Total IQ versus available IQ

The phenomenon of intelligent people who demonstrate low-IQ behaviours.

We are familiar with Orwell’s famous observation; some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals could believe them.

Those who align themselves with the intelligentsia tend to believe them too, especially professionals in academia, industry and the media. The university-educated middle classes who run our world.

Orwell’s remark was not just about the gullibility of the intelligent. It implied the resistance of those less intellectually gifted. The ordinary person didn’t succumb. A susceptibility to fashionable nonsense was a peculiar feature of high intelligence.

At first glance this seems counterintuitive. We would expect the educated layer of society to resist dangerous fads, to carefully filter through trends and use reason to make sense of things in a rational manner.

Yet we witness the opposite. From suicidal climate policies to state communism, the ordinary person is often suspicious while the most credentialed are drawn to ruinous ideas like moths to a flame.

What is going on inside those big brains? Why aren’t they using their mental machinery as we would expect? Why can they not harness those reputed high IQs? More worrying, how can those with modest intellects see through foolish ideas while their more educated fellow citizens can’t? It seems unprecedented.

But this is not the case. Nature provides us with comparable examples.

Total T versus available T

Testosterone, the male sex hormone, regulates libido, bone mass, muscle and fat distribution. Lowering testosterone can have profound effects on men’s physiology.

Total testosterone can be measured using a simple blood test. However, the number that really matters is not total testosterone but free or available testosterone, the amount usable by the body. This can be measured too although is often ignored in favour of the total value measured instead.

Many factors affect how much testosterone is available; age, diet and level of exercise are important. There are external influences too beyond our immediate control, endocrine disruptors such as xenoestrogens, the effect of plastics and even female sex hormones in the water supply.

Total measured testosterone tells only part of the story. It is available testosterone that determines masculinity.

Importantly, we know it is entirely possible for a man to have a high total measure of testosterone but low levels of available testosterone. This in turn manifests in observable differences in male physiology and behaviour. Low-T men carry more weight and display a different distribution of body fat. Low testosterone can lower sex drive and result in sexual dysfunction.

Psychological effects can be witnessed too. Low-T men are more emotional, struggle to assert themselves, and appear less masculine to women.

Low available testosterone does all this no matter how high the total value measured. When observers ignore available testosterone scores and focus only on the total value measured the results can be perplexing. Men who ought to exhibit masculine traits fail to do so. It makes no sense.

Witnessing the insanities embraced by some of the brightest people in society, where evidence of their alleged high IQs is largely absent from their behaviour, we can suggest intelligence may well work in a similar way.

Embracing bad ideas

IQ tests measure intelligence and the capacity to reason. In principle they provide a mechanism to compare intelligence levels in individuals and groups. Yet it is those who score highest on IQ tests who seem to embrace bad ideas the most.

Everyday examples include climate change initiatives, the recent Covid measures enacted in many countries, and the endless appeal of socialism. These fail even minimal levels of rational analysis and could only be charitably described as societal myths suited to the mentally challenged.

Most climate predictions, for example, have failed to materialize. Yet we witness major economies destroying power stations while energy prices skyrocket. Many of these schemes are enthusiastically embraced by the intelligent and educated groups in society, not the ordinary person.

Similarly, Covid measures fundamentally changed most Western countries. Centuries of public health knowledge was jettisoned in a global panic reaction to isolate then manage a virus that was revealed to be no more lethal than the annual flu.

Covid triggered attacks on individual liberty and we witnessed a coordinated assault on naysayers from academia, politics, media and even the corporate world. Virtually all the novel measures adopted failed to meet their stated objectives. Yet today these same interventions are hailed by many in our institutions as successes, even blueprints for future health scares, an assessment that bears no relation to the evidence.

The most celebrated fantasy is socialism and its many variants. It has never worked anywhere and when it has been implemented it has ended tens of millions of lives. Socialism is murderously bad, and yet it is inexhaustibly popular among the brightest in society. Indeed, it is kept alive exclusively by the educated not the mass of humanity who feel its depredations first.

These discredited ideas and many more besides are often championed by those who measure high in intelligence. In some cases, as with socialism, they have only ever been the product of high IQs and higher education even when it is presented using the rhetoric of the working man.¹

Time and again we see the brightest among us embody Orwell’s famous observation. We know their measured intelligence is high, their total IQ so to speak. Are we witnessing something akin to low-testosterone men? Is there some factor inhibiting the use of intelligence in those with plenty to spare? If so, what can it be?

Cognitive disruptors

There are discernible patterns emerging from today’s intellectuals and their followers, the university-educated midwits who populate many of our institutions and corporations.

We can observe three common themes, many of which tend to be present in those who strive to run our world.

Irrational belief systems

Climate change and egalitarianism are the defining creeds of today’s educated classes. Everyone who is anyone embraces both, often visibly and loudly. Both are repeatedly challenged by reality and therefore require faith to maintain.

