A dark new age?

I have noticed a rather distrubing trend recently. Those amongst us who can be considered "Intelligent" by their peers are generally looked down upon.
Never before in history has this happened.
The Norse respected intelligence, As did the Nazis, The Midevial English, the Bolsheleks, Every civilization throughout history has respected those who wielded intelligence.
Except now.
If you are smart, you aren't "Cool" like the "Sk8rz" or EMO kids.

I think this is because the average american is about as intelligent as a gorillia.....I kid you not. I have met and talked to Americans who had no idea who Thomas Jefferson was....

[swayside]

At 1/5/03 09:25 PM, FlattusMaximus wrote: I have noticed a rather distrubing trend recently. Those amongst us who can be considered "Intelligent" by their peers are generally looked down upon.
Never before in history has this happened.
The Norse respected intelligence, As did the Nazis, The Midevial English, the Bolsheleks, Every civilization throughout history has respected those who wielded intelligence.
Except now.
If you are smart, you aren't "Cool" like the "Sk8rz" or EMO kids.

I think this is because the average american is about as intelligent as a gorillia.....I kid you not. I have met and talked to Americans who had no idea who Thomas Jefferson was....

there are also people who can't point out britain on a map.

in today's society, you don't have to be smart to get by. you really only need to know enough to hold a job.

there is a difference between intellect and knowledge. knowledge can change over the years. intellect is the skill of a mind. i have an iq of about 130 in a school with an average of about 90-110ish. they may know more raw facts than i do, but i can solve puzzles and stuff like them alot better than they can.

[Nightshadeplus]

At 1/5/03 09:25 PM, FlattusMaximus wrote: I have noticed a rather distrubing trend recently. Those amongst us who can be considered "Intelligent" by their peers are generally looked down upon.
Never before in history has this happened.
The Norse respected intelligence, As did the Nazis, The Midevial English, the Bolsheleks, Every civilization throughout history has respected those who wielded intelligence.
Except now.
If you are smart, you aren't "Cool" like the "Sk8rz" or EMO kids.

I think this is because the average american is about as intelligent as a gorillia.....I kid you not. I have met and talked to Americans who had no idea who Thomas Jefferson was....

There is knowledge and then there is trivia. It's still sad though that some Americans don't even know about one of the founding fathers of the US gov't.

What grade are these people in?

[FiEnDBoi]

I find it sad that if some crazy Hitler type were to come into power and told us all to bow down to him in the name of national interest, most of us would be to stupid to repel his brainwashing

[RichardSimmonsAgogo]

i know, but truly a sadder state of affairs comes from this, people not caring
thats right i've had freinds once able to hold a solid thought, but then from somehwere they slipped, now they dont even care, its like something out of a NNY Graphic novel, I MEAN CHRIST.

and on the subject of inteligence, i just like to restate the fact that the smartest kids in your school are not the ones that study day and night and get into an ivy leauge school, for somereason its always the spaz that ends being the genius

[ChocolateChipClock]

i consider myself wise and intellegent compared to my dumbass peers. they dont have their own minds. they only listen to their parents republican ideas. they cant decide their own religions, they have to listen to the church and their parents too. they are just zombies, with no intellect that will never go beyond a mediocre mind. they are stupid...yet, i feel that they admire ppl that are wise and smart slightly. i feel that some actually do think it is better to be smart.

[RichardSimmonsAgogo]

you know sir, just because your athiest, and against our current leadership system of government does not make you inteligent, wise, insightful, or even interesting for that matter

[Nevah73]

I think his intent was more "I am intellectually superior because I formulate my own ideas instead of going along with the crowd blindly." as opposed to "I am intellectually superior because I go against the crowd."

