I don't like to play the IQ card, but sometimes you have to -- for example, with recalcitrant children or uncomprehending liberals. But I repeat myself.
Although our culture pretends to value intelligence, this is not only a transparent falsehood but an inversion of the reality. Elite liberal institutions such as academia or the MSM are aimed at stupid and/or deranged adolescents, not normal adults.
Have you noticed how many cable channels are beamed into your home, and the number of them that are addressed to your level of intelligence? It always approaches zero. Show me the intelligence to whom Joy Reid speaks, and I will show you an intelligence that, for whatever reason, failed to actualize.
We don't appreciate the gulf that exists between the intelligent and stupid. Perhaps even more destructive is the abyss between the intelligent-and-educated and the intelligent-but-indoctrinated.
The latter are the really dangerous ones, in part because they have just enough intelligence and more than enough obedience to quickly and unreflectively assimilate the indoctrination and then pass it along to the stupid. This is the role of the educational establishment in general and teachers unions in particular. And let's not forget the media.
How can one respect the intelligence of someone who can't even see that Joe Biden is an addle-brained zombie? Is this inability just stupidity? Mass indoctrination? Collective delusion? Negative hallucination?
We are drowning in Dunning-Krugery. But this post is not supposed to be about politics and intelligence; rather, about God and intelligence.
I realize you folks are, like me, just humble dwellers on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for a few handouts from Petey, but let's face it: if you enjoy reading this blog, and understand what I'm talking about, then you are pretty far to the right side of the Bell Curve, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Not only are you intelligent, but intelligent enough to feel rather eccentric, although not necessarily lonely so long as the proper stimulation is provided.
But you are bored stiff with the sorts of things that engage the interest of people situated to your left, and again, you have to face this fact. In your day-to-day life you don't run into the type of person who would ever read, much less understand, this blog. Rather, you mainly find them here, or in books, or in the vertical world, or in a few other thought spots of the internet.
Like I said, I don't like to play the IQ card, and certainly not the victim card, but c'mon, man! Intelligence has its rights! I'm old enough to remember when it was both respected and respectable, but nowadays you will be canceled for even saying something intelligent, and especially if it is both intelligent and funny. For the left, the latter has been totally off limits since the risible Obama came to town.
I understand the left, and not just because I used to be one of them. Rather, I used to be that stupid as well. For autobiographical reasons I won't get into, my brain remained on the factory setting of ambient liberalism until I was into my 40s, so my intelligence was fine, just not conformed to reality: good enough engine, no steering wheel.
More generally, all the surveys show -- as if it's needed -- that conservatives understand liberalism, while the converse is not true. Which is why they used to just engage in slander, demonization, and projection, whereas now they're just censoring us altogether. They've never been able to answer our arguments, and now they're just being honest about it: no opinion for you!
It's the same with mental illness, by the way. I understand the mentally ill, and not just because I'm a clinical psychologist. More generally, the person who is emotionally well can understand the unwell -- at least in potential -- better than the unwell can understand the well. We can appreciate that he is delusional or hallucinating, while he can't appreciate that we're not.
Having said that, just as there is a "mystery of evil," there can also be a mystery of stupidity and mental illness, because it partakes of the absurd, and absurdity corresponds to the unintelligible, precisely. No one will ever get to the bottom of Keith Olbermann.
Mass culture is aimed squarely at the 100 IQ cohort, and you probably don't hang out with too many of them, although you no doubt encounter them all day long.
You probably haven't done this in ages, but I dare you to turn on the local news for a few minutes. Stupidity can't really radiate. Nevertheless, you can feel it burning your skin.
Alternatively, try watching a press briefing by Jen Psaki. They are fascinatingly stupid and almost mesmerizingly demented -- and yet, not nearly as demented as would be Joe Biden in a press conference spontaneously responding to hostile questions. I would pay for that.
Not only is the left composed of boring lunatics saying tedious things, but they want to ban the intelligent people with interesting ideas. That's where I draw the line.
Stop it!
That was addressed to me.
Again, this post is supposed to be about God and intelligence. Now, consider the gulf between, say, Joel Osteen and Fr. Garrigou. I don't even know anything about the former, except that he's some kind of snake oil handler with a mega-church.
If that were what Christianity is, then obviously no intelligent person would be or could be a Christian. Apparently this type of religiosity corresponds to a certain type of need in a certain type of person, but we are not that person and we don't have those kinds of needs. At all.
Back to the essay on Esoterism as Principle and as Way. It is difficult for me to imagine someone situated to our left on on the Bell Curve understanding these Principles or engaging in this Way, for the same reason I can't imagine such a person performing surgery on my brain.
Just because I won't let you open my skull, that doesn't make you a bad person. Likewise, just because I am not moved by your silly argument, nor does that necessarily make you a bad person. You only become bad when you make it against the law to reject your argument, or censor mine.
We're running out of time, so I'm going to jump ahead to a couple of passages that get right to the point:
"Metaphysical or esoteric doctrine is addressed to another subjectivity than is the general religious message," the latter taking what we might call the false-but-true form of a Joel Osteen or some other midlevel but high income spiritual adventurer. These latter speak "to the will and to passional man," whereas "esoterism speaks to the intelligence and to the contemplative man."
And "only esoteric theses can satisfy the imperious needs for logical understanding that the philosophic and scientific positions of the modern world cause." We'll explain why in the next post.
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