On Reading and Its Discontents

Recently, I’ve been meditating on the place that reading holds, both in my own life and in our modern society as a whole. Personally, I like to read. I wish I had more time to do it but sadly find such time increasingly lacking (especially given the way “real life” has been over the past few months). Yet, I try to squeeze it in when I can. Over the years, I’ve seen my reading preferences change as I’ve moved to the Real Right. Less “general” history and fiction, more “deeper” history, philosophy, etc. I view reading not only as enjoyable, but also as a conscious work of personal improvement. Books (and articles and substacks and…) are a means of gathering knowledge, which may then be further analysed, broken down, and rebuilt into an ever-deepening worldview supported by this evolving knowledge base.

It’s troubling to me to contemplate the general decline of intellectualism in the United States and across the western world that has obtained for over sixty years. By this, I do not refer to education of whatever type - if anything that has increased to absurd proportions. But more education does not equal more intellectual capacity. Even as the number of degrees multiplies, the actual ability of a larger and larger share of the population to actual consider ideas has diminished. And that is really at the root of genuine intellectualism - ideas, understanding them, applying them, generating them. It goes far beyond just memorising some facts or names or whatever and regurgitating them on command.

One of the things that you will see fairly regularly on X and other social media is a left-winger who overestimates his or her own intelligence trying to score a few points with other lefties by arguing some version of “right wingers don’t read!” A couple of examples are provided below,

akhivae@akhivae

There's very little in the way of quality right wing journalism. It's mostly a never ending stream of low info op-ed and podcasts (the new talk radio) aimed at eliciting an emotional response. I do believe that as a whole conservatives enjoy reading less.

Boston Smalls @smalls2672

the right-wing podcasting wars is absolutely hilarious. I've been waiting for the day all the grifting, lying shitbags started eating each other alive. it was only a matter of time. Candace is psychotic, tim poole is a floppy dildo, benny johnson likes boys, hodge twins sit

11:15 PM · Dec 13, 2025 · 1.94K Views

1 Reply · 17 Likes

Slazac 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🌐@TrueSlazac

@cthocas @mattyglesias I want you to tell me these people champion the reading of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and 18th century political philosophy

7:03 AM · Feb 3, 2026 · 351K Views

169 Replies · 41 Reposts · 2.34K Likes

Now, left-wingers do not actually read more than those on the Right, if for no other reason than that most people barely read - period. Nearly half of all Americans didn’t even read a single book last year. The median American read just two books, and the average American read eight (this average is dragged upward by a tiny but prolific minority who read a LOT of books). But the problem then becomes one of quality. That tiny but prolific minority which I just mentioned mostly reads slop. Often on social media you’ll see these folks (usually women) who brag about “reading 150 books in a year!" only to find out that what they read is nearly all stuff like trashy romance novels, simple-minded self-help type books, or other works of similar quality. So the intellectual content of this reading is virtually nil. Like it or not, very few people at all are reading “Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and 18th century political philosophy.”

From my observations over the years, among those who are ideologically definable there are a few distinct patterns that emerge, generally corresponding to IQ stratification. Keep in mind that this stratification pertains more to the type of reading than it does to the amount of reading.

Among those on the Left, the lowest tier, generally made up of the Left’s non-white clients as well as the type of antifa street drek that appear in those memes designed to show you how dysgenic antifas are, have tastes that are virtually indistinguishable from the “average” discussed above, if they even read at all (which again, most of them don’t). The Left’s “managerial caste” of midwitted sign-wavers and paper-pushers (IQ ranges from average to maybe +1-1.5 SD) usually are inordinately proud of having obtained a college degree in something useless. Their reading tendencies will follow the “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” model of intersectional dog vomit (these folks are the reason why the Oprah Book Club list is a thing). Higher IQ left-wingers (and yes, these do exist despite the intellectual stultification inherent in their ideological framework) tend to read works which affirm their pre-existing ideology rather than challenging it to any great degree - they may be reading Foucault or Gramsci, but only because these are “pre-approved.”

On the Right, your average white conservatives tend to be stereotypical “boomerish normiecon” folks and their reading reflects this in consisting of “pop history” and “pop political” works (think Hannity or Mark Levin). However, we should note that there is a fundamental difference in their apparent motivations for reading. While leftie midwits read to be affirmed in some aspect of intersectional identity (it’s so awesome being a differently-abled feminist!) or in how bad their political opponents are (I just knew Trump was a child-eating space alien!), right-leaning normiecons do evince a desire to actual learn things. So even though they may be reading Band of Brothers because they watched the TV series a few years ago and thought it looked cool, they are wanting to actually acquire more knowledge about a subject and then try to apply it1.

