I had some mild 'debates' with distant relatives at Christmas. The main thing I noticed among my liberal family members was that they always go back on their education. They use their flimsy major(s) in college as proof that they are somehow experts. Additionally, they always bring up their white collar jobs as somehow proof of their superior intelligence.
They also like to elevate the newspapers they read as gospels of truth. They will outright dismiss any other source, without addressing the argument. Their explanations are often overwrought with big words, and could be said in half the time. I also notice they tend to speak condescendingly when they disagree: they'll say things like, 'you misunderstand' or 'you don't grasp' or 'you lack comprehension'...
They will go to great lengths to parse words rather than to address the substance. It's like I'm talking to a human Snopes...
Well, you hit the nail on the head with your first point. They overvalue education. That's a huge problem. They think because they spent 4 years in post-secondary that they are somehow more intelligent than everyone else because they think education is worth far more than it actually is.
The big issue is that their sources of information are akin to a religion. Academic institutions are their churches, the studies they read are church dogma and their journalist sources are the sources which are most aligned with the church. Any dissenting view isn't a challenge to them but heresy and should be discarded simply because it doesn't align with their religion's outlook of the world.
These people aren't actually intelligent. You know the stereotype of some low IQ woman who knows nothing but then joins a cult and all of a sudden she knows everything but all she really knows is what the cult taught her? She acts though as if she's God's chosen one with all the answers and is the smartest person in the room because she's the greatest following of X cult? That is what you're experiencing with their liberals. Their "education" and liberal worldview is nothing more than a cult and they act like good cult members who now see life through the lens of the cult. They think they're experts but all they know is their cult doctrine and they really know nothing outside of what the cult tells them.
They are indoctrinated, full stop.
Well said. In a sense, they have abandoned religion, and replaced "science" and liberalism in place of religion. Now to question their politics or "settled science" is to question their faith, and that faith is where they get their self worth, and is a direct insult to their person. You can't disagree or have a debate, because "they know", but all they know is what the "experts" (with their own agenda)/media told them what to believe....
Yes, this is a good way to describe the situation. It's almost as if science and knowledge is better sought as an addition to religion. Have an objective moral code based on religion and then seek knowledge+science. When people have no religion, they latch onto knowledge+science as their religion and lose objectivity.
People thought that by embracing atheism and anti-theism, it was the only way to objectively view science without religion clouding their judgement but when learning science without a strong objective moral code, people in fact latched onto science like a religion and lost their ability to see the science from an impartial perspective.
Interesting stuff. Good philosophical ideas here worth thinking into more. There's definitely something here.
Very interesting point!
Like when someone says "conservatives don't believe in science " I respond " I do believe in science, as well as its limitations" they tend to implode.
Science may one day be able to explain everything we currently don't know, like how intuition works, but until then we can't just toss out God-given sense & sensibility. Science is a process invented by humans, within our limited understanding of the universe. Just like mathematics work as far as in our known plane of existence.
For all we know, our scientific process could be missing something major that is limiting us from uncovering other realms.
Could be missing something like a definition of consciousness? We cannot define consciousness because we have to use consciousness to analyze consciousness. It's inherently recursive. It's why the ultimate truth has to be revealed. We cannot reason our way to it.
I come back again and again to the existentialists Nietszche and Dostoyevsky. One cannot blow out the moral and philosophical underpinnings of a society without something equally as veracious and vital to replace it. Whether we like it or not, the Judeo-Christian ethos is in the water we are swimming in; it is impossible to divorce this from our society without wavering in the wind untethered searching for some sort of moral locus. We are not supermen who can just create our own values out of nothing. Nihilism is the inevitable result.
Western civilization was built on the interplay between Platonic idealism and Aristotlean empiricism within a Judeo-Christian framework. One cannot omit nor hyper focus on one aspect or the other; to do so swings our society to the horrors of the authoritarians at either end of the spectrum or both.
Great insight. I personally, don't see any value in moving away from Christian morality. As someone who grew up atheist and anti-theist, I've come to realize exactly what you've said. The very fabric of our society that binds us together is rooted in Christian morality. The more we rebel against it, the worse off we are. The outcome from following this morality is far greater on a spiritual, happiness and overall cohesiveness level for society than the nihilism that is replaced by the rebellion against it.
What's funny and disturbing to me is that many people who think of "science" as their source of values don't take the time to recognize that "science" has no comment with regard to values. Science can't tell you which knife is better, a butter knife, or a butcher knife, unless YOU determine the purpose of the knife FIRST. THEN science has something to say. But science has no comment on whether you should cut butter or cut meat.
Scientism.
This isn't necessarily true. A lot of people with higher degrees are geniuses in one field or another, really brilliant people. But just because you know all the ins and outs of physics or know everything about how proteins interact, doesn't mean that you know fucking anything about how politics work or the plight of the modern working class person.
I guess intelligence isn't necessarily the right word. Wisdom is probably closer to the right word. I also don't really think an ability to read and regurgitate is intelligence. If you actually begun to understand the processing capabilities of many of these people, you'd realize that outside of what they were taught to know, their "intelligence" is limited and even at the fields they supposedly know, they don't know much.
You can be very knowledgeable in one specific area, but HOW YOU THINK is more important than WHAT YOU KNOW. I noticed that many people, the WAY they think is what makes them sheep. They're always rationalizing and dismissing things they don't understand. Like if you show them evidence of 9/11, they'll have an excuse, "No way could this be real, how many people would have to be in on it!" It's not about their intelligence but the way in which they apply their brains is wrong.
