08-14-2016, 10:35 AM
(08-13-2016, 02:17 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Intelligent people do not welcome violence. However, intelligent people are able to accept and deal with violence once violence becomes a regular thing associated with American politics. BTW, I don't use education as a proxy for intelligence. I'm not that foolish. BTW, I'm not foolish enough to tie my boat to a ship full of clueless idiots with college degrees with a cargo hold that's filled to max with social charity cases.
Violence rarely serves the purposes of intelligent people. It can serve small-scale objectives but often at great personal risk for little gain or indulgence. I want nothing to do with a bar brawl.
On a large scale one can use education as a proxy for intelligence. Individuals can be brilliant yet too ill-disciplined to study, they can be poor cultural fits for college, they can become drunks or druggies, and of course they can have money problems that compel them to drop out. College is stressful. Also, some people may find that college gets in the way of their plans. Want to be an entrepreneur? College will only slow one down. It is telling that college graduates on the whole are job-takers and not job-creators as a group.
But on the whole, formal education is a good proxy for intelligence. However one might hold Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve in contempt one must recognize that the cognitive elite that they introduce as a concept has some backing. Stupidity may have some compensation in the reality of most work, mass culture, advertising content, and even political discourse being made for dullards, but for finding real happiness in life, intelligence helps.
However classist America is, it still has some gatekeepers who can identify talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds and mentor them to success. K-12 education has some functions as a social welfare agency, and IQ testing can detect people with above-average raw talent (for which IQ is related). Thus the rare bright kid in the Detroit Independent School District (yes, a horrible school district) can be pushed along in a very different direction from that of fellow students who have all the disadvantages. Aid might be so drastic as to find a way to get the kid to a rural district, a high-performing religious school, or a private academy.
Clueless idiots? Most of those, not surprisingly, are undereducated people. I want nothing to do with people stupid enough to think (if that is the operative world) who think that they could go on a crime spree emulating Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Of course there are educated fools, often political extremists who think Lenin or Hitler sources of mental sunshine... or people high in intelligence but low in morals I think of Enron Corporation).
I want to be around problem solvers. People effective at problem solving are generally intelligent.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.