The Decline of Intelligence in America
Author: Seymour W. Itzkoff
Written/published:1994
Publisher: Praeger Publishers, Westport, Conn.
This book is an interesting and critical review of the declining level of intelligence in America. It uses many studies as well as reasoning and draws from the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy to present the problems faced by America in a technological, global economy. He gets into the educational system, crime, disease, the disappearing elite, the new economic reality and many other facets of our predicament. Reading it will leave the reader with the realization that in order to survive difficult choices will have to be made. Choices that the human race, whether in America or any country, will not make willingly due to humanity’s selfish, short-sighted nature. Democracy is too inefficient and based in mob rule to be maintained over the long haul. Although I believe the author’s main goal was not to discredit democracy any person endowed with common sense and/or an above average level of intelligence will reach the conclusion that democracy, as we practice it, is destined to fail. The same person will also realize the flaws of humanity make the entrusting of complete power to one person or to a group of people that have personal and selfish agendas is also equally destructive for society.
To paraphrase this book, as with many I will report on, would detract from the message and impact it should have on the reader in order to convey the importance of its subject. I have therefore chosen to quote various paragraphs or sentences in order to peak interest in it and hopefully entice the reader to try and locate a copy for him or herself. I do not focus on the individual studies themselves used by the author, which can be left to the reader, but focus on general philosophy and the supporting premises of the book. For such a serious subject it is actually an easy read as the author is very skilled in conveying a message. I would recommend this to anyone that has a sense of obligation to the future and their fellow man, and have a vision for a long lasting society based on intelligent reasoning. I also recommend it for military brass as the ultimate task of stabilizing and overseeing repair of the nation will end up in their laps. It is available from Preger Publishing in trade paperback form. It is also available (at the time of this report) in hardback but is a bit pricey unless one has a personal library or is a dedicated bibliophile. I especially recommend it for civilian professionals and all military personnel as they will be the ones to oversee and direct our way out of this conundrum we are in. I also recommend it for any who are in favor of a safe, secure, stable and advancing society as they will be needed by the professionals and military for support. It is written from a present day conservative perspective which will rankle some but the validity cannot be ignored or denied. To ignore the facts would have the same consequence for society as would ignoring or denying a terminal illness would have for an individual.
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION. (SECTIONS ARE LABELED IN CAPITALS)
“The argument of this book is simple: the United States is declining as a nation. This decline can be confirmed by any of the criteria that historians have ever used to measure the state and condition of a nation and its people.”
“The fundamental cause of this growing weakness, I believe, is rooted in the overall decline of our nation’s intelligence capital, its level of thought and behavior which neither additional educational monies nor social work efforts will be able to improve significantly.”
“The generation coming to maturity today in the United States, either presently in school or now coming into the workforce, does not have the educational, vocational, or cultural potential comparable to that of earlier generations who participated in the building of our nation. Nor is it competitive with large portions of the developed and developing world.”
“The new generation and all our populations is coming from the lower end of the intellectual, and thus the social, scale. We are creating a population of permanently poor Third World Americans.”
“Throughout the world, for almost a century, we have searched for political and social programs to lift the evil spirits of poverty and human degradation from us.”
“In the United States, we have invested our inheritance of wealth and philanthropy in an attempt to dissolve the barriers, to extend a helping hand. The universally acknowledged failure of all these programs, after almost forty years and the expenditure of over five trillion, has not dissuaded the ideological liberals. We see the old knee-jerk responses in the present Democratic administration. Ever familiar refrain: more summer programs for “needy youth,” make-work jobs for the urban poor, a few $89,000 per year jobs for a year, temporary” infrastructure” jobs to repair our city streets. All of these in the face of decisive theoretical and experimental evidence that no amount of tax monies is going to change the situation.” [keep in mind this was published in 1994]
“Intelligence is part of each individual’s inheritance, as much as are ones height and personality. Intelligence, high or low, is not fixed for any one race or ethnic group. Because people of similar ethnic backgrounds have usually bred together, it is inevitable that they will share an intellectual and personality profile. This profile group, however, can change in a relatively short time. It all depends upon who in the group will have the children and thus create the next generation.”
