What Have We Learned?

As most everyone understands by now, our ruling class hates -- for lack of a better term -- "Trumpist populism" because it has revealed their utter cluelessness to anyone whose livelihood doesn't depend upon maintaining this institutional stupidity. 

No sentient person is surprised at the sudden "realization" that our president is a feeble but compliant tool of various and sundry interests that are not our interests, from technofascist thought police to greedy public employee unions to the lucrative racist-industrial complex.  

So, what's the bottom line? What have we learned? Speaking for myself, I have learned that real intelligence is much, much rarer than people realize. What does it say that even a crank blogger such as myself knows more about military strategy than the woke heretic-hunting generals advising our president? Or that even I know more about the cause of inflation than his economic advisors?  

But these examples are too specific. I'm making a much more general point about the rarity of real intelligence. There are people who will tell you with a straight face that Ours is the most educated citizenry ever!, which just makes you want to laugh, after you're done vomiting. Can you even imagine deferring to someone because He attended Harvard!, or worse,  He's an Ivy League professor! 

Not to boast, but I'm guessing that longtime readers are attracted to a blog that speaks intelligently of religious matters. Now that I think about it, I only write to serve a small niche audience called myself. If there were someone else doing it, I could retire from blogging as well. (To be perfectly accurate, I know that others exist, but it takes me less time to write than to read.)

Anyway, back to Real Intelligence. Back when I finished grad school in 1988, I was still naive enough to believe that a PhD conferred some sort of special status. And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure that a big part of this was due to my own needs for status and distinction, long since extinguished. Back then, I still wanted to be a little Somebody instead of a big Nobody.  

Intelligence and Authority are intimately connected. Real intelligence -- the kind we're discussing here -- cannot be conferred in any extrinsic manner. Rather, it is communicated directly, intellect to intellect -- or better, heart-intellect to heart-intellect, since it transcends any transmission of mere "information," factual or otherwise. 

It's enough to hear it to know it's authoritatively true -- not necessarily because of the content but because of the mysterious source -- as in how some village carpenter said "follow me," and they did. Not only was his authority granted by no man, but the men with authority saw to it that he was given the Socrates treatment. Socrates too spoke with Authority, which brings to mind an Aphorism:

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

Or cross. Or cancefixion. The logos must be punished!

Most readers of this blog know when they are in the presence of this subtle intelligence-light (≈), and cannot be fooled by the other kinds. Some people radiate intelligence; others radiate stupidity. Who can see the face of Chris Cuomo or Sandy Cortez or Kamala Harris and not feel the stupid? 

But again, those examples are too specific, when I'm referring to something far more general: in our day and age the stupid pervades the pneumosphere; its sophicating presence is everywhere, so much so that it is difficult even to have an intelligent conversation with these spiritually coarse and intellectually crude masses of asses. It is much easier to have an intelligent conversation with my gardener or pool man than with a fellow psychologist. 

As if that's not enough, the diabolical alliance of tech giants and the DNC has emboldened the powers and principalities that aren't content to just marginalize intelligence, but ultimately wish to criminalize it. And one way they achieve this is by outsourcing the suppression of intelligence to hordes of credentialed submediocrities who gain a sense of identity and moral superiority by punishing and excluding people who are much more intelligent than they are.

Do you have any idea of the billions of dollars it costs to prop up the university apparatus designed to enforce this institutional stupidity -- i.e., the diversity goons, antiracism thugs, feminist whordes, multicultureless zealots, etc.?  The cost isn't just measured in student indebtedness, but in the assimilation of an impenetrable farcefield that repels all appeals to intelligence.

Imagine spending that much money to make oneself that stupid! These indebted students think they merely got a bad deal, but they have no idea, because they still think the product just cost too much, when the real problem is that the product is spiritually and certainly intellectually toxic.  

You can have the most expensive educational establishment in the world, but it will do nothing to alter the sobering reality of the Bell Curve. You can give a PhD to a person with a 100 IQ, but the former has no impact on the latter. 

Suffice it to say that this credentialism is one of the reasons that the ranks of our elite are packed to the gills with stupid. Not only is it affirmative action all the way down, but it is... how to put it... affirmative exclusion all the way up. In other words, they see to it with tools such as "diversity," "equity," and a ruling class that looks like us! that intelligence is not a criteria.  

But normal people are beginning to rebel, as we're seeing with CRT protests, mask rebellions, the homeschooling movement, etc. Here in California there is a slight chance that the handpicked face of technofascism will be defeated by the Black Face of White Supremacy -- in other words, an intelligent black person.

Now, all of the above was provoked in the course of reading Lee Siegel's latest collection of essays, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump (in sidebar).  It provides a lot of history and context as to how we got here. HISTORY is difficult to see when we're in the middle of it -- which we always are. 

But Siegel vividly traces the line of progressive stupidity back a century or so, to the days of Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, the latter being one of the fondling fathers of progressive perversity. Come to think of it, a better book to start with would be Siegel's The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, which goes into more detail on how we ended up mired in this tarpit of stupid.