[RichardSimmonsAgogo]

possibly but thats not how it came out, and no offense to you but i disagree, i do believe he was going the im better beasue im forcing myself to be different

[Angryjeff]

first off RichardSimmonsAgogo my respect for u is so high since u mentioned nny. But anyways it is true my motto is ppl ask me why i'm angry give me a reason not to be. It makes me sick when i have to talk to most ppl because there just so...DUMB, like they may be good in school etc.. but there abilty to think for themselves is jsut so damn low it's scary

[A-Carrot-By-Dr-Riot]

I think that the reason for the dark age that is iminent (Unless things change soon it will be within the next 50 years) is the philisophical ideas that have been accepted by so many of our best and brightest. The name of this philosophy is Post Modernism. The basic idea behind it is that everything is just as good as everything else. It says that a bunch of cigarette butts glued to a piece of paper is just as good as the Mona Lisa. It says that Equtiorial drum beating is just as good as a symphony.

This philosophy is the reason for the recent emphasis on "Multiculturalism". Our schools teach that columbus was bad because he killed indians. It teaches us that Lincoln was bad because he only freed the southern slaves as a military move. It teaches us that our founding fathers were bad because they had slaves.

The end result of this is that our youth eventually give up on school because the curriculum praises the losers and villifies the heroes. Who can blame our youth for wanting to watch Survivor and Who wants to be a Millionaire, at least there are winners on those shows.

[TheloniousMONK]

It may be the intelligent ones that get bullied all their lives, but they are the ones running the country and setting footholes in history for all of mankind to follow. That is surely worth the sacrifice of not being the strongest.

[A-Carrot-By-Dr-Riot]

But along the way we corrupt the minds of our geniuses. What good is it for them to succeed if their minds are twisted by the insane educational department.

[Ted-Easton]

Then if we know the education system is corrupting the geniuses and the intellectual then we must educate ourselves. :) that'd be nice.
But I agree- blindly going along with the crowd is the stupidest thing you can do.
"Conformity is the first step to a lack of creativity and ingenuity. A step towards the acceptance of fate and a stagnation of the species"-Easton

[A-Carrot-By-Dr-Riot]

Do you realize how disheartening self education is. I taught myself Algebra(first year, 1-2) over the summer before entering middle school. An extremely difficult effort, mind numbing and painful, there are very few books devoted to self teaching, most require a teacher.

My reward: I was placed in "advanced math" with all of the other gifted students.

Luckily for me, my mother was a big enough pain in the ass that the situation was "remedied" I got placed in Pre-Algebra. They refused to put me in Algebra because if I was in Algebra, they wouldn't be able to fulfil their requirment to have every student in a math class. They only taught up to Algebra.

It took some very underhanded tactics to get things done. My mother and all of my friends (all very smart people) parents threatened to withdraw from the school and enroll in a more cooperative district. This was a very threatening situation to the district, most people don't know it, but gifted students are ALMOST as important as gifted athletes to schools, they provide a great deal of prestige (and from there, funding) to the schools that have successful students.

Well, things worked out. I ended up in Algebra, which I suppose wasn't that bad, I probably could have handled High school Geometry, but I did well in Algebra, learned some new tricks that weren't in my book. The next year, I got to ride the bus to the high school and back every day so that I could take more math courses.

I kept up my part of the bargain, In the 3 years I spent in high school, I was in the newspaper 3 or 4 times for academic reasons, helped the school win an academic competition at the regional level (academic decathlon, anyone heard of it?) and got published in a mathematical journal (a very small blip for something pretty stupid that no one had noticed before, totally unimportant, like math trivia)

All these things brought the school increased funding.
The moral of the story: skip as much school as possible, teach yourself what you can, find some friends who can teach you what you can't. If you MUST go to school, remmember, you are almost as important as the quarterback, use this power that no one will admit that you have.

The real problem lies in this: Schools are teaching kids 1 thing. To re-gurgitate information. Any moron with half a functioning mind can do this. But you don't REALLY learn by re-gurgitating information.
I never attended public school, and I feel that that made me a much more intelligent and independant person. Unlike most Americans, I can think on my feet.

Remembering things you are told is not the way to learn.
You must seek out knowlege by yourself, Find proof, and draw your own conclusions. If only the American education system would adopt this policy.....

