The Cure For Racism

What is racism--in it's toxic form at least--but intellectual elitism? You know, feeling like you're superior to others because you're biologically more advanced. And what 'higher intellectual' with this conviction cannot deny that sub-Saharan Blacks, as a group, are intellectually inferior to themselves? By their own measure (IQ, academia and professional status) sub-Saharan Blacks are indeed inferior, so in turn we should assume that most intellectuals are racist.

This I believe, might be why academics oppose racism with such dutiful conviction. There's an insecurity there - a demon that needs to be hidden? No one wants to see themselves as racist. Especially if they are.

But don't despair. I have a solution. I have a solution to the mental picture that intellectuals have in their minds, and it derives from seeing exactly what the intellect is, and how it works with that thing we call consciousness. As follows:

When you go to sleep and dream your neocortex almost entirely shuts down. The result is that your IQ drops to about 20 when sleeping. Yet, while dreaming, you are of course the exact same conscious entity, the exact same soul. When dreaming we respond to mental information just like when we're awake, but the different kind of information induces a more powerful subjective experience, with sometimes strange perceptual depths, because when you walk out of the room of your neocrotex other cognitive processes can then become more dominant, within the consciousness.

What does that mean? It means the heart of what you are--what we all are--is not even the brain. The brain is just a computer--like a bio-electric ebook--that the consciousness logs on or off to. And you cannot log on to a neocrotex and have it be heavily dominant in consciousness, without also logging off to other parts of your brain and experience. Consciousness is not 'greater' when we awaken - just relocated. Indeed, many intellectuals are so logged on to the brain of abstract thinking, and so neglecting of other domains of thought, that for all their intelligence they can become strangely stupid in terms of more common types of thought. In fact they can be curiously daft at times, even within the fields of their expertise.

My point? Intellectuals who are good at solving the kind of problems presented on an IQ test should remember that the heart of what they are is, as far as we can know, no different to what anyone else is. And they should note that you cannot live in one mental zone without splitting from another, so it pays to respect the "humble" abilities of those who see and process information from maybe a very different angle to yourself. Because, even within your field of expertise, those supposedly dumb guys might be able to do what you could never do.

As I like to say, for a crude example: A common intellectual will master a difficult language - but a clever person will simplify it. 'Clever' doesn't show up on an IQ test. You won't win a degree with it.

Of course it's important to respect your own strengths, so you can lead when and where you should, but it's just as important to respect the strengths of others and to try and understand those strengths. The genuinely humble intellectual is not only more personable, but also more powerful. By contrast, the arrogant mentality is inept at finding (and exploiting) their human compliments, and often blind to their own weaknesses.

Knowing what the intellect is, and getting it in perspective, can be a robust cure for arrogance. The intellect (as we commonly respect it) is ultimately just a machine that can take from the mind as much as it gives. And at worse, enslave us into an unfeeling world of sterile and empty abstraction.