. The essay explains how to do that.
Indeed if one looks at history more broadly, it is almost always the case that massive sociological and cultural shifts occur when the old "memes" lose the backing of a (especially literate) elite.
One example is the Norman Conquest of England and how radically it transformed the country even down to our day-to-day language. A mere quarter of words in Modern English come from the Germanic sources that characterized pretty much the entire language before 1066. It is estimated that only 3% of words in Old English came from sources other than those brought over in the 5th Century by the original Anglo-Saxon invaders, mostly Latin used for (mainly) liturgical purposes and a handful of the original Celtic language for place names.
The early Anglo-Saxons were so chauvinistic that even the "Amen" in prayers like the Lord's Prayer was translated in surviving copies to "Sothlice", meaning "truly"!
Yet, only one quarter of words from the English language is composed of Germanic sources today, and much of that is from the Norse language of the Vikings or later additions from the Dutch. The bulk of the language comes from French and Latin and this includes pretty much any word that sounds refined or starchy [1] . The reason for this, of course, is that pretty much all of the old Anglo-Saxon ruling class was slaughtered, exiled, or dispossessed of their wealth and standing by the conquering Norman French...and the handful of remaining nobles were soon married into Francophone families and had their children reared into the same milieu. Thereafter, English was only the language of illiterate peasants. Between the last writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Peterborough in 1154 and roughly the mid-14th Century, English virtually disappears from writing and when it does reappear, it is almost unrecognizable from what it previously was [2].
The moral of the story is that in the absence of stewardship by a literate elite, various memes are often difficult to keep alive regardless of how many people initially express them.
Another good example is the expansion and triumph of Christianity over the "pagan" creeds of the ancient world. To a large degree, the absence of a unified corpus (like the Bible) and even a formal priesthood in many cases made it difficult for the traditional faiths of the Roman world to ensure against the onslaught of the increasingly hardline and intolerant Christian Roman authorities. Emperor Julian, the last openly pagan emperor [3], tried apparently to make certain pagan beliefs into something like what we would call an "organized religion" akin to Indian Brahmins. Yet, it was widely resisted among PAGANS as well as Christians as they considered it to be imperial interference with their own way of connecting with the divine!
Subsequently, the ancient creeds gradually disappeared apart from remote holdouts in the countryside. The one noteworthy exception, of course, was Christianity's parent faith of Judaism. For the key reason why, Eric Hoffer provides a good answer in "The True Believer":
"The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis and their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the school and the book supplanted the temple and the fatherland. In any social order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold" (p. 136)
[1] - Even Modern Spanish is only about 8% Arabic in spite of the fact that the Arabs ruled various parts of the Iberian Peninsula for far longer (711 to 1492), had tremendous wealth and prestige and believed their language was literally the tongue through which He spoke to His Holy Prophet
[2] - There is even a concept called the Middle English Creole Hypothesis
[3] - Note my usage of the word "openly". There were several emperors afterwards that many suspect may have been crypto-pagans and I consider the Emperors Eugenius (392-394) and Anthemius (467 - 472) to be among the strongest candidates. There was also the powerful magister militum, Marcellanus of Dalmatia who WAS openly pagan as late as the 460s!
Race IQ isn't the ONLY thing Cofnas must push the woke smart-set to go hereditarian about. 1.) He also must rub their noses in the Putnam's Bowling Alone issue that white homogeneous economies have more "social capital" than with diversity. 2.) And that game theoretic identitarianism beats multiracial atomised individualism, for nation states. 1 and 2 are also hereditarian realism.
He can't because his tribalism won't allow him to. He feels much more comradery with a 135 IQ colleague who lived in India until a few years ago than people who have lived in his country for centuries but have an IQ of 100. He feels no loyalty or obligation to those people. Which is why his movement has no future.
" Which great difference in men's intellectuals, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking; or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use; or, as some think, in the natural differences of men's souls themselves; or some, or all of these together; it matters not here to examine: only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude, that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect than between some men and some beasts."
Everyone agrees that there is "great difference in men's intellectuals." Locke notes that "some think" there are "natural differences of men's souls," but (at least in this section) "it matters not here to examine."
I'm not convinced that Locke was a blank slatist in the sense of denying innate intelligence. His essay about blank slatism is about the recondite philosophical question of whether we are born with "concepts" or whether we learn them by experience. That's quite different from the question of whether individuals and groups vary in potential ability. Locke was an "empiricist" in the "empiricist vs. rationalist debate" and the "empiricists" were closer to modern science.
Furthermore, at the time he was writing, Virginia Amerindians were mostly nude savages. In the intervening centuries we've discovered that many Amerindians CAN become Christians and learn mathematics. So there is not equality in innate intelligence, but at the time Locke was writing there really were very large environmentally-caused differences. Amerindians today live in houses and they don't go around trying to hunt whites with spears.
The doctrine of innate racial equality of ability seems like a late 19th and 20th century corruption of liberalism, not something that was part of liberalism from the beginning.
This was a really good article and made some great points. The only thing that could be added is some more emphasis on the fervency of woke/progressive people's beliefs and values. Many have described it as religious in nature and it's hard not to disagree. I'm not sure what it would take to convince these people to abandon their ideology. What they would replace it with is another question. Advocating for an egalitarian world provides a sense of meaning and purpose. My assumption is that this would be very hard to let go of for many of these people.
Absolutely. I feel that most people on the left that are most vocal about woke beliefs need dragons to slay to find meaning. The Civil Rights era had laudable goals - and so many on the left wants to have their contribution to history. Fighting the Right is both easy and reinforcing - I believe if the meaning they search for can be redirected towards fighting divisiveness instead, there's hope.
The Equality Thesis isn't the whole story with Wokism.
