This is not mine. Jim Bowery, a commenter over at The Inductivist (a blog I occasionally indulge), tells the parable of the smart birds manipulated by the genius birds. I link to it because it is very good in that way parables are supposed to be good: by illuminating ancient and immutable dynamics in human social relations and hinting at the lessons therein.
Once there were 3 classes of birds of a feather: Dumb birds, Smart birds and Genius birds. There was also a genius bird of a different feather hanging around. All summer the genius bird of a different feather went around to the smart birds of a feather telling them how ridiculous it was to fly south for the winter — that these atavistic instincts were a terrible legacy from “the bad old days” and gave very sophisticated-sounding arguments that the smart birds of a feather couldn’t quite understand but understood quite well that they’d better pretend to understand lest they be accused of being dumb birds.
Fall cometh. The dumb birds fly south to the derision of the smart birds. The genius birds of a feather think, “I’ve heard the arguments about flying south for the winter being only for dumb birds, but where really do these feelings come from? Could they have survival value? Could the genius bird of a different feather have a conflict of interest?” Even before thinking the answers through, the mere doubts raised were sufficient to motivate flying south. The smart birds of a feather, hearing these doubts raised by the genius birds of a feather proceeded to attack them as “dumb birds”. They felt superior to the genius birds of a feather. Some genius birds of a feather were even injured enough to stop them from being able to fly south.
Winter hits. The smart birds of a feather die. The injured genius birds of a feather die. The genius birds of a different feather turn out to have an adaptation to cold weather. Spring comes. An evolutionary dynamic reveals itself…
The smart bird parable has much to tell us about intergroup competition. “Flying south” is a stand-in for the metaphor of your choice — drug use, single parenthood, mass immigration — and the group can be however you define it, by class, race or religion. It isn’t a precise explication of contemporary social patterns, but what it does well is get at the rudimentary compulsion which drives group antagonism, and the expedient alliances that serve group self-interest and buttress group self-identification.
Wake up white man.
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So can I keep my drug habit or no? I need clear, simple answers here.
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so,
dumb birds = proles,
smart birds = liberal elites
injured genius birds = conservatives
genius birds of a different feather = jews.
more or less?
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Hip hip hooray!
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Bill Gates: Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
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http://www.heretical.com/pubs/fabledh.html
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Intragroup competition?
A little contrived, and aimed pretty clearly at a certain comtemporary sort of anti-elitist sentiment, compared to spare and essential classics like Aesop’s sour grapes. The most effective parables get their power from simplicity and universality.
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This can totally be converted into a comfort stage routine in pickup.
Bonus for giving a hint to the right set of girls to not follow feminism.
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I’m guessing the genius bird of a different feather was a Jay.
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Would you say that most White European descended Gentile(WEDG) people are the smart birds? They don’t seem to defend temselves very well these days in whatever country they’re in at all. Most to one degree or another don’t know what a mess we’re in and that it’s going to get worse, much worse. I’m a WEDG, but I look around and see a lot of senseless critters among my own. Does anyone have any comments or questions to agree or disagree with me?
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Too much success for Christian notions of martyrdom combined with communist propaganda planted in Western societies in the 30s achieving their latent impact.
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Is this Aesop or something?
Cause actually it sounds like something a smart bird who thought he was a genius bird but was actually a dumbass bird would come up with.
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Kevin MacDonald: Now In Parable Form
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My brain overflowed at the part with the 3 groups of birds
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There are four groups of birds.
Dumb birds of a feather (db)
Smart birds of a feather (sb)
Genius birds of a feather (gb)
Genius birds of a different feather (gbodf)
Gbodf wipes out sb by convincing them to act against their own best interests. On their way out, sb takes some of the gb with them. db just keep following their instincts.
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Then how does that relate to “drug use, single parenthood, mass immigration”? I don’t see any geniuses from other races\countries trying to convince only the smart Americans to use drugs or become single parents…
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Single parents who can raise kids with no problem argue that two parents are unnecessary. They have a kid who grows up to be healthy and happy. Meanwhile a poor single mother tries to raise a kid with no father and does her best, but the kid still drops out of high school, joins a gang and is shot to death by age 19.
A genius-bird-different-feather argument might look like “marriage is a Patriarchal institution meant to suppress women.”
