Clever Sillies

This is a short post with some examples of clever people believing stupid things. And here is the origin of the term: "Clever sillies: why high IQ people tend to be deficient in common sense."

In fact clever sillies are people who have an agenda defined by their social position, which being axiomatically believed, prevents them from understanding reality properly.

1. The Catholic Church cannot understand evolution

From a biological view, the whole of life is a space of genotypes, mutating and complexifying over time via new phenotypes in response to environmental challenges caused by geophysical events and the feedback loops within ecologies themselves.

If you look at primate genomes, the C, G, A, T sequences, nothing jumps out at you about humans. They're pretty indistinguishable from other primates. There's continuity.

Yet in Catholic doctrine, people are in a unique relationship with God, have souls and so forth. Chimpanzees not so much.

Evolution can't support such theological discontinuities, so lip-service only is paid to it.

2. Liberals cannot understand evolution

From a biological standpoint, the presently-existing human race is a marvel of diversity. Over and above the basic XX-XY genomic differences encoding differential male-female reproductive roles, we see regional and historical adaptations to climate and social complexification marking and enabling geographical migration, the neolithic revolution and even the turbulent social history of the last millennium.

New results are being released every day, from teams like that of David Reich through to everyday personal genomics companies such as 23andMe.

None of this is consistent with equal outcomes, an axiom of SJW thought. So human micro-evolutionary plasticity must be denied.

3. Economist can't understand capitalism

As Steve Keen showed, the theoretical structure of neoclassical economics - the current orthodoxy - is laughably stupid. It takes years of education to ram this nonsense firmly into economists' heads. Capitalism is conceptualised as an idealised village market: petty-commodity production.

All this to wish away the obvious truth that investment is conducted for profit, and that profits result from the appropriation by private owners of produced value from propertyless workers. Unthinkable.

Conclusion

We live in a society which denies its own economic nature and for its own replicatory purposes misrepresents the nature of the people who comprise it. No wonder we are drowning in lies.

Where is the truth?

Where is the truth, you ask. Marxists come close with their understanding that capitalism is a kind of game played by people in unequal class relations. The ideologies which makes this seem natural and right are discussed above.

Yet Marxism buys into a naive ideology of the ur-nature of mankind: generalised benevolence waiting for the right social conditions to emerge. This unlikely prospect has been falsified both by history and biology. So there's another agenda subverting the truth. The ever-critical Marx would have been horrified.

I think the people who get closest to truth are the sociobiologists (check out West Hunter some time). They have the kudos of being reviled by everyone.

As the petty-bourgeoisie gets ever more outraged at its lacklustre prospects, its febrile mobilisations, its crazed intellectual frothings get ever more irksome and dangerous.

Hold on tight .. .