In the book Tales of New America, there is a scene which stuck with me. In it, an intelligent, educated man of some stature is attempting to sneak in to the “red state” half of a Balkanized America. The man is wealthy, powerful, and possesses the self-confidence of such folks.
He is outsmarted by a lowly, unattractive border guard. The border guard explains that he was not a good-looking man, nor was he privileged to attend great universities. But that didn’t mean he was stupid. The assumption that a man employed in a lowly, backwater job is dumb is a mistake. In this story, it caught the interloper by surprise, and cost him his life.
Laymen, you see, are not necessarily in their station because they are stupid. Modern media talking heads push college education on us, as if to say not attending college means one is stupid and uneducated. It is saying that colleges have a monopoly on education, and graduating from one is proof of intelligence.
This, of course, is utter bullshit. The average IQ of college graduates has been decreasing for decades. And this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Pushing more people into the system is likely to reduce the average IQ simply by increasing the number of lower-IQ individuals applying in the first place. Second, affirmative action has resulted in a push to bring in individuals with lower test scores and GPAs into prestigious schools and scholarship programs. This, too, results in a decline. Even the military is starting to take notice of the trend.
So no, the degree doesn’t serve as proof of intelligence. And insofar as it once suggested above average intelligence, it now fails that test too.
Now, one might say that construction workers are still likely to have lower IQs than, say, Harvard graduates, and that is likely to be true. But the difference is narrowing. Furthermore, the disconnect between folks of the Ivy League world and the regular Joe has never been greater. While Yale students are worrying about microaggressions in Halloween costumes, average Joe is worrying about whether or not he will even have a job tomorrow.
The anointed, of course, find this utterly amusing. If average Joe loses his job to a bunch of illegals, this is supposed to be funny. Folks like Movie Bob suggest that not only are the Joes stupid, but the stupidity ought to be treated as evil. See if you can spot the horrific implication he’s making here:
Eugenicists would love this. Of course, they would probably send Movie Bob to the ovens for being an obese idiot, along with sending us to the same place for being politically unreliable. But never mind that. The point is, people like this consider themselves to be fundamentally superior to the laymen. It’s an attitude that even infects people nominally on our side as well.
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by more than 2-to-1. And when analyzing a breakdown of their spending, her strategy becomes clear: blanket everything. It was the sociopolitical equivalent of telling all of your soldiers to blindly charge the enemy’s position, because you have superior numbers. The tactical stupidity of this ought to be self-evident (but apparently it isn’t because people keep trying it).
Donald Trump, on the other hand, carefully targeted his resources for maximum effect. You see jumps in types of spending based on time. For instance, in the last months before the election, he outspent Hillary by far in polling. Trump’s campaign knew exactly where to target last-minute ad buys and rallies based on this data. The anointed were calling Trump stupid for spending his last month campaigning in places like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Turns out he wasn’t.
For all their vaunted education and intellectual credentials, the intelligentsia was outsmarted by a boorish real estate developer. Note also the difference in payroll expenditure. The way things work in the anointed world, and I’ve seen it first hand, is everything is accounted in terms of the size of your demesne. The more people you have, the more powerful you appear. Their first instinct is always more. More money, more people, more media exposure.
Even a regular old construction worker can tell you that at a certain point, more people and more money won’t buy you a damn thing. In fact, in many cases, adding more people just means there are more folks getting in the way. Most laymen have an instinctive distrust of committees, and for good reason.
So what is the difference between the layman and the anointed, anyway?
It isn’t precisely college education, though that is related in some fashion. There are laymen who hold advanced degrees and do excellent work. And there are laymen who hold no degree, and nonetheless do great work, also. The primary difference may be the focus.
Laymen are job-focused. You have to build a building, or fix a car, or write software to do something. The anointed are power-focused. Whether or not anything gets built is of no concern. Indeed, it may even be the opposite, in that if an organization they control ever achieves its primary goal (like, say, eradicating breast cancer), then their power would be diminished. So often times, their goal is to prevent the work from being completed. This is heresy to the layman.
Working-class voters came out in droves for Donald Trump, and the primary reason for it is that Trump at least acts like a layman in his thinking. His goal is to build buildings. His focus is the work, or at least it appeared to be to millions of American voters. At least Trump has towers with his name plastered on them. What did Hillary have?
The promotion of the anointed as superior to the hoi polloi is an illusion designed to grant them power over the laymen. If the layman genuinely believes the Yale grad to be his superior, he might override his instincts, and obey. If enough laymen are fooled, the anointed keep their power.
