Context: See GRE's Top 1% at the PaulKnatz blog. (Also see my Knatz.com/Society module on the subject: an earlier post here at IonaArc.)
I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.
In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.
God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.
Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.
Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.
When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"
GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...
We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?
Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?
How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?
Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:
Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.
Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?
I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.
Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.
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