This is a letter from one of your dull cousins.
No, it’s not to complain or ask you to do my homework, and certainly not to insult you. How could I possibly win at that?
Nor am I asking for money, though I’d quite like to.
If smarter I would have written it sooner – say, as soon as I could write and saved decades of anguish.
So, right there, you see my problem. I’m not smart enough, which hurts, because I’m smart enough to know I’m not smart enough and wish I were.
And if smarter I would write it betterer. So do forgive me for that, too.
Thanks for not saying that there are others even more gifted than yourself and so you know how I feel. Because that’s silly, like telling a poor person you know what poverty’s like because you only have a billion dollars and others have two billion.
It’s hard to write a letter to someone more intelligent. I feel self-conscious, concerned by grammar and syntax, trying not to seem too stupid – failed that one already in the terms of reference, hey. Rather like grovelling to an AI overlord hoping it won’t crush me like an ant. We’ll all need to do that soon enough, even you guys. So this is, like, good practice.
After all that you’ll be happy to know this waffle is really just a letter to me – a form of heavy musing. But that doesn’t mean you can tune out. I’m a lesser being and feeling it. Like the whales and Spix’s macaw, we pale intellects need your protection, if not consideration. If we go extinct the median IQ moves to… guess where.
Enough about me. Some serious questions need answers.
If intelligent people are so capable, why do they tolerate the rest of us? Why haven’t they become so disgusted with the stupidity surrounding them that they organize to lift themselves out of it?
It should take them only a decade to create the most prosperous, smart nation on the planet… and leave us in their dust. How can it be that the smartest among us haven’t done it yet?
Or have they?
My ex-boss’ IQ well-exceeded mine and I marvelled at his tolerance. He neither hired more genii to take some load off, nor treated me like the dimwit I was. Perhaps my practiced knowing looks and dry sarcasm kept him in check. I had cunning to fall back on, after all.
And precocious kids. No matter how brilliant the students, they aim no higher than military-industrial foot soldier and “hope to be a scientist” or “win the Nobel Prize” or “become president.”
Even a beauty pageant wannabe starts at world peace!
Science fiction authors have long toyed with stories about communes of intellect.
Howard Fast’s “The First Men” painted an unlikely but ultimate outcome: his advanced society began as a military experiment that isolated itself just in time to survive the predictable reaction of the room-temperature-IQ plodders who realised the smart-asses were an extinction threat.
Fred Hoyle based Ossian’s Ride on alien interlopers sealing off part of Ireland with much detail on security and organization. Herbert G. Wells smote us all with a comet to clear the planet of woe, while John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos – though alien and malevolently implanted – showed what a bunch of really smart kids (with supernatural abilities) might do.
But what if the smarty-pants have done it already? And if so, where the heck are they?
Have they created utopia that cunningly presents as a failed state to look like the rest of us? Would someone kindly blow the whistle?
Is it Iceland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Sweden, Monaco, Anguilla, Maui, Liechtenstein?
On that trail, why haven’t the world’s wealthy – who also are typically smarter – purchased, or simply invaded, a big fat tropical island and set up their own bank and government – eliminating taxes and controlling security? You know, like the Caymans? Oh, wait.
Holed-up in luxurious ghettos in quieter precincts of certain cities isn’t a plan, it’s a plan B.
Or is there a plan A? Like at SeaSteading with those floating islands?
It would be an arrogant but most satisfying conclusion for us dullards to ask: if they haven’t made their Elysium yet, then why are smart people are so dumb?