For example, the US military has a problem with Chinese spying. One of the reasons is that the US military hires Chinese people with Chinese passports from China, believes they are 100% American if they've been in the country for 6 months, and gives them sensitive information. A Blank Slater would easily understand why a Chinese person who was raised in China might have some loyalty to China. Wokists are forbidden from understanding that.
In fact, logically consistent people who believe in the equality thesis should be MORE opposed to some forms of immigration than hereditarians are. If you really believed that culture is the only difference between Sweden and Somalia, then you would conclude that Somali culture is one of the worst, most destructive things on Earth, and ought to be eradicated. The people who really believe in the Equality Thesis are Sowellite conservatives.
Actually, I don't think that wokists would blame the condition of Somalia on Somali culture. Instead, they'd probably blame Somalia's lack of development on European colonialism, a lack of education, geography, and maybe some other things. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
There is indeed some legitimate truth for blaming Africa's lack of development on geography, but it doesn't explain everything. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race#geography
The extreme wokists would parrot some nonsense about colonialism, but Cofnas isn't talking about the extremists, he's talking about the average smart urban democrat who reads the NYT. Those people know colonialism isn't the source of Africa's poverty.
Right, I understand very well the kinds of people that Cofnas is talking about. I think you're familiar that I spent a lot of time arguing with him about his woke origins theory. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism, https://zerocontradictions.net/misc/nathan-cofnas-emails
But my point wasn't focusing on European colonialism in particular. My point was that when (intelligent) liberal elites (and wokists) assume the equality thesis, it doesn't necessarily follow that culture is responsible for racial disparities.
The liberal elites would blame environmental differences for racial disparities, not culture. Things like adequate food, water, education, safe neighborhoods, an unhampered past, geography, etc.
Geography is huge, especially since it makes the most sense out of all the things in that list. Tomas Pueyo's post was published 2-3 weeks ago and it instantly went viral because it offered an attractive environmental explanation for disparities between countries (and races). https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
There are also other popular liberals who blame geography for national and racial disparities, like Real Life Lore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8m95sCDEf0
Or Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO5mfbpq16A
For the most part, the audiences of those authors and video producers are very much apart of the higher-IQ liberal audience that Cofnas is talking about.
"Know"? But would they ever say so publicly? Would they vote accordingly?
If not, what is the implication of "knowing"?
Jinchao Wei was a permanent resident in America (not a citizen). He joined the Navy and was later recruited by the Chinese government to be a spy.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/sailor-accused-of-spying-on-u-s-navy-was-not-an-american-citizen
Yeah, check my note above. We actually need a clean-slate replacement of a massive chunk of the current elite class. And it needs to happen soon.
This is a fascinating and important debate. I feel a little awkward weighing in because I do not consider myself on the Right, partly for reasons outlined in this article, but I am strongly Anti-Left, so her goes:
I think that you are largely correct in the long run. The Left maintains its legitimacy because Anti-Hereditarian beliefs are the norm among college-educated professionals. The taboo against even considering Hereditarian is vital to keeping the educated in line.
The core identity of the Left is based in the belief that Inequality is immoral, and we will never get out of our problems until most of society gives up on the idea of creating Equality of anything beyond legal equality for individuals. This goal only seems possible if people ignore the science behind Hereditarianism and ignoring the continual failure of previous attempts by the Left to create Equality:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-central-moral-dilemma-of-the
I also agree that convincing elites to give up on the idea of Equality must be a central goal. A modern society cannot function without merit-based institutions, which will inevitably be led by elites. The Right simply does not have enough social capital to staff millions of bureaucratic positions in all our institutions.
The Right should also not be attacking Science. They should be attacking the ideological distortions placed on science, partly by government funding. The Right should fund biological research that will help us better understand the link between genes and human behavior, particularly dysfunctional behavior.
In the short run, however, I think the Rufo/Trump strategy of radically undermining the power of Leftist activists in the federal government and Red state governments, K-12 education, and public universities along with abolishing DEI, transparency laws, and eliminating funding for Leftist NGOs is essential.
A little bit differently than most on the Right, I think this strategy is fully compatible with the Federalist principles in the US Constitution and a new Originalist major in the US Supreme Court Court is rapidly undermining the legal bedrocks upon which an expansive federal administrative state have been based for the last century will have powerful ripple effects. Together, I think this will be a powerful step towards radically lowering the influence of the Woke within our institutions.
Institutions who are in a highly-competitive environment with merit-based hiring, firing and promotions simply cannot accommodate Woke demands without undermining institutional goals. Those that do will be steam-rollered by those that do not in the long run.
I also agree with what I think Rufo is saying that an excessive focus on race will help the Left and undermine both the Right and Hereditarianism. Genetic-based inequalities are far more pervasive than just race and even if everyone is convinced that racial inequalities are 100% caused by genes, this still leaves all the other 95% of inequalities. It also makes it very easy for college-educated to dismiss Hereditarianism as a cover for racism if Hereditarians largely focus on race. So a focus on race is self-defeating.
The focus should be on explaining individual inequalities WITHIN the same group (whether it is by race, gender, ethnicity or other) that should be the focus, because it is both more widespread and easier for elites and regular people to talk about.
There is also a very powerful argument against Heditarian Communism that you did not mention. A key weakness in the Leftist world view is their belief that the best way to help working class, poor, racial minorities, women, etc is with government programs to give them material benefits. In reality, long-term economic growth does far more to help everyone, including the working class, poor, racial minorities, women, etc. If the Right does not openly embrace that as a prime goal, it will likely never win. That is a goal that the vast majority of voters and elites can get behind.