It would seem that the average Joes are exhausted of the game, however. Somewhere along the line, they realized the anointed were lying to them. Or, at least enough of them were to cast doubt on the whole lot. But they continue to double down on what caused the problem in the first place. Observe:
We, as a culture, have to stop infantilizing and deifying rural and white working-class Americans. Their experience is not more of a real American experience than anyone else’s, but when we say that it is, we give people a pass from seeing and understanding more of their country. More Americans need to see more of the United States. They need to shake hands with a Muslim, or talk soccer with a middle aged lesbian, or attend a lecture by a female business executive.
We must start asking all Americans to be their better selves. We must all understand that America is a melting pot and that none of us has a more authentic American experience.
The anointed don’t like rural America, and that much is clear. The advice is always for rural America to become like the coastal cities, never the reverse. The author of that piece isn’t telling his coastal elite compatriots to go shake hands with a farmer in the flyovers, after all. Rural America is seen as backward and populated by idiots and troglodytes, whereas the coastal elites are rich in culture and intelligence. And those backward hicks need to start doing what they’re told.
But it goes beyond merely rural and urban. Rather, it goes back to the notion of the Brahmandarins. The anointed think of themselves as Brahmans (or Mandarins – they contain features of both). And everyone not of their caste must obey their dictates. They don’t need to sully themselves with work. Whether or not they are truly more intelligent, or better in some way, doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that they have power.
The thing is, intelligence isn’t the exclusive purview of the anointed if, indeed, they even still have all that much intelligence. When I see them executing Orwellian doublethink live on Twitter, I wonder how much intelligence truly remains in their caste:
Notice the rapid backpedaling. Once someone mentioned GamerGate, Peter Daou had to immediately change his opinion, because of wrongthink. The anointed are hyper sensitive to perceived political shifts. This has, in recent years, been used to embarrass them with planted political issues, like 4chan’s push of free bleeding, which led women around the world to bleed in their pants to protest the patriarchy.
And this shows the absurdity of it all. These people propose to rule the laymen, and yet no layman would have been fooled by such an obvious political ruse. He’d have said something like “well, if you want to bleed in your pants, that’s your own business, I guess. But seems kinda stupid and gross to me.” Even a construction worker with an IQ of 95 wouldn’t be quite that gullible.
This, of course, has led to colossal flip-flopping on political issues as the anointed try to gauge how best to play the power game at that particular moment.
So an anointed can believe, simultaneously, in an extreme example of doublethink, that evolution must be true, and evangelical Christians are stupid for believing in Creationism (and thus must be accounted as science deniers), while trying to tell us that biological gender doesn’t even exist. The fact that kindergartners can tell the difference, but Yale grads can’t, is telling. So much for the Party of Science, eh?
When a layman tries to point out the obvious logical holes, he is shouted down by accusations of stupidity, and told to go “educate yourself.” The assumption is that the layman can’t understand the subtleties of the argument. For instance, in the gender example, an “educated” man might reply with “well, we are talking about gender as separate from biological sex. Gender is a social construct. Since you don’t know that, you must be dumb.”
Granted, this is what they teach in schools these days. But it’s also a ridiculous argument. A casual observation of animal species in the wild is sufficient to prove the whole thing to be utter rubbish. We don’t have genderqueer dogs, after all. Insofar as gender can be a social construct, it is in direct and conscious contravention to nature.
The argument they make is along similar lines of the feminist view of the patriarchy, as some kind of all-powerful system of privilege holding back (or oppressing) certain classifications of people because of biases, both unconscious and conscious. If the patriarchy is holding you back from being a tri-gender fartkin, then logically it must be that your nature was to be a tri-gender fartkin, you were meant to be one, and the social pressure (gender as a social construct) prevented you from it. But this can’t be true. Tri-gender fartkins observably do not exist in nature. So someone made it up, and then demanded the fantasy be accounted as true, and when resistance to the idea was presented, said the fantasy proves gender is a social construct.
It’s all circular rationalization. It doesn’t actually go anywhere.
The layman doesn’t necessarily go through all of the rationalization hoops to arrive at a similar conclusion, he just looks at the person claiming to be a tri-gender fartkin, and thinks the guy is a loony. That’s what we used to call “common sense.”
