The Perverse Stupidity of Intelligence

It's not low-IQ people who are holding us back

After a week or so of listening to all of the best and brightest leftists in the US have nervous breakdowns about how all these stupid, evil people who think differently from the way they do are the knuckle-draggers who hold back all of human progress—as the other half prepares to try to drag us out of the quicksand these geniuses insisted would make a great shortcut—something occurred to me:

Is it really fair to blame stupid people for any of this?

I’m as guilty as anyone of ranting and raving about how stupid particular humans can be. Not to mention clots of them. Their dumb ideas have crashed my genuinely vulnerable (sigh, look it up, it’s out there) life over and over again, only for me to have to painstakingly pick it back up, like some reverse-engineered Charlie Brown. And then along sneaks another subnormal with a bowling ball. It’s easy to blame stupid people.

But wait a second—whose dumb ideas? They’re merely mumbling what they’re yelled at to mumble. Are they really the ones holding us back?

Sure, they swallow all the bullshit rationalizations for avoiding what needs to be done. They get an equal voice to you and me. Rats. Dummies are so destructive!

But where do those mass-produced media rationalizations come from? Who keeps pouring more mud into the quicksand?

It’s not the dope who forgot to jump out of the back of the cart. It’s the owner of the cart-rental guild who gets paid an extra fee if we’re stuck so long we bring the cart back late.

Do you know why you even have that smartphone that you use to complain about how dumb everyone else is?

It’s because we are beginning to have an inkling of the way this universe works. Only an inkling, probably, but enough to do things that for statistically all of time would look like sorcery.

You know why we have that inkling?

Because some uppity wop insisted that the Earth went around the sun, and not the reverse, despite what everyone around him was saying. So everyone around him buried him under the prison.

Those dummies!

But hang on a second.

When Galileo Galilei tried to share his amazing discoveries about the universe we live in, he was persecuted for his brilliance by people who wanted to cling to the status quo view of the Earth, which, at that time, was almost as self-centered as Magical Crackerism: We thought God put us in the very center of the universe because aggressive, unpleasant apes that smell horrible were his favorite animal.

If you’re very young, that might sound strange. But the dumb smart people weren’t always the enemies of Christianity. When it was in vogue, they were its most fervent defenders. Are we seeing a pattern?

In the popular imagination, insofar as any of you ingrates remember ore credit Galileo—fat chance when you can barely bring yourselves to credit NASA—such saintlike intellectual figures are typically persecuted by a bunch of illiterate villagers with flaming tiki torches.

I’m pretty sure the half-starving early-early modern peasants gave a huge bunch of fucks about what the monks and other privileged nerds thought about where the sun was. Yup. I’m sure Galileo’s heresy kept them up all night every night, when they should have been getting eight hours of beauty sleep before their next twelve-hour shift hauling cow dung uphill eight miles both ways.

No, you stupid genius. It was the brilliant, literate, champagne-socialist religious figures who couldn’t handle the new idea. It was the men in clean robes with all the credentials of the time, the sons of merchants, the soothsayers to the king, who decided that Galileo’s head should be on the block.

Did they send a few stereotypical drooling villagers to pick him up? I wasn’t there, but if they did, I’ll bet a thousand bucks they had to pay them.

It takes a million lying geniuses to hold one naive genius back. Unfortunately, the million lying “geniuses” are much easier to find.

You can’t even trust people with Asperger’s not to lie anymore, particularly if they have a high enough IQ to train themselves out of certain social deficits (usually, the ones that prevent them from acquiring power/attention/money).

Unfortunately, one of the downsides of increased awareness of neurodiversity—I mean, aside from the downside of having brute-forced your way through a sorrowful life undiagnosed till your fifth rape/trip to the mental hospital, and then having to watch little turds who have suffered nothing except some mild social dysfunction (which would more realistically be chalked up to being a little Eric Cartman) successfully demanding to go on SSI and also be handed the career you earned for their “autism”—I mean, I guess I’m glad they made all those stupid propaganda films to convince Americans that people who haveAspergers syndrome are actual human beings, even if I’m not sure I consider Dustin Hoffman or that Forrest Gump guy to be fully human themselves, come to think of it.

Ribera: You’re looking at the beginning of the peace movement. Not the shitty part.

Getting paid that much to act that badly has to be some kind of Jedi slime mold trick.

But there’s been collateral damage to our vision of human intelligence, to wit: the glamorization of idiot savantry.

Outside of profound, level two-point-five ASD and up, we have a better word for being an idiot savant where I come from: Being a stubborn, stupid, blinkered fuck.

I don’t care what that online IQ test told you.

If you use your engine to do nothing but run back and forth over terrain you’ve already seen five times today, going places nobody asked you to, you’re not a luxury automobile.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this lately—I’m sure you’ve heard that most people who are officially in the Being Smart professions are leftists, since they never shut up about OR fact-check this notion, and they seem to believe cronyism invalidates such statistics when it comes to everybody but them—but most of the people who manufactured the current crises are, technically, pretty smart.

But IQ is merely a tool. If you use the finest horsehair paintbrush in the world to smear your period blood around a canvas trying to be unique, it’s still plagiarized and gross. Get somebody to teach you to paint.

