Mystery of Intelligence

There are people in this life for whom even the best things don’t work out. They could wear cashmere suits and still look like tramps; be very rich and badly in debt; be tall but lousy in basketball. I now realize that I’m one of that species who can’t get the best from the advantages in life, for whom advantages can be even a drawback.

They say “out of the mouths of babes come the truth.” At grade school, it was the most monstrous insult to be called a brain-box; later on being an intellectual almost becomes a strength. But it’s a lie; intelligence is a flaw. Just as every living person knows they’re going to die while the dead knows nothing…

It stays in Ecclesiates “ he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow:; but I never knew the joys of going to catechism with the other kids so I was never warned of the dangers of studying. Christians are really very lucky being put on their guard like that against the risk of intelligence at such an early age.; they’ll know to steer clear of it all through life. Happy are the simple mind.

Those who think there’s some sort of nobility in intelligence clearly do not have enough to realize it’s a curse. My family and friends, my classmates, my teachers, everyone’s always said I was intelligent.

I’ve never been athletic; the last time my muscles were tested by a major competition was playing marbles in recess at grade school. My skinny arms, my lack of fitness, and my sluggish legs mean I can’t get together enough force to kick a ball effectively; the only thing I have the strength to do is to scour this world with my mind. I was to puny for sport. Intelligence was a fallback option.

Intelligence is one of evolution’s features. In the days of the first prehistoric humans, I can just imagine some little tribe where all the kids run through the scrub chasing lizards and picking berries for dinner. They gradually learn from the adults how to be perfect men and women; hunters, gatherers, fishermen, tanners. But if we look more closely at the life of this tribe, we’ll see that some children don’t join in the group activities; they stay sitting by the fire, sheltered inside the cave. They’ll never learn to defend themselves against saber-toothed tiger, or how to hunt; by themselves, they wouldn’t survive a single night. And it’s not out of laziness, no, they’d like to be capering about with their friends, but they can’t. When nature brought them into the world, it slipped up. Within that tribe, there’s a little blind girl, a boy with a limp, another one who’s clumsy and absent minded… So they’ve got nothing to do and video games haven’t been invented yet, they just have to think and let their thoughts do the capering. So they spend all their time trying to think, trying to decipher the world, dreaming up stories and making inventions. That’s how civilization was born; because a bunch of “ imperfect kid” had nothing better to do. If mature never maimed anyone,; if the mold was always flawless, the human race would have stayed a protohominid secies, quite happy with no thoughts of progress, living perfectly well without Prozac or condoms or Dolby digital DVDs.

I have the curse of reason: I’m poor, single, and depressed. For months now, I’ve been thinking too much and I’ve established with complete certainty the correct relation between my unhappiness and the incontinence of my mind. Probing and pondering and overanalyzing have never given me any advantages; They’ve only played against me. The process of thought is not a natural one, it hurts; it’s as if I were uncovering pieces of broken glass and length of barbed wire in the air. I can’t seem to stop my brain or to slow it down. Probing and pondering and overanalyzing is a kind of social suicide because it means that you cannot take part in this life without inadvertently feeling both like a bird of prey and a vulture picking apart everything it sees. When we try to understand something, more often than not, we kill it and now I can feel the dangers of this encroaching on me; cynicism, bitterness, and infinite sadness. You very quickly become good at being unlucky and unhappy. It’s impossible to live if you’re to aware, too thoughtful. In nature, awareness is an exception; you could even postulate that it’s an accident because it gives no guarantee of superiority or of particular longevity. In the context of the evolution of species, it does not represent any better form of adaptation. In terms of age, numbers and occupied territories, insects are actually the masters of planet. For example, the social structure of an ant colony is far more effective than ours will be, and there isnt’t a single ant with a chair of Harvard.

Everyone’s got something to say about women, men, policemen, and murders. We generalize according to our experience, to suit overselves depending on what we understand within the slender neuronal networks and in the context of our perception of things. This faculty enable us to think quickly, judge and take a position. It has no intrinsic value, it’s just a system of signals, of little flags all wave. And everyone defends their virtues of their own advantages, their sex, and their positions.

In a debate, generalization has the advantages of simplicity and of making arguments more fluid so that they’re readily understandable, therefore they have greater impact on listener. To translate that into mathematical terms, discussions based on generalization are like additions, simple operations that are so self-evident they seem convincing and relevant. On the other hand, a serious discussion would seems more like a succession of equations containing several unknowns, intergral, and reshufflings of complex numbers.

A learned person taking part in a discussion will think they’re simplifying things, and all they really want is to make deletions, alterations, sticking asterisks at the end of words, putting footnotes at the bottom of the page and endnotes at the end of the book to explain what they’re really thinking, and from where it stems. But in a casual conversation at the end of a corridor, at a sparkling dinner party, or in the columns of a newspaper, that can’t really happen: there’s no room for vigorous accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, or honesty. Virtue is a rhetorical handicap, completely insufficient in a debate.

Men simplify the world with words and thought, and that’s how they create their certainties; and having certainty is the most potent pleasure in the word, far more potent than money, sex, power all combined. Renouncing true intelligence is the price we have to pay for having these certainties, and it’s an expenditure that we never even noticed by the banks of our minds. In this instance, I actually prefer those who don’t huddle behind the cloak of reason, and come out and admit the illusory nature of their beliefs. Like a believer admitting his faith is just his own belief and not preemption on the truths of the world.

There’s a Chinese proverb that goes something along these lines: a fish never knows when it’s pissing. The same applies perfectly well to intellectuals. An intellectual is convinced of his own intelligence because he’s using his brain. A mason uses his hands, but he too has a brain that can say,”hey ! That wall’s not straight and anyway, you’ve forgotten to put cements in between the breeze blocks.” There’s a dialogue between his hand at works and his mind. The intellectual who works within his mind doesn’t have that dialogue; his hands don’t pipe up and say,”Come on, man, you’re really goofed up! The Earth is round.” Intellectual doesn’t have that distance, that discrepancy, so he thinks he has or can have an enlightened view on every subject

Intellectuals obviously aren’t the only people infected with intelligence. I’m convinced that intelligence is a defect shared by the totality of the population, without any social distinctions: there’s the same percentage of intelligent people amongst history teachers and Breton sea fishermen, amongst writers and typist.

One thing that can be conceded is that, even if we get no guarantee of intelligence from familiarity with great works, using our minds and reading the work of geniuses, it does not at least increase the risk. Of course, there will be people who’ve read Freud and Plato, who can juggle with quarks, and tell the difference between a peregrine falcon and a kestrel, and who’;; still be an idiot. All the same, by being in contact with a multitude of stimuli and by exposing the mind to an enriching environment, intelligence can potentially find a breeding ground just like any diseases.

Page, M. (2004) how I become stupid. Antoine
Anyone who can grasp this concept deserves a clap for yourself  =)
The highest level of comprehension is to be able to place yourself within the scene and experience the thoughts of that person.