Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Pride of the Midwits

Our society holds up intelligence as a virtue more so than most other societies in the history of mankind.  Sure, there were always advisors whose wisdom and insights were sought out, but intelligent people of today are in much higher proportions than in the past.

The trouble is, we take pride in our intelligence and this ends up being our folly.

There are many ranges of intelligence.  Most people fall within the average IQ range, which is between 90 and 110 (I think, the scales may vary).

Above the average, you have what I like to refer to as midwits.  I’ve not taken any official tests, but I’m fairly sure that I fall into this category given my frustrations in explaining concepts to other people.  However, I am not a genius and I freely admit that.

I’d say a midwit is someone whose range is above average but either not quite genius level are barely genius level.

Midwits are intelligent in their own right.  They are able to take on highly technical jobs and with time and experience can excel at them.  I am a software developer by trade and that kind of job requires very high-level abstract thinking, something that does not come easily to average people.

Midwits tend to be the geniuses in their government schools.  They usually don’t encounter people with true genius level IQs.  This is because those kind of people are few and far between.

But when they do encounter such people, they are often seized with extreme levels of envy.  For you see, most of them had to work hard to be as intelligent as they are but when someone comes along and is able perform complex calculations and layers of thinking which comes naturally to them.  And that burns them up.

The fact is, many of our assorted leaders in the world tend to be midwits, at least in the West.  This means that they tend to be arrogant in their assumptions because they were the best in their schools and were not humbled for their intelligence.

And this is why they are a dangerous bunch.  They pride themselves on being better than everyone else yet they are barely better.  Being above average is merely being slightly better than other people.  It doesn’t mean you’re leaps and bounds above the average folk.

As an example of this, when Milton Friedman asked Senator Ted Kennedy why he supported Socialism after decades of failures, he simply stated that it hasn’t worked because he (Kennedy) wasn’t in charge of it.

And that is the pride of the midwit in our aristocracy.  They are barely more intelligent than the average American but they still cling to stupid ideas that they believe make them look like geniuses.

Don’t humor them.