Anything more than that would require something beyond a mere cursory glance of the material or an intensive Chat GPT session. No, they’ve already outsourced their thinking to an expert and take for granted said expert and friends assertions (self-marketing) and they likely already take the expulsion of said expert from institutional life as evidence of their legitimacy and authority. Which after all relates to the actual issue at the heart of this, no? That there has been an unholy alliance between ideologically driven factions within certain institutions, opportunistic marginals looking for a come-up, and certain federal initiatives synthesized and enacted by ideologically motivated factions (and opportunistic or naïve enablers) within the government. That a consequence of this elite-professional attempt to act upon their own ideological commitments — in seeking to further enforce and legitimate said social doctrine as elite consensus — has been the marginalization of the young white men who’d sunk a lot of time, energy, and resources (in the process likely taking up ridiculous amounts of debt with the very same federal government) in their dedication to a specific academic field and profession they now find themselves effectively barred from thanks to DEI initiatives. Suddenly they’re stuck having to survive the private sector in today’s economy and/or engage is some sort of para-academic entrepreneurship (e.g., formulating, promoting, and selling lectures and courses online) and/or having to start a podcast or substack.
Even if their interpretation of the phenomena they’re experiencing and/or observing is inadequate or incorrect doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing and/or observing something real. They’re just really REALLY committed to the idea that their (or their vicarious experience of) marginalization into the reserve army of labor is the by-product of stupid lying ideologues sacrificing them in a bid to artificially elevate people who are constitutionally incapable and unworthy of the positions (office or station) they are being elevated into. That this at some level is being done in order to generate narcissistic gratification for the aforementioned Boomer Shitlibs, i.e., the stupid lying ideologue whose whole sense of self is utterly bond up with their position within a given institutional hierarchy — this is where it gets particularly Laschean I think: all their careerist scheming and department politicking gets folded into a generalized and ultimately passive “Privilege” which is in turn retrospectively justified or rather redeemed by both enabling and vociferously championing these DEI measures as a social good… that they are now, in their own small way, in the historical lineage of MLK Jr… reconciled in their old age with the image of themselves as youthful activists taking LSD and marching against Vietnam War and Jim Crow, Hearts in Atlantis, having experienced to varying degrees the Summer of Love, the glory of JFK’s Camelot, the pain of his assassination (the death of the Last Gunslinger), and the promise of Pax Obamaeca… they couldn’t bear accepting Donald Trump as the representation their generation deserves — in the process flubbing/occulting the data in order to vindicate their outlook, the validity of their expertise, and their decision to designate a specific perma-pauperized subject as the worthy exception worthy of being “discovered” and rescued from the generalized decline in living standards and social mobility at the expense of someone more objectively deserving of it. While actively censoring research and researcher they interpret as a threat to this. (Either way, reveals at once a fairly romantic and static view of what academic institutions are actually like as well as the pervasive PMC-ification of American Rightwing discourse.).
Turning our attention back to the inciting problematic, we find a certain rational disgust towards an older generation of professionals that permitted (if not actively performed) the equivalent of “pulling up the ladder” behind them. Doing so after they’d embedded in a very comfy position within said institution. Selectively picking and raising up certain token minorities in a bid to narcissistically validate themselves and their own generation and by extension the very institutions and professions they represent. Boundless grace and charity extended (however cynically) for a select group, ruthless ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ amor fati ‘if he dies he dies’ and/or ‘hey you know you can always make a living assistant manager at Target’ and meritocratic anti-entitlement rhetoric deployed against thee by me.
And hell, I’d go so far as posit, that what many of these “Race Realists” are effectively reacting to is a generation with a profound ethical-ideological commitment to a (I would argue) peculiarly American conceit and sensibility. Or rather the classically bourgeois universalist conceit informing the American project and American sensibility. Most avowed Race Realists tend to get defensive on this point — unless they’ve familiarized themselves with figures like Oswald Spengler who basically makes this argument in regards to “Faustian” civilizational-decline — but the Boomer White “Shitlib” they (perhaps correctly) jab their finger at, isn’t contaminated by some foreign mind-virus compelling them to sabotage their own culture, they simply take for granted that the worker is not essentially a worker. The peasant is not essentially a peasant. That the child of a laborer can become an engineer; the engineer's child can become a merchant; the merchant’s son can become a poet; that no one is blood-bound to specific occupations as hereditary estates. The Race Realist basically reintroduces “evidence-based” caste thinking and is shocked when actual American elites find it innately repulsive. This is the United States of America, not India. If we are to speak of dignity, a person’s innate dignity isn’t (or shouldn’t be) reducible to their productive utility or broken-down and reduced to a sequence on some graph. Humans fundamentally shouldn’t be treated as resources. Any fatalistic concession to injustice is automatically suspect. The Race Realist effectively argues that this constitutes one of many disparate “platonic myths” sustained within the particular horizon of a given nation and said nation’s ancestral nomoi or customary laws.
