We’re all big on discussing smart and stupid these days, with good reason. We just saw two years of incredible stupid globally and in fact we’re still seeing it.
It’s a commonplace in threads and venues to see/read people marvelling, astounded, querying ‘Just how stupid can people be?’
‘How can they be that stupid?’ and so on.
Everyone is doing it. It’s all over the place. Has been for some time.
And yet: there’s no signs of any lessening in the stupidity, no diminution in stupid behaviour.
Everything is as stupid as ever or even more so. Well could easily claim more so on the basis that the simple lack of action after two years of clear demonstration of drastic radical and universal actions being necessary to save democracy, civil rights, science, medicine and plain common sense is proof enough of overwhelming stupidity.
I’m inclined to think that myself. For at this chronological remove it clearly implicates all the ‘thinking classes’. They surely need no more time to weigh all the evidence?
Yet they do nothing.
So: to cut to the chase, the question comes up, by default, in all seriousness:
‘Just how stupid can we be, anyway, and still survive?’
Or the other way round: ‘Just how smart does a person have to be to survive in today’s world?’
Yes, I’m being personal. Not questioning on some lofty abstract plane regarding the future progress of the whole human race or something. Just merely querying the pragmatic facts of current day to day life in our world: How smart does a person have to be?'
What IQ is really necessary to function without drawing attention to oneself as a misfit of some kind in today’s world?
What demands do most occupations and life styles place upon people’s IQ?
The astounded rhetorical utterance ‘How can they be so stupid’ needs putting into calm scientific prose and asked quite seriously.
Let’s find out how they can be so stupid.
Perhaps we’ll discover it’s easy. That they can be ‘so stupid’ because there’s no real requirement in our world to be otherwise. Stupid is enough perhaps.
Perhaps it is enough to merely trudge through the day following routine and one could almost do it without a conscious thought in the head.
The question of job comes up. So that would be interesting. How many jobs really require intelligence and how much of it do they require?
I know of no measures of all this.
There’s another angle, too. I don’t know if it is covered in IQ practice and/or theory.
Cunning, for instance. What about cunning? Is that measured in IQ testing? How about cunnings as fitness for life? Is a measure of cunning more important than IQ sometimes? One would think so for we instinctively know that one employs cunning to avoid the tests and challenges that might require IQ.
What about mere copying, imitation? Do you succeed as well or better simply by having a higher capacity for following a leader rather than taking on decision making for the self? What are naturally imitative human beings known as? Conformists? Imitators? Whatever. Is that ability more important than IQ?
Do either or both of those two things enable adequate functioning in the absence of IQ?
Can a cunning conformist rise to the top without IQ? That’s not even really the question, not at all. That would be startling performance. We’re merely asking what is required for a minimal level of unexceptional existence. Just enough to blend in.
If cunning conformity at the same time as lack of IQ could enable rising to the top then it’d be certain a measure of if would enable normal functioning in the herd without requiring any intelligence at all, so to speak.
And there are probably other confounders.
What about a capacity for insincerity? Obviously pretty close to the previous two: cunning and conformity but yet not quite the same, it could exist without either of them.
Would a lack of IQ be masked by a capacity for insincerity?
That segues nicely into ‘love’, doesn’t it? Or more precisely perhaps ‘charisma’. The ability to have those around one think you have some love for them, or at least ‘see’ them and value them. The appearance of something akin to love without being it.
Do charismatic individuals find life easier because of it and feel/experience a lower need for any Intellectual abilities, any IQ?
What about a capacity for confabulation? Remember childhood? Group of children confronted by angry adult demanding an explanation? Always, or usually, thankfully, one child in the group quick to manufacture some specious explanation sufficient to deflect wrath? Made up in an instant, on the fly, possibly without a grain of truth in it?
Confabulation. That’s confabulation. Making things up. In a trice. Today we call them pre-election promises, I think. Does this ability obviate a need for IQ?
It goes further. Suggested by some of the above what about a capacity to not care? Not care about other people? Not care about the truth? Not care about long range consequences of actions? A total lack of empathy perhaps is what’s suggested here. So that the individual feels free to practice all these other arts. Psychopathic I think perhaps is what such people are known as.
So the question: is a measure of psychopathy helpful in living without a functioning IQ?
And so on.
We have come to see that our world as revealed to us by the magic of the internet and the smartphone and the phenonemon of covid is nothing like we’d thought it to be.
And we stand around gawping open mouthed and astounded at the stupidity all around us.
Asking the rhetorical question: ‘How can they be so stupid?’
Well isn’t it time we found the answer? In our own interest? Perhaps it will turn out that not only can they easily be so stupid and still leave apparently ordinary lives but it may that they even have to be so stupid in order to lead those lives: that they would suffer if they were not.
That, in fact, by living that way they’re demonstrating a cleverness that many of us observers in fact do not have.
I wonder. I would like to know.
How Smart Do You Have To Be?
i think its not directly IQ related as such, its EQ. everyone wants to fit in, blend with the crowd, those with certain rarer personality types like infj seem to dominate here on certain substacks, and we dont 'fit in' so are more open to listening to other ideas.
Life is a continual IQ test, meeting a new person one assesses their intellect.
Can take a while to decide whether an old person is just trotting out old rehearsed lines and modes.
That's the thing with this plandemic; old modes can't deal with it and some people are hardly worth talking to about it.
The president of the US has dementia, how's that for a leader, a role model. He and the US are saying that it's just fine to be an idiot.
Meritocracy, nah, that's not an equitable outcome and out of fashion.
The masks make people dumb, they are on mute; like a TV with signal disruption, service might resume later.