[Red-XXV]

The dark ages actually weren't all that "dark" intellectually. The fall of the Roman empire threw the political map into chaos, and much learning and culture was lost until the Italian Renaissance began to gain steam, but there was still a large brain trust working. People such as Aquinas, Venerable Bede, Chaucer, Anselm, John Wyclif, William of Ockham, Boethius, and Thomas Mallory were all writing. It was also during the middle ages that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which can be held up as one of the most influential inventions in the history of man. Politically, Charlemagne was founding the Holy Roman Empire and William of Orange was revamping English rule. So even if the world were to descend into what you're calling another "dark age," the learned would still be here, and would still be developing new ideas, regardless of what the rest of the world may be doing.

[IamjustSci]

I think it has to do with the current trend to be politically correct. It used to be, at least when my parents and their parents were growing up, if you were stupid, people made fun of you for it. Nowadays they keep grades secret not to embarass people...they used to just post them so everyone could laugh at the retard who couldn't spell "incredible" or something like that. But yet, for some reason, it's considered ok to make fun of intelligence, because the teacher's only reaction is "oh he must be jealous" and then they ignore it. Also, grades don't matter as much as they used to. It also used to be that when applying for a job they didn't just look at what school you went to, but what GPA you had there. A 4.0 in a state college is a lot harder to pull off than a 2.0 in an Ivy League school...but I'll let you all guess who'd get the job first.

Not to mention we don't reward skill in the USA, we reward loyalty. I know EVERY one of you that's had a job has experienced this...

You've been at a job for about 6 months. You make, oh, 7 an hour (example). You are possibly the best worker there, hard working, never late, friendly, quick learner... But yet, there's another guy who works there. He's an older guy, been working there 10 years or more, who knows. Makes 20 dollars an hour. You can do your work four times as fast as him, but that fuck makes almost 3 times as much as you because he's been there a long time.

I know people want to reward loyalty, but it encourages apathy, stupidity and working and learning just enough to get by.

[NJDeadzone]

you wanna know why the system isn't like how you want it to be? How do you measure intelligence? There could be a whole topic on this alone. Another issue is that you will find people galaxies more intelligent than you that won't share the same values. It will piss you off, it will drive you mad that they have more power than you. I'm sure you'd feel real good about having a ranking system when the smartest are still the first to get their heads chopped off by an unruly mob. Do you want that risk? Or would you be the ones on the low end of the food chain holding the intelligent heads up high?

[Evil-Overfiend]

For the most part I find that simple minded people tend to fear what they don't understand. When confronted by someone that is able to comprehend things on a vastly higher level, they seem to turn against them and horde together. For this reason we see the people with the gift of genius being picked on by people that have assumed the pack mentality of behaviour. For most average people, it is simply easier to "go with the flow" of current and popular trends of thinking. Once you have openly seperated yourself and your way of thinking from the group, you are no longer a part of the group, but a seperate entity of individuality. This can easily stem contempt. It is a simple and easily explained inferiority complex. This complex can even be seen within the teachers themselves. Institutions such as schools are also to blame. They segragate the average from the bright. Unfortunately these systems don't see that there is a difference between being book smart and being truely intelligent. I have met quite a few booksmart people who are just plain stupid when it comes to the formation of their own thoughts. All of this aside, you really can't judge a book by its cover when it comes to intelligence. Unfortunately we live within a society where being intelligent is something to be ashamed of and being average is praised. This is ignorant. IF only they could understand that intelligence is a natural ressourse and it should be used accordingly. "Be a leader, not a lemming"
See I am bias, I'm a very gifted person and I have become rather jadded about this situation. Hell being picked on for being different and always being that one asshole in class that was never there nor ever studied but got 99% on the final exam, has really fucked up my perception of this topic. I think you should just be happy with the way you are and let others be the way they are. I may be wishing for a utopian society, but this irrational hatred of intelligence only illustrates your own stupidy in my books. One day, whether forcibly or not, we will all get along and petty differences like this won't get in the way of our spieces attaining its true potential. Much respect to all walks of life!

[A-Carrot-By-Dr-Riot]

I know that I'm supposed to be above this kind of thing but I'd like to give a big shout out to Thomas Aquinas, the man who put reason above religion, made religion accountable to reason. I'd like to posthumously award him an attaboy certificate.