The consensus answer for why you can’t use the r-word in polite society is that it is taboo to make fun of another’s immutable features. It is unfair, or at least impolite, to make fun of a short person for being short since there is nothing reasonable they can do to change it, a general sentiment that we should only deploy shame where it can affect change. We should not use it merely to hurt one’s feelings or make ourselves feel better.
However, it is also taboo to make fun of someone for being overweight (something you can reasonably change) because you are making fun of something physical. Insulting someone’s physical appearance codes as low status, owing to a culture that believes in mind-body dualism and values intellect over physicality. In our current post-industrial, dysmorphic, disembodied moment, you have to have extremely rare physical gifts to make money off your athleticism.
For example, eligible NCAA football players have a 0.016% chance of getting drafted into the NFL (of which ~30% will ever step foot on the turf). But, you only need slight intellectual gifts to sort yourself into the upper middle class relatively handily. Furthermore, our economies will engineer 100 new Ozempics to lean you out before we figure out how to make your brain limitless, so there is an inherent asymmetry to be exploited by those who are smart and fat, while jacked guys who are unintelligent are at a loss. We already have an entire population swallowing Adderall and Modafinil as part of their daily stack and I’m pleased to report that everyone seems to be getting smarter and everything is running as efficiently as ever.
Having noticed that places like Los Angeles and Miami are filled with 1099’s juiced to the gills and sleeping on their cousin’s floor while guys who look like Harvey Weinstein can drink from the penthouse spigot of MoneyCashHoes, I’m starting to think that sympathy for those who look unfortunate isn’t really what’s driving the taboo on the r-word. No one slept with Harvey Weinstein because they felt bad for him and, now that he has been (possibly incorrectly) imprisoned with 0 access to women for many years, still no one feels bad for him.
I propose that the real reason you can’t say the r-word stems from:
a taboo on making fun of physical appearance;
a taboo on making fun of something immutable;
the hidden belief that intelligence is virtuous in and of itself.
The catch is that the immutable characteristics that are most offensive to make fun of do not concern how people with Down Syndrome look but what the look signifies. This is why it is considered to be in worse taste to make fun of an amputee or someone born with a purely physical malady like a clubbed foot or vitiligo but less taboo. In fact, no one really believes that it is taboo to insult anyone’s intelligence but their own; they merely require that you pick the right words to call someone stupid instead of the wrong ones.
Intelligence as virtue
Ideology is bullshit. Politics is about doing what you can get away with and making a cover for it as you go. Everyone is selling on, “Correct Governance has never been implemented.” Every competing camp’s slogan boils down to, “What if we had all the money and power instead of the current guys? We’re smart so things will go well.” More recent examples include Rationalism and Effective Altruism. True technocracy has never been tried. Doesn’t the current government act as if it is effective (especially) when it is not? Don’t all of them do this? Is it even an option not to?
If you think that the people who believe Logic + FTX are stupid, then you would be wrong. They are not stupid. In fact, they are among the smartest in the world. You can tell this because of their ideology—rather than despite it.
If I were to run on a platform of unlimited state-funded bacchanals for people named Ancient Problemz, you could reasonably suspect a certain aesthetic preference for alcohol x orgasms, which might be prioritized over keeping lead out of the water supply or enforcing the monopoly on violence. Whether you think this or any other resource redistribution is legitimate, you can reasonably suspect that this prioritization benefits yours truly if only because I like when other Problemz are able to get their dick sucked.
Similarly, if you are reading a white paper, post, or thread saying that we should give all the money and decision-making power to a certain group, it is reasonable to interrogate whether that group is intimately involved with or sitting at the head of the table.
Enter Team Intellect
Team Intellect has a brilliant confluence of factors that make a compelling case for giving them more say over what we do in the world, how we fund it, and who benefits.
The first thing going for it is that its advocates are indeed smart and they sound smart. Smart people tend to make better decisions and, even when they do not, they are more articulate at defending them. In addition to being better able to process and synthesize information, they do so faster. Because they are quick to process but also possess low time preference, they have many more options and modes of managing resources, which are unavailable to people with lower IQs, often euphemistically but accurately called, “slower.”
The second thing Team Intellect has going for it is it appeals to other people who think they are similarly intelligent, meaning its constituents and evangelicals are able to persuade two groups: those who are authentically smart; and many whose status demands others validate their intelligence. Undoubtedly, some of the smartest people I know were very gungho about various COVID treatments, but I was certainly able to identify many people who were similarly convinced but had no possibility of defending their enthusiasm. Those who are less intelligent are first deciding who to believe and then what to believe—because no one wants to be called stupid, especially those who are. Even dumb people think it’s bad to be dumb.
Many leftists and liberals point out that smarter people lean left. This is deserved gloating since almost everyone values intelligence and, if you are a lefty, you have something to be proud of. However, many lefties blush at the first mention of IQ disparity across ethnic groups precisely because being smart is so important to them—in fact, they view being smart as being virtuous. They think being smart makes you a good person so they are hostile to any suggestion that their client groups are not solely constituted by good people. Instead, they revert to pretending no group could possibly be smarter than any other group lest they confront the idea that some groups (according to their own valuation of intellect) are also better than others.
Pretending not to know
Progressivism relies on unlearning obvious facts: You are not supposed to be able to guess the ethnic background of an assailant in the news based on the description of the crime perpetrated (especially when the news selectively withholds said detail); you are not supposed to know whether or not a 350 lbs woman is healthy or not (only her doctor, who is not allowed to weigh her anymore, can say for sure); you are not supposed to presume the gender of the person examining their circumcision in your locker room lest you offend the upright sensibilities of our cultural moment. And, most importantly, you are not supposed to be able to tell anything about the nature of a person based on how they look. Around every corner lies a pepe who could be prince, a thief who could be Aladin. Do not ask the pepe if he is a registered sex criminal. Do not ask Aladin what he was doing in Dagestan in 2012. You will be obligated to kiss both but it is illegal to ask who is committing jihad and who is a horny toad.
