Penguins and Geniuses

“Hundreds of baby geniuses washing up dead on Brazilian shores” is what I thought the headline read. An awfully shocking thought that was fortunately a misread on my part. I could unfortunately imaging the cult out there that might exist that was kidnapping the world’s smartest babies.

Though I think, what about all these baby geniuses? America has such an obsession with the genius or the best of the best. It’s as if some innate intelligence or over-achieved success is the defining characteristic of our humanity. What about the rest of us? What about all those other characteristics that can make us human?

As I was doing some research the other day on personality and design, I came across multiple online forums dedicated to different personality types, many based on the Meyers-Briggs personality types. Good places for like minded personalities to get together to talk about pros, cons and struggles and triumphs of being that personality type.

But almost every forum ended up with a thread talking about IQ and are intraverts smarter than extraverts, and so on.  And inevitably people would start sharing their IQ scores. One of the threads was so ludicrous I had to laugh. Almost everybody who posted a score had a supposed IQ over 135 even though less than 1% of total population would fall into that category. Though there is no way for this allegorical example to be scientific, it would fall into the highly improbably category, or as they say, possible not probable. I though, well you’re not all so smart as to realize that the point of the forum was to focus on the strengths of your personality and not on your IQ.

But anyway the point is that even a forum devoted to exploring and celebrating a personality type that has nothing to do with intelligence innevitably must bring it up as some sort of validating factor. I suppose it might have to do with its supposed measureability and quantifiability. Just like success is often measured by one’s monetary holdings: they can be measured.

It could be fair (or conciliatory resign) to see why we flock to quantitative measures , or seemingly reliable measures. Whether one can identify a pattern or not seems scientifically measurable (IQ tests) and how much money one has certainly is. And these measurements have been around for some time.

That is not to say there are not attempts at measuring other aspects of ones humanity. Emotion Intelligence, Emotional competence, Creative competence, social intelligence, and so are attempts to measure non-intelligence based characteristics. These are fairly new and still debated forms of measurement and assessment and have certainly not reached the masses.

From a Jungian perspective, how would we measure one’s capcity to empathize or console,  or  ability to perceive or judge? I don’t know. Maybe I really don’t want that to happen, to turn one’s humanity into a scientific exercise.

What I do know is that I would like those qualities to be valued as much as one’s intelligence.  A friend of mine was telling me about how smart his brother is and how he and all his smart friends pretty much refuse to engage with those who are not as smart as they are, which apparently included everyone but them. It seemed that everyone with an IQ under 150 had were somehow unworthy of humanity and were not to be respected as such.

Showing my ignorance (and clearly my stupidity) I said, “Wow, I didn’t know that not being a genius was a crime against humanity.” I should have been a baby genius washed up on the Brazilian shoreline.

This entry was posted on 20. July 2008 at 12:18 and is filed under Permusations, Misreadings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.