The True Curse of High IQ

Why smart people do dumber things than most

A question that keeps coming up in particular reference to Gamma males is why a group of men who are, on average, more intelligent than the norm, insist on a) refusing to learn from anyone else, b) refusing to learn from their own experiences, and c) doubling down indefinitely on their own mistakes.

The most relevant answer is an unsatisfactory one and it was provided by Aristotle more than twenty-five hundred years ago in his landmark book entitled Rhetoric.

Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.

– Aristotle, Rhetoric

Despite being one of the most significant descriptions of the human condition ever written, this statement is essentially useless to us in this particular context because while it describes the very What we are observing, it does not even begin to address the Why that is of interest to us.

The implications of Aristotle’s statement go far beyond instruction, though, and I would go one step further than the great Stagirite in pointing out that it is not immunity to instruction that is the most significant aspect of those who are incapable of dialectic and therefore cannot be instructed, but rather, their immunity to knowledge itself.

There is no reason, after all, to assume that there are errors in transmission being introduced by the instructor or that he is somehow failing to accurately pass on the exact knowledge that he possesses. Indeed, the evidence of our own observations shows that in addition to an inability to learn from anyone else, the Gamma cannot - or perhaps will not - learn from his own experiences or the knowledge that he has accumulated on his own without instruction from others.

But it’s not just Gammas. Most people, of all levels of intelligence from low to high, reliably demonstrate that they are immune to knowledge regardless of the source from which it is derived.

He that complies against his will

Is of his own opinion still

Which he may adhere to, yet disown,

For reasons to himself best known

– Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Many high IQ people believe that their gift is actually a curse due to the social difficulties it reliably creates for them and the emotional pain that results from those difficulties. The communications IQ gap is real. But the danger for the highly intelligent is the way that their intelligence endows them with the ability to generate very compelling syllogisms to justify their refusal to accept knowledge gained in any of a wide variety of ways.

The smarter the man, the more highly developed his ability to question sources, create false narratives, suggest alternative interpretations, and, in general, ignore any information he wishes to ignore. Even worse, he can usually do so in a manner that the average individual will find completely convincing; the best debaters can present either side of an argument almost equally well regardless of whether it is entirely true or totally false.

The true curse of high IQ is the temptation to fold, spindle, and mutilate knowledge in such a way that it has been successfully neutralized, or worse, convincingly inverted.

This is why the more intelligent you are, the more you must be ruthlessly and relentlessly honest with yourself, even if you have absolutely no intention of being similarly truthful with anyone else. But then, you would also do well to keep in mind that even if your perfectly Machiavellian approach to the world is capable of fooling everyone you encounter, in the end, you are still fooling yourself.

Yet God hath placed by the side of each a man’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over him—a Guardian who sleeps not nor is deceived…. So when you have shut the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is within, and your Guardian Spirit, and what light do they need to behold what you do?

—Epictetus

And the beautiful thing is that one need not possess an ample quantity of intelligence in order to learn from the mistakes of one’s intellectual superiors. Intelligence may or may not be a curse sometimes, but Wisdom is always a gift.