Establish familiarity with takemusu Aikido exercises:
Gyakyu hanmi tenkan – soft committed elbow, move from shoulder (learn to move self)
Ashi-sabaki – same arm shape, driven by hips (learn to move uke)
Ashi-sabaki ushiro tenkan – same arm shape – learn to lead uke : uke learns to commit to movement
Yokomen uchi – uke must learn to attack with commitment : magic wall : cast hand from shoulder : acute angle
Yokomen direct – kihon : nage moves in (superior time) and towards uke’s flank with two hand response (intercept attack and atemiuke’s face) this is body displacement whereby nage takes uke’s position with tanren advance. The advanced counter : nage uses one-hand parry-riposte (cam the arm) : eye spear – but the arm is same shape [from here in basic class, move to beginning of hubud-lubud* to effect ikkyo – rokkyo]
* the tie-up in the FMA is a blend in Aikido to keep uke in motion (thus requiring the ikkyo – rokkyo immobilizations)
Yokomen ushiro-tenkan (blend) – arm is in same shape, just low line – timing is nage must intercept, like direct just yield to uke pressure, then double dagger
Both direct and ushiro-tenkan are inside line plays where nage stays inside the tight arc of uke’s strike
Then there are the outside plays:
First a slip – where nage uses the intercepting hand, but folds at the elbow to pass uke’s strike – use a feint then fade to make the slip to the flank (Mulligan sensei special)
Second avoids by entering in for a direct elbow strike (Shibata sensei special) – sidestep while advancing under uke’s strike (but it is not a ducking action!)
Hubud interpretation to irmi-nage is a four-beat entry. Yokomen to (1) direct parry, fade to slip, then (2) nage passes the yokomen with back hand to achieve the outside line, then (3) replace back hand with intercepting hand to control uke’s elbow (contact forward pressure trap) then (4) original backhand becomes straight thrust (irimi nage) throw.
Passing the attacking hand. Nage uses the outside hand to catch/pass the yokomen (rather than intercept on the inside) – chasing timing – to feed to the low-line where nage’s back hand can replace with a pressure-trap. From there, an Aikido irimi to the flank – using the control hand as a fixed point to move away from! Don’t disturb uke’s hand while moving to shikaku. From that position, nage can execute irimi nage omote or ura.
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The banner image is Kyrian doing sticky hands exercise with Master Keating who is the inspiration for the interpretation – sensitivity drills are critical for knife work and are an under appreciated basis for informing Aikido’s movements
Nassim Taleb has indicted Charles Murray as a “mountebank” because Murray demonstrates that measured general intelligence, G, has a high correlation with financial success. Correlation has a strong resemblance to causation, especially when the measure of success is a broad proxy like income, which can lead erroneously to social Darwinism. Because this is a dangerous correlation, Taleb is quick on the attack and attempts to debunk Murray and others who use G as a meaningful measure.
I fear that Taleb’s laudable moral concern to avoid the historical horrors of eugenics has blurred his usually sharp statistical reasoning.
A very cogent refutation of Taleb’s article point-by-point is found >here< and can be summed as proving the durable correlation between G and income – people of higher IQ have a greater chance of earning more income.[1]
It seems to me that Taleb’s argument with Murray is based on an interpretive error rather than a philosophical divergence. It appears Taleb ignores the validity of G because he wants to avoid its use as a prognostic tool. His critique is less moral than methodological: he distrusts any Gaussian simplification of human ability and believes the tails of performance distributions are non-predictive in complex, “fat-tailed” domains. Yet he also sees the moral danger of such metrics, so his rejection of G is both a statistical and ethical hedge.
Murray acknowledges that G exists and that it dangerously exacerbates the disparity in social outcomes.[2] Murray is nostalgic for a more egalitarian America of the 1950s when it was possible to marry across the “wrong side of the tracks” because that created a culture with a broad appreciation for multiple perspectives. Take Murray’s Bubble Test and pay close attention to its implied indictment: America is a society now more greatly divided. Follow that intellectual thread to his treatment of G: generalized intelligence is in part hereditable and cultivated by parents who are high-performers. As America moves increasingly to an intellectual economy, the divergence in G speedily increases the divide that Murray believes will destroy the American ideal.
