The Extraordinarily High Negative IQ of Obama

Reader William has an interesting idea about "the Marxist frauds who people the academy. I’ve come up with the concept of negative IQ for people who know lots of stuff that is the opposite of truth. These folks no doubt all have very high negative IQs."

Oh my yes. I've posted on that subject in the past, except in different terms -- for example, the idea of (-K), or "negative knowing." Ultimately, you might simply say that Ø is the first principle from which all bad philosophy flows. For us, the first and last principle is always O, the alphOmega, the Ultimate unKnowable Reality.

However, to say "unknowable" can be mystleading, because we mean it in the apophatic sense, through which unknowing becomes the highest knowledge; or let us say a "self emptying" that prepares us to be "instructed by God," as it were. (I just discovered that there's actually an Orthodox word for this roundtrip God-to-God knowledge: theodidaktoi.)

Also, as we have been discussing, although O cannot be known directly, we can certainly know its energies, (↓) -- which, in a way, is true of anything, even a rock. After all, no one actually knows what a rock is. Rather, we can only know about it. But knowing about it is more than enough to get you through the day, just as knowing about God is more than enough to get you through life.

Now, any kind of materialist or Darwinist or radical secularist is necessarily living in a kind of fantasy land, since they begin -- and therefore end -- in Ø. Thus, in the ultimate sense, all of their (K) is automatically rendered (-K). You could file it all under the heading of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

For example, I just encountered this problem in The Philosophical Baby, which is highly unracooomended because it frames all of its (K) in terms of Ø, which in the end strips the subject of its profundity, or vertical depth.

Really, it's a kind of attack on vertical linking, so that the author's interior deadness is transmitted to the reader, which has the function of tamping down wonder. Certain highly provocative roads are automatically foreclosed by the tenured, in that they could never have gained tenure had they ventured down those roads. This ideological Darwinism explains how the deeply philosophical baby grows up to become the philosophomoric Berkeley professor.

Do I need to cite examples? In my margin notes I use the symbol (-?!), which, as you might guess, is the opposite of (?!). I use it when I encounter something that is so provocatively stupid, that it reaches mystical (or mystagogic) depths. And it is a kind of "reverse gnosis," or (-n), as we will be discussing below.

Let's see... How about this sloppily projected jumble of half-digested metaphysical nonsense about human knowing: "methods of experimentation and statistical analysis seem to be programmed into our brains even when we are tiny babies. Very young children unconsciously use these techniques to change their causal maps of the world. Those programs allow babies, and so the rest of us, to find the truth" (emphasis mine).

Where to even begin? Frankly, I don't think I want to dwell on it. But if one of my students suggested that human beings are programmed by natural selection "to find the truth," I'd probably slap him upside the head with my zen stick. Good thing I don't have any students. Or a zen stick.

I mean, two pages later she breezily affirms that "a hundred years or more of scientific study of the brain has convinced almost all philosophers that everything we experience" is reducible to the brain. Well, first of all, so what? Truth isn't a democracy, much less an authoritarian democracy of the tenured.

But more fundamentally, isn't that what science does and scientists do? It's like saying that "one hundred years of baseball has convinced almost all umpires that pitched baseballs are either balls or strikes." It's just a silly tautology dolled up as a philosophy. Thus, "scientific psychology tells us that we can't explain inner consciosness by saying that there really is a mysterious self that we look at with our inner eye..." Oh really? Who just said that? That thing that's programmed for truth? I'm confused.

Also, as you might expect, the book is larded with the (-K) of political correctness, for example, this clinical inanity: "We can predict that legislature for enriched preschools will lead to fewer crimes, just as we can predict that legislating for controls on carbon dioxide emissions will lead to fewer hurricanes." Wha -?! I must have missed that one. Man can legislate fewer hurricanes. Who knew?

Must move on. Again, the subject is a profound one, but you're much better off reading the works of a deep thinker such as Allan Schore.

Anyway, back to William's point about the negative IQ of the left. This got me to thinking. It's not just their negative IQ that causes so many problems, but a kind of very real "negative mysticism."

In fact, I would suggest that the latter is far more problematic, as it is responsible for the truly mass movements of liberal fascism. I think it's axiomatic that Obama could not have been elected without this tsunami of negative mysticism, or -O. Note as well that the people leading the charge were the so-called intelligentsia, i.e., those founts of (-K) in academia and the media.

This immediately reminded me of Chesterton's comment that when a man stops believing in God he doesn't believe in nothing; rather, he believes anything. I was trying to google the exact quote, but in so doing, found this little gem that applies to our subject: "Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy [insert rule by liberal elites] means government by the badly educated." This is why for the Raccoon, it generally comes down to a choice between the stupid party and the evil party.

Another brief asnide. We have heard many stories about Obama's vaunted intelligence. First of all, I've never seen it, but then again, my standards are admittedly high. But in my opinion -- and I mean this quite literally, not as mere insultainment -- I believe that Obama is the most ignorant man who has ever been president, at least in my lifetime. What I mean is that, whatever his native intelligence, it has been maimed and distorted as a result of his postmodern education. In short, he is filled to the brim with (-K).

I was reading the other day of how JFK was the first president born in the 20th century. Similarly, Clinton was the first baby-boomer president. The really ominous thing about Obama is that he is our first president who is the product of the postmodern educational establishment, which didn't really gain control until around 1980 or so (Obama would have begun college in the fall of 1979, if I'm not mistaken).

Therefore, the problem isn't just that Obama is "wrong." If only! Rather, it's that he arrogantly knows so many things that just aren't so, and that he flourished in a wackademic environment in which this way of thinking was encouraged, nurtured, and praised. No wonder he's such a moron. Every day he unleashes some kind of crazy remark that you just know he must have picked up in college. But since he's only ever associated with those types of scoundrels, he has no idea how offensive he is to normal people.

Thus, for example, Obama was the first president to ever even think about groveling around the world on an "apology tour." But this is nothing that any liberal academic wouldn't do. Likewise, when Justice Sotomayor made her "wise Latina" crack, she was uttering something so commonplace for the left that it hardly merits comment. Nor did Obama think anything of it. A large part of Obama's free fall has to do with his naively making various comments that reflect his leftist values. Surely he is intelligent enough to know that the leftist must always lie about his true beliefs and intentions.

Darn, I wanted to get into the "minus O" of liberal fascism. Maybe tomorrow.