Centrism and Protestantism are causally implicated in misallocations of intellectual capacity for mainly the same reasons. Superficially, this sounds like nonsense, but under further review this should come to be very obvious. This essay will start by explaining the role of g /IQ in society, will move onto explaining the two views, then will show how they lead systematically to misallocations of this valuable trait. Intelligence in Society: The interpersonal assessment of how smart others are starts to be reliably made in the elementary school years, as fourth graders have been demonstrated to reliably rank order peers on intelligence (Omark & Edelman 1976). Intelligence, in adult life, is implicated in the requirements for occupations that are prestigious to the point where the prestigiousness of an occupation is roughly identical to its intellectual demands (complexity) (Garbin & Bates 1966). Professions are thereby shorthand for how intellectually capable someone is, generically 1 . This is fortunate, because quick judgments need to be made of who we encounter for social effectiveness. Intelligence, as a faculty, is also responsible for the capacity of some to make sense of sufficiently complex realities, then go on to create based on that understanding. These understandings and innovations can then be material for dumbed down encapsulations that can be passed down the distribution to be made use of by the less intelligent. The man who invents the computer is smarter than the man who innovates on them, who is 1 The ecological validity of this cue has been attacked across time via affirmative action policies, but people are aware of this, and can compensate. smarter than the man who fixes them, and he’s smarter than those who can only use them. Due to this, intelligent actors are operationationally the continuous trait equivalent of the teacher helping along the less capable students. The people who can write the instructions need to be positioned to write ones that would be read, accepted, and acted out by those who can only read them. The credibility of the roles and credentials associated with intelligence, coupled with the actual operations that the faculty affords, are too significant to squander. The people in charge, or capable of being so positioned, shouldn’t be allowed to flounder in these wasteful systems of re-discovering the discovered. We can’t have smart people spending 10 years “figuring out their ecclesiology” when ecclesiology has developed, and we can’t have smart people building personal “pet systems” of philosophy when systems already exist. We especially can’t allow this when these schemes dampen the role of intelligent actors in social systems, unlike some of the other malevolent systems out there (i.e. leftism). The major political parties, ideologies and the earlier Churches have financing, infrastructure to coordinate social behavior (lists, forums, YouTube channels etc.), consensus of sources of credibility, as well as shared phronema 2 . These realities are sources of efficiency in producing coordinated outcomes, because the shared outlook allows a better fitting of the messaging to the minds of the receivers (psychological landscapes (Guilford & Dawkins 1991)), and also because the like minded people are consolidated into spaces (better conversion per impression). 2 Outlook, way of seeing / approaching the world. If your epistemic program is rooted in Sola Scriptura and private revelation, or however any given reality plays off your mind in an ad hoc fashion, you’ll find yourself neutralized via your idiosyncrasies. This is a simplification of what’s to come, but things will be clearer as things progress. Centrism: I’ve talked to centrists to the point that I’m very confident in my understanding of how centrism works. The approach to the world of a centrist is that: The centrist is on a raft flowing along a river with the time. He sees the different realities as he goes, then after anticipating what follows from each fork, he decides which route to take on the basis of it being more “reasonable”. Centrists think there’s a generic idea of what’s a “reasonable argument”, and that they’re adjudicating that from a neutral generic interpretative structure. At root, this worldview sits on the “Myth of Neutrality” as presented by people like Greg Bahnsen. There are no generic versions of the three branches of philosophy, but people who’ve been made victims of this “hide the ball” game don’t seem to know that. Concern over more ultimate presuppositions amounts to “presuppositionalism”, which is taken to be “just saying that you’re right”. If they’re more sophisticated, they might take the view that different systems work better 3 for different problems, so “eclecticism” makes the most sense. In the explicitly 3 “Work” is seldom defined. anti-theistic instantiations this is pridefully indulged in, since: “how can anyone tell you how to think like a religion does?” There’s