We all agree on most things. Nobody is going to tell you that water isn’t wet, that the sun comes up in the West, or that getting run over by a truck is a lot of fun.

We all agree on these kinds of things because being wrong about them could harm us. It’s functional knowledge,  the kind you need just to make it as a human being on planet Earth. It’s also true that most of this knowledge is also immediately demonstrable. All you have to do to prove the existence of gravity is to drop something.

So there’s not a lot of room for disagreement.

But that only goes so far. Civilization requires more abstract forms of knowledge, and that’s where humanity’s unity of opinion. becomes diversity. Something as simple as the best way to chop down a tree or the most efficient route from A to B can support a wide variety opinion. These are questions for which an objective answer theoretically exists, but so do many different solutions of roughly equal merit.

Still, these are functional questions, and their answers have a direct impact on people’s lives. Therefore, people inherently seek the answer closest to the truth.

But when you go further into the abstract, the answers mean less in terms of coping with day to day life, and it is on these questions that the average folk and the naturally occurring intellectual class part ways.

It is we the intellectuals who concern themselves with Truth with a capital T. For average folk, it doesn’t really matter. Not when you really get down to the nuts and bolts of things. Of course, one cannot believe something to be true without believing it to be True, but when the issue lies outside one’s everyday life, there’s very little penalty for getting it wrong. Thus, belief can be shaped by other forces, such as one’s preferences, one’s moral outlook, one’s presuppositions about the world, and most importantly, by whatever is needed in order to meet the individual’s emotional needs.

And it doesn’t matter how loudly we, the scouts who explore the world outside of Plato’s Cave, shout at them that they should THINK about things. They don’t want to, and arguably, they can’t. Not in the way we mean it.

It’s like a gym teacher yelling at a fat kid to do a pull-up. Maybe the kid just plain can’t. Or maybe they can do it once and at great cost. But expecting them to do it as often and as well as the fit kids is not only unrealistic, it’s cruel.

Our brains are inherently efficient in a way that can seem like laziness to the uninformed. So to an above-average person, the sort of magical and/or emotional thinking that average  people use to derive their beliefs seems like laziness.

But these people are not lazy any more than the fat kid is lazy. The truth is that the task is objectively harder for them. And it is unfair and prejudicial for the above average to hold the average to their standards.

And odds are, the average person is devoting the exact same percentage of their mental resources to figuring things out as even the most high-flying intellectual, its just that the intellectually blessed have more of those resources to start with.

Where that leaves us in the naturally occurring intellectual class remains unclear, however. The problem with facing the fact that some people are just plain smarter than the majority is that a fundamental egalitarianism is built into the very pith and marrow of modern society. One of the main things that keeps the free world functioning is the reality equality, and one rule of that reality states that all people, no matter what, have a fundamental and unalienable status and worth and that therefore no person’s opinion is privileged and therefore considered a priori superior.

This deep rooted assumption is vitally necessary for a free society because it soothes our status/worth needs enough for us to cohabitate without bloodshed. Only when we are thus becalmed that we can be citizens of a free society and satisfy our need for status via peaceful and civilized (i.e. nonviolent) means.

Trying to come to grips with the notion that some people actually are born smarter and therefore “better” in one sense than others flies in the face of that assumption.

Which is odd, in a way. We readily accept that some people are more talented than others in areas like the arts or athletics. We can handle that some people are born better at math or writing or any number of other fields.

I think this is because none of those fields of natural ability violate fundamental egalitarianism like intellect does. The assumption underlying the notion of natural talents is that everyone has some kind of natural talent or talents, and therefore in sum total we remain equal. John is good at A, Jane is good at B, Will is good at C, and society needs people to do A B and C, so we all have a place and a role and a value.

But intelligence, like I have said before, is the ultimate advantage one can have over another human  being. Intelligence, at least in the abstract, makes one better at understanding and thus controlling reality.

To people of average intellect, we are wizards, and not to be trusted because we can do things and know things they cannot.

Therefore, a true recognition of the cognitive gap between the intellectual minority and the average majority would be to force people to recognize this frightening inequality, and I am fairly sure that would not go well for us brainy types.

Our safety, as it were, lies in blending in and making ourselves useful. To be good wizards, and use our powers for good, like the Disney version of Merlin.

Otherwise, they will see us as less Harry Potter and more Voldemort.

