The Ecphorizer

The Mismeasure of Mensa 6

Lottie Fish-Bate

Issue #36 (August 1984)

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Part Six:  Lost word recovered, the John Birch connection

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[quoteright]During rehabilitation of the dams, both for power generation and flood control, we arrived at even the remote dams in the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. One of the great aqueducts for power generation had been destroyed. In the process of connecting up this aqueduct with the dam from which it originated, a massive subterranean chamber containing a whole university with its library was found within the dam. What a find! All perfectly preserved!

The history of this John Birch University, discovered when making the "John Birch Connection," was naturally included among the documents. They reveal that back in the 1960's when anti-Communists like Dr. Fred Schwartz were predicting Communist conquest by 1970, some of their number were top executives in the private utility companies which built these hydroelectric plants. These companies prepared in their largest dam a secret hideout from nuclear war or from Communist takeover.

The breakdown of John Birch University arose from the uncontainable radicalism of the students over the Viet Nam War. The deans and administrators played a double game, invoking American patriotism over the war even though ideologically opposed to an Asian land war. The youth in training at JBU seized the administration offices, demanded an all-out expose of the international bankers, the Federal Reserve Board, and the multinational oil interests, and an immediate withdrawal from Viet Nam and an invasion of Cuba. In response the deans flooded the student dormitories, and the university was abandoned in 1967. Caretakers kept it in readiness for any emergency, apparently, but no new documents were filed there any longer.

Scholars have generally accepted the library as a good picture of intellectual life at the time, and as a source of prior world history. I question both points.

On the one hand, the documents are invaluable, no question about it. We have set to rest much quibbling by Immensans. The Mensa Creed, we now know, is not a weird occultic poem from the 20th Century, infected paradoxically with Immensism. Let us consider Immensan allegations about "Mensano" which I include at this point.



Immensans claimed that our creed was an irrationalist abandonment of the whole basis of modern philosophy, the rationalism we can now identify as deriving from Descartes. Descartes regarded animals as mere machines, only Man having a soul. No one in Western culture believed in reincarnation except occultists and, most shockingly, Nazis, the Immensans claimed.

Now we know differently. Nazis were bitterly anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. Yet Mensano has now been traced directly, almost word-for-word, to the Christian holy book, the Bible, Except for three lines from the New Testament, all the creed is found in the Old Testament, sacred scripture to the Jews. Lines 10 to 12 are from Hebrews 4:12. All the others are from Job. Lines 13 and 14 conclude Mensano and are drawn from Job 33:28-30. The first eight lines are from Job 14:12-151. Line 9 is Job 12:10.

The Immensans have not been silenced, however. Now they charge that Mensa is not original, but is just derived from other religions. However, the whole history of religion has been the advance to higher religions through purging false and unworthy concepts from older religions. Mensa took the best from the best prior religions.

Whereas we now have so many Bibles in different languages and translations that we cannot doubt its authenticity, no other John Birch documents can be accepted without question. Immensans have treated the books and series of books of philosophy found as if complete. Yet we find no books by any of the great women philosophers. There is no denial, for example, that Hypatia was among the greatest of Greek philosophers, perhaps the greatest of her time (about 500 A.D.). Yet none of her works have been found there. Her immortal Mensiades is bound under the title Enneades and attributed to Plotinus. John Birch University is self-confessedly partisan. Documents from outsiders identify it as male chauvinist. Clearly, the John Birch Library distorted history to eliminate the key role of women in history. In contrast, the only text beyond bowdlerization, the Bible, is full of significant women; from the Old Testament alone are Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, Jezebel, Athaliel, and Esther.

The John Birch texts even betray a process of fakery. Several books admittedly by female authors are given as if by males, notably "George Eliot" and "George Sand."

Immensans are delighted with the John Birch rewrite of history, of course, because they like to imagine that men can be the equal of women. Everything we can directly experience proves that women are vastly superior -- we hold all the leadership positions and write everything of significance. The unrepresentative books at John Birch University have to be heavily discounted; there never was a world in which women were inconsequential in political and intellectual life.

More later...

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