An extension of the Maturin hypothesis.

Long ago in this life, I would hear often from people about how smart I was. Normally it was remarked with a tasty wonder. Sometimes it was tinged with something like dark envy. Either way I learned to accept the judgment with diplomacy. The commenters were correct, and the pleasure I felt at the comments was proportional to how smart I thought they were.

The harshest thing my father ever said to me was that I was smart but not as smart as I thought I was. It hurt, but he was wrong, and I knew even as I smarted that it meant he was afraid of me, afraid because I was brighter than he was and that was a thing he could not control.

Later on in time it didn’t happen as often, but there were stand-ins for ‘smart’. A recognition of my overdeveloped vocabulary often featured.

Now even that is rare.

I think there are a lot of reasons why.

The most logical thing is to assume that I’m not as noticeably smart as I used to be. For one thing, a much-publicized study lately says that stressing over money drops your IQ by 13 points. Also, a diminishing due to age might be expected. Combined, these things could bring me much closer to average, intellectually.

But I think there’s a lot more going on.

First, when you’re twenty or thirty, intelligence in its pure form is a mark of value unto itself.

But at fifty or sixty, a person’s intellect (maybe especially a man’s) isn’t rated on its own merits, but rather on what those brains have been used to accomplish, particularly regarding piling up cash and comforts and other outward evidence of success.

I have not succeeded, and on a bad day I might even say I’ve accomplished nothing.

So in terms of the gaze of the other, there is less evidence and less reason to believe, and say, that I am so very far above average.

Also, times have changed in some significant ways.

It feels like there are a lot more people in the world who have a lot more invested in being the smart one, or at least one of the smarter ones. There is an oversupply of people who can wave around a graduate degree, and the barista with a PhD is a standard punch line. Each of these people is very invested in seeing themselves as brighter, often because seeing themselves that way is the only foundation they have for self-esteem–I can relate to that somewhat, as per the above.

There is also the rise of the search engine, and even more latterly the ‘smart’ phone. The kinds of things one used to know, or not know, has become more elastic in the age of the google, and I don’t just mean in terms of who wrote the Odyssey or Jude the Obscure. It’s also in the brainpower it takes (or took) to know how to get from Denver to Flagstaff in an efficient way, or where to find gas or a bookstore along the way. Even in the utility of finding a bookstore, as opposed to dragging down a text to your Kindle or whatever.

Education and street smarts are both worth less than they used to be, and thus real intellect too.

Finally there’s this idea:

“Humans tend to act negatively to exceptional behavior, so if you’re high intelligence, but at least average charisma, you’re going to over time be trained to dial back how much your intelligence comes out in general affairs. —some random redditor who is smart

This online opinion concerns the case of Richard Stallman of GNU and GNU/Linux, who recently joined the casualty list of those dethroned for having smart opinions that didn’t sit well with the average intellects who hold contrary views.

Out of all these things, I think the lack of success factor is the most determinative.

In the end I’m not sure the meditation on smartness means much. It’s mostly important to me because I used to have a steady flow of buffs to my self-worth whether I cared about them or not, and now it’s a trickle.

Really the lesson to be drawn is succinctly put by Maturin himself:

Nothing, as Milton observes, profits a man like proper self-esteem.

To the extent that I can maintain my own sense of value, independent of the admiration of the gazing other, I will so profit.