So I see Taleb and Murray highlighting similar concerns, just that Taleb’s are immature; the dreams of a nascent adult:
For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”
Murray posits a more mature perspective. Everyone participates in society and therefore reputation, wealth and standing are in fact very meaningful markers of success. Not because those markers are precise indications of any individual’s inherent worth, but rather that by having achieved them the broader society has benefited from the individual’s contributions to the betterment of the many.
Thus while Murray’s discussion of G as having high correlation with success can be taken as a neo-eugenic argument, his view is clearly the opposite. Murray is concerned that G is over-valued by the intellectual economy to the detriment of all. Murray knows we need janitors, mechanics, and plumbers as desperately as we need attorneys, computer scientists and quants like Taleb. Given the scaling on Murray’s quiz, I suspect he prefers blue-collar mechanics to quants. A good mechanic arguably has done more for society than Taleb did by shorting the market for a huge payday.
Taleb, like Lady Macbeth, doth protest too much. He, more than Murray, exemplifies the paradox he condemns: he has profited handsomely from his intelligence through shrewd exploitation of uncertainty, and some of his essay reads as atonement rather than argument. Taleb correctly predicted a Black Swan event and therefore garnered a huge financial reward. He is, ironically, an existence proof of the correlation between intelligence and wealth he seeks to deny.
Murray would point instead to assortative mating, the tendency of individuals to partner by education and cognitive similarity, as a key driver of class entrenchment and the very phenomenon Taleb’s life exemplifies. For Murray G is real and now has a far greater impact on social success, but that is not a positive result. Taleb misses Murray’s concern and makes a misguided indictment, presumably on statistical grounds.
The problem isn’t with G. Clearly there are differences in intellectual ability and the modern economy rewards those with greater general intelligence properly applied. Taleb is correct to remind us that those financial rewards are not the best indication of any individual’s worth. But his is a teen-ager’s definition of value. Murray is a social scientist whose concerns and definitions are on a societal scale. Therefore the worth of the individual is to be found in their contribution to the continuance of society. Being a parent and furthering the cohesiveness of the body politic are the best indicators of success, not a puerile evaluation of yourself relative to your 18-year-expectations.
Taleb wants to deny G as a valid statistical tool because he values the potential of every individual. That is an aspirational argument, but empirically naïve. Murray also believes that everyone has a valid role to play in society regardless of their intelligence. Murray fears that job-segregation by intelligence has a negative stigma: those in higher prestige jobs (that require higher G) have no genuine connection to (or empathy for) those employed in traditional blue-collar jobs. Murray knows G is real and fearful of its divisive impact. Taleb just wants to pretend it doesn’t exist.
As much as I respect Nassim Taleb, Charles Murray has the better argument and understanding of the value, and danger, of G and its distribution among the general population.
At first glance it seems peculiar that semiconductors, a key item of national strategic interest, should be produced in only a few places in the world, most notably Taiwan, using devices produced only in Eindhoven in the Netherlands by one firm, ASML. Isn’t the United States big enough to be able to support all of these technologies domestically? Yes and no.
Semiconductor manufacturing is the most difficult and complicated manufacturing process ever attempted by human beings. A literal spec of dust can ruin an entire production run. How many people can run such a factory? Let’s look at the United States. The labor force is approximately 164 million people which sounds like a lot but half of the people in the labor force have IQs below 100. More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ.
In the entire US workforce there are approximately 3.7 million workers (2.3%) with an IQ greater than two standard deviations above the mean. (Mean 100, sd, 15, Normal dist.) Two standard deviations above the mean is pretty good but we are talking professor, physician, attorney level. At the very top of semiconductor manufacturing you are going to need workers with IQs at or higher than 1 in a 1000 people and there are only 164 thousand of these workers in the United States.
