[ This information is summarized from Scout to the Pole Chapter 18. Nanook is talking to George.]

 

Large distinction between A2 and A3

“Regarding the view that there are two separate species, this comes from the observation that all humans don’t have A3 abilities. A3 is a mental ability related to a specific brain STRUCTURE that confers special abilities on those who have it. The difference between A2 thinking and A3 thinking is substantial. This distinction is just as profound as the difference between animals and humans, where having an A1 brain structure limits animals use of tools. Sure, some animals can be “said” to use tools, like an otter cracking open shellfish with a rock. But it’s a far cry from the tool room of a modern factory. The distinction between A2 and A3 abilities, including the separate brain structure, is sufficient to classify them as two distinct species.

Most humans don’t have A3

What proportion of society has an A3 brain? When this concept first occurred to me, I thought it might be around 90% of our culture. But when I started to identify what properties an A3 brain has, it quickly became clear if its way at the OTHER END of the scale. My current GUESS is that 98% of the people in human society don’t have an A3 brain.

A3 not the same as high IQ

Now, there’s another important distinction to make here. A3 is NOT the same as high IQ. A high IQ means that people are able to remember a lot of facts. People who can remember a lot of facts are considered SMART. Society believes that anyone who is quote ‘smart’, must be able to understand systems. They think that given enough schooling, ANYONE can learn to understand systems. It’s a LIE. And because of society’s blindness to this principle and unwillingness to deal with it, our culture is set up to fail. Our whole process of government get’s this wrong. Elections are set up as competitions. This favors strong A2 people who are street smart, who can manipulate Single Sentence Logic and emotion. When they get elected and need to organize things, they don’t even know where to begin. People appointed to leadership positions are also selected because they are loyal and can keep others in line. It’s all A2. A3 in our society usually comes with statements like creativity, organized, and ‘out of the box thinker’.

Some other examples of people who we might consider smart, but who are typically NOT A3’s are doctors, lawyers and PhD physicists.

Doctors are selected for memory ability and the ability to do medical tasks in very prescribed, repeatable ways. In most of the cases I know, they are horrible at organization and dealing with problems that require change. This, I’m sure, explains why medicine is always so far behind other industries keeping up with technical and social advances. The medical establishment expects that doctors should naturally head up their organizations. So does the public. It’s Single Sentence Logic!

Lawyers are the same. They are selected for their confrontation and street wise scrapping abilities. Organization and cooperation are NOT things they understand. So, this surely leads to problems if so many Congressmen are lawyers. And most of society makes the most basic mistake of believing that laws are best made by lawyers. A3 theory finally explains why they do such a bad job at it. They are strong A2’s. But they don’t have the brain structures to do A3 thinking. Furthermore, since they make their living going to court and trying cases, they design the laws to optimize that process. It’s a clear case of conflict of interest. The laws are designed to promote a continuation of courtroom procedures. But, ironically, that also means promoting conflict. It comes at the EXPENSE of designing the laws so that disputes either don’t occur to begin with, or are simple to resolve if they do.

Now for PhD physicists. For sure, they are very “smart” people. But SMART is not equivalent to creative. First off, my observation is not actually singling out physicists. They just happen to belong to the current disaster we call ‘higher education’. In short, the universities have become social leaches. Professors are hired based on their ability to draw grant money. But grant money is awarded by committees of their PEERS. So, the best strategy to get a lot of money out of Congress is to have all the researchers focused on studies that will take as long as possible. And the real prize is to find issues that will scare society and allow Congress to use fear to drive up the research budget.

An example that might be jumping into your mind is the environmental crisis – books like Silent Spring, for example. But that’s not what I mean. Those ideas come from the fringes of research. They are new ground. They should be listened to. I’m talking about the endless mediocre incompetence that get’s blown up to seem like a crisis. This is where the government plays its role. And don’t get fooled by what seems like a RATIONAL response from the government. They are not going to make the hard decisions to broadly understand the problems and solve them. They are going to use public fear to justify big new university studies. Before long, those studies will become totally inane with minutia. But the funding will continue. Then, when a lot of smart people in society finally get fed up with one of these tangents and confront the ineptitude, the funding agencies will get some new crisis to erupt and then switch to that. But note, the original problems are never completely fixed. The breakthroughs are never made.

Let me provide a specific example: New Orleans. Most of the City of New Orleans is below sea level. New Orleans has been building levees since 1726. In fact, by 1858, there were over 1,000 miles of levees, some as high as a four story building! Then, in 1926, the Army Corps of Engineers, having constructed levees stretching from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, PUBLICLY DECLARED that the levee system along the Mississippi would prevent future floods. IRONICALLY, in 1927, the area was hit by what became known as the Great Mississippi flood of 1927. New Orleans just missed disaster. But over 300,000 people north of New Orleans were driven out by the flood.

The government came in, did some studies, put some patches in place and then headed off somewhere else. In 1947 the levees failed and the city flooded. More repairs were done. And in 1965, Hurricane Betsy breeched them again, flooding the city’s Lower 9th Ward. When is it going to stop? How much research do we need?

