Why Summers folded immediately

The ever-active Steve Sailer has an explanation I hadn’t seen before of why Larry Summers crumpled immediately in the face of unprincipled abuse from academic female PC profiteers. To present the explanation in my own way and with my own additions: Sailer picks up the Bell Curve point that in a technocracy high-IQ people run things, and points out that Harvard and similar instititions owe their commanding position to their ability to scarf up the smartest technocrats and present their opinions as authoritative neutral expertise. (Post-modern irrationalists are auxiliaries of technocracy. When they say “words mean nothing” in context it means “objections to rule by experts mean nothing.”) Unfortunately, the ability of institutions like Harvard to rule by engrossing the smartest technocrats and claiming expert neutrality is politically insecure, because technocratic society claims to be egalitarian. Technocracy is utilitarian, and we all equally have preferences to be satisfied, so on the point that’s morally most basic technocracy insists that we’re all equal. That makes sorting mechanisms like SAT tests, which divide people into more and less acceptable and say that the more acceptable people should rule the less acceptable people, politically vulnerable. Activist complaints about the anti-egalitarian nature of rule by experts therefore threaten the whole system by dramatizing the essential contradiction between its moral principles and its method of operation. Complaints by outsiders can normally be ignored or obfuscated, since experts control the public debate anyway, but when well-placed activists within the system make a fuss they have to be paid off and shut up immediately. And that’s what Summers did. Other institutions have done the same thing before him—as Sailer details, the female professors who made the fuss were notable recipients of payoffs elsewhere.