I respect Murray for his work but here he’s talking out of his butt. It’s an age-old fantasy of intellectuals that “simple folks” are more virtuous than the not-so-simple and have access to some sort of innate wisdom. In the 19th century, Russian revolutionaries called themselves “narodniki” (or “peoplists”) and would join “the people” in miserable villages to find true values and a revolutionary spirit. Needless to say, they found nothing but bovine resignation amidst outrageously disgusting daily habits and deeply perverted sexual mores. Narodniki themselves were beacons of clean living amongst these brutes.
Solzhenitsyn mocked the intelligentsia’s quest for virtue among the IQ-deprived in his novel The First Circle. The ultra-intellectual protagonist finally manages to join “simple folks” and, to his horror, discovers that the congenitally stupid are just as nasty, pathetic and vicious as the brilliant. The only difference is that they are more easily scared and more subservient.
There is no”indigenous way of learning.” There’s no alternative math and no easy, “natural” virtue. Murray is moved by the same feeling of guilt that animates Leftists to come up with “sacred indigenous wisdom.”
Intelligence doesn’t make you a good person. Neither does stupidity. But guilt will turn you into a liar, and that’s not a virtue.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is so true. As an example, 100% of all the heinous crimes from India that make the international headlines due to their depravity are committed by, let’s call them, subalterns. Who are worshipped by the Indian left.
How can Gayatri Spivak ask “Can the subaltern speak?” when they never shut the fuck up?
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Very well concluded
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Murray has clearly never lived in my neighborhood. The stupid have a marked tendency toward substance abuse and family dysfunction. Are we gonna claim that’s not a thing that they can control, in our rush to declare them virtuous? Sure, not all of them are like that. But it’s a subject that’s eaten at me these last few years– we made the decision to be a single-income family so we could raise our own kids. Voluntary poverty of a sort. We make it work. But I had some vague naive pie-in-the-sky ideas about that, at the start– like of course we would not be living in the classy high-rent neighborhoods (and no, I do not care to hang out with people who are going to judge me by how much I spend on clothes– it’s not like the middle class is uniquely virtuous either– they’re just venal in less violent and larcenous ways), but perhaps like Murray, assumed that there was a contingent out there of other lower-income families who were doing similar things: choosing to make less money so they could have a family life.
We are stupid in our own special way.
Yeah, that contingent may be out there, but so scattered and isolated you will never meet one by chance.
So instead, we live in a neighborhood where I’ve had to perma-ban two different neighbor kids from two different families from the yard (they all play in our yard– it’s a huge side-yard that appears to be a vacant lot)– once after a dispute where (and for this I give them credit) the other kids expelled a boy for trying to teach swear words to the preschoolers… and then he went home and got a hatchet and came back to threaten them; and once when one of the clearly-a-bully bigger boys got a rope around my son’s neck and pulled. My son couldn’t breathe and kicked the kid to get loose… and the kid had the gall to tell me “your kid kicked me” as though that were the main issue. The rope slipped. I have no idea how it ended up around his neck… sure kid. Happens all the time. Especially when you’re around.
Hatchet kid’s family was evicted. We’ve had two bikes and a tricycle stolen from our yard in under two years, and a new tire iron stolen from inside my truck. There’s a house a few doors down where my kids are not allowed to play because the perpetual trash-heap at their curb reeks of pot. I found broken crack pipes in the yard when we moved in. Yay social dysfunction.
We do have some nice neighbors. They are all fixed-income retirees and the nicest neighbor kids don’t actually live here, they’re the grandkids of the retirees who watch them while their parents are at work. Most of the neighbor kids are all right, but they’re doing that in spite of some fairly chaotic home situations. My eldest sometimes wishes, wistfully, that they were smarter so he’d have someone to talk to. He made a smart friend at church and I’m really happy for him, because he was kind of lonely.
And now…. I guess I kind of understand why smarter people opt for status and money over home life. Sure, some of it’s about dumb status games. But at least some of it is just being able to live in a safe neighborhood and hang out with other smart people. I didn’t grok that growing up because my parents were very smart, but low income due to Dad getting run over by a drunk driver. My mother’s endless striving to keep up the appearance of middle-class respectability without the income to support it was… icky and desperate. We were perpetually embarrassed, always trying to hide our real circumstances and failing at it. Black sheep of the family. The neighborhood kids didn’t judge us for being smart, but the “middle class” people our mom wanted us to fit in with, definitely judged us for being poor. As if it was our choice. Or that our poverty might be contagious.
