By Tim Haydon.
It’s always good to hear someone admitting defects in themselves which others have long been aware of. So when John Humphrys admits that the BBC has always been politically biased towards liberalism, we ought to feel that the wind is changing at last, shouldn’t we?
The trouble is that Humphrys is by no means the first senior BBC figure to come out with the truth about the organisation. For example, Peter Sissons, who presented the BBC Nine O’Clock News and BBC News at Ten between 1993 and 2003, has said: “The real difficulty is that the overwhelming view of the BBC’s news executives is broadly sympathetic towards the Labour Party and is inclined to always give Labour the benefit of the doubt. Stephen Whittle, a former controller of the BBC’s editorial policy, actually said that its journalists ‘work within a straitjacket of unchallenged liberal assumptions.’ A Director General, Mark Thompson, admitting only past bias, said that when he joined the BBC in 1979 ’there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people’s personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the Left’. And so on.
The BBC: Cultural Marxist Propaganda Mouthpiece
This colossal incubus on the nation has been a propaganda mouthpiece for the Cultural Marxist destruction of Britain and the dispossession of its people for decades now. As the columnist Peter Oborne wrote in 2011; “Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it [the BBC] has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite”
Despite these criticisms, little has changed in the bias of the output of the BBC. With a few exceptions, the soaps and drama storylines continue to be written from an almost exclusively Cultural Marxist perspective to the point that East Enders, Holby City and now Musketeers, for example, are little better than vehicles for pushing politically correct attitudes. The journalists are as captive in their liberal straightjackets as they ever were. There is though hope in the fact that the BBC budget is being 20% cut over a 5-year period with the loss of 2000 jobs and that moves are afoot to make non-payment of the TV licence a civil rather than a criminal offence.
John Humphrys: Right Wing People are Stupid
According to Humphrys, BBC people are liberal because they are ‘the brightest and the best’. He might as well have said that right wing people are stupid. Certainly, Humphrys’ assessment is unlikely to be disputed by the BBC staff themselves, who give every indication of fully agreeing with the view that they are not just intellectually but morally superior to the rest of us and are in a position to teach us what’s good for us. Their intellectual superiority does not run to self awareness of their own bias, or even the mere possibility that they might be wrong, apparently.
Satoshi Kanazawa and the Savanna Principle
Some might think that Humphrys’ remarks are a sample of straightjacketed liberal bias, if ever there was one, and indeed, it would be hard to dispute this assessment as wholly incorrect. However, according to the London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kakanazawa – ‘The Intelligence Paradox’ (2012), there is some truth in the proposition that liberals are on average more intelligent than right wing people. ‘Even when statistically controlled for such relevant factors as age, race, education, income and religion, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to become more liberal’….[the ]association between adult ideology and adolescence IQ is monotonic; as one increases, the other steady increases as well’.
He continues. ’Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media (and other institutions). Liberals do control the media…because, apart from a few areas in life such as business (or hard technology, engineering etc) liberals control most institutions. (p78)
Kanazawa’s theory is based on the fact that that the first human beings developed on the savanna. His savannah principle is : The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment’. We are ‘stuck with a stone age brain that assumes we are still hunter gatherers in the African savanna and responds to the environment as if it were the African savanna’.
For all evolutionary familiar problems, there are dedicated domain–specific psychological adaptions. Everyone is evolutionarily designed to have the ability to solve such problems as mating, parenting, social exchange and personal relationships.
General intelligence evolved as a domain specific psychological mechanism to solve evolutionary novel entities and problems, those that did not exist in the savanna. (This explains the high average IQs of the East Asians and Europeans who had to deal with greatly divergent, harsh, ice age conditions in their northern latitudes.) But less intelligent people have more difficulty dealing with these entities and situations. These include running media organisations such as the BBC
‘If Liberals are more Intelligent than Conservatives, why are Liberals so Stupid?’
Despite the fact that liberals are (to repeat) on average more intelligent than right wing people, why is it that they do not seem to display this superiority in daily life? It is evident (except to the less self – aware among them, no doubt) that they are much more likely than more right wing people to say or do stupid things. Why is this?
‘Clever Sillies’ and Common Sense
According to Bruce Charlton, professor of Theroretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham (Editorial of Medical Hypothesis, Dec 2009), Liberals and other intelligent people are ‘clever sillies’ who wrongly apply abstract logical reasoning to social and interpersonal domains.
Charlton suggests that all of human behaviour except for general intelligence – the savanna – evolved mechanisms – represent what we call ‘common sense’. Although everyone has common sense, intelligent people have tendency to overapply their analytical and logical reasoning ability, (derived for their generous resources of general intelligence) incorrectly to evolutionarily familiar domains and as a result they are liable to get things wrong.
Liberals are ‘Clever Sillies’
In other words, liberals and other intelligent people lack common sense. This is not because it is not available to them – everyone has savannah ability – but because their general intelligence overrides it. They think in situations where they are supposed to feel. In evolutionarily familiar domains such as interpersonal relationships, feeling usually leads to correct solutions whereas thinking does not.
It’s easy to see how over intellectualising in relation to savanna situations applies to many aspects of life in Britain today. Indeed, much of Cultural Marxism and other such intellectual houses of cards based on false premises about human nature consist of it. And if we think that our rulers as represented by the BBC are ‘out of touch’, patronising and wrong on many important issues such as personal relationships (including marriage), the treatment of crime, education, immigration and so forth -more or less the whole social agenda of the Guardian, it is because they are exactly that.
