The silent majority are not politically correct

An interesting email from a British reader responding to the public denials of IQ differences

I live in big Birmingham, and I initiate conversations with people at bus stops, in shop queues etc, with ordinaryish people (of the right half of the bell curve, to be sure). There's the world as seen through the media and written world, and there's the world of talking personally to people, and they don't match. There's a lot more understanding and knowledge out there than may seem, because it doesnt get publicised and doesn't shout out individually either.

That's why the Soviet Union collapsed so suddenly, because what the people were saying in private was very different from what Pravda was saying. And likewise, a significant proportion of "Muslims" are just pretending to be true believers. And likewise, check any matchmaking setup, ask almost any woman, and she is looking for an "intelligent" man. Ditto employers.

PC is too utterly ridiculous, too utterly divorced from reality, to have any prospect as an enduring religion. And yet it appears to be more powerful than it is, because as with those other examples, there are incentives for parrotting the PC-party line, in contrast to strong DISincentives against speaking against it. It currently holds the purse-strings and levers of power.

But as soon as something so reality-defying becomes the orthodoxy its days are numbered. As in the Soviet Union, people aren't SAYING it is ridiculous, and yet you can rest assured that many are secretly THINKING it!

The myth of the tiny proportion: So there seem to be just a handful of people who are anywhere near a sound understanding. But surely it has ever been thus. In previous centuries there was just the odd Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc. More recently there has grown up an enormous irrelevance, a huge mega-industrialised pseudo-scholarship of professional publish or perish.

Like Copernicus, genuine science has just about always been a non-professional undertaking oppresssed by institutions. The universities in UK at least are already in the process of making themselves irrelevant (companies no longer find degrees a useful criterion). They are slowly on the way out. Michel Bauwens envisages p2p, blogs etc as the new civilisational basis.

And meanwhile how few are understanders anyway? I used to think that I must be the greatest living genius (there is substantial grounds for that view!). But then I considered that approximately no-one knows about my achievements, so therefore in turn there could be thousands of equally-talented, equally-achieving others who are equally great geniuses but equally unnoticed.

The PC dominance seems to have started with an abrupt switch at 1945, reversing a fairly quick change from 19th century multiculturism. The BNP and similar parties have been rocketing from nowhere. Meanwhile the PC brigade are getting enmeshed in some pathetic tangles post-9/11. The scene could change rather rapidly again.

(For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)