But you will see peer-reviewed papers on the subject of gender as a social construct, with jargon-laden studies and complex, long-winded rationalizations and rebuttals… and some SJW will cite one and say “you are uneducated! Go to school!”
Winston tells us in 1984 that water is wet, and 2 + 2 = 4. Even if someone were to out maneuver him with superior logic chopping, he needed to hold on to these truths. Winston was the layman trying to keep his common sense amid the intellectual brutalization shoved down his throat by O’Brien and the Inner Party. You can almost hear O’Brien telling us that gender is a social construct, because the Party demanded it to be so.
And, as O’Brien explained, it was all about power, nothing more. Truth was irrelevant and could be manipulated anyway. Accomplishment was meaningless. Everything served the feeling of power. There was no other reason to exist. This is how our anointed elites feel. Their entire lives are an endless pursuit of power over their fellow man, and the emotional high this provides.
Whether they really are more intelligent in some way or not may be irrelevant, because in the end it doesn’t matter if the person asserting that 2+ 2 = 5 is smarter than you. He is still wrong, and is trying to deceive you (and often himself, too). Sometimes greater intelligence only provides a man with a greater capacity for deception.
I see little to be impressed about from these self-titled ‘elites’. From what I’m seeing and hearing they don’t display any intellectual, moral, or educational superiority. (Usually quite the opposite!)
I have never heard of Movie Bob and based and that tweet I don’t really care. Assuming intellect is a function of geography is beyond stupid as is assuming morality is actually a function of intelligence. I think i could find stronger arguments that high intelligence is more likely to be evil since more intelligent people will have an easier time of rationalizing their actions and will think on a larger scale. (Obamacare?!)
Bravo, albeit with a lexical quibble and a hierarchical quibble.
The lexical quibble is this: there are too many inconsistent uses of the term intelligence. That’s largely due to the Left’s determined efforts to redefine the term to uselessness, but at this point we’re all caught in it. Intelligence in the technical or Herrnstein-Murray sense is the ability to understand logic and perform logical operations: i.e., to work with abstractions and postulates or evidence pertinent to them. The common usages of intelligence are all over the map, including one you’ve half-stumbled into here: conflating it with effectiveness. That “lowly” border guard in Butterworth’s story was demonstrably effective at his job; he wasn’t necessarily very intelligent in the strict sense of the word.
The hierarchical quibble is this: not all the anointed are obsessed with power per se. Some are satisfied with influence, including influence over the thinking and decision making of the powerful. That group clusters in places that don’t possess direct or overt power over others, such as universities and think tanks. It’s well for them that they do, for their thinking, however intricate, nearly always proceeds from false premises. If they were required to be effective according to some objective standard (other than raising grant monies, that is), they would starve to death. In the niches best suited to them, they’re essentially free of the requirement to produce anything other than incomprehensible publications and grant money.
I have two coupled points here. The first is what economics terms the Principle of Comparative Advantage: essentially, that individuals tend to devote themselves to the sort of work that garners them the most “profit,” broadly defined. A lawyer might be a better typist than his secretary, but he’ll nevertheless leave the typing to her for obvious reasons.
The second point is the importance of risk aversion to self-selection into or out of an occupational category. Objective standards for performance impose a risk on those who commit to meeting them. Academics and other members of the intelligentsia that eschew the pursuit of actual power in favor of influence and stature among their kind are more risk averse than politicians. He who has elected to pursue political power is willing to take risks the academic / think tanker will not, even though by any rational standard politicians fail to attain their stated goals nearly all the time. Either he sincerely believes in his nostrums — my assessment is that that’s getting to be pretty damned rare in the American political class – or he’s confident about his credit-grabbing / blame-shifting abilities.
Some old favorite quotes:
Yes, indeed. The word intelligence is used much too generally. It is a form of language pollution.
That ties in to a larger issue. Progressives, and even a few Conservatives, have an obsession with their own intelligence. Their self worth is inextricably woven together with it. This prevents them from admitting error, because error would imply stupidity (to them), and stupidity would mean a corresponding loss of self esteem.
Soon, an individual so afflicted will come to be exceptionally good at rationalizations and logic-chopping, out of a sense of narcissistic self-preservation.
Thus we have a situation where many Progressives can out-argue most Conservatives, even while being blatantly and *obviously* in the wrong. Often the error is so blatant, it approaches “water is not wet” levels of wrongness.
So to them, intelligence is to be defended at all cost, and perfection is demanded in all categories. No error can ever be admitted, and the most ludicrous of positions must be defended.
