The Cult of Intelligence and "Success"

As Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success."

As such a success in this time and place nothing equals wealth and position. Thus do the idiots of the commentariat rush to call any billionaire a "genius," fall all over themselves repeating the acclaim, and fall all over themselves again attacking anyone who disagrees. (Thus did they say so of Jeffrey Epstein, sure that anyone who had some knowledge of math and was on Wall Street and had what seemed like a lot of money was not only a "genius," but sure that his fortune must be the product of his "genius"--and while this stupid view has been called into doubt in Epstein's case the general tendency of the commentariat here remains completely unaltered.)

The other side of the coin here (especially, I suppose, in a society that ignores or denies the realities of social class, and insists that the allotment of life's rewards is entirely meritocratic) is that a person who lacks wealth and position is assumed to not be a "genius," to be ordinary or less than ordinary, in a society that has a very low estimate of what is ordinary--regular folks extras from Idiocracy. The result is that an actual genius without the trappings of success--a common enough thing, one supposes, and probably the lot of most of those who could be called geniuses on this Earth--is assumed to not be a genius, to be an idiot, and get treated as an idiot, their knowledge, reasoning, judgment not only accorded no respect but treated with blatant disrespect, even by their supposed nearest and dearest, and all of it all the more painful for their simultaneously having to watch genuine idiots be hailed as geniuses because of their coming into money and power, at and to society's great cost.

The result is that to be a working class person of intelligence is to spend one's whole life being insulted in this way, as in so many others.