While the concept of IQ remains controversial, mainly for contradicting the West’s hegemonic ideology, it has limited explanatory value for politics. The case of North and South Korea is illustrative: these countries—being really the same people—have the same IQ; yet the economic and political outcomes in each are radically different, simply because the intellectual-priestly caste in each country believes in a different ideology. Raw intelligence makes little difference to successful politics if the intelligence is directed and governed in the service of an idea that is delusional.
The Koreas reflect two aspects that are essential to any people: the North instantiates everything martial, tribal, and rooted about the Korean people—it maximises their conformist tendencies and slaves their intelligence to produce a Korean version of the supreme weapon, the nuclear-tipped missile; the South, for her part, maximises the productive and merchant-like aspects of the Korean people, projecting Korea’s soft power across the world through K-pop. If both sides of the Korean people were to work in harmony, Korea would be a formidable country in her own right. Instead, she is schizophrenic; she has a split personality, somewhat like the two Germanys, and so her real potential is lost.
Now, it is liable that a minimum level of intelligence is necessary to reach industrialisation: intelligence is probably a hard limit for many countries that seek an independent nuclear deterrent. Yet, beyond a certain point, the beliefs of a people are more significant than their intelligence; and their intelligence, particularly if it has a verbal tilt, may simply be devoted to rationalisations for the current system. So it is that the conservative cult of competence is frequently turned against them. The competent technician or businessman finds their skills turned against them; they competently execute the orders of a regime that wants to destroy people like them—and this happens because it is the priestly caste, experimental and often illogical, that sets the wider objectives for a society and its intelligence.
Humans are status-orientated and it is not the competent technician or builder who sets the values he serves. So we find devout Evangelical Christians join the American army and fight successfully against the Taliban but do so to enable their priest-ideologists to liquidate the religious sensibilities of the Afghans, to “liberate” their daughters and spread LGBT propaganda—contrary to the values of the competent soldiers. As everyone in the West knows, Christianity is not cool—and has not been so for quite sometime, it is, in fact, only cool like a cadaver.
The concept of intelligence inclines to the right: it identifies immutable differences between the sexes and the races, so indicating that inequality is fundamental to the human condition. Yet it is also a scientific position: science is universal; so the classical liberal, the Darwinist, and the IQ researcher go together. Classical liberalism, in the current West, is effectively right-wing extremism when implemented correctly, but it is still egalitarian—we live under the degenerate version. There are blacks and Asians with high IQ—and women, as well—it is just a question of proportions and distributions. As with all science, the suggestion is that if the high IQ people got together—in the style of an H.G. Wells story—they could “sort it out” as a real technocracy, as opposed to our current fake technocracy and fake expertise.
What this move destroys is the idea of tribe, group, and belonging—of rites and ties that are beyond problem-solving, the very definition of intelligence. The deeper reason, of tribe and evolution, is lost in a shallow elitism; but for any group to thrive, as with the two Koreas, its beliefs must be isometric with its nature—when they are not, distortions appear. The highly intelligent can cooperate easily between races and tribes, but in such universal conditions they can also spin new stories to delude each other and their groups. Intelligence alone is not enough, and it must be aligned with the nature of the tribe.