See this post from April 2024 for what might be considered a corollary to the ideas contained within.
I’ll tell you why I’m disillusioned with politics and ideology, both progressive and conservative (aka slow progressive): they’ve ruined meaning.
First, they ruined religious meaning, divorcing spirituality and morality from every aspect of life. Second, they reduced everything to economics, dollars and cents. Money equals morality, and one’s worth in life is based on how much they can contribute to the GDP. Consumerism was a part of this bargain, substituting crass materialism for deeper spiritual meaning. Your work became your life . . . and then this was taken away too, as manufacturing jobs were offshored to cut down on production costs, equaling bigger profits for the multinationals while leaving the working class with drugs and pornography and bad food and cheap consumer goods.
We became a service economy, based on finance (and financialization) and other laptop jobs where, to paraphrase a man who has a way with words, a grunt in some foreign country makes a report reviewed by a recent college-grad assistant who puts it in a spreadsheet and then a PowerPoint and gives it to her consultant boss who presents the findings to a board of people to help figure out which advertising scheme can sell a few more pills.
But hey, at least we’re a modern economy that doesn’t make stuff anymore. Manufacturing: Gross!
Yeah . . . about those icky people who used to make the stuff, or build the stuff, or fix the stuff, or work the fields . . . what about them? What do we do with this—and I hate the term, so please forgive me—human capital?
They Know
Controversial topic time!
Put simply, the concept of human biodiversity (HBD) is that different groups of people; races, ethnicities, etc.; are different in many heritable traits, including intelligence, and that these differences are akin to the differences in, say, breeds of dogs. This feels icky, right? But remember: we are not dogs. We are humans. We are divine beings, and our differences in ability do not dictate our worth as human beings. This diversity is what makes the world a wonderful place.
A lot of thinkers point this stuff out as observations and things to think about as the powers that be create the policies we all have to live under—isn’t information good? Isn’t more information better? One would think, but because discussions about intelligence were used by bad people at some point, the entire topic is verboten.
But it is empirical information nonetheless, and IQ is a component of this. Though it gets dismissed as pseudo-science, the heritability of intelligence and the influence of intelligence on life outcomes has a lot of solid support.
Here’s where things get tricky. Both flavors of American liberal (progressive and conservative) balk at this idea, calling it racist and demeaning and mostly fake. However, they all believe it.
How do I know? Simple: look at how they live, and what they promote.
I’m cribbing from observations by my friend
, but his observations are what inspired this post so I hope he doesn’t mind me piggybacking off of his points.First, how they live. Our so-called elites marry amongst themselves. They all go to the same institutions. They rarely marry outside their race, and when they do, it’s with people of similar backgrounds, biracial or otherwise, e.g., other high-IQ and high-status. If we’re all fungible economic units, why not have your college-educated daughter marry Cletus from Appalachia, or your gigachad son marry Shaniqua from down the block?
Second, why don’t these people send their kids to, I don’t know, the military. Or a public school. Even better, if diversity is our strength, shouldn’t the Rosenbaums and the Vanderbilts or whatever rich-people surnames you like send their progeny to inner-city schools? Or community colleges? We’re all the same, aren’t we? IQ and race are all fake social constructs, right?
This brings us to the second point: what these people promote. There are a bunch of things that belie their egalitarian, anti-racist rhetoric:
Promotion of interracial marriage. Whether this is being promoted to increase or decrease IQs, I can’t say but that doesn’t matter, because it’s an impulse to make Americans literally the same. It’s not because they actually live any of the rhetoric they espouse.1
Promotion of abortion: Kill the unworthy. It’s eugenics 101. When abortion is discussed in serious terms, health/life of the mother, rape/incest, okay, we can have serious, adult conversations. But the bizarre celebration, the “shout your abortion!” stuff betrays a darker impulse that I think the powers-that-be are a-okay with. They want Cletus from Appalachia and Shaniqua from down the block aborting their babies. Fewer mouths to feed. Fewer UBI checks to send out. Which brings us to . . .