no awareness of the fact that this is ad hoc thinking, and therefore faulty. This is mirrored in the piecemeal dealing with realities. Centrism is against integration and systematization, so the centrist basically presents as a jumble of artifacts he’s been plied with. A lot of these problems come from centrists being autodidacts without any real structure or systematicity behind their educational efforts. Lastly, the centrist has a strange relationship with time. The past doesn’t exactly exist in the world of a centrist, especially not the history of ideas. They have a very limited and curated approach to history where it only ever really exists if it gets entered into the discourse by some leader figure. Consequently, there’s no cross-civilizational perspective, no cross cultural perspective, no deep explanation of how we got here, and no account of how the figurehead got there 4 . The past tense has limited use, and the other two have limited use - only being employed in a “day’s fires to be put out” sense. Issues with Centrism: The people reading this are probably aware of the problems with these ideas as far as worldviews go. In a world of artifacts and people’s choices, tomorrow doesn’t magically fall from the sky. The river that the centrist is flowing down is obviously a lazy river ride from an amusement park. Everything he consumes is curated, new, single-use, 4 If you want an obvious example of this, just look at how Social Autopsy was disappeared from Candace Owens’s history to afford her rebranding as a strong independent black conservative womxn. Her history literally doesn’t exist in the centrist world. delivered at the right times and maintains the illusion of the acceptable bounds of discourse and belief as the greater events in society play out. As much as I dislike him, Noam Chomsky is right in that the system has heavily restricted the range of discourse and supported arguing within that range 5 . The paradigm is one of transient beliefs and facts to be shuffled about to produce transient behavioral outputs after being programmed by transient artifacts. It doesn’t matter to the centrist that Galatians 3:28 6 has never been interpreted how it contemporaneously is. It doesn’t matter that the average person was a “religious nut” just 100 years ago. And it definitely doesn’t matter that feminism has roots in occultism. The past exists insofar as it has to exist in order to provide the illusion that today hasn’t just been plastered onto us by increasingly advanced social engineering. To them, the center isn’t an artifact of interested oligarchs wholly open to revision. It’s just the “state of the questions” as seen by the wisdom of the crowd. Everything is getting better all the time, because the better memes are catching on, and we’re always evolving. The tentativeness of the views of what’s “reasonable” makes it a perfect complement to scientism where everything is tentatively endorsed and controlled by monied interests. This tentativeness is intellectually legitimated by Universal Darwinism via memetics. Memetics is the product of some worthless interpretation of an analogy in the back of the Selfish Gene (Dawkins 1976/2016), which is demonstrated to be bad biology by the 6 "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." 5 Don’t take that to be an endorsement of the idea that Chomsky isn’t part of the dog and pony show. He clearly is. If my library system buys your books, you’re authorized. Extended Phenotype (Dawkins1982), as well as the Introduction to Behavioral Ecology textbook (Krebs & Davies 1993) given to 19 year old kids in undergrad. For some reason nobody points this out, and I’m very suspicious of this because of how famous Richard Dawkins and those books are. Anyway, memetics is basically a conjunction of evolutionary theory with evolutionary theory 7 , but with a couple terms changed. It performs a few convenient functions: 1. The function of arbitrarily splitting certain phenotypes into a new bin called “memes”. This obfuscates the role of selfish genetic interests in construction of culture, and the dumping of mountains of resources into proliferating new ideas. Memes are said to be the product of randomness, are judged by tests of use value, and not people trying to achieve ends through manipulating their environment in ways that make sense to them, which is obviously the case. Phenotypes don’t stop being phenotypes outside the casing of the body (Turner 2000). 2. The idea that the “spread of ideas is a natural process adjudicated by the usefulness of ideas” provides justification for the adoption of new trendy ideas at the cost of the abandonment of old ideas. Essentially: if you’re not adopting the new thing, you’re a luddite, because the displacement wouldn’t have otherwise occurred. In memetics “Early adopters” replaces “pioneers who got scalped”. 7 This isn’t a typo. They’ve literally just stuck evolution onto evolution. It’s called “universal darwinism” for a reason. 