Born with the Gift of Laughter, and a Conviction that the World Was Mad

 

There is a saying: “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” It is often useful to defuse one’s anger.

But is it true? 

It does seem to me that groups and nations pursue obviously bad policies, insist on obvious untruths, and seem impervious to explanations. One obvious example: the persistent insistence that there are mass graves of indigenous children murdered in the old residential schools. Another: that Trump claimed Nazis or white supremacists were “good people.”

Are they simply ignorant of the facts, only repeating what they have heard? No; if told the facts, they do not counter them; they just ignore or suppress them. They react in anger. Can it be that they don’t understand what is being said?

Let’s assume that people are this stupid. They just can’t make logical connections. Wouldn’t the obvious solution, then, be to select out those with the highest IQ’s, and have them run things? 

This is more or less what Plato proposed in the Republic. 

So should we turn things over to the “Experts,” presumably weeded and fostered based on their intelligence and knowledge by the universities?

No; these academics seem more prone to believe obvious nonsense than the general public. This has long been ovserved: the “ivory tower” syndrome. Academics is an echo chamber in which delusions can be mutually reinforced indefinitely without ever being tainted by reality.

How about selecting for raw IQ? 

And this is the premise on which Mensa, the high-IQ society, was founded.

And it did not work, does not work, either. On any given issue, you will never get a consensus among Mensans. They are about as likely to believe the latest obvious untruth as the general public. And hold to it with the same energy. A meeting of Mensans is like herding cats.

(Of course, I face my own logical problem here. How can I be sure it is the other guy who is clinging to an untruth despite evidence? Am I smarter than the Mensans? 

I recall this little poem by Albert Einstein: "A thought that often makes me hazy:/Is it them, or am I crazy?"

But all I can do is look at the evidence and arguments, and use my own judgement. I think it is conclusive if the other side does not counter. Although it might also be that they find the matter so obvious that arguing it is tiresome.)

It seems to me it cannot be incompetence, in most cases. It is deliberate self-delusion. Most people simply believe or try to believe what they want to believe. They believe whatever they find most comfortable or most in their interests to believe, and ignore both the truth and the general good.

I daresay women are more prone to do this than men… They will cover an ugly situation with a pretty word, and it will all be okay.

A case in point I noticed recently: a YouTube psychiatrist advising that you should cut all contact with any relative or spouse who voted for Trump, telling them “How could you vote against my livelihood?” (Sic: surely she meant interests). 

This presupposes that everyone should vote only for their own self-interest. (Given that it is also in one’s self-interest not to alienate one’s relative or spouse.)

And so, I arrive at an important truth about the world: most people are delusional, and people are morally responsible for their delusions.

Which explains why we do instinctively think insanity is not a disease, but a moral failing.

The Bible knows this. This is why, for example, it makes acceptance of the dominion of God the first commandment. Not to see this, to be atheist or agnostic or polytheist, is a deliberate delusion. 

And this, according to the Bible, is the litmus test for heaven: are you seeking truth, or not?

Mensa Poetry Prize

 

Delighted to announce that my poem "On the Night We Held the Moon for Ransom" has been unanimously selected as the winner of this year's Mensa International Poetry Competition.

Nobody Voted for Piggy to be Chief...

So how come HE wasn't commander of the Enterprise?

I read an article recently from someone who claims to often give advice to the unusually intelligent. The advice, as I recall, was, “you can either be smart, or effective. If you want to be effective, explain your ideas to your colleagues to bring them along with you.”

Amazing to think that the unusually smart could not figure this one out for themselves.

Of course, they can. It is a common fantasy—perhaps an inevitable fantasy—that the unusually intelligent somehow need our help to figure things out. Terribly flattering to us, after all, if true.

But the author is quite right to see that the unusually intelligent tend to be loners, not the ones most comfortable working in a group. It seems quite rare that the person in charge of an organization is anything like the smartest person in that organization.

Let’s try to figure out the real reason this is so.

First, the author apparently assumes that the unusually intelligent think in the same way the less intelligent do, so it is simply a matter of walking through their logical steps for the slower minds among us. Why would this be so? I suspect Aristotle had something when he observed that the ability to use metaphors well was the mark of genius. Quite probably, the unusually intelligent are thinking in terms of metaphor, analogy, pattern recognition—think analog instead of binary—and do not themselves plod step by step, from premise to conclusion, even if fast steps. This would explain why, when there is more than about 15 points spread between IQs, the person with the lower IQ is generally unable to judge the intelligence of the person with the higher one. They are just incomprehensible. If so, this makes it excruciatingly difficult, in fact, for them to explain their thinking to someone significantly less intelligent, because they have to do it in a way quite foreign to their own. It is like asking them to invent the same thing twice using completely different methods. Exhausting, to say the least.

He spoke in parables.

Asking them to carefully explain everything to those around them, then, may be like asking them to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic.

But there’s more to it than even that. As the persistent notion that we can give useful advice to the unusually intelligent perhaps suggests, most of us are not terribly sanguine about the existence, let alone close proximity, of someone smarter than we are. We tend to all have a certain amount of ego invested in the secret suspicion that we are the smartest person in the world. When, therefore, someone else who is not in some official capacity takes the time to patiently explain something to us that we did not understand, we are not usually grateful for the help. Instead, we almost always take offense. He is, after all, blatantly acting as though he is smarter than we are. Who the hell does he think he is? We’ll show him! We’ll deliberately resist doing whatever he suggests. And we’ll get ours back at him the minute his back is turned.

So there is a huge incentive for any unusually intelligent person to avoid groups and group work of any kind. It is madness for him to volunteer for any such thing. Doing so is not just trying to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic, but with a paraplegic who is furious with you and getting angrier every moment.

Hence, the genuinely unusually intelligent are not going to rise to the top of any organization. They are, indeed, almost certainly going to be “introverts,” certainly loners. It is not that the highly intelligent dislike other people, and it is not that they are socially inept. Why would they be? They are simply practicing self-preservation.

And, not incidentally, the surest way to destroy their education and alienate them from any possible contribution to society is the current mania in the educational establishment for “group work.”

Nor, I suspect, is this a simple blunder among educators. It is at least partly deliberate. They too have their resentments of those more intelligent than they.