Why Does Popular Culture Do Such a Bad Job of Depicting Intelligence?

Over the years I have more than once remarked how badly popular culture depicts intelligence--and had something to say about why it does so.

Right now it seems to me that, apart from the extent to which pop culture simply imitates other pop culture, or the reality that intelligence is rarely an ostentatious trait that lends itself to dramatic convenience, it reflects two fundamental aspects of how society treats intelligence:

1. Relentlessly referencing intelligence as a legitimator for inequality, with this epitomized by the constant portrayal of society's elite as geniuses.

2. Equally relentless anti-intellectualism.

Thus we end up with a society which despises intellectualism yet holds up the apparent intellectualism of the elite (so commonly presented as hyper-articulate, ultra-cultured, with a multitude of interests making them a polymath's polymath, etc.) is held up as proof of their inherent superiority with an expectation of the public deferring to it.

Of course, there are ways of finessing such contradictions. One is that point 1 comes before point 2, the propaganda on behalf of elite superiority coming in ahead of the detestation of intellectualism, and this easily enough. After all, the principal reason for the fear and hate shown intellectuals is the association of intellectualism with dissent--of which there is rarely any in the elite discussed here. Instead their intellectualism is made to seem a mere overflow of supposedly superabundant mental powers, and therefore harmless in itself, while affirming the idea that they are more than ordinary human beings. Besides, the rich and powerful are conventionally excused every sin and every crime in a hierarchical society--they the "unbound but protected"--with this going for the sins and crimes of intellectualism. It is those intellectuals in the other category, of and from and for the bound but unprotected, the more in as many of them do challenge the claims of the powerful (their claims to having a monopoly on intelligence, the social order which so privileges them), who are the real target of anti-intellectual sentiment.

Promulgators of conventional wisdom that they tend to be, artists are rarely equipped to question such things--and as a result of the conventional wisdom being complete idiocy generate complete and utter crap of the kind discussed here on a constant basis.