Universal basic income (UBI): They know that, with a huge swath of the poor and those unable to enter the elite halls of power due to a lack connections, unable to find meaningful work (circle this term; we’re coming back to it later), they have to do something to keep them pacified. UBI is a part of this, just like . . .
Drugs and wanking it (the new version of bread and circuses): Hey, we don’t want the undesirables causing trouble or breeding, right? Fill their days with hedonistic pleasure that, maybe, just might kill them.2
Pretty grim, right? After all, when a machine or foreigners replace a huge chunk of the workforce, what other choices do you have? Change course? Hah! Don’t make me laugh, peon!
There was another school of thought I encountered in business school who argued with a straight face that you can just teach the people whose jobs were replaced by machines to repair the machines that replaced their jobs. As if it were that easy to just tell people “Learn to code.” Who would do that? I mean, really.
So that’s the liberal side. What about the putative right? The very online bros? Well, best as I can see, they obsess over this stuff. Like, it becomes the only thing that matters. IQ and race, race and IQ. Ay yai yai. So what are the solutions?
Well, physical separation always seems to come up. It’s like, okay, and then what? Utopia? Also, this assumes you can do something like this in a country like the United States on a non- voluntary basis. Think about a forcible break-up, how bloody that would be.
Now, if we brought back freedom of association, you’d probably see more people self-sort into ethnic enclaves and have an attitude of “peace through distance” like the Roman Empire. Sure, the entire Mediterranean world, and much of Europe, was governed from the imperial capital, but Rome didn’t invite tons of Egyptians or Celts or Spaniards or Visigoths right into the city.
Well, eventually they let the Visigoths in, and look what happened.
Anyway, this doesn’t solve the problem of meaning. You can be surrounded by people who look like you, but the same problems can still persist if you don’t do anything about them. Having the biggest IQ around means noting if you don’t do anything with it. And the big problem is, how do we make life be about more than killing time until your time to meet your maker.
A Note About Intelligence
Let’s not get too hung up about IQ. I don’t think it’s pseudoscience, but I don’t think it’s the only thing that matters. Sure, it ought be a factor, but it’s not the factor. Nor should it, or anything, be the single driving factor in any decision. But it is information, and information can be useful.
A lot of the IQ talk presupposes that all laptop class and elite people have high IQs and all blue collar working class people have low IQs. I don’t think this is true. But people in the higher socio-economic classes, status in which may or may not have anything to do with having a higher IQ, are having a mostly easier go of it in this economy, but it can feel meaningless when for them—I mean, when you conduct a financial transaction or make a spreadsheet, what have you really created?
However, what IQ is not is a proxy for one’s worth or morality or fitness for existence. Intelligence doesn’t give one the right to rule, and a high IQ doesn’t make one a good person and a low IQ one a bad lesson, nor is it an indicator that someone will rule well. Again, reducing everything, especially consequential decisions, to a single variable is a sign of low intelligence.
So What Now?
Any theory or idea or movement is only as useful as its predictive ability, and its ability to propose viable solutions that will work. We’ve discussed the liberal solution, and we’re living in the first few parts of it. Are you happy? Is our country better off? Does life seem worthwhile to you? Is this self-styled cognitive-elite doing a good job?
Of course not. They hate everyone not like them. A ruling class—and there’s always a ruling class, don’t kid yourself Ameribros—that has nothing but contempt for the rolled is not, nor should it be, long for this world.3
Let’s hypothesize for a moment that breaking up the United States along ethnic or racial lines isn’t in the cards. We should pray it’s not, because it would likely be bloody and horrible. Let’s also say I’m king of America (because this is my Substack). What would I do?
I think I’d make sure people have meaning in their lives, and I’d do this by giving them something to do. I’d make sure they can work.
I anticipate the “You’re just arguing for ‘Albrecht Macht Frei’!” arguments from the idiots. Note I never said “Round people up into work camps.” I said “Make sure they can work,” emphasis added for the window-lickers among you.
