It Depends on How You Measure Intelligence

For many years, people looked at the I.Q. (Intelligent Quotient) score and made their decisions; that this person was superior, that inferior.

There are those who have ‘genius’ I.Q.s, (over 150) and those who have ‘sub-normal’ (under 100).   And we rate people by the measure of I.Q.

This person can do calculus, that person can barely manage long division.   This person can quote Shakespeare, that person has to write a shopping list.

So these two people have ‘genius’ I.Q.s so they are looked up to, and this couple is average, so shrug your shoulders.

But I.Q. does not really measure intelligence, real intelligence.  It measures the artificial intelligence of passing tests, doing math, and flings a few bits of logic into the ‘equation’.   It does not, in any way, reveal whether or not these people can really function in society.   That these people can make the right decisions.   That these people understand consequences.

There seems to often be a kind of ‘not me’ philosophy that many so-called intelligent people adopt so that they can not perceive how others see them.

They make choices not based on actual reality but on perceived reality.   That just because they are firing all the non-white people in this office, they would not be fired because they are ‘irreplaceable’.    When they are fired they can not align the fact that they were no different to Management then the man who sweeps the floor or runs errands.

Often, intelligent people, so fat in their brilliance, slap aside evidence because it doesn’t match their constructs.

The professional woman comes to Jamaica and sees a younger man on the beach who seems fascinated by her, and doesn’t get that he is a professional Rentadread or Bungaboy who wants a VISA.   Once she gets him up to America, and he spends those five years with her, and gets his citizenship, he walks off as if she’s an old pair of shoes.

The brilliant engineer is recruited by a foreign firm, and doesn’t realise he is a Immigrant on a Work VISA which can be canceled at any time to give the job to a local.   He is sure he is not in that catch all bag of Immigrant.   This is because his intellect doesn’t allow him to appreciate that all immigrants are immigrants.

When Trump passed his first ‘Executive Order’ banning people from Seven countries, Mo Farrah, who had immigrated from Somalia to Great Britain, who was the Olympic Gold Medalist in the Five Thousand and Ten Thousand Meters, believed it applied to him, because he was from Somalia, and Somalia was on the list.

He is extremely intelligent, although possibly, his I.Q. might not be as high as the Syrian woman who was a die hard Trump supporter and stood at the airport when her relatives were shipped back to Syria, because Syria was on the list.

Mo had the intelligence to appreciate reality.   She did not.

In Jamaica we have an expression; “When Neighbour beard catch fire, take water, wet fi you,”  meaning, that if they come for your neighbour in the morning, they come for you in the afternoon.