Source: TW
I live in a country where 80ish is roughly the average national IQ. Let me tell you what it’s like.
विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)
To answer the common questions, I live in LatAm and I choose to live here because I value freedom and healthy communities that aren’t infected with degeneracy.
The most noticeable way this manifests is inefficiency. Obvious, easy, efficient, long term solutions to problems are often ignored in favour of short term solutions that inevitably create bigger or more expensive problems down the road or that use far more labour and time than is necessary.
For example, if something breaks, it may be way more cost effective to simply replace it and have the problem just be solved. But they’ll repair it endlessly (often in very MacGyver-like ways), spending way more money on parts than a new item would have cost, spending hours of time repeatedly fixing it every time it breaks, until they can’t fix it anymore. And then they still have to buy a new one.
At first, I would get very frustrated by this sort of thing, but eventually I realised that they like it this way. They enjoy puttering and tinkering and solving these little daily problems. It certainly results in a lot of creative problem-solving on their part. Despite the inefficiencies, they are very resourceful. I’ve come to accept that things just never work reliably and everything is precariously jerry-rigged. I have chosen to see it as charming.
There’s also very little thought given to future consequences, like a genuine inability to connect cause and effect, which has a knock-on effect of poor risk management.
Many don’t understand that if you spend all your money today, you won’t have any tomorrow. Or that if you walk on the highway at night in dark clothes, drivers can’t see you and may run you over. Or that if you don’t keep up on the maintenance of your house, eventually things will break that you won’t be able to afford to fix (because you don’t ever put money away to save). I could give endless examples of this.
On the flip side, they do seem to be way less prone to neuroticism or other types of emotional or mental instability. They aren’t spending their time ruminating over worries. Many of the things they deal with would cause me endless anxiety but they just don’t seem to care and seem to have an ability to just appreciate the little pleasures of life and thrive doing simple routine work. They seem much more content, unburdened by complex ambitions or the need to constantly improve everything around them.
I’ve come to the conclusion that having a low IQ society isn’t necessarily a bad thing when everyone in that society is at roughly the same level. They’re all seeing the world in much the same way and have consensus on how things ought to be and they make it work for them. That’s why they can still be a functional society.
Problems arise in multicultural societies where you have groups with widely varying IQs and the low IQ people are trying and failing to live up to high IQ expectations about how things should be done, while the high IQ people get frustrated by the inability of the low IQs to come up to their standard. Then huge amounts of resources are wasted on trying to make 80 IQs LARP as 100 IQs, and of course, that just doesn’t ever happen.