“Good grades, good test scores…*nods head*, good kid!”
Those were the exact words uttered by the Principle of a school I was interviewing for. The memory of how he said it stuck with me because in that moment I realized intelligence (intellectuality really but many confuse it) was considered a quality that made the perception of any persons character overall better.I’ve found myself many times in situations where I used intellectual intelligence as a weapon to upset people, the earliest I remember was my year 7 teacher saying; “You’re lucky to have been born Matty you should feel special”, “special?” I asked, “Out of 500 million sperms, one managed to fertilize one of my mothers eggs.Woah! what are the odds?”, it wasn’t only back then when I went to Spain recently I was unlucky to get one of those hair dressers who starts giving you his opinions on whats wrong with the country and the government, it got to a point where I just snapped; “It’s a pity all the guys who REALLY know how to run the country are too busy trimming hair…”, rightfully enough he didn’t take it well and gave me a buzz cut I had to hide by wearing underwear on my head for the rest of the trip as I dislike caps and couldn’t find beanies in summer.
On the plane back it was no exception, a nice looking girl sitting in the seat on the opposite side of the aisle became quite friendly and asked; “That’s a cute unique accent, where are you from?”, a normal person would proceed to do small talk, not me…”I’m from a land where we never a finish sentence with a preposition =|”, I think she spat on my steak while I slept cause it tasted minty and she was chewing gum, oh and not to long ago I was invited to a barbeque, “I’d love to join your primitive tribe, as we stand around the burning fire sharing exciting trivial adventure stories, celebrating with a feast the recently caught prey”, I could go on and on.
I keep having to tell myself in those don’t-feel-like-socializing mood moments, “Matty you’re acting quite arrogant for something that was pushed face first out of a vagina” (still find that word funny, almost as giggle worthy as boob).
But why do we value others intelligence so much? does possessing intelligence make a person better in the judgment of good from bad? does it make anyone but themselves happier?
How About a Fountain of Wisdom?
The only reason I can see intelligence as a great virtue is in allowing us to be successful at most of the things we personally want to achieve but that isn’t necessarily something that will benefit anyone but ourselves.I don’t get many chances to use Godwin’s law in my articles and this seems to be the right moment, Godwin’s law states that no matter what topic an online discussion is about, the larger it gets the more probable it will end up coming back to the comparison of Nazi’s or Hitler in some way.I heard Hitler wanted to be a painter and got rejected from art school (how different the world would of been if he was accepted) sparking my curiosity to learn more about him, from what I have read he seems to have been quite an intelligent man, the German economy was in ruins and in under 10 years he drove it to prosperity, he brain washed and manipulated one of the most intellectual and intelligent nations in the world full of brilliant thinkers and scientists getting them to support his atrocious ideologies, one of his closest associates was Joseph Goebbels a Ph.D from Heidelberg University, all that in my opinion are demonstrations of an above average intelligence, then again many famous psychopaths are.
Intelligence is a tool, an instrument, it’s like a gun, in the right hands it can be used for good and in the wrong hands for evil, what defines our perception of right from wrong is a special sensitivity known as wisdom.Happiness can come to a person who possesses intelligence and used it in the accomplishment of their ambition but the only way happiness can come to others from a persons intelligence is if that person also acquired its sensitive cousin Wisdom, like in the case of a scientist discovering the cure for someones illness.Intelligence allows us to see words and symbols to describe and understand a concept, we know if someone dies others will feel sad for the loss but unless we have the sensitive wisdom to observe people crying and how it affected them or experience it in our own skin and memorize how it feels, we won’t be able to feel sympathy or empathy for them.Einstein himself was a witness to how intelligence can be used for wrong stating; “If I had only known, I would have been a plumber!” after hearing about the atomic bomb, there is plenty of people with higher IQ’s than him who are like computers but what makes these types of individuals stand out in their intelligence fields such as Mathematical, Intrapersonal, Artistic or Linguistic is their sensitivity.Intellectual Intelligence allows you to think methodically, how many brilliant painters or musicians are capable of drawing or playing using the right methods as if they were naturally born for it but only a few of those also posses the quality of not only introspectively feeling their actions inside but also the world around them.These are the types of people who end up being Shakespeare’s, Wilde’s, Twain’s, Nietzsche’s, Emerson’s and Buddha’s.
Some are born with more sensitivity and wisdom than others, many of those people acquire the peak of their sensitive calmness early on while the rest of us have to wait till older age to get to the climax of our wisdom as we not only accumulate life experience, we also develop the same calmness they have by losing our outside distractions such as our pride, ambitions, testosterone, allowing us to focus our attention on our now calm thoughts resulting in insightfulness.How beautiful it must be to find joy and happiness from the simplicity of maintaining a garden, playing with your grandchildren or feeding the ducks at the park.
