Low Verbal IQ Predictor of Politically Correct Authoritarianism
In an 1817 collection of essays titled Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, the English literary critic, William Hazlitt, argued that what made Shakespeare such a great writer was that his characters are perfectly natural—that is, motivated by complex and often conflicting emotions that they often struggle to resolve
Shakespeare’s characters never conform to a polemical or ideological scheme. We are moved by them because the thoughts and emotions they express seem so real, vivid, strange, and surprising.
I thought of Hazlitt’s book a few years ago when I attended a play in New York written by a young and aspiring playwright.
The plot was what happens when a black girl arrives at college for her freshman year and discovers that her assigned roommate in the dormitory is a white girl who has tacked a Confederate flag on the wall over her bed.
A polemical debate ensues that reveals nothing about the characters apart from their disagreement about the Confederate flag.
The play was embarrassing to watch and I felt sorry for everyone involved in it because they apparently weren’t intelligent enough to recognize how dumb they looked. This morning I was reminded of this play when I saw the following Tweet by the Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson:
Intrigued by this Tweet, I did some further research and found a recording of a conversation in which Peterson hypothesized: “People who are less verbally sophisticated are more likely to gravitate towards all-encompassing, simple theories.”
This strikes me a plausible explanation for what seems to be the unifying theme of all Woke ideology—namely, its reduction of human affairs and history to a crude, black and white schema with no complexity or nuance.
Thus, if you are frequently puzzled by the bizarre statements and behavior of Woke people, consider that they are even more confused than you are.
POSTSCRIPT: Shortly after I posted the above essay, I received multiple texts from friends who informed me that my apparent intention had not been understood by critical commentators. It seems to me that, though Jordan Peterson did not explicitly state it, he was reflecting on college educated people who are drawn to Woke ideology.
One commentator—Michael Brownstein—interpreted my essay as “a put-down of the so-called salt of the earth.” For the record, I frequently hang out with the so-called salt of the earth—that is, guys who did not go to college—and I can assure Mr. Brownstein that they are not interested in Woke ideology, but find it mind-bogglingly stupid.
It seems to me that Jordan Peterson’s observations confirm the same phenomenon that George Orwell famously described in his essay POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, which describes the silly nonsense that infects the minds and prose of many college educated people.
See more here substack.com
Header image: USnews.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
r.rebar
| #
shakespeare was a commitee (he was only their agent/producer) — jordan peteron is an idiot & you are as well to believe truly great thinkers like marx & eagles only appeal to simpletons…
Reply
ioff101der
| #
“Peterson” requires an “s”. And who is “eagles”? If you meant “Engles”, you not only juxtaposed the “e” and the “s”, but you hit the “a” instead of the “n”. Okay, so what!
Here’s the main gig: Y’all done called Marx a “truly great thinker”. Marx was born in 1818. Eight years before his death in 1883, after years and years of his being able to refine and perfect his theories, he stated what is probably his most famous political “truth”, received worldwide as axiomatic by the type of people Dr. Peterson wrote about. This great and wonderful upheaval in scientific thought has driven the gullible to great heights of stupidity. See if you can spot the insanity of reasoning that this “truly great thinker” lays on the world in the following paragraph. There are at least two glaring examples.
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
With fabulous attainment of thought such as this, who needs common sense?
Reply
Greg Spinolae
| #
A gravitation toward simplistic (eg. black-and-white) world views seems to also correlate with low numeracy and, specifically, an inability to comprehend even trivial notions of probability. It seems reasonable to hypothesise that blindness to nuance may be a combination of both verbal and numeric disability.
Reply