In in the hands of a sheltered brat who doesn’t know anything, outside of their chosen hobbies and whatever blinkered slice of a profession or trust fund it is that makes them their “I don’t have to deal with the problems I cause” money—and if you have anything like decent parents, money seems easy to make when you’re smart, which is another great way to be sheltered from reality while thinking you deserve all these boons—intelligence is just a full-steam idiot machine.

Because the wonderful thing about human intelligence is that it can be used to manufacture just about anything.

Including excuses. Rationalizations. And self-aggrandizing fantasies.

Yes, it only takes one brilliant, honest human being to come up with an idea that revolutionizes/saves the world. Or, in the case of Galileo, eventually leads us to the heavens.

Too bad there are millions of equally brilliant, soul-rotted and dishonest people waiting to come up with reasons why he should be stoned to death.

Unfortunately, even amongst the people who come closest to seeing the light about this sort of issue, even thinking about what we should do about the new and hideous facets of human nature that the internet and democracy have brought to the surface like a particularly itchy case of the shingles gets me called “naive.” And don’t start in on feline evolution.

Because, even though we have the facts on all of human history in a box in our back pocket, our vision of intellectual history is becoming a collapsed parody.

If you start thinking a new idea now, yeah, you can expect shitty treatment. Especially from the people who should be best poised to understand, but won’t.

But that’s the only way things ever get incrementally better. Yes, legions of self-interested, high-midwits will throw themselves in your path, foaming at the mouth, calling for your head, calling you names.

But when they say things only get good when you plant trees in whose shade you will never sit—they don’t mean literal trees. I mean, go ahead and plant the trees, it does apply, and that will be beautiful in 100 years. But even with the Internet—perhaps especially with the Internet—smart people are so stupid that even the best idea is probably not going to work out until long after you’re dead. Christ, that sucks, but so does mortality in general. Play the hand you’re dealt.

I just saw the first major French exposition of Ribera, a painter who was sort of ignored as a student of Caravaggio, but on the canvas itself, he really upped the ante. He painted some portraits of veteran soldiers with haunted eyes. Portraits which I would have to call some kind of ancestor of our ideas of peace and restraint in war--but he painted them in the early 1600s. A lot of wars followed. His “naive” idea that maybe we should start thinking about what we are seeing in these men’s eyes had little to no impact during his lifetime.

But fuck the elite minority; he put those eyes that saw too much before the public, and they, along with many other observations both lauded and obscure, were the beginning of a long slow process of thinking: Hm, is that how I want to wind up?

But war is glorious. Do I want to be the guy who’s a coward while everyone else goes and dies? Do I just want to be a farmer and do nothing with my life? Live on your feet or die on your knees! Lord Elphinstone loves us, though. Maybe that guy in the painting just lost his dad. I’m so good at designing new crossbows, I probably shouldn’t think about this too hard… Yeah, he just lost his dad to old age. What a glorious warrior for our land! Too bad about old Dad. I should go have an ale or two with mine, before it’s too late. Yeah. I’m a good Christian and a promising young arbaleteer.

And maybe that warrior in the portrait did just lose his dad. Plenty of those rationalizations are largely true in many situations, or at least natural, noble, even. But Ribera specified that the subject was a soldier for a reason.

We have endless rationalizations, especially if we are clever at manipulating abstract ideas, which is why the smartest people, should they fail in their mission of being decent, soon become the dumbest and the slowest--it’s because they have the easiest time justifying being an idiot. (Ask me how I know! Actually, don’t.)

Every true thought thunk by a genius is potentially hundreds of years away from trickling through the bullshit—of other genii. IF IT EVEN MAKES IT OUT OF THE OSSIFIED MENTAL COLON OF THE ORIGINAL “GENIUS.”

It’s a tragedy when a person doesn’t get credit for what they contribute. Believe me, you don’t need to tell ME that, kid. But some people have always taken on the risk to think new thoughts anyway.

Come to think of it, on an individual level, swimming too far against the tide might be the stupidest use of intelligence of all.

But someone has to do it. And, fortunately for you stupid geniuses, it seems like someone always does, whether you stone them self-righteously to death or not.

Yet one can’t help mourning all the lost human capital, especially when it’s used to crush and destroy other, less pathologically dishonest human capital. I can’t but wonder how many excess potential thinkers have been shorn away by l’air du temps.

Because who wants to plant trees for the future when the kids are stealing all the sunlight? Our intellectual timeline has collapsed in an orgy of youth worship. If you’re not a noble savage, you’re an old fascist: Everyone thinks they're going to get famous at sixteen and then be admired for saving the world with their common-sense policies on love or ending xenophobia or leftism or gravity.

It's naive to think that anything good can be expected to come fast.

But we have become quick to give up on anything that fails initial A/B testing. Because A/B testing is the clever thing to do. That’s just how the Internet works. Play the cards you’re dealt? Right? Didn’t you just say play the cards you’re dealt? Ha ha, it’s OK to lie…

There’s a reason the woo-woos call this the monkey mind. They’ve plagiarized some decent ideas, you know. Even stupid people have this irritating chatter in the back of their skull, trying to talk them into keeping nice and warm in the comfy cozy quicksand. But the monkey mind of the subgenius is the most slothful spoke on the Great Wheel of Progress toward figuring out what the hell is going on—which is as good of a rationalization for any of us to keep breathing as any.

In conclusion, here: Have a song. If you don’t like the recording quality, send donations to paypal via asterzingerz@gmail.com.