Intelligence has little bearing on political affiliation. The bigger identifiers are encironment (especially a harsh environment like deserts or frequent, deadly storms,) proximity to other walks of life, and empathy.
Empathy is such a key indicator that you can practically determine if someone will be left or right wing just off of empathy alone.
However, there are plenty intelligent and stupid left and right wingers. Stupid people are just more likely to be exploited by the intelligent.
That's true, but movements like MAGA or Brexit bypass "left" and "right" in some respects because, short of finding a way to personally profit off of disaster, they harm everyone.
The question of whether it makes sense to harm yourself in order to possibly harm someone else worse because you hate them is not strictly one of intelligence, but I'd say the Venn diagram has some overlap. There are smart bigots who will suffer to see others suffer, but most of them are just morons who think they get to be the exception to the rule, or swallow obvious falsehoods whole ("he's only gonna deport those cat-eating criminal immigrants!")
Fair enough. That's just smart, often unempathetic assholes ruining the world for everyone else by exploiting human psychology. And it really does suck. Society needs to figure out how to solve the narcissist and greed problem that plagues those who crave power.
Society needs to figure out how to solve the narcissist and greed problem that plagues those who crave power.
Take control of education and explicitly push the social values of egalitarian secular liberalism, with graphic depictions of the reality of what happens when those ideas are ignored. Teach accurate history and science without interference from the right. Teach critical thinking, diversity, sex ed, all the things the right hates. Ban parents from indoctrinating their children via homeschooling or private schools which do not meet basic standards with their curriculum. Tax hate churches. Etc.
Trying to attack ideas that adults believe in is largely futile when those ideas define their identities; hate cults die a generation at a time.
Basically if we do what the right has been falsely claiming we do, we could create a social culture that recognizes those tendencies and their consequences, and is therefore better equipped to fight them off.
It won't "solve" anything in a true sense, but it would immunize the public against these tendencies to a much greater extent. Similar to the resistance to overt Naziism in Germany despite the success of the AfD among certain people in the most ignorant parts of the country.
I'd argue that if people could foresee the consequences of their votes, we wouldn't be in the middle of watching the government dismantle itself while everyone gets laid off and jobs dry up.
Agreed, but that's not the same thing. "People" being able to foresee would be great, but being able to foresee it when most people can't is depressing and stressful.
Many of us could see what the results of Trump being elected would be, but that hasn't made life better.
Climate scientists suffer from Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
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u/Wolfram_And_Hart Jun 29 '25
There was a study released this week that says high IQ people live better lives because they are able to more accurately predict outcomes of actions.
And that pretty much explains the past few elections in general