A Monopoly on Smart and Kind

Why the Left is always telling itself that it is intelligent and caring.

JUPPLANDIA

Above: Adorno and colleagues essentially asserted that bigotry and close-mindedness were rightwing political traits. There’s rather a lot of evidence to the contrary.

No doubt like me you will have noticed the suffocating smugness of the other side. If hypocrisy is their shield, the thing which protects them from realising what they are, then smugness is their sword, the thing with which they will smite you even when they don’t have a fist, a cudgel or a sniper rifle to hand.

We can get into serious discussions about institutional capture, Soviet propaganda techniques, French Revolutionary fervour, the Jacobin Club, the Frankfurt School or the Fabian Society….and those things do matter. But let’s be honest.

If we wanted to really accurately talk about what is fundamentally wrong with them some very simple pejorative qualities suffice: unwarranted arrogance, hypocritical prejudice and glib idiocy all spring to mind, but for me the fullest expression of why progressives and Cultural Marxist leftists and globalists are so vile comes from this:

They are firmly and unshakeably convinced of their own superiority. Thy know they are better than us. They know they are smarter than us. And they know they are kinder and more caring and more informed than us. It doesn’t matter what the specific topic is. They are the experts and we are the knuckle dragging Neanderthals who are too dim-witted and bitter-hearted to cope with the better future that they are building.

Now the very obvious response to this, which of course I’ve dealt with on many occasions, is that in believing this to be the case I’m myself a hypocrite, because I’m demonising a whole group of people and strongly implying, or sometimes outright stating, that I (and people who think like me) are better than them. And this indeed would be a just criticism if 1. My behaviour matched theirs and 2. My beliefs rested on the assertion that everyone who shares them is automatically going to be a kind hearted genius.

But this is not the case. People on the Right generally don’t go around telling everyone, constantly, that everyone on the Right is a genius. Rather notoriously, we spend a lot more time criticising each other. We don’t show the uniformity of responses of the other side, either. We argue amongst ourselves regarding the best strategies and responses and policies. We can dislike opponents and call them stupid, but we can also recognise when they are indeed smart in particular fields.

I can draw an obvious example from my own ‘career’ writing about politics and major figures, such as it is. The most successful work I’ve ever created was my book on Bill Gates, who supports many ideas I strongly oppose. I described him as the most dangerous man on the planet. But I have never ever described him as stupid. I’ve never ever questioned his abilities as a computer science expert (his original field) or his genius as an entrepreneur and an accumulator of wealth and power. I question his intent, not his ability. I criticise the consequences and potential consequences of his pursuit of power, and I sometimes call the policies stupid, without ever making the mistake of thinking that HE is stupid.

And even where I do question the morality or the intelligence of a person on the other side, it’s based on evidence and consequence. Take Obama and Blair. I recognise them both as very smart political operators, possessed of a considerable amount of cunning, while considering it stupid not to recognise that they were both self-serving, soulless charlatans who offered nothing but (deliberate) decline and division to their respective nations. Someone like Kier Starmer is more the kind of person I’d consider BOTH stupid and evil, because I think he might even be sincere in his expressed and obviously irrational descriptions of his own rule and his own policies as benign and beneficial. He may be stupid enough to believe his own lies, whereas I saw Obama and Blair as more calculating and, in an odd way, individualistic. They served the same general Cultural Marxist, Progressive-Globalist agenda, but very much tied to self-enrichment and self-interest on a far greater scale than that of poor Kier, with his petty bribes and small man’s greed much more easily met by purchasers with deep pockets.

In these reflections, while of course still being critical of the other side, I distinguish between them, and distinguish too between respective levels of ability even if that ability is doing malign things.

I wouldn’t call Hitler or Stalin stupid, because it would be factually inaccurate and because extreme evil can be, and on many occasions has been, possessed by individuals who are highly intelligent. I wouldn’t even consider Fuentes stupid when he praises both of them, because I think he is aware of exactly what he is doing, does it for manipulative purposes, and probably has a fairly standard profile in terms of IQ and knowledge to most people his age (maybe a little bit above average for both, enough to be a good manipulator of the rest, but actually very, very far from being exceptional in the standard sense of that word).

