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Edited on Wed Dec-10-08 12:07 PM by sleebarker
I think that mostly it comes down to ego - stuff that makes us feel pity and feel superior to the person afflicted with it is okay and cool. Stuff that makes us feel inferior is not so cool.
Plus there is the fact that our culture is fucked and comes up with the idea that intelligence equals personal worth by equating intelligence with financial success and then connecting how much money and material crap you have to your worth as a person. Thus the whole "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" and "Why you reading? You think yore better 'n us?" And yeah, I relate it to sports ability too and wonder how these people manage pro sports emotionally when their egos can't take anyone being better at anything than they are, but now that I think about it - if you're just naturally bad at sports it doesn't hurt you that much in life. Huh.
And there is all the racist, sexist, and classist crap connected to the idea of IQ. If you search for "giftedness", you find a lot of white upper middle class SAHMs who are a bit overly obsessed with their kids. If you search for "IQ", you find a lot of white upper middle class men getting their self-esteem from an IQ number and getting off on being genetically superior to the lower races and classes and genders - although they do think that Ayn Rand is pretty cool as people who are disabled with two X chromosomes go.
If they're at all telling the truth about their scores, it just goes to show that IQ tests are not the end all be all of measuring intellect. They seem unable to think about environmental and cultural differences and how that may affect someone's test score (and I imagine that their environmental and cultural advantages inflated their scores somewhat), and they also seem unable to think of people as individuals and instead think of them as simple cardboard cutout categories that can be placed in a hierarchy of value with themselves at the top.
And then people on the other side of the issue are also unable to think of all the things that could affect a person's IQ score or scholastic achievements, and seem to agree with the prejudiced assholes - if they didn't agree with the underlying basic premise of the racists, they wouldn't protest the conclusions of the racists so much. God, I'm sucking at explaining my thoughts on this. I guess what I mean is that if people did not agree with the idea that intelligence = financial success = personal worth and that IQ scores and scholastic achievements are the only way to measure intelligence, their egos wouldn't be so invested in the issue and they wouldn't feel the need to protest that all kids are gifted, etc etc. It's like how if you're very insistent that Obama's skin color didn't matter and that you voted for him because he was the best man for the job, I'm going to wonder if you really mean that he's the best man for the job in spite of his skin color because if it wasn't an issue for you, you wouldn't go on and on about how it didn't matter.
And so some innocent little kid who's just doing what comes naturally and reading college textbooks in third grade or doing calculus in fifth grade gets all this ego and prejudice and fucked up ideas about intelligence and worth projected on to him or her and suffers for it.
As for me - I think that we are born with different genetic potentials for cognitive ability. I don't think that cognitive ability has anything to do with our worth as a person - all you need to do to have infinite worth is to be a living being. I have only read a couple of popular books on physics so this metaphor is probably stupid, but it works for me - our genetic potential is a probability wave and our environment is the observer that acts on the wave. A nurturing and enriching environment can push a mediocre genetic probability up to scoring high enough on an IQ test to brag about it and how superior you are to the person taking your order in the drive-thru (I once worked at Arby's and was nearly driven to suicidal insanity by people treating me like I was shit). A destructive and deprived environment can take a genetic probability for brilliance and hide it where average people will probably never find it. One of my coworkers at Arby's was funny and nice and smart. He had grown up in cheap hotels with his drug addicted mother and moved in with friends as soon as he graduated from high school. Last I heard he was working at Cinnabon's. As an intellect and as a human being he could run circles around the assholes on the high IQ society boards and blogs.
In conclusion, here is a thought to drill into your mind.
Cognitive ability is not personal worth or an expensive degree or a job that pays six figures. It is simply a biological difference, like skin tone or hair or eye color. My personal ability is part of what makes me who I am and I should celebrate it while accepting and celebrating the different abilities of others and working towards the day when we all have what we need to develop our different potentials as far as they can go.
Oh, and if you're wondering - I guess I'm in the middle of my two examples. My family was emotionally secure growing up, and financially secure in that I had what I needed and we could afford books. My parents were factory workers, and my father died when I was seven. We lived in a relatively poor rural area - my high school only had four AP classes.
So I didn't get all the enrichment an upper middle class kid would get, but I got more than the average kid in a poverty-stricken city who goes to a school where there aren't enough textbooks for everyone and the ones that are around are years out of date and there's a lot of violence.
I was reading at two, doing my brother's senior English homework for him in second grade (IIRC, he got a B+), tested at "college level and above" on an individual IQ test in fifth grade, and scored high enough on the verbal part of the SAT in 7th grade to go to Duke's TIP program. And I never bought into the money equals personal worth or the you must produce external socially approved achievements thing, so now I am quite happily settled into a job that isn't prestigious and doesn't pay very much but allows me plenty of autonomy and time to think. Rather like Einstein's clerking job. ;)
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