Woke up from a nap with this song playing in my head :

 

That obviously never really happened. We nerds never truly became cool.

I’ve lived long enough to have seen “geek chic” come around twice, in the 90’s and in the last few years. ^[1] And I would love to believe in it. But I can’t. Deep down, I know that nothing much will change.

Even though the hipsters all think they are nerds. I have an update for you on that, kids. If you weren’t bullied, you’re not a nerd. If you don’t express your enthusiasms for “geeky” things without truly thinking about what people with think of you, you’re not a nerd. If you carefully chose every item in your “nerd look”, you aren’t a nerd.

To be a nerd is to live in a society that loves to portray you as the worst kind of person to end up on a date with. To be a nerd is to live with a constant feeling of inferiority, which some of us deal with by pumping up our ego to blimp-like proportions. To be a nerd is to live with the memory of having being dumped by or even turned on by someone who you thought was your friend when they realized what a social liability you are and how with you around, they would never be cool or fit in.

And most of all, to be a nerd is to have no option to just drop the whole thing if it isn’t working. It’s not a look, a style, a fashion, a trend, or a mood.

You’re a nerd like a fish is a fish. You’re the product of a broken society that actively punishes people for being highly intelligent while at the same time pretending that this is something good and of value by patting you on the head for your high marks at school.

But the real marks you get at school are the ones left on your face after a bully pushes you face first into a locker while everybody laughs at your suffering at the hands of your peers. They’re the marks left on your knuckles after you punch the wall in rage and frustration at how actual prosecutable crimes happen to you on a daily basis and not only to the criminals go unpunished, they are rewarded with higher social status while the teachers, who all know this is happened, do absolutely nothing about it because somehow, it’s just fine as long as it’s kids.

They’re the marks left on your soul by social isolation, sexual frustration, and the cold and thoughtless hate of the world.

So no. You are not a nerd just because you put on some prescription free glasses and a baggy sweater and talk about the latest Star Wars movie.

It’s like saying you’re Jewish just because you like bagels.

You have not suffered as my people have suffered. Please do not attempt to co-opt our victimhood for your pleasure.

And for God’s sake, don’t dress up like us for Halloween.

Ahem. But I digress.

The song got me thinking about what it is that turns us into victims. Why should we, as a population, have all these terrible experiences in common?

I think it comes down to instinct and socialization.

I think the fundamental developmental process that turns someone into nerds is one that makes us favour reason over emotion. Cognition is focused upon and anything that gets int he way of that, like urgent emotional messages from our hearts and our instincts, is aggressively filtered out.

And filtered out at such a deep and fundamental level that we don’t even know we are doing it. So to us, all the vital social information coming at us about what our fellow beach monkeys are doing and thinking is ignored as irrelevant and incomprehensible noise that only makes us feel like we are losing control because those emotions like direct empathy and social IQ threaten to pull us off our icy little intellectual island and throw us into the dark and frightening world of uncontrolled emotion.

I might be overgeneralizing from my own case there, but you get the idea.

All this filtering and suppression of emotion blocks the very signals meant to help us learn how to get along with others, fit in, and develop our social senses.

Thus, we end up lacking the senses (and the sense) to socially compete and find our place in the hierarchy. That automatically puts us at the very bottom of the social totem pole, and we don’t even understand why.

From the point of view of someone high in IQ but lacking social awareness, it seems like people just randomly hate us for no other reason than pure malice.

It’s like a social Dunning Krueger effect. We not only lack the social awareness to avoid being on the lowest in the pecking order, we also lack the social awareness to be able to understand why it’s happening and the part we unwittingly play in it.

The thing is, mundane folk live in a world where they derive steady strength and comfort from the feeling of being part of the tribe. It’s a big part of what lets them relax around one another despite how contentious and cranky humans can be.

But this comfort is like a circuit and people who do not fit in break that circuit, and make the people aware of it instead of enjoying its warmth without thinking about it.

The tribe then has two ways of dealing with a circuit breaker like myself : either bring the person into the circuit or push them out of it.

They will try the first approach first. But if you not only don’t join the circuit but react to it like it’s a foreign entity trying to invade your mind, they can’t help but take that as a rejection of everyone in the circuit and of society itself.

And because we take in information primarily via language, we are left wishing someone would explain all this to us.

But they can’t. They can’t explain it any more than a fish can teach you to swim. It comes naturally to them and few people can articulate something like that.

So one side feels like they are being harshly punished for absolutely no reason, and the other might think it is sad that we’re sad but can’t deny that life is a lot easier without the other side around and so they do nothing while the more active members of this circuit act to protect it.

The only nerd-friendly analogy I can think of is that it’s like when someone shows up to play a tabletop RPG with a mundane spouse or partner. Everything was fine when it was just us nerds but then this person who needs everything explained to them is there and you really wish they would just go away.

And they, of course, feel like they are being picked on for no good reason.

Funny how that works out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.