I’m sure many who read this will have some familiarity with the late comedian George Carlin and his comment on human stupidity:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
The clip is readily available online. Go watch it. It’s fun. And disturbing for some.
For the sake of this discussion I will ignore that in any group, the distribution of a particular characteristic may diverge from the half-above- and half-below-the-average Carlin relies on for his humour. The actual distribution of intelligence in a human group could well be a few individuals of ultra-intelligence, a major mass of slightly below average intelligence, and a scattering of individuals across the rest of the spectrum. Or vice versa.
Such statistical parsing, while perhaps intellectually necessary, helps neither Carlin’s joke nor the point I am wanting to make here, which is . . .
Carlin makes his quip and immediately a large portion, perhaps most, of the audience roars with laughter. Clearly, the vast majority of the audience reflexively considers themselves to be members of the above-average group. They laugh at the fact that half of humanity (including half of the audience, one must reasonably presume) are of below-average intelligence. But they themselves are by no means members of that lower half! Heavens!
All immediately laugh, except perhaps for one or two individuals who, I suspect, pause for a moment, thinking . . . “Wait a minute. He means half of us — half of us in this room — are of below average intelligence. And he’s right (retaining the statistical reservation mentioned above). And we’re all laughing like he doesn’t mean us. But he does mean us. And this whole crowd doesn’t seem to see it.”
And then they think:
“What am I missing? Maybe I’m in the lower half . . .”
and that’s where the imposter complex kicks in, and also kicks in the complex of wisdom that has followed on Yeats’ lines in “The Second Coming”:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
George Carlin’s bit interrogates us about our place in that depressing dyad which Bertrand Russell suggested in his essay “The Triumph of Stupidity” was the fundamental cause of trouble in the modern world, that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Half of us are very likely stupider than the average but we are so sure that we are above average that we laugh at the joke and also have a strong feeling that we know how the world should work. And the few who are well above average are so full of doubts that they can only laugh along uncomfortably at both the joke and at history as it unfolds about and on top of us..
Russell went on to write in the same passage:
Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are two individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
And here is a point which has become even more of a problem in the 21st century than it was in Russel’s or even in Carlin’s day: all, intelligent or otherwise, are too individualistic, too intransigent, too damn siloed to find common ground when they differ on ANY points. It seems impossible today to suggest that the world is a complex place and that people may have conflicting but equally valid, legitimate, truthful, and legal positions among which common ground must be found if humanity is to survive.
But the intelligent, the exact ones who might be able to guide us out of the morass, are, with absolutely good reason in this hopelessly complex world, full of doubt.
And the salt-of-the-earth average and below-average mass of humanity, Carlin’s “stupid”, are filled with certainty, not just about the world, but about the fact that they are, each and every youtube-researching, church- and mosque- and synagogue- and temple- and gurdwara-going, party-member one of them, of above-average, perhaps even of extreme intelligence. But they are not, with any statistical significance, anything other than average.
And that all scares the hell out of me and makes it very hard for me to laugh at George Carlin’s bit of terrifying wisdom.
Behind the Hedge 