Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 7:10 pm
Here,
here is the
rehabilitation you seek:
You really should read the article. It makes one so much more able to speak intelligently.
A funny thing about the
ad hominem: I've noticed that you love to tell people how "smart" you are. I get that you're being deliberately hyperbolical, but when somebody does that, they've brought into relevance the question, "Just how 'smart' is this guy, really?"
I've met a lot of highly intelligent people. And do you know what I've found? They never need to tell you. You know. They know. It's never in doubt, for a moment. So the last thing they'd ever think of doing is to try to get you to believe it. They don't have to. They don't even care what you think. They're secure.
Do you know who does tell everybody how "smart" they are? People who are afraid others will not believe it. People who doubt it themselves, but are desperate to confirm it in the minds of others, in the hope that they, themselves, will finally be able to believe it. They become insecure. They show off. They try to ingratiate themselves to the company they hope to be in. They trumpet their wisdom. They always try to modify smarter people, to "bring them down," in the vain hope of making their own status seem to rival the genuinely intelligent.
The sage call these people "midwits." Midwits are smart enough to realize that being smart is a good thing, and to long to attain to it; but alas, they're nowhere near smart enough to be secure enough to let their own words, their ideas, their actions and their actual achievements speak for themselves. They're too nervous that people will fail to believe that they are smart enough to be in the game, that people will fail to notice the little achievements they actually have; so they try to remind everybody of it all... constantly... repeatedly... obsessively... extravagantly. And they're terrified that one day, somebody might point out to others that they're really only midwits, and not actually smart enough to be in the game they're in.
But what happens? Such people protest too much, too often, and too loudly; and like the queen in Hamlet's play, they give themselves away by the sheer number of their excessive and unwanted assertions of their own adequacy to the standard.
Now, I don't know you well enough to say whether that's where you're coming from or not. But I can certainly say this: you talk, or write, exactly in the manner that midwits invariably favour, presenting yourself as if you have the same sort of anxious concern for your own status. So my encouragement to you would be this: if your goal is to pose as a midwit, you're an admirable actor, and I commend the performance. If your goal is to be thought wise, or clever, or a philosopher, you
might not be getting the effect you desire from the manner of your discourse. A more reflective disposition on your own self-presentation might be beneficial.
But, as they say, "a word to the wise is sufficient" -- though, of course, a word to a midwit never is.