Compare “retard” to “idiot”
Before it became popular among the gamer community, “mentally retarded” was a neutral clinical definition used to describe developmental challenges that would express themselves across the entirety of a person’s lifespan, so too was “idiot” a term used to describe someone of low intelligence, idiot having completed the whole life cycle from tolerable to offensive to tolerable again.
The reason “retard” has become so toxic is its visual association with Down Syndrome. Progressivism demands that you pretend you can not reasonably infer the scope of a person’s intellectual capacities unless you have administered them several depositions and highly advanced captchas. It demands you cannot reasonably infer the intellect of your phlebotomist, cashier, or surgeon, who is a man, who is a woman, who is athletic and who is not. That you do not have access to your subject’s precise IQ/SAT score must prove that their intelligence is indiscernible, which is like telling someone that they are not qualified to judge whether Lebron James is tall or not because they did not break out measuring tape.
Even those who take umbrage with calling someone clinically slow, will readily describe other people as looking smart. For instance, a manlet in scrubs (glasses, stubble, big podcast head)—looks competent, has a high Scrabble score, practices Jiu Jitsu or powerlifting. And yet, without me describing it, everyone knows what Down Syndrome looks like. While not all smart people wear scrubs, not all people with Down Syndrome look like any one other person with Down Syndrome. There are many iterations of smart in the same way that there are many iterations of average and below average. Knowing that we have delimited what the range of intelligence might look like at its bookends, what if it were possible to determine the rough IQ cohort of any of those interstitial cases in between ward-of-the-state and orthopedist-in-residency? What if libs are right and everything is indeed on a spectrum?
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Special solutions for special needs
I would be remiss in my role as grifter, if I didn’t entertain the idea that “retard” may actually be truly special, a slur in a class of its own. We can all think of a word that’s worse. Some of us use it. Some of us don’t. Almost no one uses it sincerely (especially racists). If you are black, it is a birthright and what you call other black people. If you are white, using it is a deathright. Still, there are millions of people who get the pass to use the n-word and they use it liberally and with aplomb.
The thing about the r-word is no class or group of people gets a pass for it. While AWFL’s and hall monitors of similar ilk dislike its usage more than others, no group of people gets to use the word with impunity. There are individuals who get exceptions, often the same ones who use the n-word, those who are still allowed a little misogyny in their folk songs. In some sense, this softens the honorific for those who deign to use it because we are sensitive to race in a way that would probably mortify many slaveholders and slaves alike. While there are scores of suburban teens who wish they were black, very few wish they were cognitively challenged.
The decreasing quantity of people who walk the earth with Down Syndrome demonstrate this preference. The prevalence of genetic screening and abortion reveal it. Now so common, these practices may banish people with Down Syndrome before we banish the word for them. And while I am 100% positive that either political party would love to rack up the lobbying power and attendant vote bloc of Big R-Slur, it has proven hard to locate the right firm to represent them on K Street. Despite the fact that black women get the most abortions of any single group in the U.S., no one thinks the future will be devoid of black people. However, the revealed preference is that people with Down Syndrome might become rare indeed at which point the word could become more or less offensive, could lose its relevance outright. No one can imagine a world in which the n-word loses its sting.
The real problem with the r-word
In his essay, “What You Can’t Say,” Paul Graham writes,
In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
Progressivism believes in the necessity and inevitability of social progress. A civic religion sworn against the reactionary residues of the old world. The time before antibiotics, genetic screening, and elective abortion. The past is where Jim Crow and the patriarchy live.
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Here in 2024, none of us touch grass like our ancestors did. They had feudalism, acreage, and pre-industrial warfare, along with dodo birds, unprotected sex, and other assorted attractions. In this new world, we decreasingly rely on the physical strength required of humans in the Before Times and increasingly rely on the efficiency of machines in the present we’re stuck with. Thus, most people just don’t value physical attributes outside of looking hot. As contemporary philosopher, Joe Rogan, points out: women can grow a nice pair of cheeks deadlifting without much frequency, and yet many will opt for a BBL since none of them have any use for physical strength.
Disregard for physicality is further realized in those who believe the so-called “strength-gap” between men and women will be closed, or that there is anything mimicking Newtonian ballistics in female action flicks. There are countries where you can beat women and get away with it. Those women fantasize about closing this gap as well but have been disabused of its likelihood.
In fact, so much progress has been made that there are many women in The West who are forced to fantasize that there is any threat at all a man may hit them. I am not suggesting that women do not suffer violence in The West, but that the popularity of True Crime shows an appetite for intensity clearly outstripping the supply modernity offers up. In a country leading an empire where the desire for intense leadership is also unmatched by its supply, only one man could take away everyone’s favorite word.
In 2010 Barack Obama signed into law Rosa’s Law, rebranding any references in federal legislation–from “mental retardation” and its derivatives to “intellectual disability” and its derivatives. And like many greats before it, “retard,” retired its jersey, kissed the girl, and drove off into the sunset. Many lament the caprices of fashion, regretting that such a great could retire but, students of history and psychology know that those who repress are haunted by what they repress.
No Hard 'R'! (Also a great Murdoch-Murdoch episode)
The dumbing down of our legal vocabulary is something that I passionately dislike.