As regular readers (hello, you lovely people!) know, I have a rough theory of the common traits of intellectuals. Well recently it has occurred to me that intellectuals share a trait that I didn’t list in my original theory : love of the weird.

It is a subset of our love for mental stimulation. For people who need a great deal of mental stimulation, strange and unusual things are a breath of fresh air. The normal, by definition, is what is usually around, and the human mind automatically tunes out familiar stimuli. The normal, therefore, provides no stimulation at all. This can lead to the greatest fear of intellectuals, which is boredom.

So we automatically seek out the new, the fresh, and the different. The form and degree vary from intellectual to intellectual, but every intellectual is, by default, looking for something that stands out from the background noise of the humdrum. The search for mental stimulation takes care of that.

This is different from people of normal IQ. For them, the strange and unusual is far more troublesome. They might well find some strange things amusing, in a clownish way, but other strange things will frighten and confuse them. For them, that selfsame humdrum world is more soothing and comforting than boring and intolerable. They stick to the main corridors of life, knowing that by doing so, they will remain safe.

This need for the new and strange, then, is one of the factors that put intellectuals and regular folk on different paths. It is one of the things that causes the average Joe or Jolene to think we are very weird. They look at us and see how we casually disregard the border between the normal and safe and everything else, and they just plain don’t understand. They can’t imagine anything that would drive a person out into the outer darkness when everything they could possibly need was available right here in the normal world.

Or so they think.

This brings me to another mark of the intellectual I missed before : choosing individuality over conformity. High intelligence leads naturally to a higher confidence level in the products of our minds and our ability to figure out the answer for ourselves, and this combined with our need for the new and strange leads us to reject conformity as boring and an affront to our individuality, and hence, we go our own way.

This is perfectly in tune with the freethinking ideals laid down by the intellectuals who founded modern democratic cultures, but that does not mean it is without cost. By disregarding conformity to various degrees, we make ourselves seem unsafe and hence unacceptable to the rest of the herd, and we end up ostracized as a result.

Normal people actively avoid anything that might make them seem weird, because to them, being singled out of the herd as strange and hence unsafe would be to have the comfort of the familiar yanked away from them, and that is unthinkable.

We intellectuals lack the kind of social sense required to stay in the middle of the herd, and if we had it, we would likely disregard it as unimportant and/or unnecessarily restrictive. Our mental self-confidence leads us to feel much safer than the average person with mental exploration into what lies outside the normal, and our curiosity (in other words, the active form of the need for mental stimulation) drives us out there to find out what it is that the others fear.

Thus, the intellectual, merely by following their natural inclinations, ends up isolated from the mainstream of society.

One of the ways this manifests is in our sense of humour. Intellectuals, as a group, have a high appetite for abstract absurdity and even downright nonsense. Hence their love of Monty Python and skit comedy in general. Humour that the average person either doesn’t get because it relies on knowledge and a form of thinking unavailable to non-intellectuals, or they understand it fine but don’t see what could possibly be funny about it.

The comedy we consume has to be at least somewhat bizarre and surreal in order to even keep our attention. Comedy requires surprise, and it is harder to surprise someone with a higher than average IQ. We will “see it coming” at a much higher rate than the average person, and that means the demands we place on comedy are quite a bit higher than the usual stuff.

And so it goes with the rest of our tastes as well. We develop an aversion towards anything that has too much of the smell of the herd on it because it is therefore a lot more boring and furthermore will have a lot more competition for it. All intellectuals, being edge of the herd dwellers, have an innate fear of getting trampled by the herd’s sudden changes of direction, and we would rather eat scraps than fight through the throng for our share of the bigger pie.

It doesn’t matter to you who wins the rat race if your main concern is not being a rat in the first place.

And the thing is, nobody creates intellectuals. You can encourage them or suppress them, but they will occur naturally in any human population. Those of higher IQ are an emergent phenomenon of the human race, and we have to consider that perhaps we are meant to be the thinking part of natural human society.

Note that I did not say we are the leaders. Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition of human leadership, and indeed, the barriers to social understand engendered by the intellectual’s strong preference for products of the mind over products of instincts makes many intellectuals terrible leaders. In order to lead, you have to understand the herd, not ignore them with all your might.

So our duty, as it were, is to think and explore. Luckily, like a flock of starlings, this complex phenomenon requires nothing more of us than, ironically, following our natural instincts.

Keep up the good work, everybody!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.