I know of a man handicapped by intelligence; he is in every sense of the word, a nerd. Eluded by social and physical grace, as well as success, he still remains undeniably breathtakingly brilliant.
He looks every bit the nerd too. He slinks around the periphery of social settings ducking the radar of derision but he cannot. As a scrawny outsider with fish-belly white skin and lighter than air brown hair, he attracts attention and rarely succeeds in even something as simple as dodging cruelty.
Some hold that intelligence has many forms. Who could argue with that? I can still say without reservations that no lack of intelligence handicaps my friend rather it is a complete lack common sense.
This is not an editorial, to write that he lacks common sense is being precise not dramatic. Since grade school, I have never known him to defer to a sense other than his own. He will not seek advice, reference a dictionary or consult a manual. He prefers to solve every puzzle with his own dazzling but faulty intuition and though inevitably he creates a solution, it is always one tainted by a daffy eccentricity.
What does this say of the sense that allows common people with less than a quarter of my friend's intelligence to go about life with a greater skill and grace? In a nutshell, it says that common sense may lack brilliance and at times be wrong but most of the time the collective mind of not so bright people can be trusted over the intuition of even the brightest
© Greg Schiller, 2007
Author: Greg Schiller
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Comments: 33
There are many collectives in society, and each one has a sense common to them. There may be a greater common sense of very common people, but then people tend to herd up and develop common sense of their own.
Sometimes this sense is right and sometimes it is wrong........but it gets interesting when we look at when.
Well to be honest if it occured to your friend that in this world is occupied by people other than himself he might be able to live life and be a legend for both his brains and his 'social graces'! I am not being rude but I have come across 'nerds' and well if only they knew how to communicate with humanity then us normal lesser intelligent folk won't stand a chance! I think that is the reason why perfection doesn't exist..
War time had a completely different governing common sense ask the veterans, those 'commons' don't exist now and we cannot relate to them... Our 'common' won't make sense to the following generation either!
I have thought about that myself, and though it does not make for a good story there is a curious handicap that may account for some of this. There is an area of the brain that people use to sense and anticipate other people. Sociopaths often have damage to this structure.
The test to see if there is a problem is simple. The clinician walks the client through a slow obvious shell-game then stops the game and mentions that someone else will come into the room and asks the client to guess which shell the visitor will anticipate the ball to be under.
A sociopath has no conception that a person who has not witness the game would know what the sociopath observed -- they are that disconnected.
There could be an element of that here -- but I don't know -- maybe it is just ego.
I was married to such a man. With many years distance from that relationship I can now see that his bravado masked insecurity.
Miles was a certified Ultra Mensa'er -- not just a member of MENSA, but in the TOP 1% of MENSA members. No mean feat that!
He was also the most peculiar and awkward men I've ever known.
He was considered "unresponsive" because he would come up to you and say things that were seemingly random. It took two years before I finally figured out that he was merely continuing conversations that took place weeks or even months before, long after I had forgotten about them.
He had absolutely no social graces, was terribly inappropriate in social situations and often behaved irrationally. Truly someone who marched to a different drummer.
And, he was the kindest, gentlest, most helpful person I'd ever met. He would stay up until all hours patiently tutoring others in his best subjects, math, chemistry and physics. He, of course, aced all of those subjects, but failed miserably in humanities courses.
In his senior year, a group of sorority girls, as a prank, decided to take him out on a date, get him naked and embarrass to the entire university.
They were shocked to find that Miles' big brain was only exceeded by his, gently now, his manhood. He ended up marrying one of these pranksters, who swore to high heaven, that Miles was the absolute best lover she had ever had.
Last I heard, Miles works for the NSA, doing God knows what, is happily married to the prankster and has at least 4 kids.
Revenge of the Nerds indeed.
Undoubtly, you are dead-on accurate in suggesting that fear clouds social interactions, but that would not explain the reluctance to consult a manual.
My friend is indeed gentle, but only kind in his peculiar way.
It has been my opinion for years that many of our better leaders are dependent on persons of higher mental abilities who lack the ability to respond intuitively with other people - staff writers, researchers etc.
Those who recognize the abilities of gifted people and take the time to cultivate a relationship with them can find it rewarding.
Good interesting subject, Greg and a great response.