For me stupid comes into it only in terms of what might be called moral idiocy, an incapacity to realise or care how untrue, destructive and evil your opinions are, which can be possessed by both the conscious manipulators with high IQs and by the indoctrinated followers with low IQs. A psychopath who scores great on formal IQ tests will get to the same place as an idiot who scores poorly, for very different reasons. This truth is often expressed via semi-ironic graph memes, especially mockingly self-aware ones where more rightwing shitposters show their views existing at both ends of an IQ scale for different reasons (this ability to mock yourself and your enemy at the same time shows a meta-awareness even highly intelligent leftists almost never access, they simply take themselves too seriously for it).

Thus, on the Right, you can consider the policy stupid (because it’s obviously destructive) while considering the proponent smart (recognising the facility or cunning with which they are getting people to follow or enact a destructive thing). On the Right we view people as stupid when the evidence shows they aren’t even conscious of moral error, and when it shows too that they aren’t competent or skilled in anything that requires intelligence. But in the modern left, especially among Globalists and Progressives, intelligence and goodness are treated at all times as synonymous. Everyone who shares their ideology is both smart and good, and everyone who doesn’t is both stupid and evil. If you are smart you must agree with them, and if you disagree with them it must be because you are dumb (or uneducated, uninformed, etc).

There’s an epistemological dimension to this, a huge schism in how we treat knowing things. It’s as if progressives and Globalists have forgotten, so far as their own views and prejudices are concerned, that it IS possible to know things that are false, to be in error, to be highly confident of your rectitude and for that to be an inaccurate assessment. For the Right, subjectivity is where we start to grow suspicious, because subjective judgements can be false. For the Left, the more subjective (and emotional) the opinion is, the more valid and true it is. The individualist Right know that they are part of a whole in terms of objective reality, which must be deferred to, whereas the collectivist Left know they are part of a whole in terms of social ideology, which must be deferred to even where it contradicts objective reality. The first group get their collective experience from being ‘in the world’ and the second from being ‘in the world of the correct ideas’.

I’ll give a very concrete real world example: the way the Left now talk about Elon Musk, compared to how they used to talk about him. In that case, it’s even more glaring than the way Trump went from ‘we need people like you in politics’ to ‘he’s Literally Hitler’, because even when Trump was a Democrat and invited to events and flattered to his face by Hilary or by Oprah or by Jesse Jackson, there was a condescension to it, a concealed sneer (the Jesse Jackson speech clip praising Trump really shows both elements). They always thought Trump was crass and vulgar and someone to poke fun at, even when they were describing him as good instead of as evil. But with Musk, he never had that sneer directed at him in any way…,until he went off plantation. He was a hero, then a zero. The moment he questioned ANY leftist orthodoxy. And how do they talk about him now? They don’t just say he’s ‘Literally Hitler’ (although there is a lot of that).

They spend a huge amount of time trying to pretend that Musk (the most successful businessman on the planet who has the capacity to personally invent real and sophisticated technology) is stupid. They try to strip away any practical or intellectual capacity or achievement, because he’s now their ideological enemy. He can’t just be evil, even, that must mean he is also stupid. And so we see them arguing that he just purchases the work of others, that he isn’t a real businessman, that he’s a lousy CEO, that he’s not an engineer, that he’s never invented anything, or that he has no or has very limited formal credentials. The idea that Musk could be in certain fields smarter than them or possess a high general IQ, even though in objective reality this is incredibly obvious, can’t be admitted. Their belief system is smarter and kinder, so Musk must be dumb and evil.

This conflation of intelligent and good, and of both with ‘shares my politics’, puts these people in absurd positions both in who they criticise and who they praise, and in how they do so too. Again, it might be said that Trump does this too when he uses low IQ as an insult. If he does it inaccurately, though, I’ve never seen that be the case (I haven’t seen him call Bill Gates low IQ, for instance). Where he does use low IQ as an insult, it’s backed up by how the target speaks, acts and expresses themselves. Importantly, he distinguishes between smart and good and between different opponents:

“Crooked Hillary Clinton is a smart woman, much smarter than Kamala, but doesn’t lie as much….”

