I was asked in shul on Shabbos if I believe in conspiracy theories, such as the Illumanati, Free Masons, etc, control the world? Do I believe in lizard people who live far beneath the earth? I don’t believe in those conspiracy theories but I do believe in the concept of a deep state.
For a tiny people, Jews are incredibly influential. There is a conspiracy theory worthy of investigation. How do they do it? What can we learn from Jewish success? Here are some smart conspiracy theories for 2013. Is Love Colorblind? Blacks and Arabs tend to believe in more conspiracy theories than do whites.
Imagine what life is like for those with IQs under 100? They walk around knowing that many, if not most people, they interact with are smarter than them. They world might seem as if it is conspiring against you and that might make you surly and suspicious.
Steve Sailer wrote about Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, Back to Blood:
Wolfe is the master of portraying embarrassment; in particular, he can intuit what people with 95 IQs find humiliating, a subject most writers are oblivious to.
Interestingly, Back To Blood never turns into a Nestor-John Smith buddy tale, as is traditional for stories about cops and reporters teaming up. For example, when they drive west into Broward County with its ho-hum nationally franchised stores, Nestor begins to feel uncomfortable in the generic exurb. An unusually animated John Smith reflects: “We’ve just entered a strange land … called America! We’re not in Miami anymore. Can’t you feel it?”
“Nestor analyzed this concept for traces of anti-Cuban insult, even though he had experienced the same alien feeling just a moment before … Well, John Smith was an alien himself. He was apparently a living embodiment of a creature everybody had heard of, but nobody ever met in Miami, the WASP … Emotionally, he still resented it, harmless or not. “
As John Smith begins to riff like a proto-Tom Wolfe on the names of the commercial outlets:
“Animated like this, John Smith annoyed him. … John Smith could draw … concepts … out of something as ordinary as this second-rate road … That kind of thinking was a facility Nestor didn’t have. Irony came always at somebody else’s expense … his own, probably …”
Thus, it’s hardly surprising that the usual trajectory for immigrant groups, even anti-black ones like the Cubans, is toward the Democrats—the Party of Resentment.
Topping reflects upon the fictional John Smith, and journalists in general:
If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. … But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger … The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers.
Wolfe, who is a lavish spender in the tradition of Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, has seldom made any pretense that he doesn’t want success in its cash forms. (Here’s Wolfe’s tribute to Twain as the rare writer who struck it rich as a “Big Spender from the East.”)
He just wants it on his own terms.
Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is like … a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to … well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people … including the boys who came out on the strong side of the sheerly dividing line.
Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word … pushed them toward “liberalism.”
I suspect, however, that Tom Wolfe, much as he resembles John Smith, was never a liberal. I’d like to see him write a memoir. Wolfe’s first three decades—his upbringing in Virginia, his Ph.D. at Yale, and his reporting in Cuba during the Revolution—remain obscure, probably both for personal and political reasons.
