The Myth of the Smart
A Critical Meditation on our Obsession with Intelligence
Consider the following statement:
Most people are too stupid to think for themselves. The blind masses just follow their base desires, provided by mass popular culture. It’s just like The Matrix (or Idiocracy); most people are not really ready to wake up.
This sentiment is everywhere; just look at the comments of almost any YouTube video. Maybe you have even voiced a version of it to others, or to yourself in the solitude of your own mind.
Passing judgment on the (allegedly) blind, dumb masses, the speaker implies that they are not one of them. And of course, calling people dumb and blind is not a compliment, so the speaker is implying their own superiority over the masses.
Here’s the problem: we have the extremely common thought that the common people are thoughtless. We have most people believing most people are stupid. Attendant to that is the belief, held by whomever is making the judgment, that they are the exception.
Something is not adding up.
The contradiction is the point of insight. To believe you are a member of an intellectual elite is a sign that you are not.
Unfortunately, even this insight has been blurred. If you have heard of Dumb Masses Theory (DMT) then you have probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the tendency of incompetent people to over estimate their own competence, and of genuinely competent people to underestimate their competence. Dunning-Kruger is a cliché of “dumb masses” discourse. So it is not so easy to combat DMT by evoking the contradiction of incompetence mistaking itself for hyper competence. If we look at DMT in the context of Dunning-Kruger, then it seems, ironically, to confirm that most people are not that smart. Or at least, they are not competent at judging intelligence. So all of this gets confused and confusing very quickly.
That distinction between being “dumb” and being “incompetent” gets at something else. Another trope of “dumb masses” discourse is the appeal to quantified intelligence. That is, the idea that intelligence can be measured with numbers. That is, IQ tests.
Really, Dunning-Kruger is about competence in relative fields. It is not about as some general, quantifiable object of intelligence. Anyone can be guilty of the Dunning-Kruger effect, even the “smartest” person in the world. But in “dumb masses” discourse, the Dunning-Kruger effect is evoked to tell people that they are stupid, and they are too stupid to understand that they are stupid, thereby poisoning the well against any rebuttal.
IQ is bullshit. Yes, it can help make certain predictions about general social tendencies, whatever. But that merely speaks to how well IQ tests have shaped social expectations and beliefs around intelligence over decades. It does not speak to IQ faithfully representing any foundational, essential intelligence. The belief that it does is dangerous nonsense. IQ tests were conceived on the idea that all forms of intelligence were reducible to a general intelligence factor, which behaviorists simply labeled g. Today, IQ tests do not have to appeal to g to be of use in certain technical ways (to my understanding). But g is needed for IQ tests to measure intelligence in any profound way, in the way that IQ tests are casually understood. And yet there is no real evidence for g. The dumb-masses theorist will constantly appeal to this IQ stuff. Despite its scientific patina, I think it is best understood as a kind of New Age movement.
To believe you are a member of an intellectual elite is a sign that you are not.
A wise man once said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” I interpret this as an invitation to boundless curiosity. That no matter how much I know, I cannot but yearn to know more. That the more I know, somehow, the less I know. This is an impossible attitude to always achieve, but one worthy of our efforts.
In Ancient Athens, those who sought wisdom were called philosophers, while those who claimed to have it and could teach it (for a price) were called sophists. There is a reason the former term has come down to us in honor and the latter in disrepute.