Thus, even with a person now identified by most as rightwing, a person notorious for being called stupid by everyone who hates him and for calling others stupid in his own rhetoric, there’s a level of nuance the Left do not possess. The false conflation of intelligent and good and has the same opinions as me is not as rigid or as inflexible. It may even be that the degree to which Trump invokes intelligence as an insult is a direct reaction to the number of times he is falsely accused of being stupid (defensiveness) or a hangover from his days as a Democrat (a learned habit).

Generally, though, if your views are grounded in objective reality (what works, what doesn’t, what has actually occurred as real world consequences) you are most concerned with whether they are true, and not whether they are sophisticated or clever. If your views are an intellectual construct, an ideology at odds with reality, you are very concerned about their alleged cleverness-since that’s the only foundation they possess. This is also why leftists (who consider themselves rebels) are so submissive towards credentialed authority. That authority acts as a buttress and an architectural support for ideas that otherwise have no substance, ideas indeed that are weightless and still unproven despite that grand show of holding them up. The walls are Authority and Conformity, but the roof is missing and the interior is empty.

The contemporary leftist and progressive fallacy of Smart & Kind derives from these opinions being intellectual inventions, absent from real life and concocted in university settings, for the most part. Academia is the key here, as well as leftists always having been abstract theoreticians. Marx abstracted the working class into the theorised proletariat while having no familiarity with work himself, Engels inherited wealth, Trotsky and Lenin were from educated and affluent backgrounds, Mao was an excruciatingly bad poet from a a peasant but wealthy peasant background with intellectual pretensions, Pol Pot ordered the murder of intellectuals but again was an educated, affluent theorist (educated in Paris). Stalin is one of the very few major Communist leaders to have genuinely been from an impoverished background and to have never really cared about theory (beyond its use as a tool). Stalin knew that theory loving western intellectuals could be useful idiots precisely because that type surrounded him in Communist leadership.

Thus while to us the murderous history of Communism is a glaring contradiction of progressive claims to embody kindness and goodness, to them it is a continuity rather than a contradiction, excused by the same valuing of abstract ideology over concrete reality the Left has always possessed in all its forms.

Today, however, they are as familiar with our arguments as we are with theirs. Therefore there must be some means by which to excuse their own evils and exaggerate ours. What better support for that is there than determining that any rightwing conclusion is automatically stupid, and any leftwing action is automatically morally superior and more intellectually valid than ‘rightwing ignorance’? The theory continually validates itself, at length, and finds text far more compelling as evidence than consequence is. This also feeds into the ease with which they turn every fiction into propaganda, or prioritise fictions that agree with them over facts that do not (just the other day Robert Reich was telling his followers that the Star Wars spin off fictional series Andor had important lessons for viewers trying to understand Trump’s ‘tyranny’ in the real-life US. The writers of Andor are leftists who included flattering echoes of the life of Stalin in their Space Revolution fantasy).

“The Star Wars series Andor draws significant inspiration from the early revolutionary activities of Joseph Stalin, particularly his role in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery. Series creator Tony Gilroy has acknowledged that the character of Cassian Andor was influenced by Stalin’s appearance and his “gangster” years, where he used violent heists to fund the Bolshevik revolution.

Key parallels identified by critics and the show’s creator include:

• Visual and Character Inspiration: Gilroy noted that a photo of young Stalin looked “glamorous” and resembled actor Diego Luna (who plays Cassian Andor). He cited Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Young Stalin as a direct influence for the show’s realistic depiction of revolutionary tactics.
• Plot Similarities: The Aldhani heist in the series, where rebels steal a massive Imperial payroll, mirrors the real-life 1907 robbery in Tiflis (modern-day Tbilisi), which was masterminded by Stalin and provided crucial funding for the Bolsheviks.
• Character Analogues: Beyond Andor/Stalin, other characters reflect Bolshevik figures: Luthen Rael is seen as an analogue for Vladimir Lenin, who recruited Stalin for his ruthlessness and effectiveness, while Karis Nemikparallels the intellectual Leon Trotsky.”

So, by the descriptions given by its own creators, and the physical resemblance seen above, Andor deliberately romanticises Stalinist violent revolution, with Robert Reich then going on to explain that Andor tells Democrats how to respond to Trump. The mass murderer Stalin is who Robert Reich thinks should inform us about tyranny, not as an example of it, but as a hero to be admired.

