POLITICS AND INTELLIGENCE: WHAT YOUR VIEWS TELL ABOUT YOU.

There are only very few things that are more important to us than the feeling of being an individual person. Being an own character, being unique. We strive to set ourselves apart from others and defend our uniqueness in various social settings. We develop distinct tastes in music and fashion. We have certain behavioural patterns and ways we express things that we want to make us special. Over time, people also tend to change their styles when they feel their uniqueness is fading due to changing surroundings and trends. It is often argued that the reason why being special is very important is that it fulfils an important function as it satisfies our psychological needs on the fourth level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While that is true, it is not the sole reason for this behaviour or striving for distinctiveness. By feeling entitled to feel special, we also create our own reality around the purpose of our being. Not all know that the purpose of existence is the exercise of genuine knowledge production as defined in Devlet. Claiming to be special subjectively validates our existence to a certain degree by claiming a reserved space in this life. It might not reflect the reality of our being, but the self-created idea of being special is often enough to avoid the destructive feeling of uselessness. However, the most important characteristic of our personalities is our intelligence. Although not every intelligent person is inherently special, every special person is intelligent. While the broader discourse of uniqueness is often reduced to superficial aspects like personal tastes, opinions and social behaviour, the objectively important criteria to assess the distinctiveness of a person are related to our cognitive capacities. Only through utilising our cognitive capabilities can we produce meaningful real-world outcomes that are unique and add to societal progress. One of the indicators of our intelligence is our political understanding.

The Heart Of Science: Politics

The reason why politics is such an accurate measure of our intelligence is its interdisciplinary character. Politics affects every aspect of life but is also affected by all of them, though to varying degrees, of course. Many scientific fields are interconnected, like the social sciences. It would be wrong to isolate anthropology from history and sociology. On the other side, biology and chemistry are closely connected. Mathematics and physics are even sometimes interdependent. But with political science, no scientific field can be ignored. Although it often is not the most complex facet of a scientific field that is relevant to politics, there are fundamental dynamics that inform political decision-making or simply political understanding. For instance, urban design (architecture, arts) has a profound impact on our education efficiency (sociology), which, in turn, affects our economic performance (economics, maths); our economic performance then affects, among other factors, our foreign policy (international relations) and, therefore, our future societal progress (anthropology). And all of that will be accompanied by legal considerations and social power dynamics within the political elite.

Understanding politics, hence, means building cognitive bridges between many different fields and recognising structures and patterns across a wide range of multilayered interactions between those scientific disciplines. Moreover, a scientist in a specific field will have extensive expertise in the respective discipline. However, it does not follow that this scientist is aware of the embeddedness and connectivity of his field with other disciplines. How do the findings connect with other dynamics? What are the far-reaching effects of those connections? Do the scientific findings within one discipline change in meaning when put in different, more encompassing, contexts? The political scientist will have to answer all of this if he has the aspiration to call himself good in what he does. And for the layman, the same applies here, too. Politics is a topic of public interest and, therefore, also publicly discussed. Becoming an expert is surely an incredibly difficult task, and being right on every matter is not the measure that needs to be applied here. However, when we engage in political discussions, we can make assessments of our counterpart’s cognitive capabilities.

No Opinions

The most fundamental principle of politics is that there are no opinions. An opinion is nothing more than a loose idea informed by past experiences and emotions but also limited to them. Built on emotional grounds, an opinion has the significant disadvantage of being prone to be influenced by personal traumas and imbalances in character, meaning that an opinion is often also affected and shaped by deeper psychological properties that are completely subjective. Therefore, opinions can never be part of higher political discourse. If somebody repeatedly insists on his opinion, even though it has been refuted, it can be said that the person has very limited cognitive capabilities and is strongly guided by emotions, driven by a certain degree of narcissism. Because politics is a public matter, not being able to talk about it would amount to social exclusion in some situations. Without political understanding and the unwillingness to subordinate oneself in discourse, the personal opinion remains the only option to artificially retain the uniqueness described above. In this not quite uncommon situation, the political discourse becomes a tool for securing social standing and personal satisfaction.

The right way to approach political discourse and build political understanding is to view politics in terms of analyses, observations and hypotheses. Rather than to “think” or “believe” that something has to be a certain way, one is best advised to analyse and observe these things. Next, we can derive tendencies and patterns from these observations, and from those tendencies and patterns, we can derive hypotheses. Opinions and hypotheses are not that far away from each other as they both cannot claim to formulate a true statement at the time of formulation. However, the hypothesis emerges in the context of structured arguing and dependable logic. It might well be that a hypothesis is falsified, and it might also be that one person formulates 20 hypotheses that are refuted, but as long as the path towards formulating the hypothesis is methodologically acceptable, this person is always to be viewed as cognitively more capable than a person with opinion-based arguments.

People With Leftist Views

Now, to make the analysis a bit more specific, we will look at more detailed examples of political views and what they tell us about people. Unfortunately, the past three decades led to a drastic reduction of political views, now standing at two. Among the many different approaches that once existed, only two remain in the global discourse: Left and Right. Even worse is the simultaneous reduction of conceptual depth within those camps. Whereas once the political left could be divided into many sub-categories, the contemporary political discourse leaves less room for deviations, while this is equally applicable to the political right. Starting off with the political left, we need to always remember the core premise of this school of thought, which is redistribution. With such a core proposition, the political left aims to achieve equality among various societal groups – politically, economically and socially. In order to understand what this tells you about someone’s character, we can direct our attention to those people who would benefit from such a policy direction. In the contemporary social order, humans have a comfort-maximising tendency that will force behaviour that leads to maximum benefit with minimum effort. Redistribution enables such a situation. By suggesting a political order in which the stronger works to level-out the deficiencies of the weak, the weak artificially becomes an equal of the stronger. Defending such a standpoint shows a lack of productivity. The leftist person wants equal benefits with less output, and since the willingness to provide greater output is lacking, these people are inherently less productive. Surely, in some instances this situation is a matter of free choice but generally such a view stems from the personal limits of productivity, though paired with a sense of entitlement. Probably, many people would be more productive if they could. Since productivity and output are linked to cognitive ability, it can be said that the political left is limited by their cognitive ability to perform within a political system.

