Ideology and Time Preference

Stupid is as stupid does

Among intellectual trends, things like group IQ, the genetic component to IQ, and allied topics are one of those areas that is grossly out of fashion right now. Progressives, building upon centuries of blank slatist error, are enforcing the creed of perfect interchangeability among various people groups, a dogma that is necessary to buttress their argument that disparate outcomes between different groups are solely due to “White racism” and “systematic bias.” Yet, the fact that different people-groups possess different traits and characteristics, including differences in group averaged intelligence, is one that many people intuitively grasp. The continued popularity (as I can see from the backend views and other statistics) of two articles relating to this subject that I wrote nearly six years ago demonstrates this. The official suppression of this area of inquiry is a shame because it has great explanatory power for all kinds of issues ranging from crime rates to socioeconomic performance and beyond. Really, if you don’t understand or accept group differences in IQ, then you won’t ever really be able to grasp many things we see from the social sciences.

Once such thing that I’d like to talk about today is ideological breakdown amongst our population and how this impacts why broad ideological groups in our society act the way they do. But to reference this difference, I want to focus on an important second-order effect of intelligence, this being time preference. For those who may not be familiar with the concept, time preference describes an individual’s willingness (or lack thereof) to forgo immediate pleasure or profit in lieu of pursuing goals or activities which provide greater reward later on. High time preference is when a person wants it now, low time preference is the opposite.

In handy graphical format

Low time preference is the farmer planting his seeds and then waiting all season for them to bear fruit. High time preference is the gatherer eating up everything in the area and then wondering where his next meal will come from. Developing low time preference among populations that were able was an invaluable step towards developing high civilisation.

Now, there seems to be a fairly strong relationship between IQ and time preference, with greater intelligence generally correlating with lower time preference. Granted, I don’t personally know of any “peer reviewed studies” that have tried to precisely quantitate this relationship. Understand that though I’m basically making a qualitative argument at this point, common experience that we all probably share intuitively suggests this relationship. A long history of informal empirical observation, that we all “see” to be true in our daily experience, suggests that the regression between intelligence and time preference is fairly strong. Obviously this doesn’t mean that every low IQ person is going to blow all their money on lottery tickets and basketball shoes, nor that no high IQ person will do so. There are a host of other factors in play ranging from religious belief to social pressures and beyond. But it does reflect general, and pretty generalisable, statistic trends that normally hold true.

So anywise, back to the matter of IQ and ideology in the USA. Based upon mine and other observations, the ideological breakdown versus IQ seems to follow two separate patterns for the Right and Left. The Right seems to exhibit a broader range of IQ, probably reflecting that rightist ideology is a more “natural” and “normal” way of looking at the world that “regular people” of all stripes will exhibit. At the same time, the dissident Right in its various factions seems to be weighted towards very high IQ types (say, >130), reflecting their heavy leaning towards philosophical and STEM type fields. The Left, in turn, seems to have a fairly small cognoscenti that clusters in the midwit range (~105-115) and which provides managerial leadership to a much larger sub-100 horde, many of whom are PoCs belonging to ethnicities with lower average IQs as groups.

So how does this apply to our current political situation? Well, I’ve frequently made the observation that the American Left, especially, seems to be particularly high time preference as compared to the European Left. They’re trying to do in four decades what it took the Euro Left greater than 140 years to accomplish. Every action the American Left takes is grossly reactive and carries with it this panicked psychological overtone of “We have to do something RIGHT NOW!! There’s NO TIME to think about what we’re doing!! Thinking is RACIST!!” To exhibit this mindset, check out Democrat lawyer Ron Filipkowski’s tweet in which he decries Lauren Boebert for wanting to read the text of bills presented to Congress before voting on them.

This fascism thing is getting out of hand

While I’m not a fan of the Euro Left, they do seem to have historically had a more measured approach to pushing their agenda.