3. The logical consequence of running this program ultimately ends in the rejection of all Conservatisms. The piecemeal changing of what’s to be accepted fills the world out with contradictory understandings with what was believed prior, amounting to a gradual psychological/artifact undermining 8 4. Memetics also lies to people that they have a possibility of making something happen in a bottom-up fashion. In memetics, if something happens, the idea’s “time has come”, and not because it was authorized to do so by the social control systems in the hands of interested actors. State organs are just “noticing” which way the wind is blowing, and not blowing the wind at all. Memetics involves deception in how it presents a “flattening” of the landscape for how diffusion / coordination of ideas works. There are no powerful people positioned to impose things onto society through means examined by Beniger in the Control Revolution (Beniger 1986). 5. What I feel is worst of all is that memetics makes you deny substantial portions of signaling theory. Deception does in fact exist, and any theory that means to aid the interpretation of signaling behaviors has to deal with that fact. Bad ideas can be deceptively proliferated. If you read people like Bret Weinstein (Weinstein 2021), you see the horrible contradictions this set of issues present to anyone who believes in memetics. Substantial portions of his book are devoted to the 8 Conciliatory ideas like the “non-overlapping magisteria” principle from Jeffrey Epstein partygoer Stephen Jay Gould are relevant here (see a future essay for my response to Gould’s disinfo). idea that “things that work catch on”, yet, our society is magically taking on cultural water which is sinking us. These theoretical failings are key observations in the service of understanding the revolutionary social program of centrism - the ideological cousin of Lewin’s second stage of change (Lewin 1951). The centrist is eternally unfrozen, never to be refrozen, and fungible as a matter of course. They’re not the revolutionary vanguard, they’re not the conservatives, they’re just a football being carried as we go towards ruin. New frivolous books with fleeting significance will be published by the Big 3 Publishers, new hours long Intellectual Dark Web podcasts will be uploaded, and new videos with lukewarm “both sides(!)” takes will go onto YouTube. These guidance system 9 artifacts, followed and consumed endlessly, running in parallel to world events give us the iterations of the centrist ethotype 10 which squanders the associated brains. Being fungible, and strung along in this way, the centrist is taking part in the “circular political economy”. He builds no movements, grows in no philosophy, and can capitalize on no greater organization by filling a role. He’s offering the sanction of the victim to the great neoliberal abrogation machine. How this amounts to a squandering of intelligence: 10 Behavioral kind 9 Thank you to the cartoonist MadeByJimBob for the “guidance system” term. From the time of the printing press on up through the later innovations that have allowed for the cheap “stamping out” of consumer realities, people have been loosed up further and further to pursue whichever idiosyncrasies that they’ve wanted to. Developmentally, this has afforded people the ability to increasingly differentiate themselves towards not having anything in common with anyone around for miles, which has brought about the social consequences of being less compatible with others. Centrists are especially prone to this, since they’ve no allegiance to any set of longstanding cultural artifacts that would afford a hedge against this in favor of coherence. The space occupied by material culture has only come to be more crowded across recent times. The handful of TV channels that some of the older people of today had to subsist on have steadily had people siphoned off as media availability diversified. Who has been siphoned, and to where, has varied in part based on whichever psychological lures played best off their psychological landscapes. This expansion has amounted to a consumerist salami slicing, as the following paragraph will make clear. On the issue of media playing better or worse with different trait ranges, Geoffrey Miller’s comments on TV shows and autism are informative 11 . The extreme end of ‘thing oriented’ shows (i.e. classic Star Trek), which are almost exclusively viewed by men, have hamfisted acting to make up for the social cognition deficits in the audience. As viewership shifts more towards adult women, who are more socially capable, the shows 11 I don’t have a source for this, but if you want to track it down for me, it’s in the Mating Grounds podcast, somewhere. Possibly an episode with “autism” in the title. come to be more and more subtly acted. The same applies across different levels of organization for different ranges of traits and also