I have been in pursuit of an answer as to what makes me (and people like me) different from your average person since I was a little boy hiding from my bullying classmates in elementary school.

And recently, I feel like I have a solid lead on one of the main factors : we refuse to accept the communal reality.

I will explain. Prototypicallly, human beings have a shared sense of what is real. We gather information on our own, true, but then we share that information with others of our tribe, and that information is added to the group reality.

A simple example : You are driving home from work one day when you notice that a local restaurant that has been in business since before you were born has now gone out of business. Your immediate instinct is to tell everyone about it when you get home. You do so, and now everyone you live with amends their map of reality to reflect this new information.

Were it not for this impulse to share (and receive) information, there would be no particular impulse to tell anyone what you had seen, and you would have kept your version of reality to yourself.

But you didn’t. You knew there would be people who wanted to know back home, and so you told them, and it felt good.

This is how our enmeshed reality works. And even us big brained intellectuals can accept that kind of shared reality. When it is an abstract piece of information, we share the communal reality like everyone else.

But only on the surface. Below the surface, it’s a different story. Because one of the most stark and distinct differences between the intellectual outlook and the more average outlook is that intellectuals accept new information consciously, and with a fair bit of rigorous pre-testing of said information for soundness and consistency.

Average people do not do this, or at least, do not do it to the levels we do. To them, reality is a shared and social phenomenon. The topmost priority is not the truth. The truth is very important and no-one knowingly believes a lie (that’s simply not possible) but it is not the most important thing.

The most important thing to the average person is to develop an understanding of reality that keeps them in accord with the rest of their peer group.

It is not that these people are incapable of truly independent thought. In fact, in every person’s life, there will be times when it is impossible to avoid.

They just don’t see the point in wandering away from the herd and abandoning its soothing protection when, to their mind, the only possible result is to end up lost, confused, and alone.

There is nothing out there for them, or so they think.

And this may well be a function of intelligence. It might be that the kind of rugged intellectualism practiced by the high IQ set is simply not an option for people of average mental capacity. They lack the mental strength and cognitive bandwidth to keep and maintain their own independent version of reality. They need the communal reality to do at least some of the thinking for them. That way, they can concentrate on their own lives and the highly important social information from it.

That leads us to the main problem : the ruggedly independent mindset seems to be at odds with social information and hence the raw data needed for social interaction. By refusing to simply accept the communal reality and demanding such virtues as logical consistency and congruence with other known facts, the intellectual automatically excludes the less certain and verifiable information coming to them via their empathy and social antenna.

Tragically, these signals are then treated as noise, and excluded from consciousness. The intellectual comes to rely on only the information derived from reason, logic, and facts, and to ignore empathy, instinct, and even simple emotion, for they are seen as unreliable and unverifiable.

Average people believe the people they trust. Intellectual types figure it out for themselves. This opens up one universe of information and insight while closing the door on another.

So is there a route back from this decision, or indeed, a way to “have it all” by encompassing both? I am not sure. One would like to think there was, but from my observations, the intellectual way, once chosen and maintained, is irreversible.

That does not mean the situation cannot be improved, however. But the patient in this case must be willing and able to accept that the information from their emotions and instincts is valid and true in its own way, and therefore all efforts to accept and understand it are worth the effort as they will only enrich their understanding of the world.

Any adherence to the misguided idea that one can only rely on the fruits of the intellectual process will block the process. Billions of us Earthlings use the information from our emotions to navigate through the human world every day, and a lot of them are doing a much better job of it than us supposedly smarter types, so we must concede that they know something we don’t.

Open up your mind to the world of social information. Be willing, for a time, to accept some things without questioning them and see what happens. Try to find that part of the mind that takes in social information and do your best to hook it up to your main cognitive center. Feel your way through things.

And don’t be quite so fanatical in your guarding your citadel or knowledge from all irrational influences. There might be vitally important information in all that messy emotional stuff, and no intellectual worth their salt ignores information simply because it makes them uncomfortable.

That lonely vigil at the gates of the mind might help you develop a sense of objective reality, but it also keeps you isolated from the rest of humanity, and unhappy.

And what’s more important than happiness?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.