Today I’d like to talk about a personality I’m painfully aware of … the Intelligent Idiot. I am one of these people. Basically, what you have in an Intelligent Idiot is a person who can comprehend and put together words in a coherent, even effective, fashion, without really understanding the content of those words.
Such a person is good at rote memorization and paraphrase, but lacks the analytical ability for a truly rigorous intellectual discipline… like say, Advanced Calculus, or Chess. When exposed to truly radical, ambiguous or complicated ideas, this type of mind tends to reduce them to their simplest components and put them in easily defined categories instead of recognizing them for what they are. Basically you have the illusion of an insightful mind where one is not actually present.
I first started realizing that I was an intelligent idiot when I tried to read some more heavy literary works, like Nietzsche or Emerson. First off, I could barely comprehend the sentences. I knew what the individual words meant, but I had to read and reread the sentences and paragraphs to even get a gist of the overall meaning. A lot of the time, I didn’t get it even then. And as far as the underlying concepts or allusions or subtleties of the work, those were completely lost on me.
This applies to films, too. When I watch a film with “something to say” I don’t notice the cinematography, the symbolism, or subtleties of voice inflection, and its a struggle to even identify a simple theme. About all I can do is narrate the events that occurred. Most of the time when confronted with something like this that I don’t understand, I go online and find some kind of digital Cliff’s Notes summary to explain it to me.
Most of my friends don’t like for me to admit this about myself, particularly Al DeLarge. He says I am “selling myself short.” But I have long accepted it. I think this is why I like “brain candy” so much — like action movies, cartoons, and videogames. The villains are clearly defined and the motivations of the protagonists are apparent.
I don’t know why I am this way, but it’s probably due to a lack of education in critical thinking as well as a lack of exposure to nuanced ideas. Another factor is probably my lack of discipline when it comes to anything that requires effort… I simply take a shortcut to the easiest possible answer. I don’t know.
Are you an Intelligent Idiot? Admit it to yourself if you are.