across additional categories of media such as print. For example: Asimov’s science fiction is much less what people would identify as “people writing” than Bradbury’s which he was criticized for (Bradbury 1990). The main body of society no longer needs to be the target for it to make economic sense, and this has only gotten to be more true across time. Between increasing artifact diversity, and a lack of marriage to materials, the centrists endlessly bifurcate. The issue here, is that the centrist is on his little raft floating along, not countervailing the currents - unmoored. Every little bit of wind, current, or cute island settlement, moves our little tourist. If he were to set up shop in a space with an anchor, he’d be afforded the possibility of being enculturated in a belief system and a social context where he’d be afforded the ability to make use of his traits. This would be for the following reasons: ● Frequency: If I wanted to be obtuse on this issue, I’d say that the centrist has a frequency of less than 1 in 7 billion, since his combination of idiosyncrasies are all his own. In real life, we know that in practical terms, there’s a clumping together in this transient mess. The Lobster is definitely a thing as evidenced by PF Jung’s YouTube channel not being a surprise to anybody. The Lobster, however, will never be as frequently found as Democrats or Republicans. He also won’t be as frequently found as a Christian. ○ With lower frequency there’s less basis for the social efficiencies like-mindedness brings, and less possibility of anything taking place in person. Leaving centrism for something more commonly found affords higher efficiency across interactions via shared phronema, and the possibility of influencing democratic processes. ● Findability: Where do you go to find centrists? With no centrist venues, there’s no high density location to target for persuasive efforts. How do you visually identify a centrist? With no physical signs of centrism, there’s no basis to tip people off that someone is worthy of entering into conversation with as a like-minded person. This is much like the quality of information in the environment declining pertaining to relationship status as people are pushed away from getting married (Block 2010). ○ I can tell you where to find people of every political and religious affiliation. Whether that be Churches, political events, meet-up groups or any such thing, it presents no obvious issue. This is a clear efficiency over the alternative. On physical signs: Christians wear crosses, crucifixes, and shirts with scripture on them. Their houses even have Nativity scenes around the Feast of the Nativity. The same goes for political affiliation in clothing, flags etc. The people are more identifiable in chance encounters, so the conversations “initiate themselves”. ● No shared longstanding resources (material culture): Since centrism involves a whirr of resources being churned out to deliver the controlled dialectic / options of the day, there’s no continuity across time. With no continuity across time, missing out on the state of affairs for a window of time will handily leave the centrist divorced from the present “centrism”. This is a less extreme version of what happens when someone stops following progressivism for a brief window and becomes a “bigot” despite only believing what was believed sometime last Thursday. This necessarily disjuncts the generations, since centrism is just the uprooted minds of a given time. ○ Religious and political organizations in some cases span thousands of years, and have what are at least colloquially termed “canonical works”. These works, and the traditions of interpretation around them, afford intergenerational continuity. Being purposefully unaffiliated and “above it all”, precludes any possibility of the efficiencies coming from shared intellectual/religious heritage. ● Nothing greater to accept disagreements over: If you’re going to pretend you can figure everything out for yourself, there’s no necessary deference to figures or organizations. You don’t need to “stay together for the kids”, because there are no kids. You can be a centrist anywhere with anybody. You don’t need to keep from being kicked out of the parish, or the local Democrats meeting. You don’t have cause to defer to the Pope’s Ex Cathedra statements or place the interpretations of the Church Fathers above your own. You get to LARP as Socrates 12 ○ In being compelled in your outlook towards correcting off the Rock, or any rock at all, you’re provided with compulsion towards cohering to others. It doesn’t matter if the Rock is Jesus, or the rock is Pat Buchanan. There’s a truth, and it’s to be adhered to in handling conflicts. Further: If there’s no cause for deference, and nowhere you have to cohere with others, you can burn bridges and ghost people less expensively. The “oughts” / valued forefathers support agreement, and reliance on organizations supports the maintenance of connections between the nodes. If leaving is more expensive, irrespective of rejection sensitivity (Romero-Canyas & Downey 2005), more will be endured to maintain group membership. Centrism has no groups, and therefore, can’t compete on this front. ● Flitting around is anti-expertise: If everything is transient, then you never grow towards a deep understanding. Going that way only ends with you as someone who has seen a lot of things. The Jonathan Pageau debate with Tarl Warwick illustrates this point. Having had the fun of overly wide reading, might string along a person interested in ideas via how they’re fed forward, but doesn’t amount to any significant accumulation of competence. 