I just finished binging Bojack Horseman season 5, a show that deals extensively with the
intersection between a person’s inner life and their actions.
A look into a character’s inner world is what can turn a predatory, alcoholic, asshole
into a somewhat sympathetic predatory, alcoholic, asshole.
[BOJACK INNER NARRATIVE]
It really makes you question if we have the power
to really change, or if we’re more of victim to automated processes than we thought.
But that’s only fiction.
Enter this controversial PsychToday study and article, “Not Everyone Conducts Inner
Speech?”
In it, Doctor Russell T Hurlburt presents a study he conducted on inner speech, you
know that little voice in your head that guides your every move?
A group of students were asked to talk about the way they processed their thoughts about
different subjects, Surprisingly, some of them of didn’t experience inner speech at all.
“Maybe Baars talks to himself all the time, and maybe McWhorter himself sees images of
written words while he talks (there's reason to be skeptical of both claims), but I've
investigated such things as carefully as I know how and become convinced that most people
(let alone all people) do not do such things.”
”Most people (including psychologists and consciousness scientists and quite likely
you, dear reader), don't know the characteristics of their own and others' inner experience.”
Have we been completely wrong about what it feels to be conscious this entire time?
If these people don’t have inner speech, is their existence automated?
Alright cut the dramatic bullshit, this article was posted on some leftist subreddit along
with a question about what implications this had on the movement.
And in and of itself, it has zero implications.
I mean, f[HOO]king Einstein didn’t have inner speech, inner speech isn’t the same as consciousness
or introspection.
Just like some people can’t imagine images, some don’t have inner speech.
But it’s a seductive, if narcissistic, scenario, being sentient in a sea of drones.
Horror movies are made out of this stuff.
And it’s the belief in this idea, a pervasive cynicism of the world and humanity, that can
tell a lot about a person’s political beliefs.
Research has found that cynicism and distrust of others is correlated with having an authoritarian
personality type and voting for authoritarian policies.
If you don’t put faith in others, well, the placement of strict hierarchies and systems
of punishment begins to make sense.
Anyway, originally I wanted this video to be a fun, escapist what-if scenario.
Y’know, are there drones who mindlessly carry on with their life, can they handle
autonomy in the hypothetical future socialist world?
But like all fun things and politics, in my research for the video it became really clear
really fast that this wasn’t just a fantasy, and it made me question my own willingness
to buy into the narrative.
This topic has been covered extensively by others, we all know the basics, so I’ll
make it quick.
Here’s two-dollar Jefferson on the topic: “A black [is] at least as brave, and more
adventuresome.
But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a
danger till it be present.”
Psychologist Lewis Terman, father of the gifted education movement, has this to say:
“Children of [Spanish-Indian and Mexican families] should be segregated into separate
classes.
They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made into efficient workers.”
Here you see the prevailing sentiment of the time, black people, Native people and others
were animalistic drones with little consciousness.
Who, because of bogus science on their low IQ and brain size were deemed inferior and
subject to forced sterilization by the U.S. government, a practice that the U.S. Supreme
Court held up as constitutional.
While eventually the tide of history changed for racial minorities, it didn’t change
for everyone.
“I feel I cannot stand this place a minute longer and soon I shall lose the brains, and
not be able to interest myself in others and everything that goes on in the world.
The monotony and routine simply drives me wild…
I feel I shall go on degenerating in this environment into an animal, that only lives
to eat – as we do here! – and has not thought beyond.
For really that is all the ‘treatment’ consists of.”
“I have only just realised that I am actually in a lunatic asylum.
Who on Earth ordered the cabman to drive me here?”
Intellectually disabled people have always existed.
Madness is referenced numerous times in the Bible for example.
And during the Middle Ages, people’s approach to them was… a bit draconian.
Their treatment varied by culture, but most associated people with mental disabilities
with the spiritual and the occult.
It was commonly thought that they were possessed by demons, so their treatment varied from
cruelly beating a person until the demon was exorcised, to bartering with the demon to
get them to leave voluntarily.
Most of these individuals ended up paupers and vagabonds, and while their lives were
never easy, they enjoyed relative freedom.
With the Renaissance came a fascination with reason, unreason and enlightenment.
People who were considered mad were still heavily stigmatized, but seen with a peculiar
sense of respect, it was believed that they were uniquely privy to certain cosmic truths.
The emphasis on reason eventually manifested itself in the medical model of madness, which
attributing madness to physical deficiencies in the body, not the occult.
From the 17th century onward, the mad were rounded up, confined and removed entirely
from society for treatment in asylums.
The treatment of madness could be overwhelmingly cruel.
Simulated drowning sessions, tranquilizing boxes that shut off sensation in the body,
and being put on spinning machines to induce vomiting and loss of consciousness.
As technology became more advanced, strait jackets to limit movement and lobotomies were
used often.
But it wasn’t just the mad who were confined.
Overpopulated cities began to crack down on idleness, and using the police as their enforcement
mechanism, all deviant elements of society, from those with legitimate mental disorders,
to criminals, the unemployed, and women who disrespected their husbands were confined.
