Summer Fundraiser 2013, Day 5

I am beginning to see the wisdom of the Baron’s choice of Time, or the Amplitude of Time, as the theme of this quarter’s bleg. So much has happened to us since our last time in the Spring. Daily life has been so crowded with dramas and disconnects that it feels like much more than a few months since we last appeared, tin cup in hand. Come to think of it, some readers thought so too, and began to send in donations, thinking they’d missed the summer fundraiser.

And it’s not just our personal lives on the edge in those intervening months since that fundraiser. The waves of scandals, corruptions, malfeasance and cynicism coming out of our political class, our banksters, and our media echo-chambers were arriving at such a fast and furious rate (to coin a phrase), that we all began to burn out… and the smell of those many scorched souls is still with us. You can take only so many shocks before you begin to resemble those lab rats who’ve been zapped once too often. Perhaps that’s the point? Overload the public conversation so that we are finally mute? I wonder.

In the final analysis, what keeps us fully human and attuned to one another is our willingness to keep talking to each other in good faith. Even when I have neither the strength nor focus to write a post, I can still correspond; I can still leave occasional scattershot comments here and there and receive thoughtful responses in return. What I’ve learned more deeply than I knew before the advent of our blog is the great value of simple conversation. In some fashion this permits a return (in an unexpected way) to previous generations’ customs of long twilight discussions on the back porch. Except now it would be on the deck, in far more comfortable chairs. Like the old days, though, there is still an ebb and flow; many times a thread is dropped only to be picked up again later as someone appears with new information.

So what you will read below is like that. You will be reading part of a shared time, a conversation between two people who have never met but have sometimes “spoken” via the written word. The 19th century with amenities?

This particular exchange between the Baron and the commenter wildiris took place recently, at some point well after the Baron posted Outsmarting Ourselves. That essay was his reflection on the shameful firing of Jason Richwine by the Heritage Foundation. What this non-profit organization did reflects the extent to which even ostensibly conservative groups have become contaminated with the virus of cultural Marxism; what showed most obviously was their fear of guilt by association.

Whether or not this defenestration was due to Heritage’s recent appointment of a politician as their executive director is anyone’s guess. No matter how you view it, though, forcing Mr. Richwine out is a permanent stain on the institutional history of Heritage. They were not seen to act from principle so much as from a hasty and embarrassed expediency. As the Baron said in another context, “justice was not seen to be done”.

If I remember correctly, we first met wildiris on another blog, long before Gates of Vienna was in existence. The three of us were frequently in a comment section, though it’s been so long now — nine years at least — that I no longer remember what was said. What I do recall was the liveliness of those who met there to read and discuss. And yes, I did tend to go on too long; isn’t it good to know some things never change?

After we opened the Gates, wildiris showed up — to my immense pleasure we had an old friend come to visit. (There were other old friends also, but most of them drifted away or confine themselves to emails in these parlous times.) Of course back then I was sure the nic indicated wildiris was a woman. What manly man calls himself after a flower?? Well, a logger does. He simply admired those short-stemmed flowers growing in open woody areas where he lived — and perhaps logged? We used to have them here, too, in our woods, so it was another bond we had.

My point in sharing The Conversation with you is that it could only have occurred with the passage of time and with a variety of exchanges which allowed them to know one another sufficiently to share their ideas more fully. That takes trust and respect.

I hope you find this process as interesting as I did. Sometimes it’s enlightening to be simply a bystander here. We’ll begin with wildiris’ email some weeks after the post closed.

Wildiris:

Good Morning Baron,

I’ve been thinking a lot about your post from a few weeks ago, “Outsmarting Ourselves.” It brings up, yet again, that question, “Why do smart people do dumb things?”

For me personally, I think this is the most important question that a forum such as Gates of Vienna can contemplate. I really, truly believe that the answer to this question will also be the answer to what is failing about Western society and in due course also give the answer as to how to change things for the better.

I know I probably come across as a tinfoil-hat thinker sometimes, but my hope is that someday I’ll say something, perhaps just by accident, that will trigger some new way of thinking on your part, that in turn will show you the path to your answer.

So here goes… As you know I spend a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the field of AI, some of the big-ticket items of debate are concepts such as consciousness, intelligence and sense-of-self. While there is no consensus as to how these different concepts should be defined and delineated, there does seem to be awareness that they are not independent of each other, but rather form a hierarchy: starting with the lowest, which is life itself, then consciousness, then intelligence, then sense-of-self, and then finally, language and learning.

The important thing to note is that in this hierarchy, sense-of-self trumps intelligence. And it doesn’t take more than a few moments thought to see no end of examples as to why this is true. The English upper-class disdain for the EDL, for example. In fact, the need to acquire a sense-of-self can be so overpowering it will lead an individual, living in an Islamic culture for example, to become a suicide bomber in his effort to attain it.

Intelligence, by itself, is only a force multiplier for the virtues and vices that form a person’s sense-of-self. So maybe our inquiries should be focused on this thing we call our sense-of-self rather than on intelligence, since, clearly intelligence by itself doesn’t seem to correlate positively with anything going on in the world today.

Sincerely,

wildiris

Baron:

wildiris,

Yes, I think you’re onto something with your “sense-of-self” idea. The same thing would apply to that French kid who got beat up on the bus by enrichers, but would rather endure that than be “racist”. Or the Norwegian intellectual (who argued with Fjordman) who would rather die in a terror attack on an airplane than have passengers profiled, which he considers “discrimination”. This is a deeply entrenched fundamental meme that has suicidal consequences, individually and for a culture.

Intelligence that is significantly above the mean (2 standard deviations, maybe?) may have as little selective value as intelligence that far below the mean. Heck, that’s what formed the mean in the first place, after all. And the most evil and destructive individuals in recent history had high intelligence levels. Lenin and Hitler in particular come to mind.

I keep asking the question “why do smart people do stupid things?” to try to rattle the cages of people such as the “race realists”, who are preoccupied to the point of obsession with race and intelligence. There is no objective evidence that the lesser intelligence of Arabs or Bangladeshis has had a negative selective impact on their collective genome; quite the contrary. White people, in contrast, are in the process of very intelligently destroying their own genetic group.

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