America’s success has not been due primarily to its citizens being smarter than the global average. The main reason is the country’s high level of social trust — a result of equally high levels of empathy, guilt proneness, and rule following.
If humans vary in their capacity for intelligence, why can’t they also vary in their capacity for empathy, guilt proneness, or willingness to follow rules? These mental traits are likewise heritable, and they likewise vary in adaptive value, being more valuable in some cultures than in others (Frost, 2020).
Perhaps you believe that the above traits form a single package. Perhaps you believe that intelligent people are normally good. Yes, cunning psychopaths do exist, but they’re the exception … aren’t they?
That belief is true, up to a point. As human groups increased in size and complexity, they underwent selection not only for intelligence but also for traits that help people trust each other, get along with each other, and interact peacefully.
However, some human groups have gone farther in that direction than others. Some have created truly large and complex societies, to the point that the sphere of social trust mostly encompasses people who are neither friends nor close kin.
Large high-trust societies have arisen only in Europe, especially northwestern Europe, and in East Asia. In both regions, we see similar trajectories of mental evolution: higher capacity for intelligence, less willingness to use violence to settle personal disputes, and greater willingness to follow and enforce rules. But there are differences. East Asians have created “shame cultures” — wrong behavior is discouraged largely by the feelings of shame you experience when other people know you have broken a rule. In contrast, Europeans have created “guilt cultures” — wrong behavior is discouraged largely by the feelings of guilt you experience after breaking a rule, even when you are the sole witness.
…Of course, high intelligence has not evolved solely in the large high-trust societies of Europe and East Asia. It has evolved elsewhere, typically in small groups that trade with a much larger one while feeling no special responsibility for its wellbeing. Such groups have to adapt to the cognitive demands of trade — literacy, numeracy, planning, budgeting — but this adaptation doesn’t require turning the entire space of social interaction into a high-trust space. Trust has to be maintained only in smaller spaces, particularly the buyer-seller relationship. Although traders may perform acts of philanthropy for their host society, such acts are done to create a friendly climate and are not involuntary acts of guilt or empathy.
In sum, high intelligence does not act alone in creating a high-trust society. It acts in combination with other factors that channel it in the right direction, specifically by constraining behavior through high levels of empathy, guilt, and rule following. Without those constraints, high intelligence may do more harm than good.
…Americans love to play fair. To them, it seems only “fair” that immigration should be based on a single metric that applies equally to everyone — in this case, a college degree. Meanwhile, it also seems “fair” that everyone should get a college degree, with the eventual result that a college degree no longer means much. In this, and in many other ways, “fairness” is piling up one social contradiction on top of another. At some point, Americans will have to accept the limitations of fairness and the reality of human differences.
At present, the best solution would be to let in as few immigrants as possible. Any admission criterion, no matter how “fair” — criminal record, university transcript, letters of reference — will prove to be worthless, either because it can be faked or because it simply fails to measure the innate characteristics that prospective immigrants will pass on to their descendants.
American Buddhist Net 