Immigration? If you’re wealthy and want to hire cheap maid service and landscaping, immigration is great. If you run a landscaping business, it’s maybe not so good for you.
A genius-bird-different-feather argument might look like “your ancestors were unwanted immigrants from (Ireland/Italy/Germany/etc.), and they didn’t destroy the country.”
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I read a comment by Greg Cochran once that went something like this:
“it seems as though people of average intelligence believe x, above average believe y and far above average believe x”.
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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/giot-nss061011.php
New study supports Darwin’s hypothesis on competition between species
A new study provides support for Darwin’s hypothesis that the struggle for existence is stronger between more closely related species than those distantly related. While ecologists generally accept the premise, this new study contains the strongest direct experimental evidence yet to support its validity.
“We found that species extinction occurred more frequently and more rapidly between species of microorganisms that were more closely related, providing strong support for Darwin’s theory, which we call the phylogenetic limiting similarity hypothesis,” said Lin Jiang, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech.
[…]
“We selected bacterivorous ciliated protist microorganisms for this study because they rapidly reproduce, allowing us to examine species co-existence over multiple generations in a closed system during a period of a few weeks, which wouldn’t be possible if we were testing the hypothesis with plants or animals,” said Jiang.
The researchers set up 165 microcosms that contained either an individual protist species or a pairing of two species, along with three types of bacteria for the organisms to eat. They collected weekly samples from each microcosm and examined them under a microscope, recording the presence or absence of species. After 10 weeks, the researchers estimated the density of the protist species in each microcosm.
The study results showed that all species survived until the end of the experiment when alone in a microcosm. However, in more than half of the experiments in which protists were paired together, one of the two species dominated, leading to the extinction of the other species.
The researchers found that the frequency and speed of this extinction process — called competitive exclusion — was significantly greater between species that were more closely related. In addition, in microcosms where both competitors coexisted for the duration of the experiment, the abundance of the inferior competitor was reduced more as the phylogenetic relatedness between the two competitors increased.
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Aesop’s fables.
Everyone shoudl read them. Example: the story of the bitch and the kennel, which is a perfect fable and cautionary tale of population-replacement.
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The “birds” fable is a nice illustration of what Auster calls the Unprincipled Exception. Leftism screens gullible lefties against the self-preserving ones. Thus, when the message is “be racially open” (sexually, in terms of personal safety, what will you), the dim lefties, maybe proles with uppity ambitions, or uncritical true-believers, take this message at face-value. And perish, or slide down in social standing as a single mother with a mischling. Or forgot to have children until “OOOPS! I’m 45 and barren.” They embraced leftism without applying the self-preserving Unprincipled Exception.
Smart lefties preach, but don’t practice. We call them SWPLs.
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Hilariously, immediately after reading this post, I stumble upon:
http://news.yahoo.com/low-iq-conservative-beliefs-linked-prejudice-180403506.html
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Bit of a complicated explanation isn’t it?
It’s really much simpler if you remember one principle: nature abhors a vacuum. Where an ecological niche exists, a species will evolve to fill that niche.
Humans are unique in that we have evolved to fill more niches than any species before us. Usually we fill small or temporary niches through cultural adaptation. Where a niche exists for a long period of time, we begin to change genetically in order to exploit it even more effectively.
So there are currently two main male niches in society: use your social skills to get laid a lot, and eventually have a kid either through love or accident. Or, use your intelligence to become wealthy, and let women use your resources in exchange for access to their reproductive facilities (provided they don’t cuckold you).
Game introduces a third option: use you intelligence to become socially skilled, then use that knowledge to get laid. What does this do to the balance of genetic strategies? It’s very hard to say, and really it’s more a subject for computational modeling. It changes the balance, but over large timescales we really have no idea precisely how.
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Interesting illustration of group dynamics using birds. Maybe its an all to obvious comparison, but the first group that came to mind for the genius birds of a different feather are the elites in the fields of higher education.
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Good post. Keep the political commentary coming.
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Yeah, this makes a lot of sense, if I apply it to the guys at my office
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James Bowery has written extensively on Jews.
so to decode this parable:
genius = Jews (average IQ 110)
smart = whites (average IQ 100)
dumb = minorities (average IQ 90)
flying south represents the social disorder caused by Jews in a society. In general, Jews advocate undermining the traditions of white Christians.
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Wrong.
