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Issues – An introduction

Sounds like such an American word in the mouth of my modern mind and as such it feels trivial, gaudy and self important.  It’s soft and in its current setting carries connotations of teenage drama and that vague generalised inconsolability which accompanies it.  Nevertheless, I can’t help the ongoing bastardisation of language and am compelled to persist in the use of even the most put upon and subjugated words; to my mind  since the advertising revolution we have been losing, year on year, any true grasp of the basis for our communications, but that is a chapter in of itself.

Much as I have tried to carve my adult self out of sterner stuff I find myself unavoidably drawn to taking issue with just about everything.  As if rationality and emotional immaturity had teamed up to both find fault with and take personal offence at each and every tiny fibre of the world.  The following is the ill conceived and poorly researched fruits of the epic amount of mental resources I devote to topics which most people find, if not tiresome, then genuinely inconvenient to their thought process.

I’ll start with...

Knowledge and intelligence

The topic has vexed me for as long as I have comfortably been able to both distinguish and understand the subtle links between the two.  Each one a separate entity, each one basically unquantifiable and neither requiring the other in order to thrive, yet still they are inexorably bound together, related and involved.  Quantification is an issue straight away because we rely on tests to tell us our standing in this abstract score chart, the most obvious of these being the I.Q test.  This test claims to measure intelligence but how on earth can it measure someone’s intelligence independent of that person’s knowledge, a person’s brain might be capable of handling complex and difficult equations but they might lack the pre requisite knowledge to approach the task; Or on the other hand a person might have no spatial awareness whatsoever but through the application of their knowledge about spaces might get to the right answer when dealing with spatial problems.  This is why I have no time for test scores of any kind, because ultimately the only thing you can ever test is the person’s ability to complete that particular test.  (For the record I score very poorly on I.Q tests)

So in reality we all just make assumptions based on comparisons.  “This person can’t understand the things that I understand, hence he is stupid.” Or “This person talks far better than I do, so he must be very intelligent.”  For as long as I can remember people have assumed that I was intelligent simply because my manner of speech was verbose and pedantic, it exceeded their standards and was therefore taken as evidence of superior brain power.  The fact that this particular peculiarity is the product a mental disorder and has no bearing on my intelligence is of no significance to people as they make their assessments, they like simple causal relationships like “Big words = Smart.” 

When dealing with knowledge we do exactly the same thing.  If someone doesn’t know something that we know then we instantly take this as a sign that the person is in some respect deficient, whereas if a person demonstrates knowledge in some exotic or esoteric category then we automatically assume that this person is our mental superior regardless of how shallow this knowledge is (How would we know?).  It’s a ridiculous cycle of thought if you let it become it so I’ll quickly boil it down to understanding.

Understanding is the key in my opinion to judging a person’s mental faculties.  If we assume that most things (ignoring currently unexplained phenomenon) can be understood given sufficient access to knowledge and processing time then we can also say that the speed at which understanding is reached is as good a barometer for deciphering a person’s intelligence as any.

Now that’s out of the way with let’s get on with the real issue. It is difficult to say and not sound like an arrogant pillock, but I am bound to such a description simply for committing any of this to writing so I may as well continue.  I am a man of at least average if not marginally above average intelligence.  I am also a man who has spent a far above average amount of time researching and accumulating knowledge on all matter of topics from behavioural psychology to ancient history or atomic theory.  Yet in spite of these two facts I am almost completely useless.  Every day is a surprising struggle to accomplish, moments are awkward, tasks are ambiguous, morals are uncertain, facts misleading, events unclear and intentions questionable.  Everything is a challenge for me, every action a potential misstep and every inaction a missed opportunity.  I need every drop of my intelligence, knowledge and understanding, every day, just to get by.

And this leaves the question, how the fuck do people less intelligent and knowledgeable than me survive?  Encountering the same basic environmental challenges and presumably being subject to the same simple laws of conduct they manage to perform as well as and in most cases far better than I myself would.  My explanation for this has always been that minus the intellect to question ones surroundings extensively the operations of life become a far less complex challenge.  But this explanation is missing something and raises more questions than it answers.  For example if that were the case then how in the hell do the scores of people far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me cope, if I am just scrapping by weighed down by my mediocre mental capacities then how on earth is it that people manage to do such astounding things which their natural abilities.

So am I to assume that things are easier at either end of the spectrum?  Doesn’t sound right to me, I find the prospect of genius maddening and the threat of ignorance abhorrent.  Not that one has a choice in such matters anyway, there is nothing I can do to make myself more than I am save learning and learning as I will discuss is the great double edged sword of all existence and my only options for decreasing my abilities are substance abuse or serious injury.

I thought that learning would be the “silver bullet”, as exponents of education would say.  That to be in a constant state of education would eventually assure me of safe grounding regardless of the situation.  What I have discovered is that there is no such thing as safe knowledge.  What I mean by that is that there is no way to predict what the effect of knowing something will be and as I consider all knowledge to be inherently indifferent then its effect is entirely in the hands of the recipient.  In other words, knowing something could be a good thing, it could be crucial to your existence, it could save your life or open your eyes or lead you to a brilliant epiphany; or it could completely crush you, it could break your spirit and permanently jade your perspective.  There is no way of knowing what knowledge will do to you and absolutely no way for you to undo whatever damage it may have done.

In fact this very conclusion is a perfect demonstration of the point it seeks to make.  I would not have come to this conclusion were it not for my search for knowledge but ultimately the knowledge I sought led me to conclude that the knowledge was and is a hindrance to my existence, rendering huge portions of my life meaningless and counterproductive.

These sort of cyclic, self defeating prophecies are what my life is mostly made up of...

This brings us to....