Saturday 24 November 2012

Day 120: Intelligence and Deception

The one day I was looking at a book on different dog breeds, and in the book, a rating system was included in relation to the breed's
'intelligence'. I then went to check what this rating system was based on (= what makes one dog more intelligent than another), and found out they actually used deception, as an indicator of intelligence.

The more able an animal was capable of deception, the more intelligent it was considered to be.

'Intelligence' is often what makes humans distinct from other animal species -- does that mean we're just super good at deceiving ourselves and others?

You only have to consider for instance our banking system to see that this quite relevant.

Our banking system as it exists now within the framework of fractional reserve banking, in essence originated from deception, where it was observed that one could loan out money that wasn't necessarily present -- and by the time this deception was revealed, the whole economy and society had already become too dependent on this lie that it could not say 'no' to it, otherwise economic growth would falter -- and yet it is this system of deceit that affects the lives of everyone in the world.

Similarly, the notion of the human being, being a 'rational' animals -- merely refers to humans acting according to their own self-interest.

Intelligence is seriously overrated -- it's supposed to be the one thing that makes us 'rise' above all other life forms. I remember watching educational films at school on 'the human' and our awesome intelligence, showing pictures of ancient greece, and statues of long dead philosophers, architecture, literature, science, paintings, music and what not as examples of our 'great achievements', yet each time any such movies fail to illustrate our gigantic failures such as increased poverty, starvation and war throughout the centuries. Interesting how the human race and its achievements are always depicted in terms of the past as the great philosophers and painters and what not while the more you look at what characterises our contemporary era is poverty, crime, war, destruction.

Is the human race devolving?

Within reading subjects such as economics and politics -- intelligence is connected the whole time with 'superiority', where those who are educated and informed are supposedly 'above' everyone else -- and based on this should not pay much regard or attention to "the masses" and do what they think is best, which obviously suits them more than everyone together -- because according to them, this is what life is about, and all those 'other people' as the majority are not 'living the life' so why bother caring about them, they're just 'ignorant fools' and deserve whatever bad shit is happening to them.

Within that, intelligence is really another word for 'clever evil', where fancy words dress up manipulation and deceit in such a way that no-one questions it and actually looks up at it. I mean, with apes like orangutan, they found that the wider the ape's vocabulary (in sign language), the better able the orangutan was able to deceive -- coincidence?
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1 comment:

Gabriƫl Zamora Moreno said...

Thanks leila, makes a lot of sense