The Outsiders
March 11th, 2007Via: Prometheus Society:
A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment, and misanthropy.
The single greatest adjustment problem faced by the gifted, however, is their tendency to become isolated from the rest of humanity.
…
The second kind of social adaptation may be called the marginal strategy. These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class, without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often they did not go to college at all, but instead went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but in private they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers, and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects. The double life strategy might even be called the genius ploy, as many geniuses in history have worked at menial tasks in order to free themselves for more important work.
Kevin,
I am not sure why you linked this one, but I can certainly comment, as I had my day as a gifted INTJ child, a member of a high IQ society, and a think tank student. Perhaps you are trying to suggest the psychological origin of the misanthropic mindset of the brainy advocates of massive population reduction such as Henry Kissinger, Nick Rockefeller et. al.?
Being gifted does not have to lead to misanthropy. Another path is to realize that while the cognitive gap between onself and the average person is perhaps equal or greater than the gap between the average person and several other animals, that does not devalue the lives of either the animals or the average person. I have known several gifted people who were ardent advocates for animal welfare. In short, one can feel in some ways quite apart from the mass of humanity, yet still be a humanitarian. We all share the same mammalian limbic system, experience the same emotions, the same four billion year old DNA is in our cells.
Having said that, I admit that as a young teenager I read the SciFi short story “The Marching Morons” with great pleasure. This fantasy involved the gifted engineering a genocide of most of normal humanity. Much of science fiction and fantasy consists of allegorical complaints of persecution of the gifted minority or fantasies of an all gifted future in space. But most people pass through adolescence into maturity, and realize that greater cognitive ability is in fact a gift rather than a curse. They go through happy adult lives, pursue their careers as particle physicists or organic farmers or whatever and raise their families without any latent genocidal rage.
I am sure that if another technological fix were to emerge, everyone would be glad to postpone collapse and dieoff beyond our lifetimes. In fact, that is what the world has been doing for the half century since Caltech published the doomer classic “The Next Hundred Years” in 1957. But it looks like we have run out of miracles. So the camps and biowarfare labs are being built, the nuclear warheads are being refurbished.
As humanity is now starting the slide into collapse and dieoff, the quest for a scapegoat will soon follow. On one hand the great human population bloom was enabled by the fossil fueled technological innovations of the gifted. Without genius, the middle ages would never have ended and humanity would have kept on sustainably trudging through the centuries as usual, no overshoot and no collapse needed. On the other hand, it has been the cognitively below average half of humanity that has taken the greatest advantage of the reproductive possibilities of the oil age. Moreover, it has been the dull and shortsighted who frustrated the many attempts by many gifted people in the 20th century to aim for a sustainable modern world. In the end I would call the blame game a draw. Collective humanity is uncontrollable and obeys the same biological laws as yeast in a vat of sugar. The overshoot was inevitable, gifted and baseline humanity are equally to blame and equally blameless. During the dieoff, I suspect that the brilliant will fare no better than the average Joe. Best to strive to enjoy each day of precious life on this beautiful/terrible savage garden world with the ones we love.
This post feels almost like bait… =]
Here I am, escaped to a rural farm and loving the immersion in all things menial and physically engaging, the exploration of traditional folk ways and the almost complete of incompetent oversight which pervades much of the world I’ve waded through with varying degrees of success over the forty years of my life.
I dare not post my Stanford-Binet numbers from back in the day.
Out of sheer curiousity Kev, what exactly drove you to post a link to an article from the Prometheus Society?
Dropped a word there in the first paragraph:
“…the almost complete LACK of incompetent oversight…”
nothing like socio economic stratification and wealth leveraged glass ceilings for todays and tomorrows challenged minds.
An FYI for Alex:
You’ve got some serious background reading to catch up on. The middle ages were anything but “sustainable”.
(and personally, I’m getting SO bloody tired of this ultra-buzzword keeps getting thrown around with such blindly utopian implications)
Q: Why do empires collapse?
A: Because they’re unsustainable.
Q: What do paleolithic human populations do?