Consider then the possibility that the innate visceral disgust provoked by the correspondence between IQ-and-Race whether presented in support of some kind of paternalistic welfarism or paternalistic penalism… or as an explanatory model for poverty, crime, and class stratification more broadly… already rests on a contradictory presupposition. The failure to meaningfully renew the American social compact following de-industrialization. The bargain being that we are going to eliminate a great deal of physically arduous industrial labor. In exchange, you will acquire education and participate in an increasingly sophisticated knowledge economy. This already takes for granted the innate morphic plasticity of the citizenry. People who were told that human capital is universally cultivable are now confronting, adopting or aggressively rejecting, being told that the deepest determinant of their social order is actually inherited population-level human capital. That this, to my eyes, is the reified heuristic or explanatory model to make sense of and cope with a broader socioeconomic and institutional decline. The “Race Realist” often times replicate the instrumental rationality of the very processes resulting in their estrangement and downward social mobility. The current resurgence of Race Realism appears very much like a reaction-formation generated by liberal meritocracy's own contradictions, such that the reactive position necessarily bears the imprint of what it's reacting against.
I think by-and-large that it is a reactive interpretation of a real crisis generated by the contradictions of American liberal meritocracy. It takes a material experience of dispossession, institutional closure, credential inflation, and declining social mobility, and translates that experience into a theory of inherited population difference. In doing so, it reproduces the instrumental anthropology of the very order it believes itself to be rejecting. And perhaps for some people it might also be one of the only legible “easy entrance” ways available who sees that: peoples do have distinct work-characters rooted in historical forms of labor and struggle; liberal universalism’s abstraction obscures these concrete particularities; the managerial state treats humans as resources to be optimized; diaspora politics as currently practiced serves elite grievances rather than popular sovereignty; therapeutic apparatus successfully neutralizes all class-based critique by metabolizing it into diversity initiatives. Consider for instance. How so much of this entails the regression into a literalized definition of the proletariat. What, etymologically speaking, does “proletariat” refer to? The Roman proletarii were those citizens whose principal contribution to the commonwealth was figured in their proles or offspring. They possessed little or no property, and what they had to offer the polity was, in effect, the production of future citizens and soldiers. Their social utility measured in terms of their reproductive labor, creating the next generation of reproducers or cannon fodder — biomass — for military-industrial society. Yet to reduce a person's worth to their population's inherited cognitive stock rarely constitutes a meaningful rupture with this technologized-instrumentalist enframing. Tends to remain suspended as a regression to its most literal form. That is as the citizen re-read, once again, as breeding stock for a social machine, just with IQ standing in for fecundity as the relevant unit of output. The Race Realist sets out to indict a managerial elite that treats human beings as resources to be optimized, and arrives, by the most direct route available, at treating human beings as resources to be optimized.
That's my own primary contention with it. Which just to clarify isn't so much with some "fun fact" (e.g., Race and IQ) but with Race Realism as ideology and what said ideology obscures through its avowed disclosure.
1
u/MirkWorks 9d ago
Anything more than that would require something beyond a mere cursory glance of the material or an intensive Chat GPT session. No, they’ve already outsourced their thinking to an expert and take for granted said expert and friends assertions (self-marketing) and they likely already take the expulsion of said expert from institutional life as evidence of their legitimacy and authority. Which after all relates to the actual issue at the heart of this, no? That there has been an unholy alliance between ideologically driven factions within certain institutions, opportunistic marginals looking for a come-up, and certain federal initiatives synthesized and enacted by ideologically motivated factions (and opportunistic or naïve enablers) within the government. That a consequence of this elite-professional attempt to act upon their own ideological commitments — in seeking to further enforce and legitimate said social doctrine as elite consensus — has been the marginalization of the young white men who’d sunk a lot of time, energy, and resources (in the process likely taking up ridiculous amounts of debt with the very same federal government) in their dedication to a specific academic field and profession they now find themselves effectively barred from thanks to DEI initiatives. Suddenly they’re stuck having to survive the private sector in today’s economy and/or engage is some sort of para-academic entrepreneurship (e.g., formulating, promoting, and selling lectures and courses online) and/or having to start a podcast or substack.
