Intelligence is more than
education. Even higher education. It is more than book learning.
Intelligence, for me, is about character,
integrity, the ability to weigh information, to believe things that affirm life
and people.
Today, intelligence is mocked as snobbery,
pretension, acting as though one is better than others. It’s true there are those
who act intelligent who are guilty of that. But those people are basically
insecure and fearful of being found out just how little they know.
Intelligent people want to know things. They
are open to new ideas, to change, and to evolving themselves and their beliefs.
People who make fun of intelligence, who see
it as arrogance and elitism, are typically those who are clueless about the
world. They have few experiences in society working with people different from
themselves. They are anchored to a culture, a mindset, that is often limited,
provincial, and resistant to anyone or anything outside their safe zone.
There would be no great inventions, no true
art, no lasting music, no inspiring writing if people had never ventured out
beyond what they had always known.
The fear of intelligence keeps people
vulnerable to manipulation, to con artists, to schemes and tricks used to
control them, get their money, and convince them they are powerless without the
aid of the one or ones directing them.
Thinking people see through these strategies
of control. You don’t have to have an advanced degree or any degree in order to
be a thinking person. Brilliance comes in all kinds of people. But the one
thing thinking people have in common is their ability to see through the fog of
manipulation. Eventually, they understand when they are being fooled. They
figure out they are being used to support ideas, beliefs, and actions they know
are wrong, immoral, devious, and cruel.
Without actually thinking about our behavior,
how we treat people, what we consider to be honorable and sacred, we then leave
ourselves open to bullies, to power-hungry people who want to use us for their
own ego boost, their own personal gain, their own rise in some category of
influence they crave.
We see this clearly in today’s political
world. The idea of government is to provide order, assistance, services, to a
large body of people. Its purpose is to create laws that protect the weak and
punish wrongdoers. It helps society operate in healthy, productive, lawful
ways.
But when the government turns selfish, greedy,
and corrupt, when it ignores whole scores of people in order to cater to a
smaller group of others, then it has lost its usefulness.
When people think about all of this and
measure it against the values of their humanity, they begin to see the big
picture.
If you sacrifice everything you know to be
right, moral, decent, and humane, in order to follow a specific ideology, a political
party, a president and his administration, then you have failed to honor your
intelligence. And your conscience.
What should bother all of us these days are
not just the lies, the schemes, the manipulations, the cheating, the bold violation
of laws, and the belittling of others from the president and politicians, but,
far and above all of that is the insult to our intelligence.
If you just think about it, it all becomes
clear.
© 2019 Timothy Moody
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