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.