Part 1 of Why I stopped being a Marxist, a leftist, gave up humanism, took the red pill, started believing in conspiracy theories, and became an anti-natalist with nihilistic tendencies towards suicide.

Remember when the government of the United States acknowledged that UFO'S were real? Do you remember the public outcry that followed? No, you don't. That's because there wasn't one. And the question you should probably ask yourself about that is, "why not?" 

I think it's because the general public no longer believes anything the government says. For decades it was only the cranks and conspiracy buffs that shrugged off the blanket denials of authorities. They believed when we didn't. 

But that cynicism continues despite  governmental admissions. Most people still don't believe that the whole truth is being disclosed to them. Do we have alien spacecraft at Area 51? Are UFO'S really drones from China or Russia? Have little green men {sorry gray} mutilated 10,000 head of cattle for the last 50 years? 

I don't know. I'm also sure we have not been given all the answers the government has. Maybe we will learn more from the soon to be released Pentagon Report. 

You can't blame the public for mistrust. We are all lived through last year. 2020 was not only crazy, but it shattered illusions that our fellow countrymen value things like rationality and reason.  So not only do I not know what I don't know. I'm not sure what I can know/believe about current UFO disclosures.  We've been lied to before. We've been gaslit. We've had counter-ops run counter-counter-ops on us. We don't know what to trust. 

What's even real anymore?

I don't know what's real anymore.  Do we live in a simulated universe? Was 2020 a reset in that simulation? Is that why after  nearly 80 years passed since Roswell we have the US Navy accepting that UFO phenomena are real? Is someone testing us? Is it the UFO'S themselves?

THE MOST PROBABLE EXPLANATION FOR OUR EXISTENCE IS THAT AN ADVANCED ALIEN CIVILIZATION IS RUNNING A COMPLEX SIMULATION OF EARTH'S INHABITANTS TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT TO REVEAL THEMSELVES TO THE REAL HUMANS

I do hope UFO'S reveal themselves. But until they do I am full of self doubts. But my self doubts don't stop at just asking if I'm actually real, or if I live in the matrix, or if alien civilizations are visiting us. My inner doubts rise all the way to my core self. Who am I? What do I actually believe? I'm beginning to doubt most of what I used to believe. 

My turn to the left 

My intellectual journey begins more than 30 years ago when by chance I happened onto a book by Erich Fromm while I working in a public library. The name of that book was the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. The book discusses human aggression and the rise of what Fromm termed 'malignant aggression' in human beings. 

The first half of the book is a recapitulation of the biological, neurological, and anthropological sciences and what they teach about human society and individuals. Much of what Fromm says here is basic science though now somewhat dated in its concern about Konrad Lorentz and behaviorist theories, but hardly controversial. 

The second half of the book Fromm uses his psychoanalysis skills on famous Nazi personalities like Hitler. When I discovered the book I was just getting into Freud and thought the subject matter could be interesting. However, I was quite shocked by much of what I read in the first half of the book. At that time I had little to no formal education. In my family, book learning was shunned, so most of my youth was spent playing football in the backyard in Texas.

What I soaked up in the background in Texas was a love for independence, libertarianism, and the mostly paranoid pro-capitalism of poor white country folk. No one in my family had ever gone to college and we were in no way cosmopolitan. We never discussed religion or politics in my house. It was just assumed that I believed in God, loved apple pie, and thought America was the best. And except for the God part, that was basically true.

Upon opening The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness I encountered my first authority figure arguing that man is a social creature. At the time this thought seemed absurd to me. Fromm wrote how Socrates asserted  mankind was a social animal. I knew this to be untrue, so I immediately went to work in my school library to prove this guy wrong. I was so perplexed by my initial contact with this information that I skipped ahead in the book while I did research to confirm my Texan background assumptions. I read only the second half of the book that included the parts where Fromm psychoanalizes Hitler. 