“The scientific evidence for the biological roots of our social behavior continues to accumulate, and with incremental speed. Simultaneously, our disenchantment with these never-ending visions of social amelioration increases, along with the taxes that we are paying to subsidize these bureaucratic pipedreams.”
“It may already be too late for the United States. The power czars controlling our institutions of information and communication have successfully engaged in a conspiracy of silence, a quiet attempt to maintain the status quo that guarantees their power and perks, even if it means the destruction of the American middle class.”
“The smugness and assurance of their power positions, the wealth and notoriety that come with monopolistic control of the” truth” seem to explain it all. ………. Media intellectuals today have the power to create the ideas and values out of which will flow the legislation and judicial decisions of tomorrow.”
REALITY THERAPY
“Will the top 20% of our educated population, where the investment wherewithal and the high usable education Iay, take a chance with the American labor scene? The evidence is that they are very reluctant to invest in the United States. While the corporations are becoming” lean and mean” by laying off hundreds of thousands of ordinary American semi-skilled and white-collar workers, new plants are being built overseas in both the developed and advancing countries, from Mexico to Indonesia. The cost of investment is less, the climate for risk and success is better.”
BITTER TRUTH
“Our problem is simple, but oh-so-difficult to discuss, let alone accept. We are different people than we were fifty years ago. In truth, we are not the nation that we were. Relative to the rest of the developed and developing world, we probably no longer have the intellectual capital that can profit from the available educational resources.”
“As I will point out later in this book, we can do better with what we have. But for a nation now undergoing a population explosion from the bottom, now slated by the Census Bureau to have a population of about 385 million by 2050, as compared with a 1992 population of over 250 million, our present prospects are Third World, and in the lifetime of those already born.”
“Our leadership has refused to listen to the few, if insistent, voices that pleaded for a chance to argue their case. The case: Humans very in intelligence. This variability is not merely located in the person, from individual to individual, but also in communities. Thus while there is no racial test for high intelligence, it is true that ethnic groups who breed within the group tend to have a similar intellectual profile, which may be higher or lower on average than that of other ethnic groups.”
“Little did it matter to our leadership who had the babies. Thus, in the course of a generation or two, the welfare system, instituted by liberal intellectuals and politicians with the purpose of helping our people and our nation, has literally destroyed our intellectual potential.”
“Most tragically affected has been the African-American community that, even while it struggled against slavery, segregation, and discrimination, had come forth into the mid-twentieth century with great working and middle-class resilience and a leadership that reflected a secular education and political vision.”
“Of course, a scattering of individuals of high intelligence and creativity will appear. But ours is a quickly expanding population, now competing in an international arena of unprecedented educational demands. There is but an infinitesimal chance, given the existing evidence, that this nation could momentarily produce the number of creative minds necessary for the productive requirements of middle-class life, as defined by the twenty-first century, to benefit more than a small percentage of our population.”
“Ira Magaziner is correct when he envisions a sharply decreasing percentage of our population living middle-class lives. Unfortunately, this is a prescription for revolution and social chaos, the end to our democratic system.”
CONSIDERATIONS
“Our current situation is different. Blessed with welfare and death control, and without the understanding, discipline and wherewithal to exercise birth control, and internal and external tide of people from the lower social classes is spiraling millions of the permanently poor over our borders to add to our resident poor. The intelligent and educated of their own homelands do not have to emigrate. They are becoming wealthy in their home nations even while these others sink into poverty and mass degradation.”
SILENT DISASTER
“In the early 1990s about 4 million live births were recorded each year in the United States. Of these, approximately 1,000,000 were born to unmarried women. The rate of illegitimacy in the United States has spiraled upward in the past 20-25 years, to where in 1992 it stands at about 28% of our yearly births.”