12 Which isn’t to endorse Socrates, who I consider to have been rightfully found guilty of what he was accused of with zero ambiguity. ○ If the social program that you’re party to makes you dependent on this week’s experts - permanently glued to the bottom - when you could take a higher organizational role, you’re being squandered. In being committed to a formal belief system, there’s actually something enduring to learn, defend, and pass on to people who are rightfully / psychometrically subordinate to you. ● Mere exposure: Not having physical spaces to occupy, and be regularly seen within, makes you less approachable and more concerning to others. ○ As soon as someone moves from a system like centrism, towards one like Libertarianism, they adopt a social (exposure) circle which initiates / perpetuates the development of networks. An agape feast / coffee hour in a Christian community affords the same. ● Liking: People like people who are like them. If your system is being “not like those other girls”, you’re pulling against this in your moves towards idiosyncrasy. Being an anti-homophily system, centrism almost seems like it’s designed to fail. ○ Correcting off the rock(s) of a system, or the Rock Himself, via participation in said system brings you into alignment with its people 13 Having read the works, and listened to the music brings you further into 13 See interpretations of Galatians 3:28 from the saints on adopting the mind of the Church. alignment, and adds to the enticement. Moving from being anti-enculturation, towards being enculturated, is a clear improvement. ● Decreased need for translation: we naturally use words and assign value based on what we believe. If what you believe is unlike what anybody else believes, you’ll naturally speak outside their outlook, or be forced to translate as well as you can. Every savvy person knows that this is seen as manipulative, and not at all different from how progressive interact with outsiders. ○ To get into a formal system is to drop the need for translation, and to escape the likelihood of a socially competent person seeing you as a sociopath. It also comes with the benefit of making your communications less cognitively involved, since you don’t need to first arrive at what’s to be said then arrive at a reframing / restatement. ● Relatedness: The heritability of traits isn’t the ordering of traits towards ends under a belief system. Reliance on the transmission of genetic elements to perpetuate a social program is then insufficient. Parenting that’s “neutral” to belief systems is a “raise and release” analog to the nonsensical catch and release policy at the border. Every person is a set of hands capable of being appropriated towards the ends of a social program, and this can’t be left up to chance. ○ The ordering of traits under a belief system supports a continuity of efforts towards goals within the natural coalition of the family via being of a shared mind. Being networked into a space where there are families of one mind, likewise provides people to network with and persuade into working towards chosen ends. ● Reciprocal Altruism: If there might as well be endless movements of new unknown people through your generic social space, you’re not going to have relationships where people feel they have a duty to support you when in need. ○ Religious and political organizations call for engagement, and especially do so when they’re sufficiently lacking in membership. They ask something of you, and in the future they’re going to feel obligated to receive requests from you, which will undoubtedly reflect your preferences. ● Possibility of pecking orders / personal trait knowledge (credibility): if there aren't cross situational observations of people, or offices to fill, informed judgements won’t be made on these issues. How can you know whose judgments to trust if you don’t know anyone across time? The propped up thinkers have status assigned to them, but the centrist doesn’t have those means to employ to mitigate these problems. If the social role of a smarter person includes what is in the opening segment, then the lack of perceived and legitimated hierarchies squanders their traits ○ The recurrent environments, and catalogs of experts