The Clever People

Written 17 January 2026

A new paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research advocates for ‘Queering Children's Rights.’ The author of the paper asserts that children have a right to ‘gender and sexuality’ and criticises the view presented in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child's that children should be ‘desexualized’ and deemed ‘innocent.’ This innocence is to be stripped away, condemned as a ‘protectionist approach to children’ that seeks to ‘preserve [children's] innocence’ by steering them away from discussions of ‘gender and sexuality.’ The authors claim that the protectionist approach ‘merely reproduces the binary system of sex/gender and heteronormativity, thereby creating inequalities between boys and girls and making invisible and stigmatising children's non-conforming subjectivities and bodies.’ The authors want to ‘affirm children's right to...genital autonomy, bodily integrity, and sexual agency’ so that they are able to ‘discover and live as their authentic selves, free from heteronormativity and binary definitions of gender, sexes, and sexuality.’ The paper calls for ‘projects, curricula, experiences and safe spaces where children can explore and express their [gender and sexuality] without facing inequality or discrimination.’

This is pseudo-intellectual claptrap that strikes a liberatory pose to garner support but which conceals a contrary agenda. To get a pertinent answer it is often necessary to ask an impertinent question. And a simple one. Ask yourself this: with so many pressing issues in the world, why are certain people so keen to bring an end to the view of children as innocent, encouraging them to explore their sexuality?

And relate your answer to questions of power, control, interests, and resources. I would link it to the drive to put sex on a spectrum, dissolving the sexual binary so as to move biology into the corporate tech. sector. It’s big business, with the corporations looking to make billions. It’s also about power, with governments made in the corporate image looking to assume complete control over reality and resources, breaking up the family, primary loyalties, and proximal relations to take complete power.

I’d like to write on the language used. These papers are generated in the academy, produced by hired academics. They have intellectual form but not the content. It’s a world of words without substance, texts without referents in reality.

This anti-realism has been the dominant intellectual and cultural mode for half a century. I recognise the high-flown language and the paucity – and perversity – of thought. I knew in the 1990s that I was swimming against the intellectual tide. Such thinking made me regrect returning to academia in the 1990s, and made me want to leave it as soon as I could. I could speak here in the voice of a PhD philosopher or as an ex-building worker – such thinking is twaddle and should be dismissed as such in short order. Which brings me to my main point – why such manifest twaddle should be considered profound and intellectually substantial just because it is credentialised.

‘Academics’ – people overflowing with academic qualifications – are among the most stupid people alive. They are people who make some of the worst errors causing huge problems for people. Such ‘intellectuals’ are inordinately skilled as reasoning well to bad conclusions and rationalising well to present poor outcomes as the best of all possible worlds.

I make these points not to insult or abuse, but to try and unravel the paradox as to why so many clever/certified people can be so stupid.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect refers to the tendency of those of average or slightly above average IQ to think themselves far more intelligent than they are, and to think people who disagree with them to be far less intelligent than they are. We may call them midwits, midwit mediocrities who flock together and reinforce their prejudices among one another. Such consistently overestimate their own intelligence, whilst at the same time underestimating the intelligence of those with whom they disagree, people who are often much smarter than they. They lack discernment, they lack wisdom – they lack the epistemic humility required for learning: ‘only this I know, that I know nothing.’ When you already think you know all that there is to know/need to know, then you are disinclined to seek further knowledge. Such people are ill-equipped to assess how little they know. It is this that makes them incredibly stupid and inept. For all that they possess an average or slightly above average IQ, backed by all manner of academic certification, they say and do the most stupid things. Indeed, we have reason to describe them as stupid, for the reason they never learn, merely repeat and reinforce what they already know. Unable to learn, adapt, and innovate they are stagnant, sterile, and stupid. I hate to sound abusive, but these descriptions are apt in terms of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I appreciate that I may be making statements here that are stronger than the evidence allows, and that there may well be a need for further qualification. In describing ‘academics’ as stupid, I may well be presenting myself as exhibit A in the Dunning-Kruger effect.