“Some of these can be attributed to persons of means and tragedies such as Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who chose not to marry. Whether the prognosis for such children as theirs is when they come of age in and about 2010 is any better than for the vast majority of children born to the mostly poor unwed mothers remains to be seen.”
OUR UNDERCLASS
“In the last decade or so, a new element, the homeless, has been added to the term underclass. By now, all the sociological authorities agree that the problem is virtually intractable. The homeless not only do not seem to want to work, they cannot work. Our leaders seem blind to this problem. The unending billion-dollar summer” jobs” program is that they enact only serve to prevent us from facing the realities and will eventually have to be halted. Simply, the middle classes will refuse to pay for them.”
“Beyond this type of refusal is the awareness that to admit the existence of this” elephant in the corner” can lead inexorably to the conclusion that, if we are to diminish this American plague, our overriding priority would be to slow the flow of new children born into such pain and horror. To contemporary liberals, illegitimacy is one of the lifestyle options available to Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Why not also to the thirteen-year-olds in South-Central Los Angeles?”
SURVIVAL OF THE INTELLIGENT
“Already by 1994, let alone 2010, roughly half of the American population can be seen to be sinking below international levels of intellectual and educational achievement requisite to the dollar productivity of this world standard. What is to become of these individuals, and then the formerly wealthy nation that encouraged their coming into being?”
THE HIGH WALL
“….many of the less intelligent exist in a state of silent panic. It is a world that has no meaning or pathways that can lead to acceptable fulfillments, and they perceive this. Some will react in self-destructive passivity, others are equally self-destructive activity, the latter constituting at least the functional attempt at personal survival. The future as consequence might as well not exist. Many individuals have borderline intellectual and educational skills. They can work the McDonalds’ type of jobs. They are steady, and live within a limited if temporarily functioning universe.”
“But what happens when technology catches up with them, as it has in auto and steel industries? For these latter, it has been one enormous step down to night watchman, custodian, or some other non-skilled job, all the time dreading the inevitable “modernization” that will once more, perhaps finally, render them and their loved ones redundant. Their economic basis for life has been pulled out from under them, their intellectual and educational potentials incapable of advancing them to keep up with the changing world standard. What happens to their children, molded from similar genetic intellectual potentiality? Is it reasonable to speak of retraining?”
SADNESS
“The implications here are stark. The pathologies that afflict the citizenry of Third World nations, in the minority favellas of the developed world, are not remediable through more social work philanthropies, de riguer in the mentality of dogmatic liberalism. Neither will the constant outpouring of aid, either to indigenous underclass communities or to the nations of the Third World, ever be more than conscience money, a palliative that will have to be renewed indefinitely until the donor nations themselves collapse.”
“Low human intelligence relative to an explosively cerebralized techno-economic and cultural world community has resulted in the historical obsolescence of a vast proportion of the oncoming population of our planet.”
INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LESSONS
“In the 1980s we confronted this crisis by living on borrowed monies: federal, municipal, and corporate debt and bonds financed mostly from the accumulated wealth of the older generation, earned in more productive times, but partially from the benevolence of our international friends. The Republican propagandists speak of millions of new jobs created in the 1980s. They don’t deny that we lost 2 million factory jobs as we added 10-14 million other jobs, many part-time. Of course, those jobs and the supposed prosperity that they engendered were built out of this mountain of debt, which financed the entire charade.”
PROGNOSIS
“The Reagan-Bush years saw an artificial prosperity built out of high-tech weaponry and financial and real estate speculation, (junk bonds and the savings-and-loan debacle). What remains of our frontier industrial output, not including the raw materials, junk metal, and wood pulp that are sold to the developed world, has become lean and competitive in these years. Its leanness did not alleviate our chronic under and unemployment problem, which seems to worsen each year in the 1990s.”