A friend on the paleo-right list asks about the strange relation between the Left and IQ:

The left screams “intolerance!” whenever someone like Charles Murray raises the dreaded specter of IQ, even as they go to lengths emphasizing the intellectual disparities between GW and Gore […]

My response:

I think it relates to a conflict within liberalism. The basic notion of liberalism is that there isn’t any good or evil, there’s just what people want. That has two consequences:

1. The point of politics is to turn the whole world into a rational machine for the maximum equal satisfaction of desire.

2. All desires are equal, and all human beings are equal, since their desires are equally desires and it is desire that is the source of value.

Point 1 justifies absolute rule by a meritocracy, since politics becomes a purely technical issue of a kind to which a meritocracy is best suited.

Point 2 means that the power and even existence of the ruling New Class meritocracy has to be denied, since otherwise some people are being viewed as better than others since they are given the right to rule others without consent.

So we’re left in this position in which the most important thing in the world is having a high IQ and being part of the meritocracy that rules everything, but it’s also absolutely necessary to deny that’s so, that there is a ruling meritocracy or that IQ means anything.

Posted by Jim Kalb at April 25, 2002 01:17 PM | Send