[640] Pretend Smart

(This has a very small chance of making more sense if you’re drunk and you read each paragraph like a self-contained poetic rant. You can always just skip it.)

If I were to pretend I were smart, I’d take it upon myself to know what was best for everybody. That would have to be the first hard and fast rule. Practically by definition, the smart person has the capacity to know, actually does know, and will in fact use that knowledge in a proactive way to improve our assumed impoverish circumstances. I honestly can’t think of a better way to define and understand smart. Anything that deviates turns you into a Jeopardy novelty or pretentious piece of shit. People call you smart because they assume it combines with a measure of morality and ipso facto the world becomes better.

I’ve been told I’m smart A LOT. Growing up it happened. When I make some point about a country or human psychology that no one in the room knows about it happens as well. When I write a hopelessly contrived blog that I would put money on there’s me and half of Byron that could even discern what the fuck I was talking about it strikes again. Smart is looked at as a kind of gift. It’s the gateway to a level of...one has to assume survival...that is still quietly respected while everything about what we popularize seeks to mock or caricature. You hate immigrants until you realize 9 of the last 10 best techniques for fighting the cancer you developed came from the nerdiest kids in India. The irony circle churns.

I think about “smartness” in a kind of “savior complex” way. Most people don’t seem to care if you’re smart until it turns them on, you save them from themselves, or you make a considerable amount of money. And truly, with the last one, the illusion of being smart sufficiently covers for many roads to riches. We’re taken in by the characters in movies who “read people” or who describe in detail how the next 45 minutes of the movie are going to play out. In utter contrast lies reality where the smart theory is the one that makes an informed prediction that actually comes true after building on thousands of failures. It’s not enough to read the words on the page, you have to know what came before.

This is why I have a hard time not thinking I’m smart. I feel like I see the future particularly when I study the past. I’ve complained heavily about my Cassandra complex. I’ve taken it for granted that by virtue of being human we sort of all had an insight into body language and word choice. I figured it was biologically programed to have a basic fleeting grasp of what kind of storms humanity could handle and how to orient yourself in your own sea of idiots.

The title of the blog came from me refuting Byron about my capacity for intelligence. I got into a stupid conversation with a manager of the company I work for about how he could help me and what steps he was taking. Immediately I dismissed his inability to play therapist and called out his outright lies about the measures he was taking. Byron, watching, blamed this on me being smarter than him. I said that if I was smart, I wouldn’t be working for yet another company that wasn’t my own.

I’m sympathetic to circumstance. I know you can literally work to exhaustion and have no real power to change the place you’re in. I know I’m maybe a week or 2 away from my totally idiot proof sustainable lifestyle that let’s me dick around at levels I don’t even know I’m prepared to deal with. I still struggle to call it “smart.” To me, any idiot who’s been paying attention to the myriad stupid decisions made that have constructed my circumstances would try to do most of the things I have in life. It took no special ingenuity or insight to try and live sustainably. You don’t need a throbbing temporal lobe to sit in your car and deliver food for 13 hours a day. You don’t need to deconstruct Nietzsche to pay for a plot of land or solar panels.

To me, if I were to pretend to be smart, I’d not only take my presumptuous posteur about what it is everyone around me needs, but I’d frame it in a way they could understand. I’m often accused of not speaking down to people. Let me rephrase that. I’m often accused of not taking the obvious fucking truth and putting it into terms idiots can swallow. Clearly, an actual smart person would speak the same language as those they wanted to convince. Hell, I’ve argued there is nothing if not respect for the very capacity for the message to even be translated.

I think about that a lot when I think about the advice I was once given to make my ex happy. “You know how to make her happy,” in that tone. But I didn’t want to make her happy. I wanted her to be happy. I never want to be with somebody where I turn on my “This is how I know how to work you” machinery. Some would call that unintelligent. I had what I wanted, why didn’t I keep it? Well, it wasn’t an “it.”

A big reason I started writing was how astonished or baffled I was at how easy I seemed to have it. I could turn on whatever people needed to hear. The horrifying part wasn’t so much doing so, but that they knew who I was or that I was doing it and were super keen to play along. The world gets so terrifyingly boring at that point. What are you going to say today? Who cares! Make them smile, make them laugh, or just make them feel at all, and then pinch and turn. They’re begging you to pinch and turn!

To persist in your playing and pretend, you have to keep an open-ended goal like “the perpetual survival of the human race.” In this way, you can couch every single thing you do, say, or think under the mighty noble umbrella of SAVIOR who de facto has the timeless respect for all culture and creation and therefore should be given the keys to drive home. So now I’ve told you what’s best, made it into a catchphrase, and crowned myself as your savior on the waves of your enthusiasm. Still with me?

Here’s the rub. There isn’t an end goal. There can’t be. Logically, whether the sun swallows us up or we carry on until we can’t see anymore stars in the sky, there is no such thing as “perpetuity.” At least, not in the sense that we’d like to believe. Every single particle in your body is probabilistically doing it’s own thing. Here again, I could take up the mantel of pretending to be smart and add a layer of intentionality or placating sense of immortality in referencing your soul. It’ll make you feel better. The smart guy got there in a convoluted way you don’t have to worry too much about.

I think that I have no real desire to be “smart.” I just want to be right. I want to know I felt the things I did for the right reasons. I want to know I picked the right friends and right fights. I want to know that the principle of THE WHOLE THING that I could never let go of had nothing to do with my obsessive or immature nature and was correctly rooted in why we should bother to fucking exist in the first place.

Then, I could pretend to be smart about how that whole system works. You see, if you’re actually right about “how it all works,” now you make the right kind of enemies in the right kind of predictable patterns. Instantly, not just your perspective, but your feelings and priorities and actions in the world become something manifestly magical. You’re not just acting. You’re not just of consequence. You’re right. You’re needling into the heart of everything less than right who has every ounce of your capacity to figure it out as well, but for one reason or another refuses to do so.

I feel lucky to have spent so much time exploring. To say it’s not about the dollar amount isn’t some rap lyric or hippie sentiment to me. To know not only why you picked the friends you did, but what’s worth mourning when those relationships die is a gift. You can pretend until the day you die that you have the best conception of “honesty” and that you’re capable of discerning the “love” of your feelings towards other people. You can call your efforts in life and at your job “noble” or “selfless” because, in all your worldly wisdom, picked the exact right thing to orient the whole of human existence in the proper direction. Even better than those people though are the ones who turn inward. In solipsistic grandeur, of course! It’s always and forever been about you and whatever the fuck it is you think! Ain’t no proof anyone else exists anyway.

I suppose it’s weird for me in that I accept and like to pretend. I don’t really care if I’m wrong about having such a deep-seeded sense of equality and dismissive attitude about connotation that each utterance of “nigga” leaves me as hollow as you might be enraged. I don’t care if you argue “market forces” and “budget concerns” in the face of my ideas about access to healthcare. I’ll die loud and proud about how you should have bought solar panels before they were cool and efficient the day someone told you fossil fuels were fucking dumb. We’re all just pretending anyway, right? That’s the nature of my delusion, and I find it better than yours.