Of course this isn’t always the case, some people are just not born with enough sensitivity, it’s like any aged wine…the older it gets the better it will taste but it had to be made with quality grapes in the first place.The funny thing is, it only takes a good glass of wine to reveal someones ignorance.
Ignorance or Innocence, Which is Bliss?
I’ve heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” plenty of times before and in my innocence I thought it was true, I’m not much of a gamer but in my youth I loved the Nintendo 2 video games like Super Mario because they were so enjoyable, you had 2 buttons 4 arrows and that was it, now video games are loaded with amazing stories, graphics and to simply move the character you need to press 5 buttons simultaneously while juggling key commands =S but to me Super Mario was as good as it was ever going to get and I had just as much fun if not more than with any game I would now.I was innocent to the fact that Nintendo was already testing the Nintendo 64, If I chose to play those old Nintendo games now without trying anything else I’d be ignorant to all the other possibilities.
Innocence is not having learned something yet, ignorance is not being able or wanting to learn about it, with innocence your not aware there’s anything else while with ignorance you are aware and you chose to ignore learning about it which can lead to feelings of impotence by failing at achieving something you want from lack of knowledge, it also creates fear of what we cant or choose not to know.So in fact, Innocence Is Bliss, just look at the most innocent people of them all, children, can you find a group of grown up people that are as jolly as them?
White Lies are something that demonstrates our perception of ignorance being bliss, unless it’s an extremely sensitive/life or death situation I don’t believe there is any justification for lying to your friends and family saying it’s to protect them or avoid hurting their feelings.Obviously we can’t go around saying everything we think; “Here is your change Ma’am, have a nice day and oh what big nose you have”, but if someone asks a straight question like “Does this dress make me look fat?”, what would be the point of lying? if you tell them it doesn’t they’ll live with an ignorant illusion of a false reality and after a while they will start wondering why men don’t find them attractive, they’ll start questioning their personality and living in fear of not knowing why they are being ignored; “that dress doesn’t make you look fat, it’s all the cakes and cookies you eat that do” would be a more humane approach, if friends wont be honest with you who will? by telling the truth you give the person a responsibility to be able to take action, to improve themselves by working out or enhancing some of their other qualities instead, telling the truth is giving someone responsibility for their life instead of being cynical and cowardly hiding the truth making it appear like an innocent act of nobleness fearing it will reflect badly on you and your friendship, last year someone gave me a brown shirt as a birthday present; “Nope I don’t like it…I hate the color brown…but thank you for trying, now I consider you a better friend because you know one more thing about me and I wont keep to myself the idea that your a bad gifter all year around”.
We choose to ignore many things in life, when I was 13 my grandad was watching a boxing match on tv and a subtle comment escaped my mouth; “That’s borderline sadism” I remarked.He said you have to experience watching it in person to be able to understand it so he took me to a local boxing match near by the next night, there I stood surrounded by the emotionally repressed crowd who didn’t stop violently yelling, I commented to one of the Spaniards nearby; “With no self preservation need they deliberately go out there to inflict each other pain to a point where they can’t continue, if we saw two local drunks hitting each other at a bar we’d call the police, what makes this any different? they are drunk with the idea of victory, is it the colorful boxers? the judges? the concept being justified as an “organized” event? I don’t believe there’s any other specie in the animal kingdom who attack each other for entertainment only”, he said; “It requires skill, they know the risks involved”. Skill is just like intelligence, it can be used for good or evil, I assume hitting each other causing or defending yourself from physical pain and future eye or brain damage can’t be considered something positive, them knowing the risks that are involved and still proceeding to do it just shows either little sensitivity or a lot of ignorance, if we see a little kid playing with scissors we take them away…just because someone has physical grown taller doesn’t make them any more wiser.How empty our worlds must be if we must resort to watching such violent acts to feel alive.