There are — count them again — four types of bird: genius, smart and dumb of one feather, genius birds “of a different feather”.
Humans of European ancestry, excluding Jews and so on, number about a billion people (rapidly diminishing). Jews are about 13.5 million.
Jews have an average higher IQ, 113-114 are the usual figures. There is a greater spread among Europeans, the mean is around 100, but there is a comparable number of higher IQ Europeans, mostly of Northwest ancestry.
James Bowery is not saying Jews are all of the genius birds, of both feathers, but that the one is misleading the other, and only the genius Gentile birds elect to follow the dumb.
The dumb birds do not symbolize minorities for one reason: kaffirs are too dumb to do anything right themselves, while Hispanics would, certainly, retreat to their nations in the event of “Winter”.
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Being smart and having a brain is a curse if it is your brain controlling you and not you controlling your brain. Especially if there is a strong pride in looking to be smart and classy. Being in control of your smart logical (actually hamster) brain and knowing when to follow it and when to discard it is called wisdom.
Like most scientist nerds just can’t help to fallow the inclinations of their mind and develop weapons and technology for the dumber (or in the rare case more wiser) wealthy buisnessman or politican to use and turn against little people like scientists themselves.
Or like most whites in USA can’t help but to sabotage their race to look more classy and in tune with modern “diversity” school of thought.
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Parable breaks down because the “genius birds” are actually really fucking stupid. Have you read a krugman column? Good talk on this at jim’s blog:
http://blog.jim.com/culture/not-the-cognitive-elite.html
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High-Five to Jim!
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Sounds like Kevin MacDonald.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_B._MacDonald
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Uhmmm…OK.
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Truth it is, but i dont think it is a reversibile, for the USA, even the West, maybe The world.
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The parable of the smart birds is Edmund Burke’s thesis: no matter how much you think you’ve got it figured out, smart guy, be humble before institutional wisdom and the ways of tradition because they developed over millennia of trial and error.
Or G.K. Chesterton referring to the “democracy of the dead.” Orthodoxy and conservatism seem dumb on the surface to the analyst. New generations inevitably ask, “Why should we do things the old way? I don’t get it.” Well, the deep sources of wisdom that sustain certain customs cannot be grasped easily, but the their integrity is proved by their longevity. At any rate, if we are going to reevaluate old ways with each generation, if some customs are to be discontinued, at very least we should not be discard them lightly. (Hello, Marx! We’re looking at you.) Give the dead a vote:
The dumb birds go south because they have experienced enough winters to know it gets cold. The dead went through countless more winters than we have, and they established traditions for reasons only accessible by respecting their wisdom.
The smart birds (like “progressive” academicians, who are monolithically leftist) are just smart enough to reject that wisdom, like snotty kids who look down on their dads. They believe they must be smarter simply because they came after the last generation, and they imagine themselves building upon their knowledge base even though they explicitly reject that hard-won knowledge as retrograde. Whatever you want to call that, it’s not “smart.” Which is why, for all the academic credentials of leftwingers, for all their sneering and dedications to the accoutrements of intellectuals, I have never in my life, ever, met a truly smart man of the left. They became arrogant early, decided all issues settled, and stopped learning in their intellectual adolescence.
So, convinced as you are that nothing can be true if it doesn’t sound sciencey, use the trendy language of biology if you must — “evolutionary dynamic,” “adaptation,” “survival value,” etc. But we’ve been on to this stuff for awhile. Just give over to conservatism and you’ll be all right. Trust me. What good is trial and error on a grand scale when the youthful delusions of independence require him to start over every generation?
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Bad news.
You are one of the smart birds, and your conservatism is a puppet show staged by the genius birds of a different feather. You have completely misinterpreted Bowery’s parable. Perhaps if you spent less time checking stock reports and pretending to be a “Christian”, you would know Bowery from elsewhere, and thus know exactly who he means. It won’t surprise you, given your history of simply ignoring hard facts by giving yourself biblical airs, to discover that Bowery doesn’t agree that those genius birds are “just a people” unworthy of comment.
You are one of the smart birds precisely because you are as arrogant as you have proven yourself by your own words. You said it yourself: Behind the scenes finance of the political machine, and the international conflicts it engenders, is all unworthy of your time. You will be sitting pretty no matter what, come “Winter”.