In such an environment, everything gets lumped into a general intelligence bucket. It’s all muddied together. Effectiveness, competence, talent, skill, general “g” intelligence… whatever. It’s all the same to them. And they must see themselves as having the most of all of it.
As to the second point, I fully agree. The risk tolerant Leftist goes for power directly. The risk intolerant Leftist prefers to wield power via influence, and I’m guessing tenure + environment with lots of naive students makes higher education particularly attractive to those folks.
Change ‘self-esteem’ to ‘ego’ and you nail it. Modern society seems to confuse the two on a regular basis. It seems almost deliberate that things that actually build self-esteem are removed from children’s lives and we end up with a bunch of thin-skinned *ssholes. I’ll stop there before it turns into a rant.
In the case of the Leftist I think their drive to power is tied into their ego. Increasing the power and influence they wield not only helps to inflate their ego with the added benefit of insulating them from people who would challenge them.
As speaking monkeys people have very powerful ability to get food without working or fighting, some of us can simply convince others to give them food. Leftists are simply those who are more efficient in convincing others they are useful than in doing something useful. I’m not saying they can’t do anything useful at all, neither that they are all very efficient in convincing someone, just exactly what I said. Therefore their ability to influence others is their primary source of well-being. Hence the drive to power and prioritization of rituals and social structures over actual production goals.
By and large (there are exceptions) the intelligentsia are so full of rubbish that it’s probably not a good idea for them to stand on a curb on trash day: the garbage men might try to empty them.
It seems America’s progressives are definetily fooling themselves into believing they are an intellectual and moral elite – they are not only laughed at by us, but all around the world as well:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-21/baizuo-new-derogatory-term-millions-chinese-are-using-describe-americas-white-left-r
Excellent writing. It’s impossible to argue politics with irrational people, especially when I admit to being irrational myself on a lot of topics. I’ve read science articles about how all humans make decisions first, and only afterwards does the “thinking” part of the brain light up to rationalize whatever choice they made. I wish there was a way for people to argue or debate left and right without triggering that irrational knee jerk reaction.
Then common sense would really not be an oxymoron
It’s also important to realize that most “intelligent” folk, both elite and layman, are able to lie to themselves — and believe their own untruths.
Believing their own lies is the rot that is clearly shown when they refuse to hear arguments.
Great article.
A large part of the problem is that people commonly confuse “intellect” and “intelligence”. They are decidedly not the same thing. IQ is a tolerable proxy for intellect, ability to do well on tests, rather less, but neither is an effective predictor of “intelligence”, which is essentially the ability to bring a wide variety of experience and vicarious exposure [aka “common sense”] to bear not only upon daily life but also the inevitably unexpected circumstances which arise.
It’s always amusing — not gonna waste energy getting angry — when people assume that because I farm for a living in Kansas I’m not very bright. In the event, my first two degrees were in geology and geochemistry, after which I went on to soil science and agronomy. I worked four years as an analytical chemist and had the remarkable privilege of age-dating moon rocks. Oh yes, and fluent in four languages as well as conversant in half a dozen others. My neighbor carries two Ph.Ds and also grows vegetables.
The self-anointed (including KU drop-outs in nearby Lawrence) assume we’re as dumb as the cabbages and potatoes we grow, but who are the people actually lacking both intelligence, curiosity, and open minds? There is good foundation for the term “over-educated idiots”.
What a contrast with my 6 yo daughter. The tractor starter system has been AWOL for a week or so, but I finally fixed it yesterday. She was curious as to how I had done it, so I told her that I followed all the electrical connections until I found the problem, then put the broken pieces back together. “Well,” she said “it was built by people, so people can figure out how to fix it. Right?” She *already* has more intelligence than many people who consider themselves our superiors. And thus it is that a very young engineer’s mind begins to understand her world and enriches itself out here … beyond the anointed sidewalks.
Running a farm requires much more responsibility, knowledge and rational thinking than working at low-end office jobs that most of leftists do these days. Office plankton, whose ideas of how life work is often on the level of “muffins grow on trees”, thinking they are more intelligent than farmers is just ridiculous.
Quite so. Folks who can’t change a tire want to call farmers stupid… it’s lunacy.
Great article. It captured a number of thoughts that had been fulminating for me for a while.