164 thousand very high-IQ workers are enough to run the entire semiconductor industry but you also want some of these workers doing fundamental research in mathematics, physics and computer science, running businesses, guiding the military and so forth. Moreover, we aren’t running a command economy. Many high-IQ workers won’t be interested in any of these fields but will want to study philosophy, music or English literature. Some of them will also be lazy! I’ve also assumed that we can identify all 164 thousand of these high-IQ workers but discrimination, poverty, poor health, bad luck and other factors will mean that many of these workers end up in jobs far below their potential–the US might be able to place only say 100,000 high-IQ workers in high-IQ professions, if we are lucky.
It’s very difficult to run a high-IQ civilization of 330 million on just 100,000 high-IQ workers–the pyramid of ability extends only so far. To some extent, we can economize on high-IQ workers by giving lower-IQ workers smarter tools and drawing on non-human intelligence. But we also need to draw on high-IQ workers throughout the world–which explains why some of the linchpins of our civilization end up in places like Eindhoven or Taiwan–or we need many more Americans.
A growing literature points to children’s influence on parents’ behavior, including parental investments in children. Further, previous research has shown differential parental response by socioeconomic status to children’s birth weight, cognitive ability, and school outcomes—all early life predictors of later socioeconomic success. This study considers an even earlier, more exogenous predictor of parental investments: offspring genotype. Specifically, we analyze (1) whether children’s genetic propensity toward educational success affects parenting during early childhood and (2) whether parenting in response to children’s genetic propensity toward educational success is socially stratified.
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IQ distribution varies with gender. The overall male to female ratio of intellectual disability is about 3:2 … in the top 2% of distribution (above IQ 130), the ratio of males to females is about 1.4:1. In the top 0.1% (above IQ 140), the ration is slightly over 2:1. Male IQ clusters more at the extremes than does female intelligence.
Kevin Mitchell (2020), Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are
Aristo– is a word-forming element meaning “best,” or “of the aristocracy,” from Greek aristos “best of its kind, noblest, bravest, most virtuous”” (of persons, animals, things). In its Greek form, aristos denoted that which was excellent in kind, noble in bearing, virtuous in conduct. It was not yet the title of a class. The aristoi were those who embodied aretê, excellence in the moral, intellectual, and physical sense (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6–7). The word carried no contempt until democracy began to mistake equality for virtue (Plato, Republic, VIII). Today, aristocrat suggests privilege, elitist a sneer. Yet the ancients knew that excellence is not tyranny; it is the measure by which a people sustain themselves against decline. When excellence is vilified, mediocrity becomes moralized. The modern crisis of democracy is not its inequality, but its fear of distinction (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.7).
This essay follows directly from my earlier reflections where I described how contemporary academia’s fetish for equality has displaced the pursuit of merit. The Greeks would have found such moral inversion incomprehensible: equality was a civic safeguard, not a moral standard. To them, virtue could never be collective, it was the achieved quality of the individual.
In Excellence and Athleticism, I use examples from ancient Greece, specifically the Odyssey, to highlight ideals of arete: moral courage combined with ability which are requirements of being aristos. The earliest stories were always teaching texts; they provided examples of how to live and what to aspire to. In this sense, the heroic epics served the same social function as education should: the cultivation of excellence rather than its apology.
In the earliest Greek imagination, the aristoi were not simply the wealthy or well-born but those whose actions displayed a harmony of character and courage (Homer, Iliad, IX). The Homeric epics do not teach equality; they teach proportion (Thucydides, History, II.65). Achilles and Odysseus represent the two poles of human excellence; force and intellect, passion and prudence (Homer, Iliad; Odyssey). Achilles is the god-touched hero who burns brightly and dies young, the image of martial purity. Odysseus is the man of craft, a weaver of lies and plans, whose excellence lies in endurance and wit. Both are aristoi, but Odysseus is the prototype of exclusively human excellence (Aristotle, Poetics, 1454b). His heroism is measured not in glory but in return, not in conquest but in restoration (Odyssey, XXII).
Although a king himself, Odysseus embodies the tension between inherited excellence and acquired skill. His aretê is not that of divine favor but of learned craft and endurance. However impressive his athletic exploits (Book 8 of the Odyssey), he is also curiously mercantile; his interest in property is not only for prestige, but for its utility. The booty he won at Troy is lost early in his return voyage, and he replaces it only through the aristocratic gifts received from the Phaeacians, tokens of xenia, the sacred code of hospitality that bound status to generosity. Odysseus returns to Ithaca replenished; his restored wealth mirrors his restored order, proof that true excellence unites prudence with possession. [1]
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Odysseus is not the direct descendent of any god.
