The Other Side is Stupid
Of all the misguided beliefs people tend to develop are that people whose political views are different from yours must be intellectually wanting. I find that this belief is more common in liberals, but only slightly.
It’s easy to understand where it comes from. You reach your conclusion about the way society ought be structured and how government ought do that structuring, and along the way, the notion that your conclusions arrived only as a consequence of your intellect takes root. Therefore, since you also believe that intellect is a linear scale and that higher levels of understanding on every thing which could be understood can only be reached by a higher placement on the IQ number line, if someone has not reached the same conclusions about society that you have, the must be dumber than you, because they did not reach your “level” of understanding.
Every step of this line of thinking is flawed.
The underlying flaw is to believe that your political oultook is a function of intellect. There’s a very small chance that this is true. I believe that poltiical views are a function of the core of your personality, and intellect only rationalizes them and allows us to talk about them in pragmatic ways, such as translating into legislative policy. There are very smart liberals and very smart conservatives and all manor in between, both politically and intellectually.
I don’t like to insinuate that liberals are stupid, because many people I know who voted for Obama are not stupid. So it really aggravates me when liberals insinuate that all conservatives are stupid, particularly since 99 times out of 100, I know that I am objectively more intelligent than the person who is making that claim, at least on the basis that they’re making it. I score very highly on standardized tests. Is that what they mean by intelligent?
My intelligence allows me to articulate my core feelings and to formulate societal rules based on them, but I would still be a conservative even were I unable to do so. I believe a large segment of the conservative voter base is unable to do so. I also believe a large segment of the liberal voting base is unable to articulate their ideas either, which is why politics is awash in canned talking points. It’s also why politicians merely repeat these talking points ad nauseum and never actually say what intelligent people want to hear because the middle of the bell curve would be too slow to appreciate it.
I think this is one of the reasons that the more intelligent segments of either political party likes to call the other feeble-minded, because they’re not looking at the segments of the other party whose intelligence is on-par with their own but rather the morass of idiots. In my case, when I think of a liberal, I generally think of the morons who whine about evil corporations and blood for oil and so on and so on. The problem is that even the intelligent liberals still deal in the lowest-common-denominator messages because they have to, and the same goes for conservatives.
I think ultimately, the difference between liberal thinking and conservative thinking comes down to group orientation. Liberals are pro-group and conservatives are pro-individual. Too much group-think leads to Marxist collectivism and too much individualism leads to an anarchic dystopia.
But this has nothing to do with intelligence. Even if there were a definitive correlation between raw IQ and political affiliation, we couldn’t show causality.
So, do me a favor, regardless of whether you’re a conservative or a liberal – stop insinuating that those politically opposed to you are categorically stupid. The truth is the majority of people are categorically stupid regardless of how they vote, so let’s just leave it at that.
The reality is that academic thinking is precluded by practical thinking. This is the reason that conservativism survives alongside of the intellectually elite liberals. Liberals are definitely smarter than conservatives on the grand scheme, but they can’t argue their way out of cold hard reality. Like Mencken said, “an ideologue figures that since a rose smells good, it should make good soup too”.
My own example: Take for instance monogamy. Say I have a 190 iq and I explain to my woman that only non-monogamy makes sense intellectually, and I have countless rationalizations to illustrate how monogamy is antiquated and repressive, etc… It doesn’t matter, because despite how “intelligent” my arguments…and even if she “agrees” because she can’t intelligently defend herself… the logic will go down in flames quickly and contemptuously when she sees me with another woman. That is practicality taking a hearty shit right on academia.