Yes, this. Too many generations of operant conditioning in our educational systems. They don't have the building blocks of critical thinking (grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and in that order): the who, what, where, and when, then the why, and finally the how. If any of these processes are missed, you don't have learning but rather training.
I would submit that these kinds of people may indeed be very smart, but they have never learned to deal with cognitive dissonance effectively. They came up in a school system that rewarded them for being "smart", which meant they knew how to memorize and regurgitate the desired answers, but they didn't learn how to think critically, and most importantly, they never learned how to deal with being wrong about something and having to adjust their worldview accordingly. They put too much of their self-worth into being "right" and being "smart", so they can't confront anything that indicates they might be wrong.
This isn't really true either. I work with a lot of scientists with more advanced degrees than I have, and I can tell you with confidence that they do truly understand and are experts in the things that they know. They know them inside and out and are extremely skilled in their respective fields. It's not just that they memorized a textbook. But they still have extreme TDS and no functional understanding of what normal people are going through.
I consider myself extremely lucky in retrospect, because I also graduated with a science degree but found myself unable to find work in my field when I graduated. I also had a bit of a superiority complex back then and didn't want to lower myself to doing something outside of my field. But after months of not being able to find a job I ended up settling for a very blue collar job in manufacturing adjacent to my field but required no degree and worked there for a bit over a year doing essentially manual labour before finally finding something in my field. All of my co-workers at the time would ask what I was doing there when I told them about my education, and they were all happy for me "getting out" when I told them I found a job in my field of study.
The amount of perspective that that year has given me has proven to be invaluable to me. A lot of my friends and co-workers went straight out of college into their science job, and they have no idea what it's like to work a blue collar job. When I tell them stories about my past job they all say that it sounds horrible and that I was so unlucky to have had to do that job. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world, even though what I do now is better and more fulfilling to me in practically every way. So many people with advanced degrees never need to go through what I did, and so they complain about working conditions that are far superior to what I had to do in my last job.
As a whole, I still think it is. I've met a lot of people with advanced degrees (I have one myself) I wouldn't describe a lot of them as very intelligent but again, perhaps I'm confounding intelligence with wisdom. It's not really a set defined thing so everyone's idea of it is different. Is a blacksmith who knows his trade inside and out necessarily intelligent? Having mastery in something in my view doesn't equate to intelligence, even if the subject is seemingly complex. With time and discipline a lot of people can learn and get through almost anything when it comes to academia. There are some subjects which command a certain level of intelligence but these subjects are rare at the academic level.
Keep in mind that not all "advanced" degrees are STEM. There's a lot of people with social science degrees, business degrees and liberal arts degrees who also have "advanced degrees" in those fields. I'm speaking of all of them inclusive. There's also a world of difference between a PhD from MIT in Stats and some guy who got a PhD in Stats from some joke university. To me, a lot of the degrees people are getting are nothing more than glorified participation trophies. When 50% of your population has some sort of post-secondary, it has lost most of its value as a correlative indicator of intelligence. Perhaps you have a higher probability of having > 100 IQ but I hope that's not people's metric for intelligence.
Perspective and wisdom might be a better word. A CPU is intelligent in the sense that it can process complex operations if broken down into non-complex parts at immense speeds but we'd never ask a CPU for its guidance on how to utilize the information it is processing. Is a CPU intelligent? Intelligence, in my view, requires both an ability to learn and understand material and also on ability to apply. It's the latter part I see lacking in many people. They make great CPUs but poor decision makers.
This is something that I have experienced as a working professional. I will interact with very smart people who did very well in college. But one thing that sticks out about most of them is that they are just very studious. They often lack on their feet understanding. They will know everything about one topic but won't readily synthesize that knowledge. Engineering, for instance, is best met by people that have an extensive mental toolbelt and not so much an encyclopedic knowledge of it. The ability to cobble together a mish mash of ideas and bring it into a working model of understanding is a special skill that most people simply don't have. This type of intelligence is what really separates the men from the boys and the liberal from the conservative.
As someone with a background in both science and engineering, and who works alongside both scientists and engineers, this is an incredibly true statement to me.
When I was in college, all of my science classes (barring one or two) were heavily focused on memorizing facts and information and systems. Very heavily focused on imprinting as much knowledge as possible, with no application. When I went into engineering classes however, while there was a lot of knowledge to pass on, it was focused more on applying the knowledge they taught to solve new problems that you hadn't seen before. It teaches you an entirely different way of thinking than the science classes. It was SUPER jarring to me after spending a year doing almost all engineering courses going back to mostly science classes.
And now with my job I work with a lot of scientists and they all tell me that I think about things and approach problems differently than they do. It's kind of an intangible thing, but everyone in the room can notice it.
Listen to Feynman discuss theology sometime lol.
An excellent summary. I used to teach at a university, and so many people have expressed shock and disbelief when they learn I am a MAGA supporter. They can't wrap their conditioned minds around the concept of being educated and following DJT.
They overvalue education and undervalue knowledge.
This, I have witnessed my entire life.
Good way of putting it but most won't understand what this means.
They also whine when they cant get a job and want others to pay off the loans? Which is it?
Sometimes being able to memorize facts for 4 years is not useful.