Higher IQ right-wingers, on the other hand, tend to inhabit the dissident Right and are generally the folks who actually are reading “Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and 18th century political philosophy” among other things. They are much more likely to be reading the actual classics (the Greco-Roman ones, not the Reader’s Digest list), as well as digging deeply into selected subjects in history, philosophy, political theory, theology, science, and even the non-Western canon. Dissident Right types tend to read more deeply both because they actually want to be intellectually exercised and because they genuinely like to play with ideas. This is, in fact, why they are dissident Right, because they’re willing to step outside the boundaries of “accepted” discourse defined by the current Overton Window, into areas which are logically necessary but politically less acceptable. But let’s face it - this is a very numerically miniscule group of people.

Older readers may be familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, which was a tool used to categorise goals in education (the one I’m using below is the older one that I’m familiar with, but which was revised in 2001…I still think the older one is more explicative).

Lowest-tier lefties never even make it onto the chart. The midwitted lefties seem content to hover in the bottom level (knowledge), while higher IQ left-wingers can often reach up to the middle range of application. Normiecons, for their part, tend to also hit the application-analysis levels, while dissident Righters can reach all the way to the top.

This is all relevant because people on the Left desperately love to be thought of as intellectuals. But the reality simply isn’t there. Not only is there not any real, appreciable difference in the volume of reading going on by folks on all sides of the political divide, but what lefties DO read tends to be sloppish and in many cases anti-intellectual. Lefties are the ones who have literally been trying to remove “Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and 18th century political philosophy” from the curricula in our schools for decades.

But as noted before, most people don’t or barely even read anywise. The deeper question surrounding this fact is “why?”

After all, it wasn’t always this way. “Back in the day,” the quality of education and the concomitant willingness to SELF-educate was much greater. You had enlisted men on both sides of the Civil War who would write letters home to Ma while quoting Plutarch in Latin and including snippets from Milton’s poetry. This was considered to be reasonably normal. Many a farm boy in Ohio or Nebraska would teach themselves science or engineering and go on to produce groundbreaking inventions or otherwise advance science and technology. As hard it is for us to believe today, this was actually fairly common in the old days. This is something that is almost unthinkable today, however. As Joseph Sobran once opined, we’ve gone from teaching Latin in high schools to remedial English in colleges. Reading and the lack thereof is a strongly correlated second-order effect of all of this.

One reason for this is the general decline in overall average IQ in this country. Even as “education” has increased in terms of the number of students entering college-level institutions and the volume of degrees being handed out, the overall ability of these graduates has declined precipitously. Fewer people have the cognitive capacity to truly grasp intellectual topics, to really understand them and expand upon them, rather than merely repeating them robotically. Of course, reading in both quality and quantity will suffer from this.

Related to this, and one of the major reasons for the decline in overall average IQ, has been the brownification of the American population. The IQ differences between whites on the one hand and blacks and browns on the other are widely known, even if many choose not to acknowledge them. So when you go from an 89% white population in 1960 to 61% in 2020, there are going to be significant knock-on effects to this, including in education and overall intellectualism. Coeval with this “raw material” decline is a change in cultural traits. Where we used to have cultural features which would direct many of the more capable members of our society into intellectual pursuits, this is no longer the case. In its place, we’ve seen a thirdworldification of our culture that derides intellectual betterment as “acting white” and which celebrates the reduction of nearly everything to the lowest common denominator.

Another diversity-related factor is that mass immigration has actually changed the sense in which “intellectualism” is even understood. For instance, think about Vivek Ramaswamy and his blathering about “mediocrity,” by which he meant that American kids don’t spend their entire lives memorising lists of words to win spelling bees and whatnot. As I’ve pointed out before, this sort of activity is not really “intellectual.” Memorising lists of words to win a spelling bee is not the same thing as actually knowing words because you read a lot and intuitively learn what they mean and how to use them properly. Yet, this is the kind of “striver culture” which has been imported along with primarily South and East Asian immigrants which also tends to place important on appearance over actual ability. Chinese kids can diligently perfect their test-taking skills and score well on the SATs, but it has historically been the white kids who actually developed all the science and technology that we associate with the modern world.

Sadly, I don’t see much of a future for genuine intellectualism in these United States, at least not in the near term. The culture simply won’t sustain it anymore - between the social atomisation and the anti-whitism and the long-term progressive grip on culture creation, there’s nothing there to encourage genuinely intelligent approaches to ideas, whether we’re talking about their creation, comprehension, or dissemination. Sadly, our library system won’t be of any help. What was once a valuable resource for helping low-income-but-high-IQ young men overcome barriers to entry are now basically just holding pens for homeless people to watch porn all day while being overseen by pink-haired activists with master’s degrees in library science. The dissident Right - the only folks who are really, consistently playing with ideas, are tiny in comparison to society at large. But like the bookleggers in A Canticle for Leibowitz, it may be up to us to keep the flame alive until the next cycle begins.