All i am saying here is that do not allow yourself to become hostile to the concept of intellect simply because a few seemingly well educated persons get pompous. Pomposity is not limited to the well educated. Many people who do not know a damn thing are pompous too.
As for happiness, that is a different matter. I would rather be another nut in the bowl and happy than a hand-wringing genius . Just a self thing, I guess. Good article.
-Greg
Well greg.. these people are phenomenally intelligent you know.. they may not have figured out society and its complexities but they can figure out gadgets, besides which gadgets wont talk back.. they don't require you to be witty and suave...
I absolutely agree but then is that not the essence of politics? Who ever read a position paper? Few people even the texts written about the subjects behind position papers....yet when we pull the lever we are supposed to have an understanding of what is best. The only way we can do this is by having a "sense" of the candidate and what they stand for.
I would love to be able to speak of these things without launching a food fight, so I will brave and give it a try. George Bush represents a sense common to half of Americans. He represents their values, their beliefs and their sense of what it is to be an American. We call this red and blue.
The Democrats represent another sense.
Yes, there is overlap. Yes, there are single-issue voters. Yes, there are people who make dispassionate decisions -- but still politics is about sense. People will vote for the candidate who makes the most "sense" to them.
There is another sense, that of alienation. People who understand Bush's most motivated voters understand how this works both for his benefit and to motivate his opposition.
Bush's core supporters are religious conservatives and cultural traditionalist who abide by a long standing common sense. They feel alienated by the courts and by the media so they have focused themselves politically.
The Democrats have traditionally drawn their support from people who have formed a common sense in part because of exclusions derived from the alienation of race, gender, ethnicity or the economics of the market place. The Democrats also draw support from people who desire to incorporate otherwise alienated groups.
We will heal our wounds and heal our culture when we reunite these senses.
I think that is very possible. I do not really understand autism. I am not sure if science really understands it. I do, however feel that people can have an undiagnosed touch of it; that would explain a lot.
What I wanted to explore was the tendency of some brilliant people to "wing it" rather than to consult other people or even a manual.
Shruthi is onto something. Physical objects are finite and thus easier to comprehend. A very brillian person can completely understand a clock by focusing on it, but they may never be able to understand their spouse or co-workers -- some people prefer worlds where they have more control of understanding.
I have a question.. Don't we all have our own little quirks? Aren't there times when we 'wing it' too? When we throw good sense straight out the window and go ahead and do what we please?
Nerds are lke that too in a way... Their world is so different from ours they are so occupied with what they are working on that people and society are just incidental to their existence... The world that they understand and occupy has a solution to every problem... Every formulae will lead to a discovery, every experiment will have a discovery at the end of it... Life unfortunately doesn't come with an instruction manual or formulae or structure... Somehow I think they see life as an entity with a code and formulae and so on..
Speaking as the "King of Quirks", I would say yes we do. One of the gifts of literature is that we can see ourselves in the characters we read about.
Eventually I found God in my own Spiritual higher Self ... I now know what I was missing before, I no longer have to conform to others that so desire to be 'normal' just like each other ... or just a bit egotistically better than the others.
I now see common sense as more of a balance that trusts intuition more than most would allow ... but that is just IMnsHO.
I think you are right on much of what you say. I just ponder these things and though I seem to think sufficiently deep about what I write about -- I don't. I am just winging it.
You make a really good point that in politics we support the person or party who makes the most sense to us. What a great way to describe it - I find myself at political odds with my in-laws and it drives me up the wall. The way they see things just don't follow my sense of what is right, true and the best way of doing things. Now if only I could ever get a word in edge wise at the dinner table and have a nice discussion without interuption that would be nice.
Lisa - You're right, there do seem to be a lot of similarities between the super geniuses and autistic individuals.
Shruthi - I have known very bright people that are aloof, snobish and feel they are superior to others. However, I really think that for many of these people with almost super human mental capacity are intentionally aloof, they just don't know how to relate to people and, at least the way I see it, no amount of 'training' would change that. As Greg mentions their brains are physically different.
The question was would you rather be beautiful and dumb or be intelligent and ugly.
He states he would rather be the beautiful but dumb person because then you wouldn't know the difference, whereas if you were ugly but intelligent you would know how ugly you were.
I'll take intelligence over beauty any day. Beauty is fleeting (though I guess as he points out, if you're dumb you don't know the difference).