So a winning strategy for the Right is a combination of:
1. Undermining the power of the Left with Federalism etc that I explained above.
2. A focus on Hereditarianism were the focus is on explaining all types of inequalities, not just race.
3. Promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth to give voters an incentive to vote for the Right, even if they are a little skeptical of #1 and #2 above.
"Institutions who are in a highly-competitive environment with merit-based hiring, firing and promotions simply cannot accommodate Woke demands without undermining institutional goals. Those that do will be steam-rollered by those that do not in the long run."
Up to now, the reverse has been true. How elite law schools have remained competitive while accommodating some amount of woke demands was shown in Richard Sanders' Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in Law Schools _chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/01/Sander.pdf) in 2004 (see esp. pp. 400-414). Basically, they took the strongest students they could get within each race, with de facto quotas for each race. Since 2002, affirmative action has been a condition of law school accreditation, but even before that, all or nearly all law schools practiced it aggressively. And as long as they all did it, none of them were damaged by taking a certain percentage of weaker URM students.
At the law firm level, there is a voluntary "McCormick" certification that a firm can obtain by hiring and promoting certain levels of women and minorities. It's voluntary, but just about everyone seeks it. Every elite law firm in America is committed to diversity.
Obviously accreditation requirements and certifications are a guard against cheating -- no school or law firm can boost itself by no longer admitting/hiring URMs. But it's not clear that the guard is even needed. If Harvard went to race-neutral admissions tomorrow, it would admit few or no black students, and I think there would be a huge backlash against that, not least among Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution. Efforts among conservatives to create competing educational institutions -- Bari Weiss's university, Rufo's New College -- have mostly been disasters, because the "conservative" brand is toxic in education. That's Cofnas 101.
Having gone to one, I don't see making any headway in changing elite private universities, which is why I did not mention them in my comment. It is much better to focus on other institutions, particularly the federal government and Red states.
You are correct about some of these details, but the competition within these organizations is more between individuals rather than truly transparent competition between institutions.
No, elite private schools imposed DEI rules that are not based on merit and are highly insulated by massive endowments. Plus, they receive billions of dollars in government subsidies.
The Prestige game insulates them from true competition. They are perceived as better, not because they offer better education, but because they can enroll the best students. They enroll the best students, because they are perceived as better (and round and round).
Plus, they thrive on a lack of transparency. They keep their admissions policies secret, while they claim to make decisions purely based on academics.
Voluntary DEI is illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and should be prosecuted.
Starting a new institution, particularly a university, is always hard. I would expect most to fail. UAT seems to be doing very well.
Why should I care if "Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution?"
Do you have an alternative that will work faster than the progress we have seen over the last 10 months?
"The Prestige game insulates them from true competition. They are perceived as better, not because they offer better education, but because they can enroll the best students. They enroll the best students, because they are perceived as better (and round and round)."
Well, yes. Having the best students makes you the best school. And that is rational, since the quality of its student body is the most important asset that a school can offer a prospective student. Right now, a strong and visible commitment to racial and ethnic diversity is a necessary concomitant to elite status.
Law firms are not insulated from competition, but they are as committed to diversity as any university, and broadly speaking the most prestigious and profitable firms tend to be the most visibly committed to diversity. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, including where the most profitable law firms are located, but one major reason is that incoming young lawyers demand it.
"Why should I care if "Harvard's non-black admittees, who would be horrified to find themselves at such a "racist" institution?""
Because that attitude strengthens wokeness at elite institutions.
"Do you have an alternative that will work faster than the progress we have seen over the last 10 months?"
I'm more interested in permanent progress than headlines, and I don't like the administration's focus on antisemitism, a wasting asset. But I don't mean to carp, any progress is welcome.
I don't see you offering any solutions. You are merely describing the problem. We already have plenty of that...
Think of my proposal as a Containment scheme, like what was developed during the Cold War.
We can never eliminate dangerous ideologies, but we can contain their negative impact on society. If they cannot spread enough to eliminate transparent, non-violent competition, the ideologies will eventually destroy themselves because they cannot actually change material reality in their desired direction.
With the proper Containment policies, time is on our side.
I’m definitely not offering any solutions, because I don’t think they exist. But pointing out the flaws in others’ solutions is still providing a service.
But you have not pointed out the flaws in my proposed solution or showed why current attempts in 2025 are futile.
Black-pill conservatism is worse than the Woke. Choose another path.
> They should be attacking the ideological distortions placed on science, partly by government funding. The Right should fund biological research that will help us better understand the link between genes and human behavior, particularly dysfunctional behavior.
What do you mean by the second sentence there? If you mean rich Right-wingers should fund that science, I agree. If you mean the right should support the NIH funding said research, I disagree for the reason given in the first sentence above.
I don't know how I can rephrase the second sentence any better. It seems very clear. the Right should support via NIH and via other institutions.
The NIH should absolutely fund research on the genetic and other causes of diseases and dysfunctional behavior. The first and second sentences do not contradict at all. They reinforce each other.
I have no problem with other institutions funding genetic research, but it would be ridiculous for the NIH not to be involved. The NIH funding can be used to overcome the ideological distortions, particularly by eliminating DEI requirements and requiring datasets are available via open sources that any researcher can access, regardless of whether or not the government funds it.
In dependent of DEI having a single source dominate funding is not good for science. It tends to lead a premature forced consensus on a possibly false theory. See the Alzheimer's debacle for a recent example.
I never claimed that we should have "a single source dominate funding." The NIH funding something does not preclude other organizations from doing the same.
Prohibiting NIH funding on the genetic and other causes of diseases and dysfunctional behavior would be a great way to help the Left. They have already established many prohibitions on genetic research by labelling it as racist. Those should be repealed.
Funding of genetic research is the single biggest thing to forward Hereditarianism, if the theory is correct. And if it is not correct, then we can learn from that as well. But the Left is trying to shut down that research.