The closest he gets is through his maternal line to his great-grandfather, Hermes. Achilles, by contrast is son of an immortal Nereid and his paternal great-grandfather is Zeus himself (details). Ajax the Greater is the son of Telamon, son of Aeacus and (another) grandson of Zeus. Through his uncle Peleus (Telamon’s brother), he is cousin to Achilles. So, Odysseus is the most human of heroes.
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The Greeks never confused democracy with equality of condition. Aristotle wrote that the polis exists for the sake of the good life, not for mere living (Politics, 1252b). The city is the vessel through which virtue is cultivated; its purpose is moral, not economic. Yet he warned that the polis has natural limits (Politics, 1326b). Beyond a certain scale, citizens can no longer know one another well enough to share responsibility. A city too large becomes a crowd, and a crowd cannot act with conscience. The strength of the ancient polis was that each citizen bore the consequences of his decisions. The rich fought beside the poor, the hoplite phalanx bound in literal interdependence (Hanson, The Western Way of War). In such a world, “tax the rich” made no sense, for the rich bled with the rest. Citizenship was a moral bond, not an entitlement.
The modern franchise has inverted this proportion. Representation without consequence has produced a democracy of appetite rather than of virtue (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics). Scale has destroyed sympathy; bureaucracy has replaced neighborly duty. The ancient polis required citizens to act together for the sake of the common good; the modern state requires only that they vote and demand (Arendt, The Human Condition). Aristotle would not have called this democracy at all but ochlocracy, government by the multitude’s passions (Polybius, Histories, VI.4). The citizen of Athens understood that freedom was a discipline. The citizen of the modern West believes it is a right (Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty).
This confusion owes much to Christianity’s leveling impulse and to the Enlightenment’s rational optimism (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I), but it reached its political consummation in America’s moralization of equality. Tocqueville saw the danger early: democracy would lead men to love equality more than freedom, and they would accept servitude if it meant sameness (Democracy in America, II.1). The ancient Greeks feared hubris; moderns enshrine it: we no longer fear the gods but presume to perfect ourselves through policy. The result is moral fatigue disguised as justice (Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind).
In the ancient world, excellence implied responsibility (Aristotle, Ethics, IV). The agôn, the contest, was sacred because it revealed merit in full view of others (Nicholson, Aristocracy and Athletics). The games were not entertainment but judgment. Each man’s aretê was tested before the community. When Odysseus strings his bow to slay the suitors, it is not only an act of vengeance but of restoration: the right order of the world reasserting itself (Odyssey, XXI).
He earns his kingship anew. The Greek understood that rule must be justified continually by virtue; authority divorced from aretê was hubris (Politics, III.12). In this sense, aristocracy was never hereditary; it was performative (Plato, Laws, III). Nobility without excellence was a fraud (Thucydides, II.40).
Modern societies have inverted this ethic. We defend incompetence as inclusion and mistake equality of outcome for fairness (Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice). Where the Greeks sought to honor the best, we are taught to suspect them. The “Woke” moral vision does not correct injustice; it levels aspiration (Scruton, How to Be a Conservative). It claims compassion while breeding resentment. In erasing standards, it annihilates meaning (Lewis, The Abolition of Man). To reject excellence because it offends equality is to commit the oldest sin: envy recast as ethics (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I). Plato warned that democracies decay when the unfit demand the honors of the excellent (Republic, VIII–IX). Aristotle called it the corruption of timocracy: when ambition survives virtue and prestige detaches from desert (Politics, V.8). Once the moral authority of excellence collapses, only power remains (Tocqueville, II.2).
Yet excellence, rightly understood, is not arrogance. The true aristos serves as exemplar, not ruler (Xenophon, Memorabilia, II.6). He leads because his character commands imitation. Odysseus’ metis, his cunning, is inseparable from his endurance and his piety (Odyssey, IX). He is not the strongest but the most complete (Auerbach, Mimesis). His excellence arises from the union of intellect, skill, and humility before the gods. When he blinds the Cyclops, Homer compares his precision to that of a shipwright drilling timber (Odyssey, IX.382–94).