Smart & Kind?

Almost all research on IQ that provides click bait conformation of the Smart & Kind Fallacy exists to provide that confirmation, draws from the left wing researchers involved already having that opinion, and then uses methodological sleight of hand to provide the ‘confirmations’ the research teams wanted to find. This runs all the way from the theorised nonsense of the French Revolution, but really becomes a formal academic practice (teaching the ‘left means smart and kind’ fallacy and providing junk data proofs of it) with the seminal 1950 work of Junk Psychology, The Authoritarian Personality:

“The Authoritarian Mind refers to the psychological profile and ideological framework detailed in the 1950 landmark study The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. Originally developed to explain the psychological susceptibility to fascism and the Holocaust, the theory posits that certain personality traits cluster together, predisposing individuals to uncritical submission to authority, aggression toward out-groups, and rigid adherence to conventional values.

Key components of this mindset include:

The F-Scale: Adorno’s team developed the “F-scale” (F for Fascism) to measure these traits, which include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception (opposition to subjective thinking), superstition and stereotypy, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and puritanical attitudes toward sex.”

Academics who were already Marxists simply defined authoritarianism via traits they knew could be more easily pinned on the Right than the Left (i.e. conventional being authoritarian rather than radical being authoritarian, subjective being good and objective being oppressive, inherited sexual morals being oppressive, meaning perversions and extreme fetishes are somehow liberating for all). One not mentioned above is that leftist psychologists frequently cite nostalgia or a belief in a prior Golden Age as an authoritarian marker…when in reality all conservatives and all cultures possess some version of an affection for the past and it is generally speaking a utopian vision of the future which is far more likely to lead to authoritarian actions and to be used to excuse them. Even traits which may indicate authoritarian views (bigotry, close-mindedness) are defined in ways that ignore huge historical evidence of these traits being very powerful in the psychology of the Left itself (and more prevalent there than on the Right).

Theory is so prioritised over reality that these definitions even ignore the crashingly obvious point that an all powerful State intruding on everything (socialism and communism) provides far more opportunity for authoritarianism than a smaller State bound by traditional limits (rightism or conservatism).

Formal IQ studies and research which claim that leftists or progressives are more open-minded, more intelligent, and more informed than rightists set out to reach this conclusion, and are acts of political self validation rather than acts of scholarly enquiry. Really, it takes a lack of thought to reductively believe that open-minded (for instance) equates with intellectual wisdom, when it could just as easily signify gullibility and susceptibility to programming (if for example propaganda is telling people to be more accepting of others) rather than individualist insight. It takes an even greater lack of thought to think that everyone who accords with your opinions, and you, stands as genius compared to everyone who disagrees or differs.

The Blue Button/Red Button Test equating IQ and altruism is another example of a facile gimmick being used to assert the Smart & Kind Fallacy of left wing thinkers reassuring everyone that they are smarter and kinder than anyone else. Altruism, like many things, can be a virtue in moderation and a vice in excess /we are living very much in a period of altruism as vice). A test which says that ‘liberals’ hypothetically asked to pick between their own survival and the survival of the human race pick humanity more often than rightists do says nothing about whether the respondent is giving a truthful answer, whether social vanity and reputation protection is behind that answer rather than true desire to sacrifice oneself for others, whether a real world choice would play out the same way etc etc.

It might be more intelligent, too, to treat answers to hypothetical imaginary situations as, well, anything OTHER than confirmed facts.

In answer to those taking such tests and taking their claims seriously I offered the following satirical response:

“Genius IQ: You know that the greater good has been the single most consistent argument for mass murder in human history.

High IQ: You know there is zero real correlation between intelligence and altruism.

Low IQ: You are convinced that social vanity based responses in ridiculous tests prove that other people who share your politics are smart and kind.

Very Low IQ: You believe that social vanity based responses in ridiculous tests prove that YOU are smart and kind.

Amoeba IQ: You devise the tests.”

Anything a leftist academic, intellectual or even scientist declares to be proof of greater leftwing intellect and compassion is going to be proof of nothing more than their constant desire to assert such a thing, and their reductive simplicity in believing such as thing to be true.

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This article (A Monopoly on Smart and Kind) was created and published by Jupplandia and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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