A: They keep spreading out when their population overruns the local resourcee base.
Q: Why did the Europeans of the Middle Ages heaad west into the “unknown”?
A: They were running out of firewood.
I don’t doubt you’re a sharp cookie from your well-honed verbage, but as for the attached mythos, give me a break.
I have a way of posting stories to myself using the “Private” function in WordPress. I forgot to enable it on this post. Woops. I should know better than to be mucking around that late at night/early in the morning.
I just liked this part:
Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered.
I could have avoided a decade of pain and nonsense if I had read this when I was about 22. Figuring it out the hard way sucked pretty bad. By the time I was 32, I was finished, fuck it, done. Never mind the probable damage done to my liver by countless bottles of cheap wine and taking pathetic comfort in knowing that I wasn’t as far gone as Charles Bukowski.
I wonder if I could have formed more constructive responses to what’s happening if I had been able to avoid the idealism and bullshit to begin with, rather than being bludgeoned by and struggling against most peoples’ pathological desire to remain ignorant.
Well, I’d always assumed it was ignorance, and not stupidity. I thought that education and information were the keys to salvation for all……..
That was my problem.
My dad, a simple and direct man, cleared it up for me when he said, “Kev, most people, including me, are just too fucking stupid to understand this shit that you’re talking about. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow: Millions of people are going to wake up, get in their cars and go to work. Just like they did today. That’s it.”
That’s it. And to those of you who think you’re going to change that, I just hope you can afford better wine than I was able to afford.
Doug,
What I meant by the middle ages being sustainable was that the cycles of wars, famines, and plagues could be repeated endlessly. A 25% population reduction is a very unhappy event but need not cause any social collapse. Life got a lot better after the black death – before people had too many babies and it got worse again. Minus the invasion of the Americas, another plague or famine or warfare would have repeated the cycle. Forests can regrow.
On the other hand, as the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle observed in the 1960s, fossil fueled civilization is a one shot affair. One planet, one chance, and we blew it. Even if one could wait a hundred megayears for the oil to be replaced, the high grade metal ores would still be gone. So no starships for the bipedal apes, or any other species that might follow us on this planet either.
But it certainly was a great party, we should all be glad to have lived in the age of air travel and many other wonders that will vanish into legends in a few generations.
Kevin,
Waikato draft is an excellent local source of ethanol. Works for me.
Wow! a fantastic post indeed. Def close to my heart. Specially Kev’s comment 😉
…goes off to fill another glass of cask red.
As I’m currently obtaining completely free shelter and sustenance from a Christian homeless charity,
(free for me, at least, but, as we all know, it costs the Predatory-Business-Class-Cloaking-Itself-In-The Psychomanipulation-Called-Christianity
[well, relatively speaking, it costs them nothing, but, if I consume X resource units, in an effort to meet my basic needs, without generating any (elite-control-mechanism-strengthening) return on the consumptive investment provided by Their Christian business agents, then, in the short term, I win a very, very tiny war against Them every time I eat, sleep, and bathe at Their business agents’ expense!!])
I haven’t the words to express how much I needed to read an article like this one; even though I am surrounded by, generally speaking, kind and harmless people (who are also, as it relates to their religious beliefs, certifiably insane) I have never felt so alone in my entire life.
p.s.
Here’s a fantastic article:
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1058
I second the Itulip article. Read it a couple of days ago, highly recommended.
Wow.
Just started reading this website. Tho’ this is an outlier from the normal content, it was definitely worth the read. I too wish I had read this years ago. Tho’ I don’t count myself as gifted, I’m not without some intellect (I have a Masters in Evolutionary Biology with some work towards my PhD, but now I’m a Systems Engineer after becoming disenchanted with academia.)
Given a lack of commonality with the people I grew up, I also felt (and still feel) the inherent differences to which the author alludes.
Ditto trying to explain this to parents too focused on their own wants to understand and lend guidance. I just wished I had figured this out sooner. Truly a life-altering event today.
Just wanted to say thanks for posting this.
We all have the same intelligence. Some more left brained and quieter than right brained and outspoken.