The Sage Forge: The "N.Q."

Lee Emmerich Jamison

When a group is outside of society's philosophical "comfort zone" they need to be very cautious about seeming to have a high N.Q. What is that?, you may ask.

It's the "Nut Quotient".

Conservatives are outside of the dominant media culture of today's world. That does not mean they are wrong. What it does mean is that they sound strange to the central nervous system of the society, so when they speak their minds they risk being shut out of communication with the world they need to convince if their ideas, observations, and convictions are to have an effect on the world.

A friend has recently stated the conviction that within ten years professions of Christian faith will be considered grounds for declarations of mental illness. In today's world that sounds like a statement with a high N.Q. Most people are not students of history and do not realize that less than three quarters of a century ago a people who, by accomplishment, ranked as the most civilized folk on Earth had decided that people whose only crime was to have been born to Jewish parents suddenly went from being leaders in society to being a form of human vermin. Former bankers or college professors became suitable donors of highly prized, supple leather.

It had been the conviction of the knowledgeable in German society that such things were unimagineable there, too. Merely pointing this fact out has an above moderate N.Q. where stating that mankind has "evolved" beyond such atrocities has, ridiculously, a fairly low one.

In any society the highly placed have to move a great volume of people who, by definition, are not brilliant. Germany's National Socialists were, and if you look around hard enough still are, honest enough to say out loud that the "Great Men", that is to say the most intelligent, should move the masses around at their whim. They "know" better than we how we will serve society best.

Today's elites believe the same things. They think it crucial that the "best and the brightest" (today's Great [wo]Man) be the one who makes our choices for us. They use the same essential toolkit- the manipulation of the people through prejudice, social pressure, and herd mentality rather than true education. While this is particularly true of dominant media culture today it a dangerous temptation for both ends of the political spectrum.

The whole preceding paragraph has a high perceived N.Q. in today's media environment. That is a fact of life for conservatives today. That is why we must never answer prejudice with prejudice. Prejudice on our part is the road to the thing my friend fears.

The dynamics of religious prejudice in the whole of a society are too involved to explain in a morning, but leaders who use prejudice to move the masses are skilled at delineating the acceptable boundaries beyond which subtle differences, smoking, sanctity of embryonic life, literal acceptance of the virgin birth, doubt about global warming, or Jewish parentage can turn neighbors into vermin in the eyes of a larger body politic. It is not hard to find such delineations corresponding nicely with certain inconvenient forms of political intransigence. How convenient.

If Christians are considered mentally ill in ten years you can bet that such will, at first, be the case only for very narrow groups of seemingly incoherent beliefs. Most of us won't be affected. You can relax. Now, there is a statement with a low N.Q.

That ought to scare the hell out of you.