One of the most often overlooked errors in cognitive processing is the tendency of experts to over-estimate the extent and value of their expertise. The best example I can think of is trading. A trader is considered brilliant if he or she can make the right call 65% of the time. But, just flipping a coin, pure random chance, gives you being right 50% of the time. The expertise, the brilliance, only gives you a marginal 15% advantage.
(chuckle) Well, Bill, I’ll allow that 15% sounds like a slim margin. But for an alternative view, here’s a snippet from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People:
On reflection, I’d settle for that 5%. As for a 15% advantage…how many people would I have to murder with my bare hands?
Economists, who believe themselves quite smart, are only able correctly to predict interest rate direction six months out about 25 percent of the time. Direction only, not magnitude. They could *double* their success rate by flipping a coin.
Thanks for a great article. Those who’d like to see a marvelous example of a good, decent, and smart working-with-his-hands kind of guy might want to check out a recent discovery I made, the Essential Craftsman channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzr30osBdTmuFUS8IfXtXmg
A good place to start is his “Why I Love Tools” because he not only talks about tools but about the importance of friendship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_f_6QsWutY&t=5s
In addition to learning about building and fixing, you’ll also learn a lot about responsibility and showing good sense—something that’s severely lacking among the “anointed.”
It has started to become common knowledge that the dietary guidelines that have been promulgated by The Experts over the last few decades have led to the most obese and unhealthy generation in history. It turns out that salt is good for you and meat is better than pasta. Who knew?
I am a person who is ridiculously good at tests, among other quirks.
The dirty little secret is that a lot of the “elite” are not particularly good at tests or acquiring academic knowledge, either. That is why so many of the tests have been dumbed down in the last couple of decades. That is why so many parts of academia have become hostile to highly learned scholars.
(That is also why the intelligent and curious entrants into academia will often have all their good qualities shamed out of them by hostile instruction and mentoring. The tall nail gets hammered down.)
But most of the current generation of elites are insulated from all honest appraisal of their skills. They honestly think they are smart as whips, when they are usually average or below.
They are given everything, and they benefit from networks established by their parents and professors. But without breadth of general knowledge or curiosity being fostered or rewarded in their bubble-world, and without much in the way of natural gifts to carry them, they end up as ignoramuses. They are good at mouthing the right set of comments, and that is all.
Basically, if you were good at word puzzles and okay at math puzzles, if you had a good vocabulary, if you could write short essays quickly, and if you could enjoy these things instead of being nervous, you could ace standardized tests of the old sort.
Today’s elites do not like challenging pastimes, like puzzles. Puzzles have right and wrong answers.
I think you really have it. I’ve been saying for a long time that it’s all about power and nothing else. Also you touched on this and I’ll repeat, to them (the anointed) not only is it just power but power now. They do not care about the long term future. They can’t admit being wrong ever. Even wrong a little bit is wrong in everything. When their power gig collapses and it will, it’ll go all of the sudden and completely and they’ll never never ever understand why.
“Winston tells us in 1984 that water is wet, and 2 + 2 = 4. … Winston was the layman trying to keep his common sense amid the intellectual brutalization shoved down his throat by O’Brien and the Inner Party. You can almost hear O’Brien telling us that gender is a social construct, because the Party demanded it to be so. And, as O’Brien explained, it was all about power, nothing more. Truth was irrelevant and could be manipulated anyway.”
Yeah, but the disturbing thing about quoting this example is that — in the book, at any rate — O’Brien won.
When the physical world goes sideways on the anointed, they immediately call for a tradesman to set their world right. Yet they still lord over the tradesman? The trades and crafts have more real, practical and useful knowledge than all the editorial boards and faculty lounges of the United States. Can lectures on genderfluid intersectionality repair a broken irrigation system, fix a Tesla motor, overhaul the traction system of that penthouse elevator or replace the broken banister on the sweeping staircase?
“They need to shake hands with a Muslim, or talk soccer with a middle aged lesbian, or attend a lecture by a female business executive.”
I’d be willing to bet that the author of that piece has no orthodox Jews as personal friends, has never discussed cars with a middle aged car mechanic, and has never attended a lecture by a libertarian. I’d also be willing to bet that there is a higher percentage of non-whites in my neighborhood than in his.
Note, too, the use of “they need to”, Not “It would be a good idea”. There’s more than a whiff of cultural totalitarianism there.
Also, I’m getting a little tired of hearing how crappy middle America is from folks who couldn’t wait to leave their home town for LA, NYC, or DC. The communities where our elites congregate are some of the most provincial places on the planet.
