Originally Posted by
Tooting Carmen
Yes and no. China has a higher average IQ than anywhere in Europe, yet still it is one of the most repressive and authoritarian nations on Earth. For that matter, a lot of MENA, Central Asian and SE Asian countries are not that far off Europe (and needless to say that Russia is a tyranny aswell).
IQ is pseudo-science. :
...[p]sychology arose and developed in capitalist society, a class society. In all class societies, the dominant social, cultural and political views are those of the dominant class.” And more so, with the continuing expansion of the psy-professions, Parker (2007: 1–2) argues that psychology has become an increasingly powerful component of ideology, ruling ideas that endorse exploitation and sabotage struggles against oppression. This psychology circulates way beyond colleges and clinics, and different versions of psychology as ideology are now to be found nearly everywhere in capitalist society.
“Intelligence” Testing
In the previous chapter I discussed the development of an increasingly complex work environment throughout the twentieth century; at the same time, the psychological sciences expanded its areas of jurisdiction to facilitate skills diversification and “personal development,” increase the productivity and efficiency of the workforce, and enforce conformity to the dominant values of capital by pathologising and depoliticising worker resistance. The primary site for enforcing such structures of discipline on the future workforce, however, would come to be the school—this was where the psychological sciences would first make a significant claim to expertise beyond the psychiatric institution and the analyst’s couch. Rose (1999: 135) recounts that, as with the factory or the parade ground, school brought children together in a single space where they could be observed and judged en masse. Individual differences between children were made visible by the school system, and the institution, “sought to discipline [children] according to institutional criteria and objectives” (Rose 1999: 140). However, there were those who would not or could not adapt to the desired moral codes for behaviour and performance at school. These young people—who came to be labelled as “educational imbeciles or the feeble-minded” (Rose 1999: 140)—were a problem for the authorities.Inspired by the eugenicists’ obsession for marking and testing biological and mental differences within the general population (Chap. 7), psychologists developed the intelligence quotient (IQ) test to measure the academic performance of school children and separate the able from the less-abled students. This is the beginning of psychometric and associated testing which has since expanded across many areas of economic and social life. Commenting on the significance of the “intelligence” test, Rose (1999: 143) states that,The technique of the test was the most important contribution of the psychological sciences to the human technologies of the first half of the twentieth century. The test routinizes the complex ensemble of social judgement on individual variability into an automatic device that makes difference visible and notable.Thus, the intelligence test can be seen as a moral technology used specifically for the social judgement of school children by psychologists under the guise of “science” (see also Roberts 2015: 12–13). The inventor of the test, Alfred Binet, had developed it to identify the “feeble-minded” to be sent to special schools. Significant for contextualising later mass testings and screenings of school children for intelligence, abnormalities, and mental disorders, Rose (1999: 142, emphasis added) notes, “Binet’s test used criteria that were directly educational and behavioural. They were direct assessments of the degree of adaptation of individual children to the expectation that others had of them.” The key to the success of Binet’s test was not the ability to accurately measure “intelligence”—which he felt was impossible to predict through such time-restricted tests—but its administrative usefulness in identifying problematic individuals (Rose 1999: 142)
It is impossible for psychology to be scientific :
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism is recognised by scholars on both the right and the left as highly significant in explaining the formation and continuance of the fundamental economic and social inequalities witnessed within advanced industrial societies. His theory of historical materialism states that the source of human progress and historical change is not to be found in “legal relations” or “political forms,” but rather “in the material conditions of life” (cited in Howard and King 1985: 4). By this Marx means that the economic relations of human beings determine all other relations in that society. Material survival rather than the development of rationality and spiritual thinking forms the fundamental basis of human endeavour in each historical epoch (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 42)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sh...atric-hegemony
" every man is an intellectual, though not all have the social function of intellectuals under capitalism.
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