Mencken on the Inferior Man

Mencken on the Inferior Man

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the inferior man, pages 15-21, 31-32, 38-39. Below is an overview of his discussion on the inferior man; my comments are in brackets.
    About the inferior man, Mencken notes “that there is actually no more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue, than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day.” In the early days, testing this notion of superiority of the inferior man was difficult. “[W]hat cannot be tried and disproved has always had a lascivious lure for illogical man.” Recent knowledge about “the content and character of the human mind,” has disposed of “the old belief in its congenital intuitions and inherent benevolences.” [Studies during the past several decades show that genetics has a much greater influence on the human mind than suspected in Mencken’s day.] The functions of the mind are mostly “purely physical and chemical phenomena, and its development and operation are subject to precisely the same natural laws which govern the development and operation, say, of the human nose or lungs.” Thus, some “minds . . . start out with a superior equipment, and proceed to high and arduous deeds; there are minds which never get any farther than a sort of insensate sweating, like that of a kidney.” [Mencken is correct in that some minds are genetically superior to others. However, he ignores the spiritual or soul aspects of the mind, i.e., the mind is more than physical and chemical phenomena, a notion that he, most likely, would reject. In the last two chapters of Darwinism Refuted, Harun Yahya discusses this aspect of the mind. Being an evolutionist, Mencken would have rejected Yahya’s book as so much superstition.]
    Open-minded people can easily observe the difference between a superior mind and an inferior mind. When exposed to suitable training, a superior mind “acquires the largest body of knowledge and the highest skill.” On the other hand, “no conceivable training can move” the inferior mind beyond a certain point. “In other words, men differ inside their heads as they differ outside. There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally stupid and cannot.” [Mencken is writing about intelligence, and what he writes is true. However, a person with high intelligence may be weak in wisdom, common sense, morality, and ethics. A person of low intelligence may be more endowed with these traits than many highly intelligent people. That is, a high I.Q. makes a superior mind, but it does not necessarily make a superior person. For example, university heads and professors have high I.Q. Most likely, Mencken would consider most of them “betters” and “superiors.” Yet, most of them show no more love for liberty than the typical inferior of the mob. For the most part, they are Puritans, cultural Marxists, who want to micromanage everyone’s thoughts and actions and mold everybody into their ideal. Thus, the relationship between intelligence and the desire for liberty seems weak.]
    “Liberals, whatever their defects otherwise, are themselves capable of learning, and so they quickly mastered the fact that MM. Simon and Binet offered the most dangerous menace to their vapourings ever heard of since the collapse of the Holy Alliance.” [Simon and Binet were pioneers in intelligence testing.] Liberals despise intelligence tests for two reasons.  “First, they provide a more or less scientific means of demonstrating the difference in natural intelligence between man and man — a difference noted ages ago by common observation, and held to be real by all men save democrats, at all times and everywhere. Second, they provide a rational scale for measuring it and a rational explanation of it.”
    Mencken continues, “An intelligent man is one who is capable of taking in knowledge until the natural limits of the species are reached. A stupid man is one whose progress is arrested at some specific time and place before then. . . . Some men can learn almost indefinitely; their capacity goes on increasing until their bodies begin to wear out. Others stop in childhood, even in infancy. They reach, say, the mental age of ten or twelve, and then they develop no more.” [This later group dominates Social Justice, Black Live Matter and Antifa. They are also predominant among the anti-Confederate crowd.]
    Naturally, the democrats [egalitarians] strongly object to this conclusion of the naturally inferior man. “Their objection to it is rather of a metaphysical character, and involves gratuitous, transcendental assumptions as to what ought and what ought not to be true.” [Not only do democrats dominate the Democratic party, they also dominate the Republican party and even the Libertarian party.] They claim that “believing such things would be in contempt of the dignity of man, made in God’s image.” [But God made people the way that they are.]
    Alas, democracy is “a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart.” Furthermore, the “anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked; and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.”
    Mencken adds, “that man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him, but what is not true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat.” [The anti-Confederates support Mencken’s observation. They lack the ability to acquire knowledge, but they easily absorb delusion. The same type of person is also seen supporting Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama and to a slightly lesser degree George Bush.] Moreover, the inferior man “has a dreadful capacity for embracing and cherishing impostures.” Since the beginning of recorded history, priests, politicians, and all sorts of quacks have victimized him. “His heroes are always frauds. In all ages he has hated bitterly the men who were labouring most honestly and effectively for the progress of the race. What such men teach is beyond his grasp. He believes in consequence that it is unsound, immoral and of the devil.”
    Fear guides and controls the inferior man. “[E]ducation is largely a process of getting rid of such fears.” [Today, what passes for education teaches the inferior man to fear even more and tries to teach the superior man also to fear. One can see the operation of the inferior man in public education, which is nothing more than indoctrination in politically correct thinking. Parents who send their children to private schools are often looked down upon, even by the super rich who send their children to private schools. The worst heretics are parents who homeschool. They are accused of being pariahs who abuse their children and often have their children take from them.] “The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the immemorial fears of the race — of strange men and strange ideas, of the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene.” Unfortunately, “the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears.” Moreover, lacking logical sense, he is “unable to reason from a set of facts before [him], free from emotional distraction.” Furthermore, the inferior man is “incompetent to take in the bald facts” himself. Except at the most elemental level, words convey nothing to the inferior man. His mind “cannot grasp even the simplest abstractions.” [Perhaps, more than anything else, the ability to think in abstract terms is what separates the superior man from the inferior man.] All his thinking “is done on the level of a few primitive appetites and emotions.” [Although Mencken avoids mentioning race, some races seem to have more difficulty thinking abstractly and seem to “think” more on the primitive level of appetites and emotions.] Thus, ideas leave him unscathed; he is “responsive only to emotions,” and his “emotions are all elemental — the emotions, indeed, of  tabby-cats rather than of men.” Therefore, educating the inferior man is impossible.
    “[I]n all departments and on all planes the inferior man reduces it [love, which “runs from the erotic to the philanthropic,”] to terms of his own elemental yearnings. Of all his stupidities there is none more stupid than that which makes it impossible for him to see beyond them, even as an act of the imagination.” Moreover, he “cannot formulate the concept of a good that is not his own good.” From time immemorial, he has hated both sacred and secular heretics. “His first thought and his last thought, contemplating them, is to stand them up against a wall and have at them with musketry.” No record is found of him ever opening “his mouth for fairness, for justice, for decency between man and man. Such concepts, like the concepts of honour and of liberty, are eternally beyond him, and belong only to his superiors.” The inferior man is a natural coward. His “congenital fear is easily translated into cruelty.” His “deficiency in imagination” makes him incapable of projecting “himself into the place of the other.” When the inferior man’s “ betters stand before [him], asking for something that [he] may withhold — when [he is] thus confronted, though the thing asked for be only fair dealing, elemental justice, common decency,” he is a wolf.
    [Examples of the inferior man include supporters and members of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Social Justice, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter. Another example is the people who seek to remove and destroy Confederate monuments. They do not understand why the South fought for its independence, the purpose of the monuments memorializing the Confederate soldier, or the reason for erecting them. Moreover, they can never understand because they are incapable of understanding. It is beyond the capacity of their minds. Therefore, they fear them and want to destroy them. Still, another example is the supporters of Hillary Clinton. They do not understand Donald Trump’s supporters, and they will never understand them. Therefore, they fear them and want to bring Trump, who represents them, down. Blindly, they support Clinton because she is one of them; therefore, they understand her, although she despises them and spits on them.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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