There has been an interesting video going viral of late, from the channel BantuCityDiaries, which looks at the rather disheartening results of an impromptu IQ test administered to the residents of Nigeria’s capitol city, Lagos. The video is worth watching just for the amusement factor, if nothing else:

You can practically feel the presenter’s disappointment and sadness at the results. And that is not surprising, because – as he is African himself – he is well aware of what those results mean for his people.

The comments, though, are a hoot and a half to read. If you go through them, you will see NO MERCY WHATSOEVER for the Africans. It appears that even the politically correct jackasses running EWCHOOB cannot deal fast enough with the hard realities of race, and of racial differences.

Here is the reality that the presenter, and perhaps his team, and certainly most Africans, cannot bring themselves to accept easily:

IQ is not everything. It is not the determining factor of one’s outcomes in life. But the average IQ of a large group of people DOES have some serious implications for society and national-level outcomes.

The MAFF is not hard to figure out. An IQ score follows the usual Normal (or Gaussian) distribution – that is to say, the classic “bell curve” – explained clearly by the following mathematical equation for the probability density function:

And when you integrate this from left to right, you get the cumulative density – that is to say:

All of this is just a fancy mathematical way of saying that, for a given population with a given mean IQ and a given standard deviation of that IQ, you can therefore measure what percentage of the population is going to produce geniuses, super-geniuses, and total drooling morons.

Now, there are several different types of IQ test, all of which have a slightly different way of measuring the results. The most common method seems to be the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, which has a normalised mean IQ of 100 for all populations, and a standard deviation of 15. The Stanford-Binet approach seems to use a standard deviation of 16. For the purpose of our discussion, it really does not particularly matter which IQ test approach we use – let’s stick to the Wechsler scale for the moment.

Using this scale, you can figure out pretty quickly, given the average intelligence level of a given population on a “large enough” scale (which is to say, several thousand test takers), what percentage of that country’s population will be of an intelligence level comparable to the global average, and what percentage will be outliers.

This is where the news gets very bad for Africans, especially of the sub-Saharan variety.

You see, in a country with an average IQ of 100, exactly have the population will be of up to average intelligence, and exactly half will be over that. A country with an average IQ of very roughly 100 is about what is observably necessary to maintain a modern industrial economy. Having an IQ between 90 and 110 seems to be about the right level to comprehend and understand some fairly standard concepts related to mechanics, spatial analysis, logical reasoning, mathematics, physics, and a bunch of other very basic subjects that help us explain the world around us.

Once you get below about 90, though, things start getting difficult. At an IQ level of below 90, certain basic relationships become much harder to grasp and understand. Simple concepts that you and I take for granted – the foundational elements of logic and reasoning, for instance – become quite a challenge to figure out.

These are all points related to the individual level, though. Now imagine an entire society where the AVERAGE person is too dull-witted to figure out how to operate a car or a computer, never mind maintain one.

That is the reality confronting sub-Saharan Africa today.

It is well known, and has been well known for decades, that sub-Saharan African IQ is on average somewhere in the 70-75 range. You really need to put some numbers against this to put things into perspective.

Nothing I am about to show you is hard to figure out. You can do it in a spreadsheet simply by using the NORMDIST function and a bit of nous.

In a society of exactly a million people, where the average IQ is exactly 100, you can work out quite easily that 2.28% of the people will have IQs at or above the genius-level threshold of 130 (again, depending on which test you use – let us assume the Wechsler distribution with an SD of 15). Under these assumptions, you will have, in a population of a million, roughly 22,750 geniuses.

Indeed, in that population you will have about 429 people who are super-intellects, with an IQ of 150 or above.

Somewhere in that population, you MIGHT end up with ONE individual with an IQ of above 170 – which is so far off the scale that, at such a point, it is nearly impossible to accurately measure intelligence.

This is what a healthy society looks like. It is a society capable of not only maintaining an advanced industrial economy, but building on it, and innovating within it. That is a society in which highly intelligent people exist, are able to find each other, and are able to thrive – ON AVERAGE, we are NOT speaking about individual experiences here.

Now consider what happens when you have a society in which the average IQ is 70.

Suddenly, EVERYTHING shifts entirely to the left. Instead of about 2.28% of the population having an IQ of 130 or higher, now you have 22,750 or so people with an IQ of 100. And you might have barely 32 geniuses in the entire population of a million people. You will simply not have anyone at the super-intellect level, at all, statistically speaking.

Think for a moment what that means for a society.