Again: You are one of the smart birds because your understanding is idiosyncratic, and what is more, you believe the genius birds of a different feather are “just a people”, without discrete interests.
You refuse to accept this because you misunderstand yourself as bearing their feather.
I would turn that admonition to give in back at you, but you already have given in, for conservatism is inherently weak and prone to compromise. What do you call a conservative party that talks “amnesty” for those who are not us, and wages war for those who are not us against nations which have not attacked us? But you ignore all of this because you imagine yourself to be so lordly that world affairs and the fate of our race and nation are irrelevant; you will always come out on top, which is but the creed of cutthroats and other traitors.
That is your “conservatism”. Some Greek and Hebrew phraseology, some deft political psychobiography, a lot of cling-clang gongorism, head-in-the-sand hot air, and absolutely without honor to anyone but yourself and your supercilious clique.
Your “conservatism” in fact, politically, leads straight back to FDR and his kosher kabinet, the first “neoconservatives”. What did they conserve? Make that case for us. Stop pretending to be a preacher and let’s wrestle in the facts. Can you do that? can’t your “eternal verities” stand up to some facts? Sounds like a leftish fear to me. Can’t have facts troubling you; oh no. And you use “the ancients” to shield your own vanity and hypocrisy!
Beyond your miserly little self-fiefdom creeks the great bloody machine of the world. You pretend to be on top. In reality, you avert your eyes and pretend it isn’t there. You go “nya nya nya” and call it high-mindedness. I call it being a brat.
As you like long wordy quotes though, choke on this, you conservative who can’t bring himself to admit the grand ceaseless hemorrhage of foreign aid, i.e. billions of dollars, to Israel, just to start; — and this is from a Christian who knew more Hebrew than you:
“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism.
This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom.
It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.
No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.”
– R.L. Dabney
There you have it — the great gusty King A, exhorting ch to join the soulless capitalists who invite the world to replace us in our own land! the soulless capitalists who provide a sturdy scratching-post for leftist claws! Good, you’ve read your Mises and your Rothbard. You speak the language of the spirit. Now, whither hath flown thy soul?
The really galling aspect of this is that you are no Christian at all. You are the same species of worldly, haughty dollar-fiend as the Man abhorred, and you affect to preach and pose above others as though you are one of his party.
You ever washed another man’s feet? ever fed people with a loaf? Dirty people, mind. Not freshly scrubbed Republicans at a dinner party. You ever had pig-iron nails through your hands? when’s the last time you whipped usurers? you have investments, haven’t you? when is the last time, when was ONE time, you did anything Christ-like?
You have preached “will to power”. You show less respect for Ron Paul, a man who sincerely desires to end usury and needless unprovoked foreign aggression, than that yid Redleg, and nearly ejaculated on yourself over the Gingrich upset, which I predicted, by the way, would not be repeated in Florida, and look who’s enjoying a very cool 13-point lead in the early polls. Who the fuck are you to preach to anyone?
You represent just one party, and that is the Mammonites. You dance around the golden calf and call it “conservatism” like every other shitskin-touting sackless Republican whipping boy. Truth is you’re a fucking judaizer. You admitted it elsewhere. And it’s about time you shut the fuck up and shove off from our company, for you are an obnoxious, honorless cunt of a man.
As a biologist might say: The adaptation of the conservative ideology to accommodate “progressive” demands, and the survival value conferred to those with monetary interests thereby, reflects the evolutionary dynamic of a subspecies in resource overreach being pushed out of power by the virulent subspecies crowding their habitat to the point of collapse, encouraged by permitting parasitism at nearly every level within the corporate franchise of advanced capitalist society.
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Es ist zeit fur reich?
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It could also be a parable for marriage.
The dumb birds get married, while the smart birds who listen to the genius birds of a different feather say, “Fuck marriage! It’s a scam!” and end up being weeded out of the gene pool because they don’t get married and pass on their genes.
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This is awesome.
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Maybe it was all the marijuana I’ve been smoking but I couldn’t work out which fucking bird of what feather or genius was saying what to who about flying and halfway through I gave up. Whats the cliffs notes?
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Well, this is why when I write for the masses, I keep certain things in mind. Advising them to live as if they have choices that they don’t and options that they don’t just because I have those choices and options, is convincing them to kill themselves.
