Intelligence and Genius

What is genius

For use here, genius is the property of having a higher General intelligence than the normal person. There is no implied superiority, and it doesn't refer to anyone being better at one type of task (ie academically gifted) than other people.

Problems Associated With Genius

There are a number of problems associated with being a genius in a world of people with normal intelligence. For a start, how can those who have to stop and laboriously work things out possibly understand someone who can take one look at a problem and immediately see the solution? Equally, how do you as a clever person understand someone taking half an hour to understand something that you can see immediately?

Educating the Gifted

Then there is the matter of education. Do you integrate the genius into a normal school where he will be bored while the slower children strugle to grasp what he has understood imediately? If the clever person is not too much cleverer than the rest, then there is good evidence that if you assign that person to help the slower members of class, both extremes will benefit.

On the other hand, you can take the genius and stick him in with his intellectual peers. This can have serious impacts on the person's social development, as what 19 year old university student want's to hang around with a 14 year old? Also you can find that the clever person suddenly goes from always getting an A grade, and never struggling with anything, to only getting a C grade, which they will often regard as a complete failure.

The Intelligence Trap

Another problem that the intellectually gifted can often have is a tiny, but very significant problem known as "the intelligence trap". This is caused because the gifted individual will see a solution to the problem so quickly that they will not even stop and think that their solution was not the best one, and not falling into this trap takes deliberate training to make sure that it is avoided.

Discrimination Against Geniuses

For many years, you have seen the intellectually gifted being treated as outcasts, as people who we need, but who should not be let out to contaminate "normal" people. Part of the reason for this is that once you pass a certain level of intelligence, you quickly spot that the mores and customs that the less gifted live by are an aritrary set of rules designed to prevent friction. For this reason, the gifted often decide to ignore the arbitrary rules, and instead reason out their own set of standards to live by. The most intelligent have often fallen foul of society for doing this, not because they do anything wrong, but because they happen to do something that (often uneducated) society doesn't like.

Some of the greats in history have had this problem, oscar wild and alan turing were hounded for being homosexual, coleridge was persecuted for using recreational drugs, byron was forced to flee for his life for having a relationship outside wedlock. In all of these cases, the problem was not that their neighbours had any problem with their behaviour, or that they had any problem with their peers, but their peers neighbours definately had a problem with them.

Hopefully, this is an attitude of intollerence that the race will gain control over in the next few hundred years.