You make some very good points – but there is one striking error and one fundamental problem:
1. Yes, homosexual/bi-sexual behavior is seen in animals.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150206-are-there-any-homosexual-animals
http://nautil.us/blog/why-are-so-many-animals-homosexual
Now, I’m aware there are arguments discounting these findings — but I have a vague recollection that the kin selection hypothesis to explain the persistence of homosexual behavior has been around since I was in school back in the dark ages (i.e. gay folks help their relatives’ offspring survive at a higher rate).
2. I’m not sure your definition of “anointed” above – which I understand to be someone who is power-focused as opposed to being job-focused – can be made to be useful/operational. You’ve set it up such that the True Scotsman fallacy likely applies. Anyone who isn’t power-focused is excluded from your set of the anointed. The problem is that doesn’t lead to any conclusions regarding that person’s political leanings and without peering into someone’s thoughts, you can’t tell what is really motivating them. For example, take an in-house attorney who has a degree from an Ivy League school. Part of his/her job involves the development and enforcement of processes in order to protect his/her employer. Sometimes, those processes seem to get in the way of reaching an immediate result and there is a certain level of formality which is required in documenting exceptions to the process and approvals for nonstandard terms. Another part of his/her job involves supervising (directly and indirectly) certain junior attorneys. That being said, he/she is intensely interested in the job getting done — job-focused as it were – for if the contracts don’t close, there are no sales, the company doesn’t hit its’ targets and disaster would follow (reduced bonuses, risk of termination, etc.). Does he/she have a fair amount of power/authority? Yes. Is he/she power-focused by your definition? I suspect some would perceive him/her that way, especially in the sales organization. Now – is this person a die-hard Republican or Democrat? Would you characterize him/her as conservative, liberal/progressive, libertarian, or other political leaning? The short answer is you can’t tell from the facts given.
I also have some minor quibbles:
a. When you say 2+2=4 is true, you are making the very common assumption that you’re living in a base 5 or higher system of numbers (typically base 10). The following are also true statements:
2+2 = 10 (in base 4)
2+2 = 11 (in base 3)
Each are just as true as 2 + 2 = 4 (in base 5 or above).
The point is it is very important to document your assumptions as one or more of them may come back to bite you.
b. I agree with the other posters that you never defined “intelligence” – and that is an important step in understanding the problem before us as there are multiple possible definitions. I suspect your essay above uses intelligence in several internally inconsistent ways, unfortunately.
Just 2 my cents
“At some point we need to start treating “stupid” as functionally different from “evil”.
The corallary to this fallacy is that smart is functionally equivalent to good. I have three exceptionally bright offspring. If I said it once, I said it a million times, “Good is good and smart is smart and they aren’t the same thing.”
A large fraction, at least a third, of Nazi concentration camp and death camp commandants had PhD or MD degrees.
The most common grade given at Harvard is an A. That means if a Harvard graduate comes to you applying for a job and they have a 3.7 GPA, that means they’re really a C student.
Sometimes greater intelligence only provides a man with a greater capacity for deception.
The person with high intelligence is much better at concocting elaborate rationalizations than a person with lesser IQ. Which means the latter sometimes can have a significant advantage because he acknowledges the truth and gets down to the business of dealing with reality sooner and more honestly — while the former wastes valuable time and energy devising complex explanations why reality cannot be what it clearly is.
A high IQ unassisted by a commitment to the truth (including the courage to admit one’s mistakes) often just serves as an engine for generating nonsense. IMHO, the following article really helps explain why some of the dumbest ideas come from some of the “smartest” people:
Clever Sillies – Why the high IQ lack common sense
Porretto mentions different kinds of intelligence.
But I would like to resurrect a term to better reflect some the quality folks are pointing to: wisdom. Intelligence has many definitions, as Porretto mentions, but wisdom has a quality all its own, not necessarily directly related to intelligence.
Excellent post, excellent responses.
(h/t to Sarah Hoyt, through Instapundit)
Indeed. Wisdom is a word that carries a much greater weight. Intelligence, yes. But tempered by experience. Knowledge, certainly. But balanced with the understanding that so much remains unknown.
It’s rare enough. Socrates couldn’t find much of it in ancient Greece. I’m not sure how much better he’d do today.
leftists changing their opinions on a dime is nothing new. before adolph invaded the soviet union, american commie stooges were all in favor of the nazis. once he attacked stalin, they whipped around 180 degrees overnight.