Beating Mind Games: Why Johnny Will Never Be A Genius

This post will probably offend a lot of people, but if you can get past the resentment (mine and yours), I think the point is both valid and one needing to be addressed.

As someone with an above average IQ (Okay, WAY above average and yes, I've been tested.), I find the fact that geniuses are universally hated and reviled, bullied and put upon to be rather depressing. Let's face it, we as a nation, revere strength and physical power over brains and mental agility. The former are muscular bad-boys with good looks who are glorified on the field of combat (well, sports fields in mock-combat) while the latter are bespectacled, acne-scarred social misfits relegated to musty, dark rooms, pouring over stacks of moldy old tomes in the search of something the stereotype will typically say is relevant only to the searcher. The former gets the girl and his face on magazines until he's too old for ESPN. The latter gets the Nobel Prize, and pretty much complete obscurity after that.

People call geniuses social misfits (at best), mock them, deride them, insult them and yet without them - that top 10% of brain-power among human kind - civilization as we know it would cease to exist. Without the thinkers, the doers could only do so much. In warfare, if you eliminate the planners, the army can't fulfill its role and is eventually defeated by the side with planners. Better planners will win over poorer planners.

In schools, mediocrity is ENCOURAGED, if not enforced, by the social structure. The person who skews the average by actually learning the material better than anyone else is vilified and outcast from the rest. Never mind that they are more likely to make more money, be more successful in life and have the last laugh at the 20 year reunion, they're hated by their peers all their lives. Given this proclivity in our social expectations and traditions, it's hardly any wonder that they tend to form intellectual clubs.

Geniuses tend to group with other geniuses because, finally, there is a new peer group that actually understands what's being said as well as one in which the peer group has a mutual understanding of the life experiences of others in that group. They don't talk football stats or which steroid is least likely to turn one's testicles into useless raisins. They talk Cobal, or Klingon, or Chemistry. Like everyone else, they have mutual interests. Unlike everyone else, those interests have little or nothing to do with physical prowess (except in sex, but that's just the human condition of wanting what you can't get).

The similarities between the two groups - the physicals and the geniuses - are numerous. It is the mentality of the two which is so vastly different. Geniuses think. Their activities involve brain-work. Physicals do. Their activities involve muscle work or relatively mindless entertainment. Because of this mentality gap, the two groups don't relate well to one another. And because of the fact there are ten physicals to every genius, general society is made up of physicals who take a dim view to thinking.

Now, least you think this is a skewed perception consider this: The person most likely to get beaten to a pulp in school is above average in IQ. The evil character is almost always portrayed as an "evil genius". Even "Brainiac" was an outcast among the super heroes. Politicians especially do NOT want an educated, smart electorate. God forbid they have one because then they'd actually have to come through with their campaign promises. People would remember them. They'd also have to stay on their best behaviors, because educated people aren't about second chances when these elected officials screwed up so badly the first time. They can't lie to them (smart people actually bother to check snarky things like facts and figures, starting with the hypothesis that most politicians are lying in the first place in some way). They can't twist the truth (for the same reason). Smart people are usually smarter than the politicians.

And so, because society, and their leaders, are generally made up of physical types whose brain-power is less than equal to those of the geniuses, they make life very hard on the geniuses. Everything reflects the bias against being smart, against being well educated, and against having a point of view that differs from what these physical types have decided is 'normal'. Mediocrity is the goal. If excellence is to be seen, it must be a physical feat because they can see it. Mental feats require people to understand what they were, why they were done and how it may effect them. That requires thinking on the part of society in general and, as we have already established, society in general isn't really cut out for that kind of thing.

"ELITIST!!!" you scream.

"Damn straight," I reply mildly.

Consider this: Most of you will never understand quantum relationships or how faster than light communication is not only possible, but is being tested now.

No amount of ditch digging, wrestle-mania, pro-sports or any other physical act is going to make this register in the minds of most people. These who can't conceive of such notions are the people who deny global warming, believe in politicians or political pundits as if those people are saying or going to do anything other than what it takes to get elected and generally go around beating up the very people who actually understand what's going on. Let's face it, most of you don't understand the technology you use every day - even the exact means necessary for you to read these words on your screen are little more than a vague notion that it's "like TV". (It isn't, by the way. It may look like a duck and quack like a duck, but it's not a duck.)

Now, it's not that you HAVE to understand these things. You don't. You're probably a doer (though one could argue that doers are out doing and thinkers are out thinking, and most people who bother to read are thinkers, which means this blog post is being read by the wrong people, but isn't it nice to have someone who understands your plight and is willing to put it out there?). Doers have to do.

Yet it's up to the thinkers to invent this technology, find those medical cures, design those buildings and cars and motorcycles and sports safety equipment. I'll bet most people could name the winner of last year's world series (or who's in the playoffs this year) than can say who discovered Penicillin which has saved more lives than will ever WATCH those games. (Just so you don't have to Google it, Alexander Flemming is credited with the discovery in 1928, and awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 which he shared with two others who helped him develop the antibiotic from the penicillin mold. Ian Flemming (no relation) invented James Bond. The two Flemmings are often mistaken for the same person.)

So while doers make the world go around, it's the thinkers that enable them to keep it spinning, making things faster, better, stronger for everyone. We each have our roles to play in the grand scheme of things and the thinkers recognize this. It would be nice if the doers were less inclined to beat the crap out of the thinkers, though. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's bad. We know you don't like change or new things. But we're thinkers. That's what we do. We make things better and by doing so, change the old things. You are doers. You will learn to do with the new better than you did with the old. Just take a deep breath, let it out slowly, follow the instructions (I admit we thinkers could write them so you can actually understand them better) and you'll be fine.

In the meantime, buy a thinker or two a beer. After all, it was a thinker who invented the stuff in the first place...