A certain type of intelligence.
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There’s a certain type of intelligence, isn’t there? A type that has an answer for everything, a justification, an intellectual response from a lofty pedestal.
This intelligence is often underpinned by prestigious education and membership of historic institutions. It knows all the facts and figures of one side of history. It has learned to debate since primary school.
It can justify anything through careful reasoning, a one-man Socratic dialogue, arriving quickly at its own conclusion with a harrumph and a scoff.
This type of intelligence has an ugly certainty to it, a puffing of the chest, a jutting out of the jaw. It believes in itself above all else, a self-referential loop of knowing.
This type of intelligence sees dead children as a statistic, a necessary byproduct of a broader context, a stepping stone to a brighter future that the rest of us are too dim to envision.
This type of intelligence sees the poor, sick and desperate as architects of their own suffering. In public, it says “We must all shoulder the burden, we must all be hardworking people who strive to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us”. But in private it sneers “Fuck them, let them eat cake”.
This type of intelligence is dead behind the eyes. Its soul is withered and shrunken in a dark corner of the corpus, but sometimes it comes alive at 3 am, jolting the host with terrifying visions and thoughts: ‘What if I’m wrong?’
This type of intelligence has no heartbeat, no pulse, no stomach. It stays alive through the sheer force of the thinking mind, powering a rictus grin and a strong handshake.
This type of intelligence doesn’t want to learn more unless it reinforces what it already believes to be true.
This type of intelligence is not interested in nuance or doubt; it cannot sit with paradox and philosophical contemplation. It only knows, even when it doesn’t know.
This type of intelligence loves debate and argument, but hates dialogue and silence. It cannot stand openness and possibility, for they threaten its own notions of truth and reality.
This type of intelligence is constantly in fear of losing its precarious power.
As McGilchrist says, this type of intelligence is an excellent servant but a terrible master.
We must make it obedient once more, for this type of intelligence is causing immense harm.
"There is so much high-speed technology, so many scientific discoveries, and yet the highly educated modern man has as his most powerful achievement putting the entire planet at risk of extinction. Considering that this is the planet that our children will inherit, this “high intelligence” looks more like total foolishness to me. Something is clearly missing in the minds of people of the modern society."
- Arkan Lushwala
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Then somebody comes along and says, ‘The whole system's screwed up. Let's burn it down’. Their gut feeling says, this is a person who's speaking to what I know, what I believe is true. So I feel that the absolute critical need right now is for those of us who want to try to work towards forging a better and a more humane society is to actually be straight up with communicating that: the system is rigged. The system is one designed to exploit and extract as much as possible. It's all designed around what's called a wealth pump, to suck wealth, to suck people's lifeblood out of them for the benefit of the elites. We've got to start from that basis and then show that there are different ways that we can organize society, that to vote then for the extreme right-wing fascists who basically are supported and part of the mega billionaire class, that's not going to help anybody. And of course, people will discover that.”
The philosopher Jeremy Lent with powerful reflections on ‘fractal flourishing’, the human essence we must rediscover to survive and thrive.
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