specific to formal systems provide credibility to appropriate, and ‘selfishly’ develop, in the minds of others. Centrism can’t compete on this front, as it has transience built in. Transient relationships and significances don’t support the recognition of expertise that others would willingly subordinate themselves to. ● Ritualization of pecking orders: Without formal social organization, there’s less basis for legitimated demands being placed onto others such as dues collection, or direction of efforts. There also isn’t the information that offices carry, which facilitates deference. Without these bases for compulsion, the centrist has fewer means available to have his ends achieved. The compulsion an office holder is capable of, and the specific credibility it adds, work together to move people towards ends more capably analyzed. ○ I’ve gotten a number of things through being a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) 14 and having run the Toastmasters club at the University of Pennsylvania. Nobody wanted to be the President, so I just walked into credibility that I could wrangle towards my own ends. Some college clubs, like that one, are open to outside people, and some will even pay you to 14 Highest award in the education program that fewer than 1% of members get. speak there with the university’s money. The more important versions of this are obviously priests, bishops, local political organization office holders, etc. which all afford greater influence. Being, or having the ears of these people, is obviously an intellectual force multiplier. ● Brand cache: Being an atomized individual provides no free brand cache to mooch off of in amplifying your efforts. Personal branding starts you at zero, which is always worse than whichever significance you can plaster onto yourself for free or low cost. ○ The different political parties, philosophies, and organizations are villainized by their opposition, and have audiences where they’re seen positively. With the favorable audience, being a group member affords you an “in” when contacting people to ask things of them. Inciting an attack from the hostile audiences in the name of the chosen party could provide a basis to build up your status as a group member, so both sides are useful as audience members. If you’ll notice: the controlled and fake opposition people are always “under attack”, but “nobody can stop them!” None of this is afforded by being atomized. ● Money: lacking social organization means lacking the specialized money gathering actors, and people to ask to provide donations. Without social organization there’s also no basis for wealthy people to prop up your efforts. ○ Once a smart centrist moves from his self-enforced anti-affiliative position, he can work towards guiding the efforts that those resources afford, which could be taken to be a force multiplier. Here, it’s important to be mindful of what the obligations and restrictions are, so the money doesn’t disappear. A “normie” social organization might come along with certain requirements and wires to avoid tripping, but could secretly afford shepherding people towards certain ends because the audiences for both efforts overlap (AKA: entryism). How centrism wastes the potential of a smart person should now be obvious. Atomization strips you of: facility in fitting in with others, developing relationships, gaining additional bases of credibility, and economic force multipliers. Settling down into a belief system is infinitely better than being a dupe of endless revolutionary actions while whining about how “both sides” are bad. Now onto how the same issue presents in Protestantism. Protestantism for our Purposes: Protestantism is taken to be all Christians who are neither Orthodox nor Catholic. Protestants believe in Sola Scriptura, and aren’t dependent on Apostolic Succession to enter into the status as clergy. Anyone can set up a Christian community with their own teachings in any place that affords gathering and claim it’s a valid church. This leads to the extreme of decentralization within Christian branches. In Catholicism, there’s a global hierarchy running from the laity on up to the Pope. In Orthodoxy, there’s a much flatter Ecclesiology where it only goes up to the Bishops, with the Patriarchs being the first amongst these equals. Protestantism ends wherever the given church organization ends. If you disagree with it, you can just scoop up other discontented people, then walk off into fractionation and discontinuity. This can’t exactly even be said, however. There’s not exactly a thing to set up, as Protestantism doesn’t have an ecclesiology. The pre-extant ecclesiologies that are long standing in Catholicism and Orthodoxy can’t be unboxed and assembled, nor can the other bases of life in the Church. Everything needs to be re-adjudicated with every new pastor. Efforts towards perpetually re-casting what’s already been established means unnecessary efforts.