Amerika

Over at Grey Enlightenment, a classic experiment revisited:

Since 2008, economically and socially, we’re also seeing the rise of the ‘deferers’ – the high-IQ kids who deferred eating the marshmallow, now grown-up, and are reaping all the fruits of prosperity in our ‘new economy’, getting richer than ever while the ‘eaters’ are on the lower echelons of society, stuck with crappy, low social status jobs and bad relationships, assuming they even have jobs.

Unfortunately this assessment misses the point. Our problem is not that the smart are getting ahead the expense of everyone else, but that they are not. Instead, we have a quasi-intelligent middle layer that has taken over, and by doing so, has crowded out anyone who “knows better” about its little schemes, which periodically break down into depressions.

What has happened in the economy since 2008 by the way is what always happens: the quasi-intelligent but obedient and diligent (read: “frequently in attendance”) get promoted because they are good little cogs that in theory make people money by being in that desk chair. The intelligent are demoted because no one understands what they are going on about, and the truly mediocre are paired down as soon as their roles can be replaced by automation.

We are promoting those who are best at taking tests, studying, repeating in detail what they were once told and staying abreast of talking points and current vocabulary, not our brightest. Like all societies, ours is collapsing because we set up a single path to success through schooling and then dumbed it down to fit the audience, so now we have mostly useless people even at the higher levels.

This is just one manifestation of the gradual takeover of our society by a single idea, equality. On the surface it sounds good, but underneath it is a cauldron of guilt and instability. As Breitbart News reports from Europe:

Migrants have placed their babies, toddlers and young children on railway tracks in Greece in a bid to blackmail European authorities into reopening their borders.

…“We understood the EU advocates human rights not human trafficking”, and, “I’m child and might not know much, but I believe treating people disrespectful for being born on the other side of the planet is called: ‘RACISM’”, added others.

…Around 36,000 have been trapped in Greece recently, unable to move on to their preferred destinations – namely Germany and Sweden.

The message is simple: when you don’t get what you want, use an equality spell to demand others give it to you!

It’s the same thing that happened with education and jobs. At first, education went to those who had a background for it. Then it needed to expand, to democratize, so they started “educating” others — but of course, these lacked the invisible abilities of the original group. The judgment, the depth of thought, the perception. So we faked it. We made up a bunch of tests and memorization contests to reward people of quasi-intelligence in place of the actually intelligent.

Now, you will rarely find anyone in this society who is mentally competent in the important ways. They have no judgment skills because their general intelligence is high but not high enough. You do not get outright incompetents like Angela Merkel ruling nations until the smarter people have been driven into hiding. And that’s where they are, hoping it will all blow over, as they live ordinary suburban lives.

The rest of our worker culling is easily explained: Technology has enabled business to collapse its worker pool and, upon observing that most workers spend all day on Facebook, it probably had little compunction about thinning the herd further. Why bother keeping around the useless? Your competitors will not.

Tags: intelligence, jobs, work