By my senior year of college, I had already learned that intelligence does not pay tuition. (Sometimes I'm a slow learner.)
I was preparing for graduate school, but I had also lost a scholarship and been dropped abruptly into the arithmetic of survival. I was paying for college myself. I was struggling financially. Whatever illusions I had once held about brilliance carrying me through life had already burned away.
I paid my bills by typing. I worked for a hand surgeon, transcribing medical notes, precise, unforgiving work where errors mattered. It wasn’t clerical filler. It was how I stayed enrolled. It was how intellectual ambition remained materially possible at all.
One afternoon, waiting for class near a campus coffee kiosk, I overheard a graduate student describing an interview for an internship. She was outraged. “The second question they asked me,” she said, “was whether I could type. Type. I don’t want to be a secretary. I want to teach English literature. What does it matter whether I can type?”
She expected sympathy.
What she got, at least from eavesdropping me, was disgust.
Not because she wasn’t intelligent — she clearly was — but because she believed intelligence should exempt her from basic competence. Typing wasn’t beneath the work. It enabled the work. The question wasn’t clerical. It was diagnostic. They were asking whether she could function.
That moment stayed with me because it revealed something larger than individual arrogance. It exposed a cultural error.
We have turned intelligence from a tool into a caste marker, and in doing so, we are crippling ourselves.
Intelligence as Status, Not Skill
Modern culture does not merely value intelligence. It moralizes it, turning it into a virtue instead of a trait.
“Smart” has become an identity, a signal of belonging to the right class. Intelligence is treated not as something you apply, discipline, and test against reality, but rather as a justification for authority and exemption. If you are the right kind of smart person, you should not have to demonstrate the basics. Your status is assumed to stand in for competence.
This tendency is especially pronounced in modern liberal elitism, where authority flows from credentialing, abstraction, and verbal fluency rather than from demonstrated stewardship. The assumption is rarely spoken aloud, but it is everywhere: those who are smarter should decide.
The result is an intellectual class that defines itself by cognition while quietly distancing itself from execution. Practical skills are not merely undervalued. They are treated as socially contaminating, necessary, perhaps, but belonging to the wrong kind of people.
This is the core mistake: we have confused intellectual capacity with authority.
Intelligence is real. It matters. But it is not self-legitimating.
Left to itself, intelligence optimizes for elegance rather than truth. It prefers clarity to durability. It assumes rational actors, ideal conditions, and recoverable mistakes. Failure is treated as an anomaly, something to be corrected later, rather than as a condition to be designed around.
Human variability is dismissed as noise. Illness, exhaustion, misunderstanding, resentment, uneven ability: All these occurrences are treated as deviations rather than constants. But these are not bugs in human systems. They are the operating conditions.
Reality asks different questions:
– Can you operate under constraint?
– Can you adapt when things go wrong?
– Can you recover from error without collapsing the system?
– and especially, Can you keep working when the work is boring, dirty, dangerous, or not to your taste?
These are not secondary concerns. They are the conditions under which almost all real work is done.
A system that cannot absorb failure is not sophisticated. It is fragile.
What Actually Makes Systems Work
Here is the part modern culture consistently misses. Functioning systems require certain critical capacities that rarely impress intellectual gatekeepers:
- Work ethic — the ability to keep going when the work is repetitive, unglamorous, or unrewarded
- Practical competence — embodied knowledge of tools, processes, and failure points
- Reliability — consistency over time, not brilliance in moments
- Judgment — choosing well under imperfect conditions with incomplete information
- Humility — the willingness to learn from those closer to the work
These capacities are not alternatives to intelligence. They are the disciplines that make intelligence useful. They are also largely invisible until they disappear. When they are present, systems hum quietly. When they are gone, nothing works — and no one understands why.
The Hidden Damage of Intelligence Worship
The harm of intelligence worship does not fall only on elites. It distorts how everyone understands their own worth.
Smart people are taught that difficulty signals misplacement and that struggle implies failure. When reality resists them, they experience it not as friction but as injustice.
But the inverse damage is quieter and crueler.
Capable, perceptive, reliable people, often quite intelligent in their own right, come to believe they are inferior because they are not the smartest. They internalize the hierarchy. They discount their own judgment. They defer to people who sound smarter, even when those people understand less about how things actually work.
This produces a tragic inversion: those closest to the work doubt themselves, while those furthest from consequence grow ever more confident. Warning signals go unspoken. Errors are quietly compensated for. Systems limp along on unacknowledged labor until that labor finally withdraws, exhausted or demoralized.
When collapse comes, it looks sudden. It isn’t.
And there is one final consequence of intelligence unmoored from reality, and it is inevitable. When an intellectual class repeatedly designs systems that fail and then explains those failures without correcting them, ordinary people stop listening. Not because they reject intelligence, but because intelligence has stopped being accountable. This rejection is not ideological. It is experiential.
People notice when policies don’t work. They notice when experts are insulated from the costs of their own decisions. They notice when failure is reframed as ignorance or moral defect rather than error. Over time, trust drains away.
Legitimacy is not granted by credentials. It is granted by stewardship. When intelligence insists on ruling without correction, it invites its own rejection. And when that rejection comes, it is not a misunderstanding. It is a verdict.
Intelligence, Properly Placed
None of this is an argument against intelligence. It is an argument against intelligence elevated into a caste and shielded from consequence.
Disciplined intelligence — intelligence grounded in humility, exposed to failure, and answerable to reality — remains indispensable. It can design systems that bend without breaking. It can learn from people who do unprestigious work. It can build for how human beings actually live.
Typing was not beneath intellectual life. It made intellectual life possible. The same is true of every quiet competence our culture has learned to sneer at. Until we remember that, we will keep producing elites who are articulate, confident, and shocked when the world refuses to cooperate.
The tragedy is that everyone loses, including the elites, whose intelligence never grows into the wisdom required to truly and correctly lead.
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