I anticipate another, more valid argument: “King Alexander, if you’re against materialism and economics über alles, how is this different? And what’s with all the German? Are you secretly, you know . . . ?”
Har har, fictitious interlocutor. Very funny. No, I’m not a mid-century Germany fan. Germans also just happen to have a word for everything. They also have spetzel. Have you ever had spetzel? Mmmm . . .
Anyway, you have correctly identified the God-shaped gap in my discussion. I’ll tell you why I’ve neglected religious meaning as the bedrock of my plan: we need to take baby steps.
People in America aren’t ready for a spiritual reawakening. Not yet. First things first. Get the basics taken care of—defeat nihilistic despair—and then get to the metaphysical.
Because you have a giant group of “unskilled” laborers, i.e., people frozen out of this wonderful economy of college-educated dorks selling insurance and briefing spreadsheets to each other, what do you for them?
If the IQ/HBD stuff is real—and our rulers sure act like it is—what do you do for the people on the left side, regardless of their complexion?
Note that, twice, I said “for them,” not “with” or “to.” And at the end of the day, if the IQ/HBD stuff is real, who cares? There are people suffering, who don’t have to be suffering, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that their suffering is deliberate.
I propose taking measures that will allow them to contribute to society while feeling like they’re contributing.
Friends, we have to become a nation that makes stuff again.
Now, I’m not an economist, and I understand that anything I propose is just as pie-in-the-sky as some of the things I criticize, but they’re ideas that I think could actually be implemented.
End immigration for 25-30 years. This is not due to any animus, but mainly because we have enough people out of the workforce or not getting paid enough to get off the paycheck-to-paycheck treadmill. Saying “Bootstrap, you lazy millennial/Zoomer!” will get you jail-time in my America.4 Stop driving down wages. Stop filling the market with cheap labor. Want to know why Americans won’t do certain jobs? Because the cost of living is super-high and these jobs aren’t paying enough because foreign labor is undercutting them. The Chamber of Commerce and the big companies who love paying people less are as much to blame as the cynical politicians who want new voters.
Penalize companies that offshore manufacturing and reward companies who manufacture here. This could be in the form of tax incentives,5 reducing or amending some onerous regulations that don’t actually do what they’re supposed to do, or other ways to encourage the jobs that actually create physical things to stay here. This would allow people who don’t have prohibitively expensive college degrees to find good work.6
Break the university system. This is a topic for a post by people more qualified than I. But in addition to this, I’d add: overhaul the American education system.7 High school should teach everything kids learn in their undergraduate course of general education classes, maybe more.
Control technology. I’m no techno-pessimist, but I will say that just because we can create technology that makes people obsolete doesn’t mean we should. The implications of such technology should be thought through before we just go ahead and do it. Efficiency isn’t the be-all, end-all if life. Other things matter! Additionally, if we are going to go the technology/AI/teach people replaced by robots to repair and maintain the robots that replaced them route, at the very least don’t have Americans train their cheaper replacements in software coding—it’s rich to tell blue-collar Americans to “learn to code” when you’re not hiring Cletus from Appalachia or Shaniqua from down the block as coders.
Trades! Bring back guilds and apprenticeships and all of that stuff, and for the arts as well. Let kids who are good with their hands and into cars or pottery or stonework start working for experienced tradesmen or artists/musicians instead of going to grade school and high school and college. System overhaul! Why do we have to do things the way we’re doing them? Spoiler: we don’t.
Is this paternalistic? Sure is! But as King of America I have a duty to all of my people, especially when they’ve been royally screwed by the system my predecessors have abused. These left-behind people aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re people, with lives and hopes and dreams and goals. Let’s start treating them as such.