Why would you support their efforts?
And eliminating DEI requirements and requiring datasets are available via open sources that any researcher can access (both of which I already mentioned) is a key part of enabling other organizations to do so.
I’ve become more convinced to your view. One of my friends is like you in that he has the patience and focus to go through every single potential counter argument and rebut it in an engaging way. I would definitely get bored and, even if I forced myself, I would do crappier, less engaged work. I think there’s a bit of jealousy on the part of people like me towards people like you, so we cope by being overly skeptical of the battle of ideas.
You've created a very good article, but I want to point out some important facts:
Indians actually support the left, advocate for socialism, anti-white discrimination, etc:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-case-against-indian-immigration?triedRedirect=true
https://knightsofthegreenshield.substack.com/p/riding-the-tiger-why-the-anglosphere
Migrants retain their views even through generations:
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-assimilation-myth
Overall, Indian immigration to the US will lead to a strengthening of the left and development like in Canada.
In addition, the fact of "human biological diversity" is not only the difference in IQ, but also the innate ethnocentric nature of people, especially non-Western nations.
Therefore, it is quite rational for any political right-wing party that believes in social Darwinism, the free market, and love for white people to oppose mass Indian immigration to the United States.
I doubt there is some innate ethnocentrism. Clannishness, maybe, but the ethnic level is too high up and abstract. The most virulent ethnocentrist nation can become the most woke.
We must not essentialize EVERY human behavior down to the genetic level.
It is fascinating as a Singaporean to read this. As at 2025, Singapore is run by a high functioning cognitive elite, with some “woke” concessions of late. The late LKY was notorious for being an enthusiast for eugenics and “gifted” education programs (check out the “graduate mothers scheme” that he tried to implement in the 1980s). The current crop of elites who run most things in Singapore today are a direct product of his hereditarian educational and immigration policies, some of which are still in place. Really worth discussing if you have the opportunity, methinks!
I think if this is really your belief, you need to stop talking about the meta argument (whether anti-wokists should push hereditarianism) and start creating as many high quality arguments that hereditarianism is true as you can. You seem to assume that any intelligent person would agree that hereditarianism is true if they looked at the data, but nothing I’ve seen has been that bullet proof. And there are plenty of good left wing arguments that at least add a considerable amount of doubt to the hereditarianism thesis. (Sasha Gusev provides some arguments for example.) I know plenty of smart people who are familiar with at least some of the data that don’t even think IQ is a very good measure.
Right now, the easily available evidence and argument online simply isn’t of a high enough quality (in my mind) to convince a committed leftist that hereditarianism is true. Moreover, it is not strong enough for someone who is on the fence or exploring these ideas to open themselves up to social banishment by even raising this type of argument with friends or family as a possibility, let alone raise it as true. Maybe if you considered both sides and had to choose in a safe environment, the evidence would fall in hereditarianism’s favor, but given the immense taboo around the subject that simply isn’t enough. If you want people to become hereditarians in the current social / political environment, you first need to work as hard as you can to craft a near bulletproof argument that hereditarianism is true. I just haven’t seen anything like that yet. Until someone can go into an argument where they know they will be branded an extreme racist safe in the knowledge that the facts are *definitely* on their side, your approach simply isn’t going to work.
The most high quality while concise summary of the evidence in favour of hereditarianism comes from this short paper https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2021-warne-2.pdf "Between Group Mean Differences in Intelligence in the United States Are >0% Genetically Caused: Five Converging Lines of Evidence " by Russell Warne.
Have you read it?
What do you think are the most convincing counter arguments from the left wing side?
Sasha Gusev only attacks one of the lines of evidence, namely the fact that blacks have lower polygenic scores for IQ than whites (and north east asians have higher) .
He generally steers well clear of talking about earlier research which contradict his favoured explanation for IQ gaps, that parental education and economic status causes the IQ gaps.
This is what people thought decades ago , but when they compared black and white people of the same socioeconomic and educational upbringing, they still found that blacks people had lower average IQ.
see https://the-boomer-tribune.medium.com/human-racial-and-ethnic-populations-and-differences-in-iq-scores-3cdd2b5cabe section : “Controlling for Socioeconomics” Does Not Really Change the Gaps
and more here https://reasonwithoutrestraint.com/poor-environmental-explanations-of-the-gap/
As a result , environmentalists defaulted to racism as an x-factor explanation for why blacks of equally affluent and educated upbringings did worse than whites, but an x factor would violent measurement invariance.which has been found, and logically, racism isn't like a magic spell that makes blacks perform worse. If racism does cause worse black IQ it has to cause it through proximate material causes like racism causing worse job opportunities causing childhood socioeconomic deprivation causing lower IQ. I think James Flynn made this argument somewhere against x factor "racism" explanations of the IQ gap.
I have actually read the Russell Warne piece before, but thanks for sharing again. I will look at the other pieces. I appreciate your engagement.
Maybe my complaint is that the debate generally ends up revolving around relatively complex statistical questions where it is hard for a layman to distinguish between the two sides’ arguments. Someone opposed to the hereditarian thesis can then cite a left wing academic who engages with the statistics in a way that is hard for the layman to refute, again opening them up to charges of racism without a bulletproof argument they can fall back on.
Yes, I think herediterians tend to overstate the strength of their case.
1) They have relatively strong evidence for American Black population, where I would say Occam's razor would favour the "mostly hereditary" explanation... but then they tend to make generic sweeping statements about Africans (and countries of the world in general) which are simply not supported by strong data at all.
2) Herediterians had hoped that genome-wide association studies would prove their case once and for all, but they did the opposite, they kind of contradicted them (missing heritability paradox).