So much ambivalence. I’m OK with not being middle class. I was raised to strive for that, and it was a misery. I still despise the people who silently judged us for not having the money to conform to all the latest GAP and Tommy Hilfiger uniform rules. I loathe the idea of turning into my mom, and trying to shove my kids up the social ladder. But in practice what that means is instead of living around a lot of petty social signaling bitchiness, we are living around a lot of raging social dysfunction. One is certainly safer than the other. Is it more virtuous? I’m never certain. I think it’s that old divide between Ahrimanic evil and Luciferic evil, you know? We let the sins of the intellect off too easy, because they aren’t mugging us and stealing our wallet at gunpoint. But the thing is, they *are* mugging us– they’re just doing it through nepotism, corruption, and connections. Is indirect mugging better?
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I babysat two kids, 7 and 3 yo, over the weekend. Turns out the father taught the 3 yo to swear like a sailor because he thinks it’s funny. I had to teach the 7 yo that when you take off your boots upon entering the house, throwing them against the living room wall is not the right way to proceed. And that referring to your father as “that black bastard” is unacceptable. And that throwing wrappers on the floor or going through people’s pantry without asking permission and throwing stuff out on the floor is not OK.
Interestingly, I never had to explicitly teach my kid any of it. She knows by absorbing how we act at home.
Yes, I probably sound like a snooty middle-class pearl-clutcher with all this but I don’t mind. The kids will have happier lives if they at least sometimes see that a different form of life is possible.
In my culture, we have the concept of “intelligentsia” which I find much more helpful than middle-class vs poor. Income doesn’t grant you entry into intelligentsia. Only a more refined sensibility does. One can be downright indigent and still belong to the intelligentsia if they understand why having loud fights in public, throwing boots at the wall, posting complaints about your husband on social media, or laugh like a horse in a small enclosed space with strangers isn’t ok.
There needs to be a word for intelligent people with refined sensibilities who aren’t rich or even financially comfortable at all. Especially now that it’s getting harder to enter the economic category of the middle class.
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We refer to ourselves as the genteel poor 😉
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“the genteel poor”
Even as a kid I realized that while money might be tight (often… irregular) in my family and it wasn’t always clear how the bills were going to be paid…. we weren’t really poor.
“Poor” was a state of mind… we knew some poor people and they had a completely different approach to… just about everything, a kind of learned helplessness combined with a kind of…. envy that was foreign to us.
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This was a subject my grandmother harped on a lot. You weren’t poor unless you *acted* poor. Poor was a state of mind. You could be out of money and not be poor. She’d grown up broke in the Depression, but not poor! Never poor! The *poor* people were the ones who drank, gambled, and refused to work even when work was avaialable, in her book.
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“It’s an age-old fantasy of intellectuals that “simple folks” are more virtuous than the not-so-simple”
Is that what he’s saying though? Who has a lower IQ than Murray? Almost everyone. It will be trivially easy for him to find lower IQ people that do okay.
I think that maybe what he means is that people of average or slightly above average intelligence often have better life outcomes than geniuses.
I’ve known people I’m pretty sure are at least a standard deviation below me and who have had pretty good life outcomes and more than a few with at least a standard deviation (probably closer to two) above me that… just bad…. not good past a certain point it’s not clear that high IQ is an advantage in everyday life).
Those with significantly lower IQs…. yeah, they fall prety to (or actively seek out) all sorts of dysfunction. They aren’t helped by a modern world where all sorts of things that they need are simply out of reach because they don’t have the brainpower to deal with even basic bureaucracy…. let alone predatory conmen.
The other issue is intellectual curiosity… I might know and like normies of average IQ and they might have better life outcomes than me in some ways…. but I don’t want to spend time around them unless they’re actively curious about the world and how it and people work (and don’t work).
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I was thinking along the same lines. A good illustration is comparing Silicon Valley with the rest of us. The Silicon Valley geniuses who haven’t tried hard and failed at something in life cannot emphasize with others because they have no personal experience of failure or limitations.
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Well, they fail at their personal lives. Look at Musk.
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He doesn’t see it as a failure, though.
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Dude’s on ketamine. That’s not a sign of profound joy of life, to put it mildly.
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Curiosity though… that is only partly a function of intelligence. A lot of it is inborn at every level, but gets stomped out of people by the education system.
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“Curiosity though… that is only partly a function of intelligence”
I remember a comment by a friend about an acquaintance who’d received a very prestigious scholarship….
“She’s smart but in a really ordinary way” and it was maybe unkind… but true. They were well organized and methodical but could only repeat back what others had written and seemed to have no original ideas or potential for ideas…
The friend was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known and one of the most perceptive… the type who could make an offhand comment that you’d think about for years and things didn’t work out so well…
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Yeah, curiosity is not a seemly and sociable trait.