They took the stake of olive-wood, sharp at the point, and thrust it into his eye, while I, throwing my weight upon it from above, whirled it round, as when a man bores a ship’s timber [385] with a drill, while those below keep it spinning with the thong, which they lay hold of by either end, and the drill runs around unceasingly. Even so we took the fiery-pointed stake and whirled it around in his eye, and the blood flowed around the heated thing.
The poet celebrates craftsmanship as nobility. To work well is to be virtuous (Arendt, The Human Condition). The modern world forgets this. We divide labor from dignity, wealth from service, intellect from humility. The ancient Greek would find this madness: to be excellent was to be whole (Ruskin, The Stones of Venice).
The decline of aristocratic ideals has also impoverished leadership. Modern elites are not the best of anything; they are functionaries of a system that confuses credentials with character (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy). The bureaucrat thinks compliance and adherence to policy is virtue. The political classes now govern by sentimentality and spectacle, not by wisdom or restraint. They have preserved the appearance of moral authority while severing its moral root. They moralize because they cannot lead. The result is a moral vacuum filled by slogans. We are ruled not by aristoi but by advertisers listening to pollsters.
The Greeks knew that every virtue has its vice when abstracted from measure. Aretê without humility becomes hubris, courage without prudence becomes recklessness, justice without wisdom becomes vengeance (Aristotle, Ethics, II.7). The polis endured because its citizens still believed in proportion (Plato, Philebus, 64d). The modern state, swollen beyond recognition to Leviathan, has replaced proportion with process (Hobbes, Leviathan). The citizen is reduced to consumer, and democracy becomes a perpetual redistribution of grievance. The tragedy of egalitarianism is that it breeds dependency, and dependency breeds tyranny (Tocqueville, II.4).
We must therefore recover the moral meaning of elitism. To be elitist in the Greek sense is to believe that the best should lead and the rest should strive to become better (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra). It is to honor excellence as the path to justice. The ancients did not envy their heroes; they emulated them (Plutarch, Lives, “Pericles”). We resent ours and then lament the absence of greatness (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind). The culture that mocks virtue cannot produce it (Kimball, The Fortunes of Permanence). If democracy is to survive, it must again become aristocratic in spirit: a fellowship of excellence bound by duty, not a marketplace of resentment (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics).
The remedy is personal before it is political. The polis begins in the soul (Plato, Republic, IV). The citizen who cultivates his own excellence restores the moral order from below. Craft, courage, and integrity are still the building blocks of freedom. Odysseus, the craftsman-king, remains our truest model (Odyssey, XIII–XXIV). He suffers, endures, and restores. His journey is the allegory of civilization itself: skill rescuing virtue from chaos (Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force). We are his descendants when we learn the art of returning home (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus).
The ancients would have laughed at our bureaucratic pieties. They understood that laughter itself disarms power. “Power can be resisted and undermined by laughter,” wrote Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), who grasped what Homer knew: irony is the weapon of the free. And the Athenians paid their citizens to attend the plays that served precisely this purpose, to mock political leaders who overstepped (Aristophanes, The Knights, et alia).
The restoration of aristos will not come through institutions but through example. Excellence must again become attractive. We must learn to revere those who do things well, whether they build, heal, teach, or think. The path back from decadence is not through equality but through aspiration. The Greeks knew this, and so must we: a free people are bound not by sameness, but by shared admiration for the best among them. When that admiration dies, so too does liberty (Thucydides, II.40).
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[1] The demonstration of xenia, the proper treatment of a stranger by a host, is a testimony to the Phaeacian king’s greatness and Odysseus’s excellence. There is a nice counterpoint (a faux-pas) made by the less experienced Telemachus who, when visiting Menelaus rejects a gift of horses because horses are not much used in Ithaca. Telemachus is too pragmatic and misses the point of aristocratic gifts: they are gestures of friendship to promote bonds and recognition of status, not merely things of utility.
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References (Selective)
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1996.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. London: Penguin Classics, 1954.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Protective Arts 