And nobody likes Voldemort.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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Been pondering the meaning and implications of being He Who Walks Through Walls.

Not physically, of course. Socially. Psychologically. Philosophically. What price have I paid for my much vaunted ability to see through to the truth all the time? What was it that made me able to inherently understand how the walls of social reality were nothing but puffs of smoke, as easily bypassed as a line painted on the sidewalk? Where has my extreme independence of mind really gotten me? When you can casually disregard the rules others live by, the very pillars of their consciousness of the world, what do those people think of you? Do they hate you? Admire you? Disregard you entirely because you’re mentally indigestible to them?

Mostly that last one, in my case, I think.

I am not sure if I was born with this fanatical need to be independent of mind or whether it’s a result of traumatic damage to my social antenna. Certainly I was very bright from the beginning, and I have theorized in the past that this might lead to a developmental bias towards intellectual growth over a more concrete social understanding of the world.

But perhaps that also leads to taking things far too literally. I have also talked here about how us nerdy intellectual types completely misinterpret social interactions because they take them far too literally and end up missing the social context entirely.

You know, one kid walks up to another, insults him,  and slugs him on the shoulder. Where he comes from, that’s a standard play entreaty. He expects to get the same in return, followed by maybe some play-fighting.

But the kid is from an entirely different social context where there is no such thing as playful violence, so as far as he knows, he was just randomly assaulted by a stranger. He reacts accordingly, crying out in pain and looking at the first kid like he’s a monster.

The first kid doesn’t know how to interpret that, so he reacts to it as a rejection. So he does what his social context tells him to do, which is to call the other person a wimp for reacting to a simple greeting-punch like it’s a brutal karate chop to the nads.  In his social context, that’s meant to solicit the proper play-fighting response.

But devoid of social context, this seems to the punched kid like a further assault, and one that is brutally (and brutishly) unfair.

And so forth and so on. I’ve been through this before.

The punch to the shoulder is, I admit, an extreme example, but I think the basic misunderstanding between the two sides of the intellectual coin runs through all the problems that we nerdy types run into. By being ignorant of most of the social reality that defines the lives of people of average intelligence, the nerds constantly misunderstand what is really going on around them and end up viewing the world as more arbitrary and cruel than it really is.

Whoops, I started off trying to talk about myself and then wandered off into the academic again. How intellectual of me!

Back to that ferocious independence of mind. It really feels inborn to me. Like it’s the other side of the coin from my passivity. I am passive and tend to go with the flow, which is why despite my intellect I was mostly a well-behaved kid. But I am also very strongly opinionated and quite capable (and a bit too willing) to defend my opinions. And I simply cannot abide anyone trying to control me via force. I won’t accept it.

So it’s more like I am passive unless a certain line is crossed. I couldn’t exactly define that line because it’s very much an internal thing. I know the line has been crossed when the alarm goes off, basically. And then the other side of my personality comes out.

And I am pretty sure that is part of my basic temperament. I find it hard to imagine a version of myself that follows the rules because they’re the rules. Maybe if the rules had actually protected me, I would sing a different tune.

But they didn’t, and so to me, rules are agreements and nothing more. To me, they are no more real than the lines on a map. I follow the rules, for the most part, because most of them make sense to me and seem necessary for social cohesion.

However, I also feel no moral compulsion to follow ones I think are pointless, stupid, or downright destructive. I might follow them for practical reasons, but never moral.

Maybe that interfered with my social learning, though. Perhaps people learn social skills and social consciousness by fitting themselves into the rules and by sharing that experience with others doing the same.

Me, I remained the same no matter what. I did not allow myself to be socially constrained or defined. And therein, I think, lay the seeds of my downfall.

Even then, though, I might have fared better had I been a proud and haughty person. But I am sensitive and eager to please. I really want people to like me. I want to get that feeling of approval and acceptance.

I’m just tragically lacking in the basic cognitive skills that would let me get it. No wonder I am drawn to show business!

And the combination of being eager to please and socially clueless basically makes a person pathetic, and that’s the worst thing you can be. You can be a raging asshole and still get some respect. But pathetic people disqualify themselves from respect and automatically end up at the bottom of the heap.

Once again, I ponder whether I would have been better off just listening to the side of me that wanted to go the intellectual elitist route.

But I couldn’t do it then. And I couldn’t do it now.

So maybe I am the person I am meant to be.

Then what am I so depressed about?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.