Why Are Smart People Stupid?

It is a simple answer.

Firstly, we have no definition of smart. Just like the words god, good, free, and nature; we simply just don't know how to define them and when we do it just comes out wrong. If we were more careful about the word it might start with the distinction between rote and process. But as we've learned, I had to bring up this distinction because nobody cared enough to do it. We confuse these things: people that know a lot of information with people that actual know what to do with information. It is a confusion between memory and true intelligence. We mess up this distinction and we mess up a thousand other things. All these mistakes are made en route to a complete breakdown of human understanding.

We simply have no clue what we mean when we call someone smart.

For that matter, and for the same reason, we make this mistake when we call someone stupid. So, the first problem is that we don't know what smart is. Smart people are stupid because they weren't smart in the first place. If we understood the definition we might call these people quick or clever or we might say they have great memories, but we wouldn't call them smart.

Additionally, people with the potential to be smart are worse off in our relativized culture and herd metality. They are alone and their high funtioning brain devolves into self-destruction and false rebellion. If we defined smart correctly we would find that there are high functioning people (probably many of them) that have this potential. We might also find that almost everyone, including those we don't call high functioning, that are capable of it. The truth is that our cultural/moral langauge and its product, our culture, do not encourage process thinking. Early education teaches science and assimilation. We are taught that the world is round and that tw0 plus two is four. In addition, we are taught that if we want to live in this world we have to play by the cultural/moral language rules. This in itself is not a bad thing, it is called being socialized. The problem is that what our culture asks of us is backwards. There is no place in this perverse CML game for people with quick wit and active minds. Nothing deep is reinforced for them as good and nothing complex in them is brought out. They are left alone feeling like villians.

In addition, when the quick mind become villianized by society it turns inward. It creates a structure of its own that psychologists call OCD. They pretend it is a disease of the mind. High functioning people with no training and no connections outside themselves are guilted into creating structured, rule-based lives in which they pretend to be protected. This mind then goes through stages.

Stage one: Fake rebellion. They rebel against CML and act out like children and they may in fact be children. They create another world where they are the creative artist or the militant misanthrope. The end product of this fake rebellion is anger and alienation. They wear funny hats and argue with people for no reason. They become a wild little Socrates that knows nothing but sophistry.

Stage two: Depression and hypochondria. These minds devolve into themselves, with no ability to integrate what they know with what is outside. Their internal life of rules and understandings does not match with the outside world. They act out, seek therapy, and sometimes become violent.

Stage three: Fake assimilation. They then pretend to believe in religion, philosophy, society and CML. They become rule protectors and not rebels. They selectively adhere to things in a vain attempt to salve loneliness.; Because they have spent their lives rebelling and being depressed they have less of a social network to protect themselves from error and this experiment is doomed to failure.

Stage four: Misanthropy and literalism. The middle-aged misanthrope with a quick mind has, in this stage, been broken. The potential is gone. The end result of this entire disaster is what I call the "lack of irony." The conclusion these people come to about their place in the world and society is that "the other has broken my rule." What they miss in this final stage is irony, the essence of art and creative thought. They have never been able to apply their own mind in an authentic way to art and possibility. They read and they side with the history of literalist philosophers and figures. The end result: they know nothing. But they have failed to find a social network and they are alone in their misery, too weak to be violent, and their only solution is suicide or a life of depression. It is a sad state for someone with potential, but yet that is why they seem stupid.

Smart people (or at least those with potential) do stupid things because they live in a world of the dumb. It is not (I might add) individual dumb-ness but a backwards, perverse cultural/moral language game that is at the heart of our blindness and self-destruction. These people (or for that matter all people) have a choice, to see the real world or to fall into herd mentality (the world of rote).