Some in workhouses to force economic contributions for all members of society, and others in
asylums.
Civilization and madness were completely opposed after all.
Civilization represents reason, while madness represents unreason.
And unreason was the battering ram used to remove anyone and everyone who was considered
unfit for society.
Despite a lot changing in medical science, institutionalization remains a major issue
for anyone with mental disabilities.
There was another controversial article, published in 2016 titled, “The War on Stupid People.”
Famous statistician David H. Freedman argues that the United States has gone too far in
its quest to establish a meritocratic society, and in the process we have begun equating
human worth itself to intelligence.
It’s unnecessarily glib and a little condescending, but it’s unmistakably correct.
People who have low IQ’s have a much lower quality of life.
They make far less money and are more likely to meet an early death.
People with low IQ’s have been shut out pretty systematically, whether it’s employment
opportunities disappearing, employers checking your college GPA when hiring or conducting
pre-employment tests to check your intelligence.
And you might not see anything wrong with this either, because if you’re like me,
meritocratic ideals have been something we grew up with, if they’re less able then
they deserve less of the pie.
And our collective fetish for IQ can be seen everywhere, from the circle-jerk on what the
Florida man is up to this week, to the Darwin Awards and top rated IAmVerySmart posts.
The most popular cult shows center on troubled genius, and people increasingly value intelligence
in their partners at the expense of other traits.
I think you get the point.
Freedman notes that it wasn’t always so bad, up to the 50’s, having an average or
low IQ wouldn’t affect your quality of life very much at all.
He ends the article by noting that “when Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined
the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire.”
One where those who were destined to rule were fast-tracked on their way in life at
the expense of those without merit.
Sound familiar?.
A few points before we continue.
First, yeah things got worse for certain people with low IQ’s after the fifties, for others
it was always that way, the United States has a long history of using IQ tests as justification
to gate-keep success.
America could be great for white men with low IQ because it was awful for just about
everyone else.
And secondly, it equates IQ with intelligence.
Not even the co-daddy of the IQ test, Alfred Binet thought it was an adequate measure of
intelligence, it can’t measure emotional intelligence or creativity or a bunch of other
variables that make up what we think of when we think intelligence.
And studies show that having too high of an IQ, can make you a worse leader and manager,
so IQ even falters as a capitalist metric for workplace success.
You had one job IQ!
And third, and this might be the most important point of all, it assumes that IQ is an actual
measure of some tangible intellectual ability.
I don’t know enough to say whether IQ measures anything other than an individual’s ability
to take an IQ test, whether it’s a simple aptitude exam that measures collected knowledge
with a Western flavor, but there’s a serious argument to be made that IQ is a useless metric
entirely.
Either way, I want to argue on the terms of the author.
IQ equals intelligence equals merits, and that’s the basis from which we’ll continue,
because trying to decipher any further than this is too much for my peanut brain.
There’s always an undercurrent of fatalism when we talk about intelligence, an unspoken
truth that it’s either something you’re born with, or something you acquire early
that can’t change much.
There’s serious science on the heritability of IQ, and because it’s such a coveted trait,
insinuating that people or groups of people tend to have less of it than others is a huge
sin.
But I won’t shy away from the controversy.
IQ and poverty are linked.
Heh you thought I was going to go somewhere else with that didn’t you?
Nah, IQ and poverty.
And it’s a nasty connection.
“Research shows that children who slip into poverty, even for a short time, suffer long-term
setbacks even when their families regain their economic footing,” says psychologist Ruby
Takanishi, PhD “In addition to negative health outcomes[,]research
also shows that children raised in poverty are more likely to experience negative educational
and cognitive outcomes, often as a result of less mental stimulation and increased stress
in their living situations.
Some research even shows that the brains of poor children may be unable to process information
in the same way as the brains of kids in higher-income families.”
“even though the economy is likely to recover in the next few years, a generation of disadvantaged
children may not.”
Damn.
The process of cognitive recession in adults who slip into poverty is also measurable,
meaning being poor will actively hurt your intelligence.
Poverty creates poverty in a vicious cycle.
Which really flies in the face of everything we were ever told about how wealth was self-selecting
and those who were poor and homeless deserved it.
This view is still everywhere, with articles that have titles like “Is the American Dream
dead?”
And there’s an obsessive amount of effort that goes into measuring the level of social
mobility in the country.
If we’re reduced to a caste system where you can’t advance no matter how hard you
try, well, we haven’t made much progress from the old feudal system.
But assuming that the system is well-oiled and effort, intelligence and spunk is correlated
with higher success, is it still all that different from feudalism?
I mean, yeah, being able to advance economically is hugely important, but both meritocracy
and feudalism come with one important assumption: that, yes, some people exist to be the rulers,
and others exist to be ruled.
I would like to say that capitalism is special because feudalism came with the assumption
that your position as ruled and ruler was bred into you, but throughout much of capitalism’s
history that, wasn’t very different at all really.
And even today, we’ve decided that we’re okay with unlimited levels of destitution
and inequality.
We just tell our selves that they deserve it.