Can decent people and anti-intellectuals form a society together?
Some people think that rule of law and a strong economy will be enough to patch up America, but I’m not sure.
I live in Silicon Valley where we have rule of law and a strong economy and yet are also producing people, mostly men, too toxic to exist in a reasonable society.
Stephen Miller is an example of this sort of toxic man and he also comes from a background with rules and money:
At 39, Miller is a millennial (51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Harris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation (84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates and a likely 75 percent of students at Duke voted for Harris)
These men are toxic because, in America at least, it’s not enough to passively go with the flow. One must actively try to be a better, more intellectual and empathetic person or the entire country can fall back to the monstrous slaver nation it once was.
How much and what kind of immigration should America accept? It’s very easy to grab extreme answers like completely open or closed borders but quite hard to educate oneself towards more justified positions.
For certain Silicon Valley was founded on the wrong kind of immigration — importing talented people for profit while education simultaneously became less and less affordable for Americans. At a minimum a reasonable society would take those profits and reinvest them towards a better educated populace.
Equally certain though is that the sort of immigration that allowed Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather to escape anti-Jewish pogroms is something any empathetic American should support.
For most of my life I have been for lowering the rate of immigration for two reasons:
- The high rate of immigration never polled very well and supposedly we live in a democracy.
- Bringing more people in while America has such inadequate safety net and educational systems is dangerous.
However with America now at 1.6 births per women, I currently generally positively view anything that would result in more children in this country.
So democracy is tough enough without anti-intellectuals — people who not only don’t want to think about complex issues but are actively opposed to reason, logic, and learning.
I claim that anyone or anything that undermines empathetic, intellectual thinking (IE woke) is a danger to American society and human survival.
Exhibit A — you’ll blow yourselves up
See story here.
Exhibit B — everything must be regulated
Immigration, the rich (taxation, leaving to offspring, political contributions, etc.), carbon emissions, and even scientific research:
Throughout the development of this independent assessment, it may be obvious to state that SAGO has only been able to analyze evidence made available to them and the public. However, SAGO and WHO are aware that more data exists. Some examples of this include requests for more information including:
a) the sharing of more than 500 sequences from individuals with COVID-19 early in the pandemic; (China National Center for Bioinformation, 2022).
b) more detailed information on the sources, locations, sampling and testing methods of animals sold at the HSM and other wet markets in Wuhan, including upstream farming or illegal trade; and
c) information on research and field activities in laboratories in Wuhan, including staff health records, biosafety and biosecurity information of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Wuhan China CDC laboratory.
The June 2025 scientific consensus is that we don’t know the origin of Covid-19 and that, as uncomfortable as it might make some people, human creation of a pandemic virus is possible.
Exhibit C — organized religion is dangerous
American Christians are divided among themselves between following some version of Christ and white nationalism. However the white nationalist group is much more aggressive.
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) serves as a major umbrella organization, representing over 45,000 local churches from about 40 different denominations, including Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Holiness traditions.
Dr. Kim in this October 8th 2024 interview says that what defines Evangelicals is a “posture of engagement”. This posture of engagement led many pastors to endorse Trump to their congregation and the IRS now allows this political engagement without loss of tax free status.
Dr. Kim also mentions in this interview, “providing legal services for immigrants and strengthening communities desire to be multi-ethnic” and a whole host of good works Christian evangelicals do.
Unfortunately I’m not convinced evangelicals can support empathetic, intellectual thinking. Christian doctrine is othering by nature — non believers are sent to hell by god. Christian doctrine is anti-intellectual by nature — the word of Jesus is all you need.
“We lament the suffering and recurring trauma of our immigrant neighbors, including many refugees who have fled violence or persecution and have followed every rule,” commented Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. “These are not the nefarious criminals that we should deport. These are families with children whom our country initially welcomed. As evangelicals, we believe every person bears God’s image and deserves safety, dignity and fair treatment.”
Dr. Kim can and does use the bible to fight against racism:
You see there in Revelation 5, the same kinds of categories in Genesis 10 — geographical, political, familial, linguistic. But there again, you also see there are no racial categories. Again, at least in terms of how we understand race. So the Bible definitely has human categorization, but it uses categories that are not quite the categories that we use in North America.
But this form of intellectualism just opens a can of worms that anything in a 1900+ year old book can be used as if it were scientific evidence.
Or, as Stephen Miller does, you can appeal to an anti-intellectual God without mentioning the bible:
We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation. And we will defend this world. We will defend goodness. We will defend light. We will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us. You cannot frighten us. You cannot threaten us. Because we are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God.
The whole practice of having pastors read an already anti-intellectual book for you and tell you what to believe from that book sets up Miller to do well with Christians.
Exhibit D — you not only have to teach science but the latest science and adult learning too
If you can, fairly quickly from an evolution point of view, breed a German Shepard to have strong guarding instincts, then why can’t humans vary tremendously from each other in profound ways?
Science has, until recently, been rather supportive of racist thinking. Traditional biology textbooks described genes as a “blueprint for life”. That’s simply not true and modern biologists realize that there are contributions at all human levels — DNA, cells, organs, culture, etc.
The German Shepard example is deeply flawed as you can teach a German Shepard to behave in almost any fashion. Even on base tendencies, what humans call race is nowhere near as defined as purebred German Shepard.
Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.
More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.
Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.
If you’re not subscribed to science and keeping very up to date, you still live in a world where human genetic diversity is way greater then it actually is.
And even if you stay up to date enough to know that race is nonsense, you might still believe in an old fashioned version of gender. You wouldn’t realize that children are gender detectives who implement what they learn:
This basic gender identity knowledge (e.g., I am a girl!) sparks children’s motivation to seek out information about their gender group (e.g., girls play with dolls) so they can match their behavior to their understanding of gender (e.g., I want a doll!; Martin & Ruble, 2010). Children’s active search for gender knowledge leads them to amass a large amount of gender stereotype information throughout early and middle childhood (Martin & Ruble, 2004; Miller et al., 2013). Research examining the development of stereotype knowledge has found that children tend to learn gender stereotypes for activities/toys and appearance by preschool, occupations around age 5, and personality traits throughout the elementary years and into adolescence (Miller et al., 2006; Ruble et al., 2006). More recent research has highlighted the important role of appearance stereotypes and how appearance and personal attractiveness are especially central to girls’ early gender development (Halim et al., 2018, 2024; Miller et al., 2009). The research on developmental trends within specific domains (e.g., activities, appearance, occupations, traits) underscores the multidimensional nature of gender stereotype beliefs (Miller et al., 2024).
Having old fashioned ideas about race or gender is corrosive to society. Anti-intellectuals sell these lies as the glue that bonds a society together.
They think the lies help everyone know their place so that stuff gets done. Bring back slavery and invigorate the economy. Bring back women as second class citizens and solve the birth rate crisis. These are the sorts of simple idiotic things an anti-intellectual thinks and you can’t form a society that decent people can live in around that bullshit.