Making up for that, the political left has a strong social and emotional component that emphasises empathy, fairness and social togetherness – all aspects equally important to societal functioning as mechanical aspects like productivity and innovation. With those tools at hand, the political left is constructing a normative frame that allows for their proponents’ accommodation within the political system without stark power discrepancies. By the formulation of human rights, fundamental rights, normative principles and the concepts of social fairness and balance, the political left can appeal to our universally present emotions that prefer peace and harmony. To upkeep such peace, the argument of the left is structured around the redistribution of resources between more productive and less productive people. From a character standpoint, this means that the leftist people are able to dominate normative discourse and utilise linguistic tools to not only frame their unproductive attitude in a favourable light, but also to convince the more productive person to share his wealth. There is a stark contradiction in asking for social fairness at the expense of economic fairness. The groundwork for this stance was made by Karl Marx who called for the universal equality between worker and producer. What is often overlooked is that the worker is not the one that innovates and pushes for economic progress. An order of equality between worker and producer would work as a maintaining system but not as an expanding system. The leftist person carries this inherent thought with himself and is rather status quo oriented in the economic sense. In the context of social progress, the leftist person, however, is the driving force behind social sciences. With a greater awareness of power structures and our linguistic embeddedness of our behaviour, the leftist scientist has less difficulty to uncover dynamics that transcend mechanical logic.

Summarising, a left-oriented political perspective often hints a certain degree of cognitive limitation for mechanical and economic productivity. As the aspect of those material advances are less relevant within the normative construct of social harmony, the leftist person wants to make his limitation up with structures that forces the more productive person to share his wealth. On the other hand, the leftist person is more capable to explain social behaviour and interactions in terms of imbalances. There is a clear orientation towards universal harmony within the world of the leftist person with the premise of reaching such harmony with minimum input.

People With Rightist Views

The rightist person is a mechanically, non-redistributively, thinking person. Though normative concepts can play a role in the lives of the rights, these are often predefined normative concepts, such as religions or sometimes legal frameworks. Little normative innovation can be expected from the right as their mechanical success reduces incentives to seek harmony. In capitalist societies, productively successful people create a social discrepancy towards the left, which already puts them into a harmonic position. Accordingly, the person on the right is often reliant on the intra-functionality of his social surroundings. Just like the left person wants to alter the rules to be on the same level as the right person without investing the same effort, the right person invests his primary effort to uphold the social distance from the left person in a form of validation of superiority along the measurement of mechanical metrics as the only measurement his cognitive capabilities allow. In other words, the rightist person can only think in mechanical ways and does not value the empathic, harmonic side of life – at least not outside of its inner circle, which has the same normative values as himself. Such thinking surely denies the far-reaching development of the social aspects of our character, but it is also this focus that opens the door for economic progress. With their heightened economic productivity, rightist people are often the main drivers of innovation in technology and economics. Needless to say, the inventions in humanities are rather of a basic nature.

Since there is such an inability to build in-depth sociological connections, the right is prone to make very limited inferences on those matters. Racism is a very suitable example that illustrates how lower-dimensional rightist people can think. On the other hand, the significant advances in the fields of economic theory were primarily pushed by the right. Lacking empathy, the rightist person has a character that relies heavily on structures and rules. As we have seen above, religions can provide such a framework as it is an outsourced framework for behavioural guidance. Whereas the leftist person can build his own normative construct, the rightist person needs written laws to effectively behave in normative contexts. Accordingly, the rightist views hint at moral impairment as mechanical values supersede normative ones, where written frameworks of normativity are absent.

Conclusion

In the end, the biggest problem is that our political understanding is limited to two sides. Both sides are more opinion-oriented than analysis-based. To assess a person’s level of intelligence, one can make a first quite accurate assessment by checking how a person is arguing. If the arguments are emotion-based and do not include any analytical value, the person has a lower intelligence base than people with an analytical approach to politics. If such a person is then rather left-oriented, this person has little productive ambitions and is also often infected with an unwarranted feeling of entitlement to equality and fairness. If there is a high analytical understanding of politics within a leftist context, this person can be described as intelligent in social and emotionally oriented disciplines that aim at analysing social interactions.

If someone is analytically weak and on the right side of the spectrum, this person will likely have an underdeveloped emotional character which makes him vulnerable and erratic, though this person might have the potential to be economically productive. With a high analytical understanding of politics and right views, a person is likely to be a producer of goods and services, adding to the survival of society through production. However, this person might lack the perspective to put his work in wider contexts.

If someone has a high analytical understanding of politics, is emotionally advanced and economically productive, however, then we call such a person a devletist. This political understanding is detached from the left-right binary and also eliminates the opinionated discourse from its jargon. Devletism requires both sides (as well as all the other ignored sides) to work together to reach the maximum of societal development. As such, the devletist school is the superior political approach to the contemporarily reigning approaches.