Much to my suprise the author grew on me. Erich Fromm is a terribly good writer. He has THE ability we seek in a public intellectual. He takes complex ideas and makes them easily understood. I was so impressed with his techniques for explaining aggression that I immediately turned the book to the beginning pages and gave the arguments about human  beginnings a chance. By the end of the book I was thoroughly convinced that man is a social animal. I also converted to socialism and started reading Karl Marx. Later after reading Marx's 1844 manuscripts I joined the Communist Party USA.

My swing to the ultra left lasted almost 3 decades. In part because of good science, philosophy, and argument. The left appeared to be more scientific when they talked about theories; moreover, they grounded their arguments in Science which I liked and respected. Additionally, they seemed more humanitarian when they talked about the poor. They offered compassion, not just insults. Finally, they often spoke also about sacrificing a bit of yourself for others, and that appealed to my martyrs complex.

When I compared the left to the cruelty I often saw in my hometown conservatives, I was agahst at the disingenuiness displayed by religious people who I thought were taught to love the poor, but instead I witnessed behavior that can only be described as callused disregard for their fellow men. 

Things have only gotten worse on the right. It has grown increasingly paranoid and racist. Though that didn't start with Trump. Remember The Bell Curve? I found a copy at a garage sale in Thayer, MO right around the time the book was released.

I've had a fascination with IQ since I was in the 5th grade and was given one by my school district. I remember they brought in an outside counselor of some sort. The test consisted of verbal excersises, pen and paper questions, visual tests and the  lot. I recall one question where I was asked to repeat a long paragraph about a train backwards. I recall the test giver being shocked as he beamed a smile at me informing me that I was "his first student with the ability to recall the entire paragraph BACKWARDS."  It was only years later after reading the Bell Curve that I discovered the significance behind his statement. It seems that backwards questions are double scored. 

I was never told my score. I was however advanced to the highest grade in my elementary school {I was in the 5th grade and suddenly went to the sixth}. I was placed in the gifted and talented program and my teachers began to act very differently around me. My home room teacher hugged me right after testing and confided to me in a whisper that, "We didn't know if you were just lazy..." 

A brief aside about IQ tests:

Allow me a brief indulgence about these tests. If you're reading this and you think I take pride in a somewhat above average score you'd be wrong.

First, even a relatively high score, say a score around 140, which nets you what they used to old fashionedly call genius (they now call gifted) really only means  that you score higher than 97 percent of test takers. If you're a kid in a large elementary class you might be the brightest kid in a few of your periods. What's 3% of the population in America? Well, more than 10 million people would score as well or higher than you. When IQ tests are viewed from such a perspective it suggests these tests don't prove much. I'm sure the reader has known many people that smart. High scoring test takers aren't really geniuses. I know a lot of smart people. Most of my close friends have very, very high IQ's. None of them are from Mars. 

Now had you asked me as a child was I a genius (when I suffered from a bit of Dunning/Krueger syndrome) I might have answered that I was. My parents parrotted that line to me that I was all the time while I was a child. And I believed it. I don't blame my parents for that they were only trying to encourage me the best they knew how. (Although we now know that praising a child for his 'intellect' instead of his effort ends up being self defeating.) 

Intellectual humility was not something that came naturally to me. Of course once you come across real genius in the form of Shakespeare, Marx, and other figures who tower across the intellectual landscape you begin to recognize what actual genius is like. All this new found humility is in contradistinction to the profile that Murray attempts to persuade you to build around so called high IQ folks. He suggests profound differences between low scorers and high performers. He starts the the book by flattering the "types of people who would read this book" and uses official sounding terms like "standard deviations." 

But corellation does not of course equal causation, and I'm afraid that even if my IQ was 80 the explanatory power of IQ would be in trouble with me. I rank in the bottom 10 percent of income for men at age 50. I never graduated from high school much less college, so I think the author of the Bell Curve would be very unhappy with me for killing his curve. 

{ A further aside on Charles Murray himself - was he racist? Expect a full discussion in an upcoming blog and podcast.}