Now, instead of the vast majority of people in the population being able to work within the confines and reap the benefits of an industrial modern economy, you have a great huge mass of people who are literally too stupid to understand basic mechanics, logic, and mathematics. That is not an insult, it is a fact. An IQ of 70 is basically a retarded person – that is the correct term for it, because “to retard” means “to hold back” or “to prevent”.

And that is precisely what the huge overwhelming mass of that society will do to the very people who are the innovators, the bright minds, the thinkers, the inquisitive ones who want and need to explore the world around them.

Now multiply everything I just said by a factor of 100, or 200, or 300. In a society like Nigeria, where the average IQ is perhaps somewhere around 75, that means that out of roughly 200 million people, there are roughly only about 10 million who are of AVERAGE OR HIGHER IQ by GLOBAL STANDARDS. And they have to carry the weight of very roughly 190 million people on their backs. This is utterly unworkable.

For the higher-end professions on the cognitive scale – the doctors, engineers, lawyers, technicians, computer scientists, physicists, and so on and so forth – of IQs with 120 or higher, thereabouts, you are looking at perhaps 270,000 people in the entire country.

Given these realities, is it AT ALL surprising that so many of those higher-IQ types end up leaving? Imagine having to fight, every single waking moment of every single day, against the crassness and stupidity of a society that simply cannot comprehend basic realities of infrastructure, sanitation, civic sense, law and order, etc.

Anyone who has lived in India – average IQ of around 84, though it can range as high as 96 depending on where you go – can tell you what that is like. It is a horrible, soul-crushing experience.

Now imagine living in a place worse than THAT, and you have an approximation of what Africa is like.

It is again important – vitally so – to stress that IQ is not everything. It is possible to raise the average IQ of a nation through better nutrition, access to schooling, and a few other routes. But there are hard limits to this, as the US population of African-Americans has shown. The Black American population has consistently scored on IQ tests a full standard deviation below Whites – that is to say, the Black American population has an average IQ of roughly 84-86, thereabouts, and that has been a consistent and invariant result for DECADES. This is in spite of well over a TRILLION dollars of interventions and spending designed specifically to lift Black communities out of poverty, into education, providing them with better outcomes, better nutrition, better opportunities, and so on.

There does appear to be a hard genetic ceiling on how high you can raise IQ – or so it seems to me, I could easily be wrong. I am not a geneticist or an intelligence tester.

This is the hard reality of Africa. You CANNOT solve the problem of low African IQ. It is simply not possible. There is not the least point in trying.

Which leaves us with the last point from the video’s creator:

He says that the rest of the world must not mock Africans for being stupid and low-IQ.

I disagree.

Why SHOULDN’T we do it? Because it makes us “racist”? Is that all?

I am not White. I grew up constantly being mocked for, basically, being a massive nerd. When I were a wee lad, I was fat, bookish, and socially awkward. Even when I attended an elite private school in Australia – where, as we are legally obligated to remind you, LITERALLY EVERYTHING WANTS TO KILL YOU AND EAT YOUR EYEBALLS FOR JUJUBEES!!!! – the less academically inclined students mocked me constantly for my nerdiness.

I was nowhere near the smartest or most academically gifted student at that school. But that mockery had an effect on me. It spurred me to work hard, to prove myself, and – when I went to university – to shed the excess poundage and take up healthy eating and exercise habits. Those persist to this day, which is why I am in far better shape and health than most men my age – and even many who are a decade or two younger, have a hard time keeping up with me.

If we can mock Chinese and Indians and Russians for being massive nerds and big-brain types – why, then, can we NOT mock Blacks and Pajeets and Pakis for being low-IQ idiots?

The only reason I can think of, is that one should not “punch down”. Perhaps not. But then, is it fair to mock fat out-of-shape nerds who can’t get laid? I used to be one of them. I am not any more. Yet I preserve my brainpower and my understanding of complex systems – that is what makes me very, very good at what I do.

Perhaps the mockery might someday inspire Africans to stop blaming Whites for all of their problems, and get on with solving them without begging for aid. That, at least, would be a big step in the right direction.

After all, a continent that is rich in resources, yet cannot feed itself, is not a continent that anyone else can fix. And a continent that cannot come up with people intelligent enough to maintain basic institutions – like rule of law and private property rights – is not going to be saved from the quite inevitable collapse into looting, theft, and barbarism that takes place when you ignore or outright destroy those institutions.

The core lesson of everything Africa-related is, as always: LET AFRICA SINK. That is all there is to it.