Eugenics – Genetic basis of A3 – Degradation of intelligence

There is another implication that occurred to me reading Huxley’s passage. My intuition immediately jumped to better education as the solution. But, if the A3 brain model is correct, brute force education alone can’t solve the problem. Some how, society has to acknowledge the A3 model, then identify humans with A3 ability, and then allow them greater roles in organization. And, more profoundly, if we want to achieve what Huxley called a self-conscious society, it can’t be done just by selecting different people as leaders. It would have to be done by changing the ratio of humans with A3 brains. Now we’re back to the old problem of EUGENICS.

This is NOT going to be an easy problem to solve. Here is another paragraph from Huxley which expands on this point:

“There is an inherent tendency for the hereditary constitution to degrade itself. In all organisms so far investigated, deleterious mutations far outnumber useful ones. That man shares this tendency we can be sure, not only from analogy but on the all-too-obvious evidence provided by the high incidence of defects in “civilized” populations, both mental and physical of genetic origin. In wild animals and plants, this tendency is either reversed or held in check by the operation of natural selection. But in civilized human communities of our present type, the elimination of defect by natural selection is largely rendered inoperative by medicine, charity, and social services, while there is no selection encouraging favorable variations. The net results is that many deleterious mutations do survive, with a tendency to degradation. Humanity will gradually destroy itself from within; it will decay in its very core and essence, if this slow but relentless process is not checked.”

As Nanook says in the book: WE’RE DOOMED! We can take this as a joke if we want, but it isn’t a joke. Carl Sagan expands on this in The Demon-Haunted World. . . page 428:

“When we consider the founders of our nation – Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others – we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders. They were well-educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politicians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them, fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United States into the far future – not so much by establishing laws as by setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed.

The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able, more often than not, to correct its own trajectory.

At that time, there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jeffersons today.

Where are they?”

The intellectual capability of our culture is already being penalized

Cognitive evolution is already wreaking havoc with biological evolution. Principles like “survival of the FITTEST” have been replaced by bleeding heart sentimentality. Humans who would have died from disease only 100 years ago are now being kept alive. I don’t think the new principles have been around long enough yet to impact the number of people with high A2 and A3 abilities. But I think our culture is already persecuting them. If you want to get a scholarship to college, these days, you’d better be good at sports. Intellectual ability has become a scam. It is talked about everywhere as the holy grail. But there is no reward for it. Keep your eyes on this issue. Here is a discussion of this from Sagan’s book. Page 433:”

“The twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed America’s most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man. Now it’s no good to have such rights if they’re not used – a right of free speech when no one contradicts the government, freedom of the press when no one is willing to ask the tough questions, a right of assembly when there are no protests, universal suffrage when less than half the electorate votes, separation of church and state when the wall of separation is not regularly repaired. Through disuse they can become no more than votive objects, patriotic lip-service. Rights and freedoms: Use ’em or lose ’em.

Due to the foresight of the framers of the Bill of Rights – and even more so to all those who, at considerable personal risk, insisted on exercising those rights – it’s hard now to bottle up free speech. School library committees, the immigration service, the police, the FBI – or the ambitious politician looking to score cheap votes – may attempt it from time to time, but sooner or later the cork pops. The Constitution is, after all, the law of the land, public officials are sworn to uphold it, and activists and the courts episodically hold their feet to the fire.

HOWEVER, THROUGH LOWERED EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS, DECLINING INTELLECTUAL COMPETENCE, DIMINISHED ZEST FOR SUBSTANTIVE DEBATE, AND SOCIAL SANCTIONS AGAINST SKEPTICISM, OUR LIBERTIES CAN BE SLOWLY ERODED AND OUR RIGHTS SUBVERTED. The Founders understood this well: ‘The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united,’ said Thomas Jefferson. ‘From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, ‘til our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.’ “

“So even if the number of humans in our country with A3 abilities is still the same, if we apply the same measurement to society, which can itself have a social IQ, then the score is dropping drastically.”

Being told the truth

“Here is another example with quite a different form. But it comes from the same limitation on A3. People often say they want to be told the TRUTH. Sounds simple enough. In fact, this is a key discussion in a lot of the self help books – how important it is for people to tell each other the truth. It’s also a standing proclamation of every school teacher on the planet. But what seems like such a simple process is actually a field of land mines. The truth we are talking about here is truth with a capital ‘ T ‘. It has to be accurate. It has to be comprehensive. That means it might have to be a complex answer that brings in a lot of variables. The problem is, people who don’t have an A3 structured brain are not able to deal with organizational complexity. So, they may listen. But all they can capture is bits of Single Sentence Logic. This means their Single Sentence Logic brain is listening for trigger words. If they hear one, which sets off a strong negative emotion, the discussion will change into a fight.

How often do you think this might occur in our society? This is a VERY VERY big problem.”