I suspect the difference is found in IQ disparity. Until recently at least, Europe did not have much in the way of a large, ethnically distinct low IQ underclass. Meanwhile, the US has had a relatively large one which continues to grow via unrestricted immigration. As such, the Euro Left was in a position to follow a moderated approach that “acclimated” their populations to encroaching socialism. Their leadership could keep the long game in view. The American Left, on the other hand, is compelled by the low IQ proclivities of its constituent populations to keep throwing gas on the fire regardless of what it burns down.

So while the goals of the American and European progressive movements may be very similar, their methodologies have been quite different. American leftists follow an approach to implementing their ideological agenda that is obviously designed to appeal to low IQ people who don’t have much foresight or capacity for second- or third-order “metathinking.”

There’s a reason so much of the progressive Left’s economic program nowadays centres upon simple handouts, reparations, and other direct wealth transfer programs. It’s because that’s the only benefit the Left’s constituencies understand. Certainly, rightist ideas about teaching them to better themselves, obtain marketable skills, save their money - these are going to be right out. Likewise, self-defence and self-policing are hallmarks of low time preference people who take responsibility for themselves and their families. Gun control, on the other hand, is a stereotypically low IQ/high time preference policy choice because it essentially transfers responsibility away from self and onto an inanimate object. Let’s just punish a mass of people who are law abiding instead of compelling those who aren’t to act rightly. This can be seen from the simple-minded “direct correlation” arguments that gun controllers use to appeal to people unable to really consider higher order effects.

Support for abortion as it is presented in the USA is perhaps the epitome of high time preference, low conscientiousness/self-responsibility thinking. There’s nothing more low IQ than being unable to keep your legs together and then murdering the product of that union because you want to girlboss for another few years. Even our supposedly “scientific” response to Covid (and now monkeypox) exhibits the sort of ill-considered, high time preference “do something now regardless of whether it works or even makes sense” mentality that characterises the American Left’s ideological proclivities.

Even in the one area where you’d think the Left would be successfully utilising low time preference - the debate over climate change - they are consistently failing. I mean, what could be more long-term and forward thinking than saving the planet and bequeathing it to the generations to come? Gives off a real “planting a tree in whose shade I’ll never sit” kind of vibe to it. Yet, every solution to the “problem” involves some kind of get-rich-quick scheme for infrastructure providers, sold to people using short-term “the oceans will boil off in ten years” fearmongering. Long term solutions such as investing in proven high-energy density technologies like nuclear power are naysayed in favour of gimmicky nonsense like wind turbines. All of it is bolstered by the low-IQ failure to understand that weather does not equal climate, that just because it got to 115°F in Arizona a couple of days in a row doesn’t mean there’s any validity to selectively cherry-picked multidecadal climate models generated on a computer.

So yes, there really is a palpable difference in the IQ profiles of the two basic White ethneis in this country and their respective clients (which is what is really being modeled using ideology as a proxy). The bulk of the Left is, in fact, generally lower in IQ and exhibits correspondingly higher time preference behaviours and attitudes, which the political progressive Left must adapt to if they are to energise them. Unfortunately, while left-wing managerial leadership may not be overwhelmingly smart, they are crafty (which isn’t the same thing) and quite capable of capturing and using institutions to their own ends, thus enabling them to channel the destructive tendencies of their coalition into politically useful ends.

However, I’d close by suggesting that even though the Right may have a more normally distributed IQ profile (pun intended), conservatives and others on the broad Right also need to work on regulating their time preference, though ours needs to be more in the areas of following through on self-improvement. Lifting, not eating garbage food, reading good books, learning a trade, learning fighting skills, learning to shoot and handle firearms (and their accruements), generally just self-improving to prepare for the coming collapse - these are all things that people on the Right shouldn’t just talk about doing, but be doing. But this requires the cultivating of a low time preference approach to life that is not currently encouraged by our social media/megatainment/soundbite driven lifestyle. The Right’s broad profile has the horsepower to do this but needs to find the will to do so.