Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. Many thanks to LN for translating this post from the blog Invandring och mörkläggning:

Sunday Chronicle:

The clever and the stupid

by Karl-Olov Arnstberg
January 1, 2023

Last week’s Sunday Chronicle was about intelligence and the quarter-century-old but still controversial research report The Bell Curve. Today I thought I’d shift the focus from the average IQ ratio of different groups to the “smart fraction” — see the picture above.

Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate is a philosophical theory which maintains that human beings are not only shaped by their environment and experiences, but also that they can be shaped into almost anything. Aristotle asserted this in his treatise De Anima (On the Soul), and the Greek Stoics developed the idea. The next big names are the canonised 13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and then the 17th-century philosophers Descartes and John Locke. In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, the latter coined the term “white paper/blank slate”. In his novel Émile or Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoes the same idea when he argues that adults can mould children into whatever they want. Then we may jump to Marx, who argues that it is capitalism that creates the differences (the injustices). In the paradise to which the dictatorship of the proletariat leads, all people will be the same, that is to say, good. No rich capitalist pigs there. The Social Democrats were not convinced that this happiness would be achieved through revolution, and so launched their alternative, social engineering.

The idea that we can all be equal is attractive to socialists in the first place, which, as we know, has cost the lives of several million people. Freud may also be included in the ranks of believers, since he argued that inheritance has minimal significance. Man is formed in his early childhood years. As late as the 1950s, behaviourist psychologists were so convinced that all human behaviour was controlled by the environment that there were even those who believed that the right therapy could cure Down’s syndrome.

That’s the legacy we live with to this day. The politically correct dogma assumes that all human beings are born as blank slates, and that it is only faulty policies, upbringing and environmental factors such as education, nutrition, medical care, etc. that prevent a person from attaining the intellectual or cultural achievements of another person.

It does not seem to matter that there is no scientific support whatsoever for the ideology of equality. Neuroscience, psychometrics and evolutionary psychology have totally shattered the theory that humans are born as a blank slate. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s 500+ page exposé The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published in 2002. Four years later, it was published in Swedish.

Politicians who prattle on about the equal value of human beings, and feminists who campaign for equal opportunity quotas, should be ordered to read it. It would save us citizens a lot of political nonsense. It would also save money, not least when it comes to aid. It is not possible to use aid to help poor countries with low IQ averages out of their misery. Moreover, if politicians were to follow what modern biologists and evolutionary psychologists agree on concerning the importance of heredity, they would put an end to the immigration that is currently filling up Sweden with new inhabitants from Africa and the Middle East faster than the fastest chicken can run.

In 2002, what was called the Smart Fraction Theory was first presented by someone using the pseudonym La Griffe du Lion (The Lion’s Claw), which probably stands for the American sociologist Robert Gordon, who wrote anonymously to avoid a lot of hateful comments and claims of racism. Even controversial science should be driven by logic, theory and empirical evidence, and thus not be disturbed or stopped by vilification and threats. But that’s unfortunately what has happened.

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