The Inequality Of Man: Contra Helvetius

...returning the burden of proof back where it ought by now, and long since, to be and to have been. Said Helvetius in De L'esprit, p.198: "who can be certain, that a difference in education does not produce the difference observable in minds?" This implies that the entirely environmental explanation of mental differences of ability, is the default assumption. That is not known to be true, it must be argued for, and compared with the evidence for the hereditarian position, which is never stated as the complete explanation, much less demanded to be disproved. The evidence is heavily for an important role for heredity, while the environmental assumption is stated in radical terms, and defended by the use of smearing methods against the hereditarians. Such methods indicate a weak position, when used by the most educated and knowledgeable in the relevant fields.
If groups are to be authoritatively assumed to be equal in authoritativeness, and one group denies this assumption, it would be self-contradictory to try to impose the assumption authoritatively. This also puts the default position back where it should be; neither favoring the hereditarian nor the anti-hereditarian premise, unless the anti-hereditarian one is stated radically, in which case, it has the higher burden.
Without egalitarian assumptions, the task of the power-greedy, to manipulate resentments of groups like races, nations, classes, religions, genders etc. in order to destroy resistance to despotism, becomes all the more difficult. Do we then have an explanation why this egalitarian assumption is held to so fiercely, but not in a random way, as to who wants more power to enact more theories, and who wants less of that kind of power-seeking?
Added 7-8th-08:
In the very next sentence of the above linked quote, Helvetius continues:" Who can assert, that men are not like those trees of the same species, whose seed, being absolutely the same, but never sown in exactly the same..." environment, as we say today.
The biology here is impossibly backward and totally wrong; fertile seeds are always different genetically, and such that the environment can, and often does, vary much less, when they're starting close to each other.
The logic is faulty or even outright mendacious, with the 'who can assert that men are not like those trees', improperly demanding disproof, where the burden was on the egalitarian making assertions of great moment.
This has stood for centuries, as facts have accumulated contradicting it, in immense volume, as if genetics does not exist and has not existed. To turn the burden of proof back on the population-genetic egalitarian now, though, threatens to overturn the edifice of state interventions, insofar as these are based on population-genetic equality being the default assumption, and one with discretion to raise indefinitely high, the standard for the (improperly demanded) disproof.
This issue is not like any other, in the malice and power-greed it evokes and thrives on; it is rich food for demagogues, agents-provocateurs and other devils of the moderne anti-culture.
Added 8-5-08 from: Monday, August 4, 2008

When Your Officials Say Everyone Is Equal, That's When The Mass Murders Start...
on a really large scale, more than on the opposite premisses. Internationalism and anti-hereditarian official beliefs, are the ones associated with the large-scale murder operations. People who refuse to magically lose their identity, when some power-seekers have in mind to equalize everyone into brotherhood and liberation for aggression, tend to get equalized to death.The danger is from internationalistic and anti-hereditarian regimes, when the criterion is mass killings being present or absent, more than it is from particularistic and pro-hereditarian governments. One is more ambitious, and in the worst sense of unlimited power-greed; the other implicitly acknowledges limits to such ambitions. In spite of this fairly obvious observation from history, one is taught with an emotional intensity that nihilists cannot otherwise summon, that the one big slippery slope is that which supposedly slides all the way down, when patriotic, hereditarian and, in some way, particularistic, regimes are allowed, or even made to sound not to be the worst. To argue against it with the facts though, will never be enough. One must drop the assumption of there being sincerity and good faith on the other side, the better to realize instantly, that the other side has to use attempted smearing, with just that slippery slope, and just that fake dilemma laid out, as described and implied above. It has to be a smear job against the exponents of even small inconvenient truths, since there is no good argument for liberating aggression in the service of internationalistic, anti-hereditarian power-greed.