“Stupid” or “smart” or “IQ”. Take your pick.

Intellectual capacity is a social darwinist fantasy.

That includes insults that go along the lines of, “Trump supporters can’t read.”

[Aside: I dislike Trump supporters, mind you. But if they couldn’t read (especially reading Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or the text part to Russia-funded propaganda memes) that would actually be an improvement right now. Lower cognition would be an improvement if it were real.]

Anyways my reasons are as follows: I’ve tutored quite a few people, and never found one actually incapable of learning a particular concept.

I have, on the other hand, found a large number who were underconfident about their ability, citing their “low” intelligence specifically. And unlike their intellectual capacity, this belief in IQ was actually limiting. And harmful.

I have also encountered people (outside of my tutoring) who thought their “intelligence” was a source of superiority over the masses.

They were not superior people. Their vocabulary – which people often use as a misguided proxy for intelligence – was offputting because they often used words they had clearly never heard used in context. Indicating these words were added to their lexicon unorganically, pulled from a dictionary or thesaurus rather than an adventure novel, highlighting a strange set of priorities that always made these people suspicious to me.

Every time someone calls me smart, I tend to suspect they’re trying to scam me.

Every time someone calls me stupid, I shrug because they clearly haven’t met all of the people who call me smart.

But in all cases, they are invoking the idea that some people are just capable of more, and others are just capable of less. It’s social darwinism, like I said.

And I find it disgusting.

If you want my respect, never appeal to social darwinism in my presence.