But, of course, only those who know a lot know how little they know. Intelligence lies in humility. The more I know, the less I assert, Bertrand Russell wrote somewhere. The paradox is that whilst those of average intelligence overestimate their intelligence, those of higher intelligence often underestimate their intelligence. The really intelligent people are more impressed by how little they know than by how much they do know. Midwits are so impressed with what they know that they can tend that that is all there is to know and/or all they need to know. They are blithely unaware of the limitations of their knowledge. Oddly, ‘uneducated’ folk of below-average IQ often share the same trait of the highly intelligent in that both groups are humble and smart enough to know how little they know. Rather than claim a knowledge they don’t have, they will say that they don’t know and have the desire and the courage to find out. Which is why – to put the point provocatively – the dimwits are a whole lot smarter than the midwits. The dimwits are closer to reality, seeing how things are and how life works without filters. They have a belly-to-earth understanding that those who inhabit a realm of symbols, abstraction, and mediation lack, or dismiss as ignorant and unlearned. They have retained the sense they were born with and not had it educated out of them. They are not ’educated’ enough to be persuaded that men can ‘become’ women or any number of the impossibilites and sophistries being peddled in this age of deceit and delusion. That is why they have to be coerced into compliance, and why the new manufactured truths have to be enforced. The ‘uneducated’ don’t fall for the pseudo-intellectual nonsense produced by those who employ a range of grandiloquent phrases to try to conceal the fact that they are saying nothing of substance. Orwell described such people as cuttlefish squirting out ink:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

‘Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them,’ Orwell is often reported as saying. It sounds like Orwell, but is not something to be found in his works. He did say something very similar, though: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’ (George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945). Orwell was writing on one piece of nonsense. The contemporary world offers countless examples. This returns me to the paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, entitled Queering Children's Rights: Reflections on a Systematic Literature Review. The authors of this paper argue that protecting children from sexualization through the assumption of innocence ‘merely reproduces the binary system of sex/gender and heteronormativity, there by creating inequalities between boys and girls and making invisible and stigmatising children's non-conforming subjectivities and bodies.’ The authors argue that we should instead ‘affirm children's right to...genital autonomy, bodily integrity, and sexual agency’ so that children can ‘discover and live as their authentic selves, free from heteronormativity and binary definitions of gender, sexes, and sexuality.’ Who could disagree with such an intellectually cogent argument, not least given its liberatory intent? Just about anyone who is smart enough to want to know the substantive meanings behind the fancy words and fancy phrases – and not to take promises of liberation at face value. `

The words sound impressive, but what do they mean? Those innocent of Dunning-Kruger can see this paper is dreck dressed up in a faux intelligence. The argument must be highly intelligent seeing as it is the product of the academy. If it’s not art, what is it doing in an art gallery? It’s rubbish and you don’t need any special education to know why, only the senses you were born with. Whilst the dimwit sees the perversion very clearly, the midwit is ensnared by ‘education’ and swallows reasons and rationalisations that depart from reality. They celebrate it as smashing normativity, on the assumption that all norms are bound up with power relations. They don’t read in depth, only certain approved authors at surface level. They rehearse and recycle stock arguments as opposed to actually arguing. They know nothing of history, nothing of anything. They know what they know, and think that to be everything. They are the products of immediacy, thinking knowledge is obtained at the click of a button. They seek a knowledge that confirms what they already believe to be true. They are condenscending towards those who have the temerity to hold contrary views, insulting their intelligence, thinking their scarcely reasoned assertions and assumptions sufficient for agreement.

They are unable to use their own words and thoughts to express their views, and instead rely on the internet to do the heavy lifting.

Wisdom is knowledge allied to the capacity for discernment and judgment. Without discernment and judgment, knowledge falls short of wisdom, the possession of midwits who, for all they do know, don’t know how little they know. Such people are easily used and manipulated by forces beyond their comprehension towards ends that are the opposite of the ones they think they are working for. Such people become like the gullible women in 2 Timothy, forever 'learning' without ever arriving at the truth:

But understand this: In the last days terrible times will come. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

2 Timothy 3: 1-6