Their continued existence in the face of relentless contrary evidence is a testament to the depths of belief at play. These are modern religions that have thoroughly captured influential layers of society.

Attending to these beliefs while facts, data and basic observation continually destroy their foundations takes real dedication. Every climate prediction that comes and goes, and there are many, must somehow be incorporated into the crumbling meta-narrative to keep it alive. The ozone layer, the ice caps, polar bears, snow, low-lying islands, and coral reefs; all were fated to die yet are still with us, and in most cases thriving.

Similarly, equality exists nowhere in nature. Its total absence anywhere and everywhere is challenging to accommodate after decades of special initiatives designed to establish its supremacy. How can this be? How much invisible racism and sexism are we expected to believe exists?

This level of delusion requires considerable mental effort. The more important the cause to the person, the more internal resources they must devote to maintain it. The volume of energy academia alone devotes to avoiding any discussion of inherent differences between identifiable groups is just one comical example. Entire careers are dedicated to a position their own research routinely disproves. This represents suicidal levels of delusion and yet on they plod, shouting to all who will listen that we are wrong and they are right.

Secular religions are intellectually demanding. How much cognitive energy is being sapped just to keep these unusual belief systems alive and how much mental energy can be left with which to live normally?

Social approval and ostracism

Another disruptor seems to be the need for social approval. More accurately, the need to avoid social ostracism.

We witnessed this during the Covid measures. Even trained physicians and epidemiologists, those well placed to challenge the absurd medical intrusions invented by bureaucrats, proved unable to do so. They could not possibly have believed all they were told and yet they played along. Few were prepared to challenge the novel orthodoxy that emerged from the political and media classes.

How much mental effort is devoted to scanning the landscape for the social clues needed to avoid offending or challenging approved narratives? It is a sophisticated social game after all.

We all possess some kind of social radar, but what about the strivers who aim high? What is their internal landscape like? Those with the ambition to seek high office but need to be careful what they say and do? Maintaining that complex map of how to act and with whom isn’t cheap or easy. It takes a lot of effort and attention.

This kind of extreme group awareness must take its toll. While many social climbers are psychopaths who believe none of what they say, many others swim in the same waters and lack the mental strength to remain unaffected. Perhaps some of our midwits are in this category, their intellects dulled after years and decades of attending only to the approved message and carefully navigating the communal terrain they maintain in their heads, all of it to avoid the ostracism they so fear. If so, it cannot leave much to embrace normal life.

Mental illness

A final factor must be mental illness. Increasingly we live in a Cluster B world. Antisocial, borderline and narcissistic people are everywhere. Their behaviours are distinct, and difficult to miss.

Evidence is growing that a sizeable portion of society do not grasp reality fully. They live in a world of their own making.

The constant outrage we are subjected to is often the giveaway. Eccentric individuals aggressive about the existence of statues that have stood unmolested for centuries or the lack of female capitalists at the very top of some global corporation most of us are only dimly aware of.

Even if these were legitimate concerns it is the inappropriate nature of the reactions that make us pause. The anger and the posturing, the destruction; the unwillingness to debate or discuss in an adult fashion. Outrage is common as are intolerant demands to accommodate their views, although never those of others. A distorted conviction and sense of righteousness only zealots possess.

The fantasy worlds the crazy maintain in their heads must soak up considerable intellectual energy. Socialist and feminist utopias, atoning for centuries of slavery, other past sins. All these and more unfold within the imagination and cannot leave much room for a normal outlook on life. That is why, for some, only abnormality remains, and it looks like mental illness to the rest of us.

The inhibitards

Do these things act like intellectual xenoestrogens and disrupt the natural flow of the intellect? Just as Western men seem to be degenerating into a kind of hormonal no-man’s-land, are our brightest people lost in unsupported belief systems, fear of social disapproval and perhaps descending into madness?

Do these schemes absorb mental energy? Are the intelligent confused by a cognitive maze of their own creation, leaving less reasoning power for the day to day running of their lives? Is this why nominally less intelligent people sometimes do better since they are not lost within their own minds; they are not maintaining elaborate fictions that agitate the university-educated?

For example, the post-doctorate Gender Studies graduate is spending a lot of time noticing institutional sexism and anti-female bias everywhere. All those female CEOs that don’t exist, the casually sexist jokes by men, and the signs of female oppression that are everywhere from history to the present day.

That is a lot of mental horsepower absorbed in a fruitless set of tasks that accomplish nothing of value except to continually shore up a distorted vision of the world.

By comparison, the plumber she has hired to fix her sink is carrying around almost no baggage. He lives in a world of blocked toilets and waste pipes in which there are a finite number of things that cause problems.

He spends no time wondering why there are almost no female plumbers because he doesn’t care. His intellectual powers have not been captured by fantasy.

Is this what is happening? Is their cognition absorbed by fictional views of life that must be maintained? Is the maintenance so expensive it leaves little intelligence left to navigate normal life despite their nominally high IQs?