They are indeed ‘clever sillies’. ‘Brightest ‘ does not always mean ‘best’
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(Party Member) Some years ago staff at Conservative Central Office dubbed the ghastly B.B.C. the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation. Once I had finished laughing and thinking how true this was I angrily thought about the even worse treatment we Nationalists receive. At least the Conservatives get a right of reply ! I hope our Party appoints Spokesmen and women on all the main subjects and keeps trying to get our brand of decent, classless Nationalism heard.
I feel that Tim Haydon could have mentioned a view names to counter John Humphreys’ charge that “Right Wing People are Stupid”. Just for a start, how about Enoch Powell, Professor Alan Sked – the original founder of UKIP, and even our Andrew Brons.
If you will permit a touch of egotism on my part, my wife says I am a “clever silly”, mainly because my attempts at DIY are grade 3 – that’s one up from ‘useless’. Yet back in the eighties I took a supervised Mensa Test and was judged to have an IQ of 141. Well, it was probably a good day for me, and is probably about 101 now. I have, of course, always been Radical Right and not a recent Liberal convert!
I have long thought that the more brilliant minds were on the academic ‘right’ as the ‘left’ are just PC ‘sheeple’ – they do not have the guts to do anything that might attract criticism whereas we on the right are constantly having to defend our ‘common sense’ policies so our quills are constantly sharpened. John Bean being a right-wing nationalist is obviously not a ‘Clever Silly’ and given his IQ is not ‘Right Wing Stupid’ so he must be ‘Clever Clever’ – my sentiments entirely!
Yes, of course there are many intelligent right wing people. Tellingly they are to be found in the hard sciences rather than the humanities, although a grand daddy in the humanities, Plato, was very right wing by any standards.
Scientific right wingers include the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and the Nobel Prize – winning co discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson.
Perhaps the reason that so many graduates seem to lean toward what has been called “liberalism” is because they have been educated by people who have a political bias. It would appear to me that these educators, for at least the last half-century, have been teaching a very one sided political view about everything. The Marxist “long march through the institutions” included all academic institutions, but especially Universities, where it seems that most if not all professors are extremely left wing politically (if not openly Marxist).
There is a very “politically correct” view taught in all schools today, from infancy right through to adulthood. It is therefore not surprising that almost every graduate who leaves university has what can be termed a liberal bias. It is a gross mistake of logic to assume that liberalism is a facet of the most intelligent though. Just as it is a mistake of logic to assume that all graduates are more intelligent than non-graduates.
John Humphrys makes the mistake of thinking that he and his colleagues are liberal in their views when in fact they are anything but. They (the BBC) are deeply prejudiced against anything that does not concur with their views. This is not a liberal open-mindedness, this is actually close-minded arrogance. He says that the BBC employs the brightest and best from all the universities. The truth is that he and his supposedly clever colleagues are simply unwilling and unable to allow any view other than their own. They commit the daily crime of extreme political and social bias while purporting to have a policy of impartiality. Do these people actually call themselves the most intelligent people in Britain?
John. I dislike this “right wing” label it belongs to the Tories and there UKIP clones. We have far more in common with Patriotic Socialist than rabid Capitalist. As a Nationalist I see us as Left of Center. There is a void left by the old Labour Party and I for one would like to see us attempt to fill it.
Certainly it does in respect of economic policies. Both the Tories and UKIP (particularly) have ‘Right-wing’ policies in respect in their advocacy of what is called economic neo-liberalism ie mass privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, excessive globalization/financialization of our economy ect. UKIP embrace all of this to an even higher degree than the Tories do and this is one of that party’s greatest flaws which probably explains why they have so far failed to breakthrough with respect to Labour voters.
Graham, I too dislike the “right wing” label. The liberal-left and the neo-conservatives control the media and in consequence the public have been brainwashed into believing that nationalists must sit on the right of the political spectrum. For this reason I have for years described our thinking as ‘radical right’. I fully agree that we have far more in common with patriotic socialism and in consequence the British Democrats should aim to fill the void left by the old Labour Party.
I think that part of the problem is that the old ‘Left/Right’ labels are pretty simplistic and need to take into account BOTH economic and social stances. Also,of course, what is perceived to be ‘Rightwing’ or ‘Leftwing’ can change with the passage of time.
For instance, anyone advocating the return of capital punishment would today be regarded as either ‘Right-wing’ or even ‘Far Right’ but the post-war Labour government didn’t abolish hanging and carried-out many death sentences so what did that make them?
Jean Marie Le Pen was fond of describing the Front National’s political position as being, “economically to the Left, socially to the Right and nationally for France”
As for myself, I would place myself slightly to the ‘Left’ or the ‘Left of centre’ as regards economics as I don’t regard economic neo-liberalism in Britain to be a huge success. I would advocate an economy modeled more along the lines of either Germany’s ‘social market’ economy or the paternalistic economic development of post WW2 Japan.
‘Other Ranks’ in the armed forces often referred to their officers as ‘educated idiots ‘.
I think that Kanazawa has nailed it.
” …but the post-war Labour government didn’t abolish hanging and carried-out many death sentences so what did that make them?”
It was not for the want of trying. In 1948 the Commons passed a bill attempting to abolish the death penalty but it was overturned by the Lords. There was a temporary suspension of death sentences for a few months. The Labour government then instituted a Royal Commission but it didn’t report until 1953, when the Tories were back in. They did not have the numbers to finally abolish it until the mid-60’s.