3) In general, the fact that Africans have significantly higher genetic diversity than any other population group globally (due to founder effect) also makes it very doubtful to me that they can be so swiftly categorised under the umbrella of "blacks" with a (near) normal distribution of traits (such as IQ).
A rebuttal to your point 3 would be that while africans have high genetic diversity they share quite generally exposure to inbreeding historically and currently which is known to lower iq at the population level! There are also adoption research showing that biological parent iq but not adoptor parents predict child iq,there is all sorts of research strenghtening the view that race iq differences are genetic, academics claiming the contrary have either not seem it or they have a moral agenda which fears racism.Academic papers have been written openly about not letting the public know about group iq differences and for ceasing to research the topic!
The Cofnas model of the psychology surrounding this pretty much perfectly describes my social milieu. This may not be surprising, since we have a lot of overlap.
In particular, a lot of comments below take issue with NC's characterization of the elite, but I think he hit the nail on the head with the projection point. Contrary to what I see conservatives say in various forums, my experience all indicates that high trust, high achieving people are simply misled by their elders, and end up believing a (relatively) plausible story about history and race relations. In most cases, the elders themselves don't even know they are lying. It's not like the equality thesis was rare among elites 40 years ago.
Of course there is some room for conspiratorial suppression-of-information thinking here, since it is plainly true that people react stubbornly and confrontationally when you challenge their central beliefs. But "people are actually just sincerely wrong" is pretty obviously the main thing going on. I've frankly been confused that NC keeps trying to persuade people of this, but I guess it comes from my lack of contact with conservatives re this topic.
My experience with left of center people is that there are intelligent high trust people who have curious minds who get guarded by others. You challenge the view and the curious mind is listening, then the guard hears something wrong and they morally shame and start flinging shit all over and actually cause social trauma in order to shut it down and make the curious mind afraid of the topic so that they and everyone else try to avoid it in the future.
Yeah, I see this stuff too.
I also agree with the conservative story that the left is generally pretty neurotic, which I think plays a role in this type of thing. I'm not sure I have much of a theory for the "guard" role here beyond that, though. Immaturity, which obviously also afflicts many people their entire lives, seems to be a part of the story. But even granting that, the sense of threat from disagreement and the misunderstanding of how to respond productively still both seem strange to me. Maybe they're just manifestations of general social incompetence or underdevelopment or something.
Its a war and they chose a side that is built on faulty foundations. So the truth is dangerous.
I don't agree with everything that you write, but I would say that this is the best post that you've released all year. Well done!
You are right to criticize Rufo for not promoting hereditarianism. However, I think that he and his audience lack the cognitive capacity and desire to understand why hereditarianism is important.
Rufo is not an intellectual. Indeed, he lacks the ability to engage with ideas in a serious way. His response to his post was to hurl a bunch of ad hominems at me: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1976711214777745625
There's a chance you may want to skip existing elites alltogether. All the normie shows use ''had the highest recorded IQ in class or whatever" as a synonym for this guy's really smart and gonna be a big player. Just switch IQ for SAT. And make all SAT scores public and searchable. Do the same with at least all government employee salaries. On the same website. Everyone will search their classmates, notice the less capable ones that got further ahead for *reasons* and you'll have the energy needed to get something functional going.
Have a reality tv show where normie men with a week's training beat army women at airsoft.
Then do the same for high SAT v. low SAT (Is there data on the correlation between IQ (I mean SAT) and marksmanship?)
Normies understand that successful fighters are just better, in the same sense they admire Trump despite him calling himself better because, yeah lol he's rich and bangs supermodels, of course he is.
Then declare that for high IQ graduates batchelor's should really only be two govt funded years. But they must be psychologically healthy (ie. lift weights/do sports). And why can't you do law or medical school straight out of high school on the basis of your LSAT or MCAT again? Bring back LLBs. Also, any firm with government contracts MUST NOT DISCRIMINATE! Govt spending is 26% of GDP? Well, well, well.
----
A Loyal American Elite before the Trump admin is over. And one with the revolutionary zeal needed to overthrow the current order.
In GB, you go to lawschool directly from highschool. Law is a trade. I enjoyed it for that reason. College was directionless and kind of humiliating, being an average looking White male.
Superb essay.
Firstly, I just don't get Rufo's opposition to what you're doing here. It's obvious that the war of ideas is the most important war to be waging, and it's also obvious to me that the war is being won slowly but surely. It will most likely be a generational thing, as you touch on in the essay. Most of my elite gen Z friends acknowledge hereditarianism is obviously true. We just don't talk about it openly because gen X elites wouldn't get it and millennial elites would pearl clutch and castigate us. But the ideas have seeded and will rise to the top over time. I guess we'd need to wait until "everyone knows that everyone knows", as Pinker puts it.
Where I am not that convinced here is that acceptance of hereditarianism will likely lead to more meritocratic societies. I really think that race communism would be the most likely outcome if it happened right now overnight. To me, the equality thesis isn't the stem of wokeness. I see the equality thesis as the motivated reasoning that upholds the equity thesis.
The deep desire is to not feel guilt and shame regarding one's own superiority. This is currently achieved by pretending that superiority doesn't exist (between groups, but also many liberal elites insist there is no such thing as talent or innate ability at the individual level even). It's also achieved by elites inventing ways in which groups are oppressed and then claiming membership of those groups.
If it is shown that superiority can be conferred genetically (I say this as if it hasn't been shown sufficiently ...), the desire to offset the guilt and shame only intensifies, providing more motivation to pursue equity unabashedly.
Hereditarianism is true, so it will naturally spread. Blank slatism will fade. But communism seems to be much more persistent. To truly win the hereditarian revolution we need to first ensure that communism is banished from elite circles, which requires that liberal, western, and elite guilt and shame are squashed. Otherwise this guilt and shame will just leverage race realism to enact harsher equity measures.