Committed socialists certainly expend a lot of intellectual energy on the ravages of capitalism. The rest of us understand businessmen can be ruthless profit-seekers and adapt accordingly. We are not maintaining an alternative economic utopia inside our heads then laboriously comparing it to real life. And yet some are, many of them in academia. It must be exhausting. It seems to consume them.

It is tempting to conclude a preoccupation with invented mental models inhibits the full use of reason, resulting in a form of intellectual retardation that we witness in otherwise capable people. Like men who indulge in a poor diet and gain considerable weight. It lowers their capacity for exercise and movement, both crucial in the production of testosterone. In time, with enough accumulated abuse, it feminizes men taking them ever further from optimal testosterone levels. This crucial hormone is absorbed, stored and used elsewhere with very little left to manage libido, fat distribution and the rest so all the masculine traits we associate with it evaporate, despite nominally high levels present within the bloodstream.

Those who become cognitively inhibited due to intellectual retardation, the inhibitards if you will, seem to be everywhere and are prone to fall for faddish ideas as their captured IQs leave so little intelligence to utilize they act like simpletons, unable to reason and interpret novel ideas at quite the level we would expect. Hence climate fanaticism, Covid madness and even embracing egalitarianism and other obviously flawed socialist ideas.

As horrified as they would be at this observation of their intellectual limits, we know them by their overt behaviours.

Low-IQ behaviours

When we observe the popular ideas championed by our intellectual betters and their hangers on in the professional classes, we see a litany of nonsense that exposes their inability to apply reason or even basic common sense.

The endless desire for various forms of socialism is an appeal to adolescent fantasy. Rational planning, rational individuals, rational populations all making perfectly rational choices in keeping with the common good which, rationally, everyone in utopia will value. No one over the age of 15 could believe this. Anyone familiar with the history of the twentieth century is aware it has all been tried and has failed multiple times.

And yet the very brightest among us fall for it every time. This time we will embrace democratic socialism which is superior to other forms. This will lead to superdemocratic socialism which is better yet since we’ll have flying cars and jetpacks. Then it will be all-singing, all-dancing socialism. After this some form of enlightened megacommunism will be truly amazing. All we need to do is fundamentally change human nature to make it work.

Some devote their entire lives to this fantasy. To them these are realistic ambitions worthy of serious effort while ordinary people reject it time and again.

The climate schemes are no better. Net zero is a slogan not a strategy, yet it is destroying society. When examined in detail it makes little sense. Decommission power stations and replace them with unreliable energy production methods. All this to service climate goals based on flawed computer models.

Reason is absent from these calculations. Only the intellectually limited would embrace this worldview, an understanding of energy management for those unable to think their way through basic logic.

Once the implications of these actions are understood, and the energy prices rise to threaten our survival, only the mentally ill would continue. And that is precisely what we see. No debate is welcome; those most determined to continue with unwise climate policies are now glueing themselves to roads. What is that if not a complete absence of higher reasoning?

Covid demonstrated for several years that the most credentialed among us were unable or unwilling to invoke reason even when the stakes included their own health or that of their children. This included those with the medical or scientific training to assess the evidence and understand its significance. Even they succumbed.

Many people with limited intellects and no fancy degrees gave the whole thing a hard pass and would not allow anyone near their children. They do the same for socialism and bizarre climate rituals. They are normal. They make use of the intelligence at their disposal which is often more than enough to damn many schemes since most of them make no sense.

They behave in more intelligent ways than their intellectual superiors who exhibit low-IQ behaviours. And it is this we must focus on, their visible conduct, not their impassioned beliefs or grand ambitions.

We therefore must look beyond obvious measures of their place in society, high IQ scores and credentials, and examine instead their explicit behaviour and visible choices in detail. We must use our own intellects to expose their inability to think, reason or judge the way most can and highlight these deficits.

Questioning their intellectual capabilities, their available IQ if you will, challenges the assumption of superiority much of the West’s terminal decline rests upon, that an intellectually capable technocratic class see further than the rest of us and therefore have some divine right to rule over us all.

This is the precious myth they cling to, the foundation that animates the profound destruction of our way of life guided by liberal ideas that in turn are driven by fiction.

Using our own intellectual gifts to question the demonstrable absence of theirs is deeply wounding to this layer of society. In doing so we can hope to ensure the future belongs to the sensible and not the fanatics servicing a fantasy inside their heads. We must remind the inhibitards their low-IQ behaviour is being observed and it is past time we insisted upon an explanation.

1. The imposition of communism and its variants has always been a result of the educated middle classes, never the working man in whose name the movements are often enacted. They can get the working classes to seemingly endorse socialist causes but only via the claimed benefits. They’ll tax the rich or build better schools and hospitals etc. It is only the high IQ brigade who are attracted to notions like equality or social justice reckonings that underpin the psychology of socialism.