The Proud: The Dumb, The Loud

It's very easy to tell a highly intelligent person. Not because they say highly intelligent things. Some people, usually in the managerial professions, have the art of spinning impressive verbiage into the Emperor's jockstrap down to a fine art. Being completely brim-full of shit is a contemporary occupation. No, an intelligent person is far more often revealed by their questions, their language and their attitude.

The right questions to ask are ones which guide but don't disrupt narrative, which facilitate explanations – brief, pointed requests ensuring discourse arrives at a conclusion. The clever will also listen to the exact words you use, and make sure they are exactly appropriate, because they appreciate that ideas cannot be better than the language they are couched in. They re-interpret, and ask, and point, and massage, and understand what you're saying.

But the most immediate thing to notice about talking to a real clever bastard is humility. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. And the more likely you are to accept someone else's claim to authority. It was no surprise to me when I realised that the professors in our department are more likely to constructively accept to your explanation and accept that you know what you're talking about than smart-arse grad students, who are more likely to shit all over what you say with tangential word-faeces. If there is a moral to this story it is simply: listen.

I don't know if a good level of mutual understanding while communicating deserves a name (intellectual osmosis, perhaps?). But I have the feeling it may be a more common event in other people’s lives than it is in mine.

Because teaching, and perpetually explaining things like a complicated psychological thesis to people, often results in something that makes me seethe and want to fuck neck sockets.

Most often, people don't ask. Immediately, they tell. At all times, they tell. Tell, tell, tell.

Most often, people can have a conversation consisting entirely of telling each other their opinions, none of them recognising the fact that anyone else is there at all.

Most often, people simply treat what is in front of them as a Pavlovian springboard into further inanities, spin a gleeful pattern of linguistic ejaculations that just travels off into the aether, saying nothing, discovering even less.

Why?

Why do the suburban dome-heads that surround us, these cretinous dimwits who have no folds in their cortex, continually conduct their lives from their shitty little pulpits? Why are their ears painted on?

Because we all live in Lake Wobegon, "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." Thank you very much, relativistic education. Thank you for a world where perspective is sacrosanct, where stupid constructs hold more weight than evidence, and smoke and hubris are more important than truth. Where every little fucktard is told he or she is a deadset genius, and their opinion is important.

Thank you for our comfortable & gelatinous lives, spirit of human progress. Thank you for all the bountiful wealth you've given us - Cabbage Patch dolls, pro wrestling, and animal-track sneakers. Thank you for making our gene pool so much shallower. Thank you for destroying personal responsibility by redressing stupidity through lawsuits and class-action.

And thank you very much to stupid, pig-headed human nature. Thank you for maintaining the egocentric cognitions that have kept us alive for the last 5 million years. Thank you for the obsolete impulses and open-savannah heuristics you have saddled us with, that most are mired in.

But seriously... you can all fuck off now. You're holding us up. You're interfering with progress. You bring drooling yawps from people who should be quiet, and silence voices that should be heard. Turn up the heat and boil this everyday peasant pride away. Please.