I suppose we just need to teach Nietzsche and Cofnas in high schools and we'll be fine.
In my view, the "communism" part is there because smart people recognize that avoidable suffering should be avoided. That is the point of "from each according to ability, to each according to need". The whole hang up occurs in negotiating the thoughts and feelings proximal to suffering. Resolving that might be tricky, but I don't see why we should deny or suppress natural human egalitarianism as a response, rather than finding ways to channel it more usefully and avoid its potentially harmful expressions.
To be clear, I am not a fan of actual communism, but in the essay, it was used to mean something more like egalitarianism. I am a fan of the latter, within reasonable limits.
As for all the shame and superiority stuff, in my experience, there are absolutely massive individual differences related to guilt and shame, and virtually none of the people I am close to who are woke or woke adjacent are doing the sort of quasi-sublimation you're talking about (although I have seen it). Most people I know have just been misled by educators their whole lives, are smart and high-trust, and never looked into the matter themselves, because the educators made a plausible case. I think you should update your psychological model in that direction.
The guilt and shame are subconscious drivers which make it much easier to adopt the views of woke educators. Admitting that guilt and shame are driving one's own wokeness is worse than not being woke at all (doing so reveals that wokeness is a self-serving worldview, which is the opposite of what it purports to be), so obviously it is suppressed and denied at the subconscious and conscious levels.
In other words, I think your friends that you think aren't driven by guilt and shame are just very good actors who fool primarily themselves and then you.
I reject your presupposition that unavoidable suffering should be avoided. That's utilitarian slop that is just accepted as dogma in elite circles but is clearly not true.
We evolved to minimise suffering among our close kinship. The "natural human egalitarianism" you speak of only applies to those with whom we share the most genetic material. Expanding this to all of humanity, or to all mammals/animals as some utilitarians do, is very far from being natural and is a distortion of our evolved morality.
If it is true that Norway, say, is not only richer in wealth but richer in beneficial genes than Somalia, what is the logical egalitarian response? If we reached the conclusion that Somalia, given every equal opportunity as Norway, will simply never be as wealthy or successful due to the genetic lottery, what is an egalitarian to do? It is avoidable suffering because Norway could just subsidise Somalia forever. Therefore should we implement said subsidy to avoid the suffering?
I take from your response that the things I think are "slop", that you understand the people I know better than I do, and that egalitarianism within "reasonable limits", "usefully channeled", and "[absent] harmful expressions" should be interpreted as Norwegians indefinitely subsidizing Somalians. I sincerely do not understand whether this was meant to be some sort of good faith engagement.
Okay sorry I’m being too assertive. Yes I do think utilitarianism is slop but it is the predominant ethic adopted by almost every westerner, particularly liberal ones.
I’m not saying I know your friends better than you do. I’m just suggesting that your friends are human—all too human. I may well be wrong here in my assessment of human psychology, as you suggest.
I think your worldview is a really good one tbh. But the problem I see is that the fundaments of it aren’t robust enough against slippery slopism and extremism. In my view that makes it not the optimal world view and a bit of a utopian ideal. I would love it if we could enact measured egalitarianism. The problem is that the guardrails that you and I would adhere to won’t be adhered to by everyone, and that your/our argument therefore becomes one of magnitude not of principle.
The egalitarian agrees with the communist in principle, but realises that in practice there are bad consequences if egalitarianism is taken to the extreme, so adheres to arbitrary rules of practical implementation. All I’m suggesting is that the superior worldview would not require such arbitrary guardrails to buffer extremism.
Ok, thanks for the thoughtful response.
Re. utilitarianism, I think it mostly emerges among elites as a natural Schelling point morality, because it is universalist and pro-cooperation, and because elites are to some extent defined by the recognition that cooperation is generally positive sum. Maybe there is also an additional piece here that elites are rare and therefore must be cosmopolitan to coordinate in any number. In any case, I'll agree that neuroticism plays some role too, but we may disagree on the centrality, unhinged people on the internet aside.
I think utilitarianism can be pragmatically combined with your views about human nature by incorporating limits to the expansion and depth of ethical consideration of others, and by explicit negotiation of the social contract. That model turns public or political ethics into a primarily technocratic social engineering problem (which I'm a fan of, because I think we can solve technical problems), with the main alternative appearing to be the existing system of socio-political factionalism (which I am not a fan of). As for the slop, I'm not a shrimp-welfare proponent or a racial reparations proponent, but I think I'm a utilitarian in good standing nonetheless. Every ideology has its fringe. Do you especially disagree with any of this?
As for your observations about guard-rails and adherence, I agree, but I don't think they mean we need to rework the basic set of principles. Maybe we do. But usually, if one can convert a big problem into a series of incremental ones, and convert the incremental ones into technical institutional issues, rather than cultural issues, one can do a lot more to solve them (I'm almost sure you agree on that, so I'm saying it because I'm a little confused about your notions of arbitrariness and slippery slopes here, and where the conclusion to basically throw this stuff out is coming from). Here I'm channeling a bit of Scott Alexander's "Biology is mutable, culture is fixed" essay, which I agree with, and which is related. I tend to think that social and cultural phenomena are pretty much over-determined compared to everything else, so they provide a poor surface area for interventions. Granted, the science of institution building barely exists, but in my view, we have more serious knowledge on that matter (and it's more buffered from participation by bad actors and non-elites) than on social interventions or moral engineering at large (under which I'm including convincing people not to have egalitarian leanings, or convincing people who are not naturally egalitarian to be more so). Here, too, I'm curious if we're actually more on the same page than I initially thought?
