Liberalism and the Perfectibility of Man

Christianity could be inherently liberal – the idea of the perfectibility, malleability, and salvation of man through deeds and other extrinsic virtues, versus salvation through intrinsic factors such as IQ. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings inspired the French Revolution and is the genesis of modern liberalism. From Wikipedia: Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

Rousseau’s man is a “savage” man. He is a loner and self-sufficient. Any battle or skirmish was only to protect himself. The natural man was in prime condition, fast, and strong, capable of caring for himself. He killed only for his own self-preservation. When the natural man established property as his own, this was the “beginning of evil” according to Rousseau, though he acknowledges the sanctity of the institution of property and that government should be created to protect it. The natural man should have “pulled up the stakes” to prevent this evil from spreading. This property established divisions in the natural world. The first was the master-slave relationship. Property also led to the creation of families. The natural man was no longer alone. The subsequent divisions almost all stem from this division of land.

Rousseau believed that civilization is a ‘trick’ perpetuated by the elite to suppress the weak, and that the default state of man is savagery, also known as the ‘noble savage’. This explains why left has no faith in humanity and wants society to regress unless man is perfected to their exacting, egalitarian standards, and it’s this leftist drive for ‘perfectionism’ and ‘equality’ that has the intentional consequence of causing society to regress to a more ‘noble’ and savage state. It also explains why the left allies with Islam, because they both share a desire for Western civilization to fail and for society to regress both technologically and economically to a more primitive, but egalitarian equilibrium. It is this enmity against the rich, individual cognitive exceptionalism, and technology that unifies the welfare left.

The belief in perfectibility of man motivates liberals to support useless social programs that run headlong into the limitations imposed by biology. Similarly, this ties into the delusion that practice can make can make an imperfect man perfect (the 10,000 hour rule). It would seem antithetical to rationality to believe this superstition. Holding the number of hours of practice constant, smarter people get much better returns for the hours they devote to intellectual endeavors such as math, stock option trading and chess. In regard to music, some people have an ‘ear’ for it and others don’t (perfect pitch, for example). Professional sports are another example where having an obvious biological advantage (being taller in basketball) could reduce the number of hours of practice needed for mastery, and short people are vastly underrepresented in the NBA.

Most proponents of HBD, such as this blog, believe that by virtue of genes and IQ some people are born ‘better’ than others. The role of nurture should be create optimal socioeconomic conditions that allow these exceptional individuals to live to their full cognitive potential. Biology always has the final word and, in the Randian way, people with cognitive superiority should be able to gratify their desires within certain ethical bounds without having to accede to an ambiguous moral higher power. And the state should also not be curtailed in this manner, in that the un-scientific assumption that ‘all life is precious/equal in the eyes of God’ should not bear influence on policy; policy should, in accordance to Kantianism and Hume, be rational, or in the economic sense, maximizing economic value and the advancement of the human canon of knowledge as it pertains to technology.