Never got asked to go to a boxing match after that, a few months later though the bullfighting season started and my grandad being a big fan decided to take me along one afternoon, you can imagine how that went.I believe the word “Bullfighter” is wrongly translated, they don’t fight with the bulls, from what I saw I think it’s perceived more as a romantic dance to the death which is why the “bullfighter” wears ballet shoes and elegant clothing as opposed to a gladiators armor.None the less, it was one of the most horrendous animal cruelty acts I’ve seen and I was astonished to see how the public accepted such atrocious spectacle, the bull injured his claw running on the way out and was bleeding but they continued, they poked him several times with what appeared to be a javelin from a horse to calm him down, they proceeded to stab these nicely decorated sticks on his back which was around the time he started vomiting blood, as the finale to the great show the bullfighter changes swords to a sharper one and attempts to insert it right in the center of the bulls back trying to hit a lung so it fills up with blood and he dies quickly, unluckily this Matador missed the spot 3 times after each attempt removing the half way stuck sword and trying once more, finally they just decided to take it out of its misery by poking a knife on the back of its head as it was making these disturbing gasping noises, I’m so glad we paid the extra $1000 so we could enjoy such pleasant sounds in first row.The word ‘ignore’ comes from the word ‘ignorant’, I don’t care what reasons anyone tries to provide to ignore these acts, there is no justifiable motive to premeditatively yet unnecessarily harm another living creature and less so for the pleasure of others to view.
Ernest Hemingway is one of my all time favorite authors, a man of great intelligence, a passionate aficionado of bull fighting, one day decided to scratch an itchy in the back of his head with his favorite shotgun, he once stated; “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”.Don’t you just love when history facts fit in to place? Which brings me to my next point;
Suicide Is a Sign of Intelligence
Now I know that’s quite a serious statement and I’m not one that likes to start controversy…who am I kidding? yes I am. I always wondered why animals never committed suicide, some say it’s because they are incapable of feeling depression, after researching online I found that countries like Jamaica with an average IQ of 73 had suicide rates of 0.5, Albania with an average IQ of 90 has suicide rates of 2.9, on the other end of the scale countries like Germany with an average IQ of 102 has 21.8 rates and Japan with 105 average IQ’s has 25, then I started wondering why religious people commit less suicide than your average atheists, why people in countries with caste systems such as India have less suicide rates than Americans even though they are poorer, or why in the past people who lived in the middle ages didn’t commit as much suicide as the ones today.Yes I’m sure the first thing that comes to mind is stress from work and modern life, materialism, we live in an industrial age of competitiveness but those are only the exterior factors that influence it, the real reason is intelligence and individuality.You see in the past the whole concept of being an individual didn’t exist, if you were born into a carpenter family like Jesus then you had to be a carpenter as well, thats how it worked, there wasn’t a decision involved, we were part of groups and had statuses in society, marriages were arranged, kings only married into their own blood and if you were born a peasant you never had the aspiration to be a king like you can now to be President. Everything had certain rules and those rules took away the responsibility from your own life, you were now part of a collective machine each having their duties and knowing what they had to expect from life, they lived in ignorance just like the people in the mentioned White Lies above letting others take responsibility for their life because only an intelligent person would refuse to follow such mindless rules and illusions.Now that we are somewhat “free” individuals we are responsible for our own lives, the ignorant accept their mediocre routine lives of waking up going the same job, coming home to sleep and get up again the next day to repeat the same task for the next 40 years, the intelligent however realize that there is no rules or religions that impose guidelines as to what we can or cant do and that the world is at our feet…we have the option to make decisions, choose alternatives and regret every single one of them, it’s too much pressure and stress, it would be easier if we worked as a collective society again where everyone had their life story already written and all we had to do is act it out, we could never get depressed and start crying over “All the things I could of done with my life if I had only ___ “, but now we are the directors, writers, producers, costume designers and actors of our life story. It’s wisdom that stops people from fulfilling such dark thoughts.
As Hemingway said, intelligent people suffer more, how many philosophers, thinkers, scientists, professors I’ve met that seemed so serious and rarely smiled?, some say it isolates you, an example of this was being in a car not to long ago and hearing the driver say; “I hate slow drivers”, would I dare bring up the sad truth?; “Why do you hate them? if they choose to drive at the bare minimum speed who are we to complain? maybe they had a traumatic experience driving…we don’t know their life, in fact blaming anyone for anything is merely an escape mechanism used by the ignorant to put the responsibility on others instead of yourself, it’s easier to try and change another person by asking them to drive faster than to work on yourself and develop the virtue of Patience“.By saying that I’d be as ignorant as they were by blaming someone else for doing something that is making myself unhappy in hearing such comments, wisdom allows you to accept people for who they are as part of life and with the biggest empathy hoping someday they’ll come to the realizations by themselves.
I find it quite sad that in our culture we decide to put our elderly away into homes while in many wiser countries they keep them close by even living with them sometimes even though this usually occurs out of poverty but it allowed them to share their vast life wisdom with their grandchildren instead of letting them grow up with friends, siblings, television or the internet as the main source of knowledge while their parents are busy at work.Then again my opinion is biased.
Remember this; Intelligence can help you at work but only Wisdom will help you at life, next time you’re judging someone by their intelligence…ask yourself if they are wise enough to make it a quality of admiration.
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