Lastly, you could definitely object that there is an "adding epicycles" quality to the things I've said, and I would agree with you that a satisfying worldview would not ideally require a ton of this stuff. But I think that either "reality has a surprising amount of detail", as they say, or I'm just really bad at seeing the elegant solution here.
I'm not sure if I agree that cultural interventions are so unrealistic. I haven't read that Scott Alexander essay, but will. I might argue that widespread egalitarianism is a consequence only of constant and widespread social engineering. So I'd be calling for less social engineering, not more.
Regardless, you reasoning is tempting. Plenty for me to wrestle with there. Thanks.
“This looks bad, but the hereditarian has at least two aces up his sleeve.”
Hereditarianism has another third major ace up its sleeve: deep down, most people know, through lived experience and intuition, that the equality thesis is false. Liberals can claim otherwise all they want but when they move out from diverse neighbourhoods to more homogeneous ones, they know why they are doing it, at least sub-consciously. I am also always surprised by how candid many of my fellow French expats are - many of them from working class backgrounds - on why they left France (hint: it has nothing to do with high taxes), or how many feminist women who suffer from street harassment do not hesitate to clearly identify who is the typical harasser. There is a sizeable portion of the profesional-managerial class which dwells in an uncomfortable position of cognitive dissonance regarding this issue, and hereditarianism would scratch an itch most of them seem to feel acutely. These are the people you probably should target first, rather than college professors and NYT journalists.
This essay is a bit confusing. At the beginning, you present the "logic of wokism". Later, you talk about how many beliefs are not based on rational thought. Clearly, wokism falls into that category. So, wokism isn't based on that logic at all. It is a religion that is spread by indoctrination and protected by censorship.
I don't think most wokists even have those premises. They're not interested in equality. That's why "all lives matter" and "it's okay to be white" are hate speech. Wokists don't care about equality of outcomes on the basketball court. They don't mind that men do most of the dirty and dangerous jobs. Wokism is all about having fake empathy for the correct "victims". The "intellectual" elites are usually just surfing the crowd. Everyone has easy access to the evidence and arguments about race realism, but it remains a heresy.
The taboo on biological realism goes beyond race and sex. The rejection of eugenics is an example. Dawkins once made the obvious point that eugenics would work, and he got a huge backlash. It's even more taboo to say that eugenics is good or necessary to have a sustainable civilization. It's an obvious implication of evolutionary theory, but it's also a heresy.
The falseness or even absurdity of a religious belief can be feature, not a bug, because it sets apart the believers from everyone else. A Christian has to believe that God begat a son, who died on the cross for our sins. A wokist has to believe that a man can be a woman. A weird belief is like a funny hat or a dietary restriction: it defines a community of people who have adopted that meme.
(1) All men are immortal.
(2) Socrates is a man.
(3) Therefore, Socrates is immortal.
Obviously, something has gone wrong if you believe (1). But *given* belief in (1) and (2), (3) follows logically. To make it analogous to wokism, both mainstream liberals and conservatives say they believe that all men are immortal, but conservatives deny that the man Socrates is immortal. Conservatives came to the right conclusion, but their beliefs are inconsistent.
Wokesters have a double standard: you can say "black lives matter" but not "white lives"; it's okay that blacks are overrepresented in the NBA but not that whites are overrepresented in hockey; etc. But there's a rationale for this. Blacks (or other underrepresented groups) deserve compensation for the injustice perpetrated against them. If they are overrepresented in a few areas, that makes up for being massively underrepresented in others. That's not a crazy position to take if you accept woke logic.
Yes, but they are deriving (1) from (3) and (2), not (3) from (1) and (2). And there is a (4) upstream.
It's not a chain of logic. It is a chain of motivation.
They need a moral emergency to signal virtue. So, they invent a moral emergency, using a standard formula, to justify their virtue signaling.
If you expose that their moral emergency is based on lies, they will get mad at you, because you are undermining their claim to virtue. They will say that you are part of the problem, because you are denying that the problem exists.
The mass graves hoax in Canada is a perfect example.
Wokists wanted something to signal about. Some "researcher" found anomalies in the ground near an old residential school (boarding school for native children, used for a long time to encourage assimilation). These anomalies could be tree roots from an old orchard. They could be old graves that have lost their markers over time. The former is more likely.
This information was reported as the discovery of a "mass grave of indigenous children", despite there being no evidence to support that claim. Years later, no bodies have been dug up. They have not excavated even a single anomaly, because they are afraid that they will debunk the hoax.
Now, the hoax is sacred. People have been fired from their jobs for questioning the existence of these supposed graves. It is called "residential school denialism". There was even a law proposed to make this "denialism" a crime.
The truth doesn't matter to these people.
I mean, even Wikipedia states that "As of September 2024, no human remains have been excavated or confirmed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site." which seems to indicate to me that this "hoax" is not as sacred as you suggest.
Flags were flown at half mast, a day of mourning was declared, churches were burned down. All because of anomalies in the ground, which are probably tree roots.
Look at how it was reported: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/28/canada-remains-indigenous-children-mass-graves
Yes, it is a hoax, and it has become a sacred belief.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/residential-school-denialism-explainer-1.7485959
I don’t see that ‘eugenics is good’ is an obvious implication of evolutionary theory. Our uniquely social species evolved a repertoire of traits that exist on bell shaped distributions. In our highly cooperative species, it is the distribution of those traits that is adaptive. It seems more likely to me that eugenics would be similar to contraception, an example of evolutionary decoupling.
You have a false conception of eugenics, as selecting for a single trait (usually IQ), or selecting for a "master race". Eugenics is artificial selection to regulate the genome, and it selects for traits that make civilization work.
The simple implication of evolutionary theory is that selection is necessary to regulate the genome and the population. Normally, selection involves excess reproduction and premature death. In simple terms, it requires most children dying before they can reproduce. So, if we want to maintain a civilization with low child mortality, we need to regulate the population and genome ourselves, with selective reproduction.