I have a really unfortunate habit of pulling threads– like, I read something, or somebody tells me something, and some part of it *bothers* me. Like a hangnail, or a misalignment in the carpet pattern. Doesn’t quite make sense. I am congenitally unable to just leave that the hell alone: I *need* to understand why it bothers me. I start asking questions. But what about this thing? How does that work exactly? Poke, prod, and pry relentlessly trying to get at the core of the thing, and make the annoying inconsistency fit, understand the bigger picture where these two seemingly contradictory things can coexist, or get to the point where I understand the thing from every possible angle and verify that… it doesn’t fit because there’s some wrong fact or assumption in there– maybe it’s a mistaken belief. Maybe it’s a deliberate lie. Maybe it’s an unconscious lie.
Sometimes that’s a simple idiocy, like when you’re twelve and your mom tells you that shaving your legs will make the hairs grow back in darker and thicker. If that were true about hair, then we would recommend shaving as a cure for baldness, and haircuts would be like something out of the fairy tale “Melisande”: to be avoided at all costs! Hairs are dead keratin– you can’t affect future hair by cutting current hair, and there’s no difference between cutting it at the skin level with a razor, and cutting it several inches out with scissors. No, I did not keep that line of reasoning to myself. I was totally obnoxious about trying to get the facts straight because the dissonance in my head was unbearable.
Sometimes it’s a more complex and touchy idiocy: like grilling my Sunday school teacher (an insurance salesman who lived at the Country Club) about the implications of the Gospel story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man. The self-justifying way he presented it didn’t make sense. That’s not what the Gospel says. How can you throw out the literal words so cavalierly? But I was young and stupid and didn’t have the sense to see that I had touched a nerve and I should back off. Couldn’t let it go. I *needed* him to properly see the inconsistency that I was seeing, and explain it so I could understand– and it’s hard to describe the intensity of that need.
In either case, nobody appreciated my curiosity. I got yelled at by more than one grown woman over the first one. Never quite understood why– was it because they got called out on a well-meaning lie? Was it because they believed it themselves and had never questioned it and didn’t like looking stupid? Was it because a smartass twelve-year-old was questioning their holy authority? The second one got me permanently banned from Sunday school. It’s amazing how fiercely people will defend an obvious lie, and how socially damaging it is, to not go along with it.
In general, curiosity and thread-pulling behavior, plus a modicum of intellectual ability… not a recipe for social and economic success. Part of that, in childhood, was needing adults to be the omniscient arbiters of reality that my child-self thought they were. So I’m better about not insisting on that now, pursuing it too aggressively IRL. But the inclination to pull the thread is still there. I pursue it through books mostly. Trying to have a conversation about any of those things usually ends in disaster– I’m so far into the cave network that trying to talk about the eyeless fish and the mineral deposits with someone on the outside is like… we aren’t even talking the same language. I sound like a raving lunatic. Most casual conversations I spend trying to avoid every interesting topic, from pumpkins to Proclus to perception.
It’s lonely, even though I know a lot of nice people who tolerate me. It’s probably why so many conversations can only happen on the internet, where all the weirdos hang out. The text format lowers the intensity so people don’t take interrogations so personally ;)
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And the parents who stick a tablet into a child’s hands to shut him up.
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And that. Cor.
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It is a form a guilt or self-flagellation for having it easier than most. I was not the smartest kid, but I was smart enough for people around me (parents, educators, neighbors, other kids) to say that I should consider myself lucky to memorize everything, that learning comes naturally for me, that it is not the case for everyone and more importantly, that other people who do not perform as well as I do have qualities too. I was my duty to find qualities in people in whom I had zero interest, and I felt bad for it. I genuinely tried to help many kids though, and I think this is why I like being an educator today.
Cultural capital is an interesting concept associated to intelligentsia. My family had cultural capital, but little capital. And for that reason it was respected, even if our lawn was definitively not the greenest one on the street.
Ol.
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TL,DNR: I just wanted to post the links. And no, I don’t agree with Murray’s premises or back handed compliments of the virtue of the dim bulbs.
Charles Murray always talks out of his ass. However, due to his Mensa qualifying IQ history as a professional smarty pants, his butt noises show a high level of intellectualization. Whether these are whoopie cushion sounds or just Mozart or Bosch taking the piss depends on your priors. And the quality of the Foley artist.
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Which part of Bell Curve do you find unconvincing? Or Facing Reality?
Serious question.
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