I know there is a strain of thought that raises valid arguments about the silliness of thinking there’s a “based multiethnic working class” waiting to revolt. I, however, do not think there’s a “based multiethnic working class” waiting to revolt, nor do I want one to revolt if it existed. I want the people who actually exist to not feel like they have the need to revolt, and also to not feel like they have to drown their lives in alcohol and marijuana and fentanyl. At the end of the day, people don’t have to live the way I personally think they should live as long as they’re not committing crimes or otherwise being a net drain on society. It really is that simple.
The Makers
The idea is to inculcate a culture of creation.
Look, I write fiction. I include the arts in this as well as the trades. Creativity takes all forms, and the creative impulse us something that us human beings, alone in all creations, share with God Almighty.
If we are going to be a viable alternative to our techno-crapitalist status quo, those of us on the reality side of things need to grease the skids for the looking reimposition of reality and be ready to have solutions. Many of these modern problems require old solutions, and many require new ones. It’s a combination of what’s been tried that works, and what hasn’t been tried but needs to be tried because what we’re doing isn’t working.
Do what my other friend
says: make stuff and go to space. Next stop: the stars. Hard to get there if we have to purchase all components and technical support from overseas. And even if we do, so what? Cletus from Appalachia and Shaniqua down down the block sure aren’t going to feel like they’re a part of it if their own countrymen just outsourced space exploration.America isn’t ready for spirituality yet. America had forgotten where deeper meaning can be found in that realm. First, we need to solve the crisis of meaning in a more elemental way—by giving people something to feel good about.8
A construction worker can drive on a road or over a bridge or past a building and say “I made that.” A weaver can see clothes on people and say “I made those.” A farmer or farm-worker can see eggs and meat in the supermarket and say “That was me.” And you don’t need a 169 IQ or whatever.9
At the end of the day, we all need to feel useful. As King Alexander, this would be my biggest domestic priority.
Alas, a man can dream. Will anyone have the will to try and implement any of this? Who has the balls, and the support, to end the gravy train supplying the gravy to the rich and powerful? Merchants will prove to be a far more entrenched and bloodthirsty group to defeat than even aristocrats. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
- Alexander
It’s always nerve-wracking to offer concrete suggestions because you open yourself to criticism, but whatever—it’s time to be bold. I hope this post gave you some food for thought. Support my writing by buying one of my books here, or throwing a few drachmas into the caffeine fund over at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you for reading and God bless.
Obviously, people can marry whomever they want, of whatever race. It’s just weird that those in charge push A so heavily but then do B.
Yes, I’m insinuating that the opioid crisis was deliberate and is going according to plan.
It’s an expression, Mr. FBI Agent monitor man.
Or maybe the death penalty; I’m still thinking about this.
To be fair, taxes should be lowered across the board and not just for businesses.
I had a buddy with a blind, reflexive hatred for Republicans (who are awful, mind you) endlessly mock former Texas governor Rick Perry’s gloating about how he got Toyota to build in Texas, creating 3,000 jobs. “He’s getting so hyped up about 3,000 jobs. Whoopdee shit,” my buddy said. As if 3,000 jobs is nothing! Ideology makes people crazy.
I know, I know: what does this mean? Listen: as king, I’d have only the best advisers.
I know this sounds dumb, but it’s not. Trust me.
I remain convinced that most people who brag about their high IQs are lying about their IQs. As my dear departed grandfather always said, if you’ve gotta tell them who you is, you ain’t.
Well said, much better than I could have said it. We need to talk about solutions to our problems because honestly we have been diagnosing for the past decade and I'm tired of it.
I work in politics and I I've spoken with folks who represent the trades and manufacturers.
And I'll ll tell you this -- when it comes to manufacturing it's not the manufacturers who don't want to make things here in America.
It's workers in the workforce who don't want to make things here. And this is largely because of the state of our "public" education system -- kids that don't want to sit in classrooms all day are all too often segrated and sedated in special classrooms where they don't belong.
Of course there's more that could be said here, but ultimately blaming the manufacturers is blaming the victim. When our school culture is either apathetic towards the blue collar worker at best or proactively discouraging people from working, we shouldn't be pointing the finger at people who want to provide jobs and meaning to our great country.