Smartest man in the room

When I was a kid I always thought I was pretty smart. This fondly held belief stemmed from several places, all of them destined to take firm root in my childish psyche.

Firstly, I think that during significant portions of my childhood, I was probably better educated (or at least better read) than children of my age. I spent most of my early years in bed after contracting juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and all I did was read. This meant that when I finally got back into school, I knew a whole lot about a whole lot of stuff. This contributed to a slightly inflated sense of my own intelligence, largely because being slightly smarter than a group of children is no great feat. Kids are idiots.

Secondly, I valued my social standing too much to hang around with the children who were noticeably intelligent. This meant that I could exist in a state of heady solipsism, never running into anybody who could challenge my intellectual mastery (except teachers, and they clearly did not count).

Thirdly and most importantly: my mum told me I was clever. All the time. And I believed her because, as previously mentioned, kids are idiots.

I don’t think this erroneous belief is limited to yours truly. I think a lot of people go through their early lives secretly knowing themselves to be the one smarty-pants in a world full of durr-heads (please forgive these technical terms).

Then you move out, go to uni, go to work, go and see a bit of the world, and it slowly dawns on you that perhaps you are not the towering mental colossus that you always thought you were. At first it’s a gradual process: people get consistently better grades than you or they mention books and films and people that are apparently important but of which you have limited knowledge. Then you find that more and more people seem immune to your charms and manipulations. You find yourself outsmarted by your boss, your lecturers, the postman. Finally you end up in a pub on a Thursday afternoon in the midst of a heated debate about globalization and you realise, with a flailing horror akin to loosing your grip on a ladder, that you don’t know a single thing about what they are talking about and furthermore, may not have had an original and/or interesting thought in your entire life.

It’s a rough moment. I pray, for your sake, that it occurs but once. The sad fact, however, is that you are probably destined to stumble through these moments a score of times in your life. In fact, fuck it, I take back my prayers, if it happens to me (me! A tupping genius!) then I bloody well hope it happens to you.

If you want the cake of shame to taste really awful you need a good few spoonfuls of arrogance in there first, and your own intellect is an easy thing to be arrogant about. Firstly it is the limit of your own consciousness, which makes it difficult to accurately map what lies beyond it. To paraphrase another famous idiot, it’s hard to know what you don’t know you don’t know. Secondly, knowledge is a tricky thing to define – what is important for someone else might not count for you and vica versa. It’s easy to dismiss what others know as useless or indulgent, and see your own way of thinking as vital and dynamic. Finally, it’s really, really hard to admit the plain truth – that quite a lot of people are much more intelligent that you are.

Actually, there is perhaps one more point: that a lot of people in your immediate vicinity seem to be idiots. I mean honestly, they’re everywhere. On the telly. In the newspapers. Writing the newspapers. Advising the most powerful man in the world. The most powerful man in the world. When the majority of the educated world hold themselves to be more intelligent that the President of the United States of America (who is, let us not forget, basically the king of the world; when the aliens arrive they aren’t going to be visiting Kevin Rudd first of all), then we might be forgiven for holding an inflated sense of our own mental acuity. OK, so they’ve got another one now and he seems quite bright, but the point still stands.

The problem is that you cannot measure your intelligence by comparing yourself to people noticeably thicker than you. It might be easy to feel clever in a room full of numpties, but you aren’t necessarily that smart of the general scale. If you play for a men’s football team, you cannot claim to be the best in the league if you only play against girls under-13’s squads.

This would normally be where I would try and draw the whole post together with a relatively positive, upbeat solution. Well, not this time, thicko. You’ll just have to accept the fact that quite a lot of people are quite a lot more cleverer than you, innit. And unfortunately, the only way to advance on the road to cerebral progress is to consistently interact with those people, even if it means getting your mental faculties rubbed in the metaphorical dirt every so often.

On the other hand, you could just hang around with your mum all day. Every mother tells her child that they are the sharpest knife in the drawer. But remember she’s only saying it because you are her kid, and if we’ve learned anything today it’s that (sing it with me folks!): kids are idiots.