I was born and grew up with certain qualities. One of the most significant was that I was very intelligent, much more so than many others around, young and old.
Saying such things provoke a response which we now may call “being triggered,” a “micro-aggression” which provokes angry interruptions from others. I believe that after all, we have been conditioned to do so in general for people who are outliers in ways unsanctioned by the group mind. The terms of triggering and micro-aggression simply put a name to responses which were previously vague.
“You think you are so smart.” Well, I am. Whether to admit it or not, to myself or a hostile society, there are certain truths which I must believe and incorporate, or despise about myself.
Some persons, for example, find that their truest identity does not comprise their biological gender. That is largely a matter that is not my business. But I do recognise a brittle American societal inability to tolerate deviance from its norms. It demands that transgender individuals sequester off and despise the part of themselves that is different from social expectations, or alternatively, embrace rage and hubris against the evanescent and indistinct body of “oppressors.”
Neither of these two approaches makes sense to me, for people who are transgender, or people who are highly intelligent. The first are loudly denounced as deviants; the latter are slowly strangled throughout their lives by the ressentiment of the dumb-asses.
I am not in Mensa. I do not know my IQ. Those are, to me, “safe spaces” for deviants to self-assemble in isolation from an oppressive society, and affirm whom they are. All transgenders should move to San Francisco or New York, places more friendly to transgenders, no?
Studies show that New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont are asserted to be transgender-friendly, while Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, South Carolina are not.
Something seems pernicious to me to tell people to go to where they are wanted.
In America, it is much easier for the highly intelligent. They are not wanted anywhere.
Nobody wants a smarty-pants. I understand that. I interact well with people of all intellectual abilities, and have no shibboleths about the intelligence of others. I don’t denigrate people who are not as smart as I am; I accommodate. When giving directions, I am skilled at rudimentary explanations as well as those geared towards others who are very bright.
But accidentally showing off brilliance often provokes hostility, even physical attack, from others who somehow feel threatened.
I have always been disgusted by the network show Big Bang Theory, and perhaps even more so by Young Sheldon. It is a field trip to the menagerie of the smart, those whose intellectual gifts are blemished by their serious deficits in other ways. Thus, we can feel smugly superior to them. All they can do is understand Minkowski space. They can’t find true love.
Since the very start, I had one hue on the palette of brilliance. There are many hues, in the way that no person is simply an aggregate of easily-enumerated qualities. My smarts never translated into profound skill in chess. Rarely, if ever, do I feel brilliant playing chess. My analytical skills are okay, and my insight reveals itself well on occasion. I am not as good a player as Anna Cramling, whom I find delightful; and of course, Pia Cramling, her mom, a quiet plain-spoken grandmaster whom I adore. I have no need to measure myself against their skills. Their brilliance is of a different sort.
I grew in the blue-collar outlying neighborhoods of Boston proper, which was not a place that cherished intellect. The terrible mistake that I suffered was to be skipped over second grade at the insistence of my parents. They did not know any better. They really thought it would help. All-in-all, it didn’t. Living with the mantle of brilliant youth did not go smoothly in a class of those older than I was; true, by a year or so, but in the regimentation of the American educational system, a palpable outlier.
Rather than proceeding through an autobiography, I want to wind down and observe how profoundly anti-intellectual American society is and has become. In many civilized places, people look to the few who have studied problems and analyzed solutions to some particular issue for informed perspectives. We, on the other hand, Google and then argue. We have taken up the trend of buttressing our opinions by wider and wider deviations from reality. The red-faced man always wins.
I was naive for some time, looking for the Wild beyond the Wall of Zamyatin’s novel We, where intellectual types could flourish. For a while, I was deluded that the rat’s nest of American academia was a respite from vicious tribalism. I was a slow learner in that regard.
I am eager to hear any responses from others which this essay might provoke. If you are triggered, stow it. I’ve heard it all. But others who live the hunter-gatherers’ existence of the intelligent folks in American society, do chime in.
I was intelligent once, too. A lot of good it did me!
Does intelligence equate to wisdom?
Of course, Socrates claimed that his wisdom consisted precisely in the fact that he knew he was ignorant, at least, ignorant of the big things, such as, definitions of wisdom, beauty, truth, courage, justice, prudence, friendship, piety, yes, piety, etc. He obviously knew some mundane things, too numerous to mention. Don't most of us?
In my experience, you're the first to proclaim so boldly on a public platform that you are very intelligent. Normally, a smart person is humble, no? Maybe not. Larry Summers, Mike Pompeo, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham seem cocky about their IQs. But they are humbugs all, and, granted, probably have lots of grey matter, better to marshall their evil artistry more successfully.
What, more precisely, do you base your much above-normal intelligence on? Being moved up a grade in school a year early? My mother was promoted in such a way twice. And no one loves their mother more than me, but she wasn't that smart. My dad won every political argument they ever had on the merits, which I noticed early on. He was just right; she was just wrong: The facts and logic were on his side.
So is your laurel deserved? I don't know; you write well, use big words correctly, but that's a relatively easily learned skill (I taught college English, so I've seen it; just keep reading, writing, and getting some constructive criticism, and the magic happens to those that do so).
However, even if self-deluded, you seem an affable chap, so I enjoyed your gambit here; it was strikingly different. Keep up the good work. Talk soon maybe.