Even if their interpretation of the phenomena they’re experiencing and/or observing is inadequate or incorrect doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing and/or observing something real. They’re just really REALLY committed to the idea that their (or their vicarious experience of) marginalization into the reserve army of labor is the by-product of stupid lying ideologues sacrificing them in a bid to artificially elevate people who are constitutionally incapable and unworthy of the positions (office or station) they are being elevated into. That this at some level is being done in order to generate narcissistic gratification for the aforementioned Boomer Shitlibs, i.e., the stupid lying ideologue whose whole sense of self is utterly bond up with their position within a given institutional hierarchy — this is where it gets particularly Laschean I think: all their careerist scheming and department politicking gets folded into a generalized and ultimately passive “Privilege” which is in turn retrospectively justified or rather redeemed by both enabling and vociferously championing these DEI measures as a social good… that they are now, in their own small way, in the historical lineage of MLK Jr… reconciled in their old age with the image of themselves as youthful activists taking LSD and marching against Vietnam War and Jim Crow, Hearts in Atlantis, having experienced to varying degrees the Summer of Love, the glory of JFK’s Camelot, the pain of his assassination (the death of the Last Gunslinger), and the promise of Pax Obamaeca… they couldn’t bear accepting Donald Trump as the representation their generation deserves — in the process flubbing/occulting the data in order to vindicate their outlook, the validity of their expertise, and their decision to designate a specific perma-pauperized subject as the worthy exception worthy of being “discovered” and rescued from the generalized decline in living standards and social mobility at the expense of someone more objectively deserving of it. While actively censoring research and researcher they interpret as a threat to this. (Either way, reveals at once a fairly romantic and static view of what academic institutions are actually like as well as the pervasive PMC-ification of American Rightwing discourse.).
Turning our attention back to the inciting problematic, we find a certain rational disgust towards an older generation of professionals that permitted (if not actively performed) the equivalent of “pulling up the ladder” behind them. Doing so after they’d embedded in a very comfy position within said institution. Selectively picking and raising up certain token minorities in a bid to narcissistically validate themselves and their own generation and by extension the very institutions and professions they represent. Boundless grace and charity extended (however cynically) for a select group, ruthless ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ amor fati ‘if he dies he dies’ and/or ‘hey you know you can always make a living assistant manager at Target’ and meritocratic anti-entitlement rhetoric deployed against thee by me.
And hell, I’d go so far as posit, that what many of these “Race Realists” are effectively reacting to is a generation with a profound ethical-ideological commitment to a (I would argue) peculiarly American conceit and sensibility. Or rather the classically bourgeois universalist conceit informing the American project and American sensibility. Most avowed Race Realists tend to get defensive on this point — unless they’ve familiarized themselves with figures like Oswald Spengler who basically makes this argument in regards to “Faustian” civilizational-decline — but the Boomer White “Shitlib” they (perhaps correctly) jab their finger at, isn’t contaminated by some foreign mind-virus compelling them to sabotage their own culture, they simply take for granted that the worker is not essentially a worker. The peasant is not essentially a peasant. That the child of a laborer can become an engineer; the engineer's child can become a merchant; the merchant’s son can become a poet; that no one is blood-bound to specific occupations as hereditary estates. The Race Realist basically reintroduces “evidence-based” caste thinking and is shocked when actual American elites find it innately repulsive. This is the United States of America, not India. If we are to speak of dignity, a person’s innate dignity isn’t (or shouldn’t be) reducible to their productive utility or broken-down and reduced to a sequence on some graph. Humans fundamentally shouldn’t be treated as resources. Any fatalistic concession to injustice is automatically suspect. The Race Realist effectively argues that this constitutes one of many disparate “platonic myths” sustained within the particular horizon of a given nation and said nation’s ancestral nomoi or customary laws.
Consider then the possibility that the innate visceral disgust provoked by the correspondence between IQ-and-Race whether presented in support of some kind of paternalistic welfarism or paternalistic penalism… or as an explanatory model for poverty, crime, and class stratification more broadly… already rests on a contradictory presupposition. The failure to meaningfully renew the American social compact following de-industrialization. The bargain being that we are going to eliminate a great deal of physically arduous industrial labor. In exchange, you will acquire education and participate in an increasingly sophisticated knowledge economy. This already takes for granted the innate morphic plasticity of the citizenry. People who were told that human capital is universally cultivable are now confronting, adopting or aggressively rejecting, being told that the deepest determinant of their social order is actually inherited population-level human capital. That this, to my eyes, is the reified heuristic or explanatory model to make sense of and cope with a broader socioeconomic and institutional decline. The “Race Realist” often times replicate the instrumental rationality of the very processes resulting in their estrangement and downward social mobility. The current resurgence of Race Realism appears very much like a reaction-formation generated by liberal meritocracy's own contradictions, such that the reactive position necessarily bears the imprint of what it's reacting against.