Here's an essay on the topic, if you're interested: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2017/11/dysgenics-overpopulation-and.html
Society does need people with different abilities, but having, say, more blind people, would not benefit society. Higher IQ is generally better, but we don't need everyone to be high IQ. So, we need eugenics that is based on social productivity and responsibility -- not selecting for a single type, not maximizing for a single trait. The essay explains how to do that.
Indeed if one looks at history more broadly, it is almost always the case that massive sociological and cultural shifts occur when the old "memes" lose the backing of a (especially literate) elite.
One example is the Norman Conquest of England and how radically it transformed the country even down to our day-to-day language. A mere quarter of words in Modern English come from the Germanic sources that characterized pretty much the entire language before 1066. It is estimated that only 3% of words in Old English came from sources other than those brought over in the 5th Century by the original Anglo-Saxon invaders, mostly Latin used for (mainly) liturgical purposes and a handful of the original Celtic language for place names.
https://sjquillen.medium.com/what-was-old-english-like-part-i-blithering-with-beowulf-b36f528f1cd8
The early Anglo-Saxons were so chauvinistic that even the "Amen" in prayers like the Lord's Prayer was translated in surviving copies to "Sothlice", meaning "truly"!
Yet, only one quarter of words from the English language is composed of Germanic sources today, and much of that is from the Norse language of the Vikings or later additions from the Dutch. The bulk of the language comes from French and Latin and this includes pretty much any word that sounds refined or starchy [1] . The reason for this, of course, is that pretty much all of the old Anglo-Saxon ruling class was slaughtered, exiled, or dispossessed of their wealth and standing by the conquering Norman French...and the handful of remaining nobles were soon married into Francophone families and had their children reared into the same milieu. Thereafter, English was only the language of illiterate peasants. Between the last writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Peterborough in 1154 and roughly the mid-14th Century, English virtually disappears from writing and when it does reappear, it is almost unrecognizable from what it previously was [2].
The moral of the story is that in the absence of stewardship by a literate elite, various memes are often difficult to keep alive regardless of how many people initially express them.
Another good example is the expansion and triumph of Christianity over the "pagan" creeds of the ancient world. To a large degree, the absence of a unified corpus (like the Bible) and even a formal priesthood in many cases made it difficult for the traditional faiths of the Roman world to ensure against the onslaught of the increasingly hardline and intolerant Christian Roman authorities. Emperor Julian, the last openly pagan emperor [3], tried apparently to make certain pagan beliefs into something like what we would call an "organized religion" akin to Indian Brahmins. Yet, it was widely resisted among PAGANS as well as Christians as they considered it to be imperial interference with their own way of connecting with the divine!
Subsequently, the ancient creeds gradually disappeared apart from remote holdouts in the countryside. The one noteworthy exception, of course, was Christianity's parent faith of Judaism. For the key reason why, Eric Hoffer provides a good answer in "The True Believer":
"The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis and their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the school and the book supplanted the temple and the fatherland. In any social order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold" (p. 136)
https://archive.org/details/the-true-believer-eric-hoffer_202304/page/136/mode/2up?q=%22Jewish+men+of+words%22
[1] - Even Modern Spanish is only about 8% Arabic in spite of the fact that the Arabs ruled various parts of the Iberian Peninsula for far longer (711 to 1492), had tremendous wealth and prestige and believed their language was literally the tongue through which He spoke to His Holy Prophet
[2] - There is even a concept called the Middle English Creole Hypothesis
[3] - Note my usage of the word "openly". There were several emperors afterwards that many suspect may have been crypto-pagans and I consider the Emperors Eugenius (392-394) and Anthemius (467 - 472) to be among the strongest candidates. There was also the powerful magister militum, Marcellanus of Dalmatia who WAS openly pagan as late as the 460s!
Race IQ isn't the ONLY thing Cofnas must push the woke smart-set to go hereditarian about. 1.) He also must rub their noses in the Putnam's Bowling Alone issue that white homogeneous economies have more "social capital" than with diversity. 2.) And that game theoretic identitarianism beats multiracial atomised individualism, for nation states. 1 and 2 are also hereditarian realism.
He can't because his tribalism won't allow him to. He feels much more comradery with a 135 IQ colleague who lived in India until a few years ago than people who have lived in his country for centuries but have an IQ of 100. He feels no loyalty or obligation to those people. Which is why his movement has no future.
" Which great difference in men's intellectuals, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking; or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use; or, as some think, in the natural differences of men's souls themselves; or some, or all of these together; it matters not here to examine: only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude, that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect than between some men and some beasts."
-John Locke
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/439/locke0420.htm
Everyone agrees that there is "great difference in men's intellectuals." Locke notes that "some think" there are "natural differences of men's souls," but (at least in this section) "it matters not here to examine."
I'm not convinced that Locke was a blank slatist in the sense of denying innate intelligence. His essay about blank slatism is about the recondite philosophical question of whether we are born with "concepts" or whether we learn them by experience. That's quite different from the question of whether individuals and groups vary in potential ability. Locke was an "empiricist" in the "empiricist vs. rationalist debate" and the "empiricists" were closer to modern science.
Furthermore, at the time he was writing, Virginia Amerindians were mostly nude savages. In the intervening centuries we've discovered that many Amerindians CAN become Christians and learn mathematics. So there is not equality in innate intelligence, but at the time Locke was writing there really were very large environmentally-caused differences. Amerindians today live in houses and they don't go around trying to hunt whites with spears.
The doctrine of innate racial equality of ability seems like a late 19th and 20th century corruption of liberalism, not something that was part of liberalism from the beginning.