The genius bird of a different feather could be an evil genius who wanted to cull the smart or let’s say middle class of birds, or he could just have been too socially inept and self centered to realize that he was so different.
Either way, the result is a bunch of dead birds.
It is interesting how Nature works despite our intentions.
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Liberals put up billboard calling all white people racist
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Sounds like an analogy to the Jewish Question(TM).
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Great story. The takeaway here is that the goal of being more alpha means to falling victim to your own self-doubt or the often selfish and self-serving agendas of others who seek to pull you down because they lack the courage to break free themselves.
I had a recent situation where a girl I know and who I always game and seems to respond…had apparently told the girl I’m going out with not to spend time with me. She also sought to try to actively exclude me from some social-circle event while inviting the girl I’m seeing.
The truth here is misery loves company. The “smart birds” here try to pull down the genius birds by attacking them.
The genius birds who succumb to these attacks lose.
What’s missing in all this, is the fact that the “dumb birds” are actually smart whereas the “smart birds” in this parable are the dumb ones.
One thing I find is that when you demonstrate a kind of magnanimity rather than being something that is welcomed by passive aggressive cunts, it actually turns them against you. But if you turn bitter and play their game you get sucked into a drama of your own creation.
In social circles when you get attacked, look for the true message.
Why were the smart birds trying to sow doubt? Were they genuinely questioning the wisdom of flying south…or were they too lazy to fly and wanted to find others who could validate this lack of resourcefullness and effort?
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dumb birds: non-federal income tax paying, net-loss-to-the-economy underclass.
smart birds: guilty white liberals and other assorted Democrat voters
genius birds: conservatives, libertarians
injured genius birds: traditionalist, conservative-leaning individuals who vote Democrat bc they succumb to the belief that if they don’t, they must be racist or stupid but don’t really understand why.
genius bird of a different feather: professional liberal politicians, academics, and the occassional big-govt Republican.
winter: societal collapse when the United States no longer has sufficient strength in its currency nor sufficient credit to borrow money from the rest of the world to support the entitlement state (read: the vote-buying state)
death: the extinction of the entitlement state voter as a political animal
spring: anything from the fracturing of the country into two or more separate nations (shall the south rise again?); to civil war; to a brief period of utter lawlessness, to be replaced by a period of martial law while a new totalitarian “republic” is cobbled together under a Putin-esque savior.
Obama 2012!
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They don’t seem to defend temselves very well these days in whatever country they’re in at all.
Their advanced creature comforts depend on the same infrastructure as brings and has brought other races into the Anglo-American post-Christian universalist franchise.
To be rid of other races, we would have to revert technologically.
Find a people in all of human history who have done that in toto.
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The point is that a valid but adversarial point can disguise its adversarial nature with “sophisticated-sounding” arguments.
It’s probably not a good idea to draw analogies between broad categories of people like “Jews” or “liberals.” The analogy loses its potency because you’re obviously starting out with prejudices. It’s better to start by replacing “flying south” with a specific issue and then identifying the various arguments and groups.
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The birds flying down south is a metaphor for doing what is evolutionary/culturally the norm. It is going against the norm what the genius birds of a different feather propagate.
Ex. Staying with your own racial group is common sense from an evolutionary and cultural point of view. It is the birds of a different feather who play mind games to make you think otherwise.
Bowery’s comment on his site.
“Actually, since it is the dumb birds and the genius birds of a feather who fly south, flying south is analogous to not doing drugs (under the model that highest and lowest IQ don’t do drugs — which doesn’t really hold that well with the actual data but I’m not going to hold a general principle hostage to that discussion).”
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“The point is that a valid but adversarial point can disguise its adversarial nature with “sophisticated-sounding” arguments.
It’s probably not a good idea to draw analogies between broad categories of people like “Jews” or “liberals.” The analogy loses its potency because you’re obviously starting out with prejudices. It’s better to start by replacing “flying south” with a specific issue and then identifying the various arguments and groups.”
I’ve read (and argued) with Bowery on Inductivist. He means what the commenters say he means.
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IE, he is talking about Jews.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Now let’s see if the kiddies can take the next step in connecting the dots and realize that “prejudice” doesn’t arise in a vacuum.
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[…] little while ago, Heartiste shared a parable (devised by Jim Bowery, linkage at the Heartiste link) with his […]
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