Culture
The Importance of Balanced Intelligence and Knowledge
Oct
Story at-a-glance
- Many important types of intelligence besides “intellectual intelligence exist.” Without them, we cannot connect to our deeper wisdom and are easily lead astray. Likewise, if our intelligence remains unbalanced, our knowledge will almost always be patchy and incomplete
- A century ago, American education was hijacked by oligarchs like Rockefeller who replaced cultivating critical thinking and deep knowledge with training widespread compliance
- Education trains us to have a very linear form of intelligence which often misses critical details because it lacks the ability to see the broader picture. This for instance characterizes many problems in medicine
- Those trained to have excessive left brain thinking are often challenging to have a dialog with because they are both aggressive in asserting their ideology and simultaneously incapable of seeing anything which does not prove they are right
- This article will discuss the importance of balanced intelligence and strategies for cultivating it
Throughout history, many different types of intelligence have been recognized (e.g., physical intelligence and coordination or emotional intelligence). In contrast, our society worships a very specific type of intellectual intelligence that as far as I know has never previously been so highly valued by a society.
In my own experience, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve interacted with who I know are much smarter than me, yet when I compare and contrast our ability to get things done, to correctly interpret data we are exposed to, help patients, or live a happy life, I come out far ahead of them. Likewise, I’ve lost count of how smart people I’ve met who simply don’t “get it” and frequently are misled by something quite obvious.
Years ago, when I discussed these experiences with a spiritual teacher (as I was frustrated with how easily many of my medical colleagues were being misled) and was told to stop getting upset because “intelligence does not equate to being resistant to mind control.”
Modern Education
I’ve long noticed that the educational system builds up a very specific type of intelligence and reciprocally destroys the other ones (e.g., I found the more I was “educated” the more I lost the ability to think and access the deeper capacities of my mind). Because of this, at each level of my education, I was initially an enthusiastic A student, but then become disillusioned, switched to self-study, and in many cases barely passed my classes.
Note: Discovering how to bio-hack the sleep cycle to rapidly memorize large volumes of information was what essentially allowed me to largely boycott the educational system but simultaneously get through it.
That skill set was immensely valuable during my medical training as it allowed me to devote myself to learning what would help my patients rather than be swallowed by the allopathic model. Likewise, both college and medical school followed a similar script. They only wanted you to replicate exactly what your teacher had shown you and harshly reprimanded ever presenting an independent approach to the problem.
Note: Numerous medical school deans and residency directors I’ve spoken have lamented that the newer crops of medical school graduates lack the critical thinking which is needed for them to effectively function as doctors during medical residency — yet they simultaneously fail to recognize how their own actions are removing critical thinking from their trainees.
Ultimately, I was driven by a deep yearning for as much knowledge as possible. Since you’ll never have enough time to study everything, I gradually realized:
1. It’s critical to recognize during the knowledge accumulation process when you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns and aren’t learning much more of value regardless of the effort you are putting in. Many however become attached to what they know and simply spend all of their resources reaffirming their existing knowledge base with extraneous details.
2. In contrast, it’s also important to recognize which things actually have a depth and value to them that justifies spending years, if not decades developing mastery in them.
Note: Doing this often requires adopting a broad focus that allows you to see and accept the contradictions within a subject so you can gradually unravel the mystery behind it.
3. If you can eventually grasp the fundamental processes that ultimately underlie something, that knowledge can often make it possible to rapidly understand many seeming unrelated phenomena because while many things on the surface appear different, at their heart they are often the same.
4. People often assume that if they follow the path society lays out for them that everything will “work out,” when in reality it often does not. For example in medicine, many of my classmates chose specialities they fell into or simply for the money — and most of them are now miserable because their heart was not behind what they ultimately had to do professionally.
Likewise, many I know blindly took the COVID vaccines without questioning them because the medical system they believed in told them to — and quite a few of them suffer every day from that decision.
The Transformation of Modern Education
Over the last century, there’s been a systematic dismantling of the educational system as its focus shifted from creating an empowered electorate to producing subservient citizens who only existed to fill their pre-designated societal roles. To illustrate:
• In 1903 John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board,1 which over the decades (with Carnegie’s foundation) gave billions to schools around the country until in 1973, the Department of Education was created. These foundations reshaped American Education,2 transforming it from a locally managed process to a rigid and mandatory centrally controlled one.
Note: The director of Rockefeller’s “charity” admitted their goal was to have this new model of education train the populace to be compliant slaves who lacked critical thinking.3
• In the 1960s, one of my relatives was given documents by a group that preceded the World Economic Forum which detailed a global plan to impoverish America so that everyone would willing submit to low paying and backbreaking corporate jobs to get by (e.g., consider Corporate America’s recent vaccine mandates), hence ensuring the American people would be compliant and do whatever the ruling clash wished.
I learned about this as a child and have been astonished to see each part of the plan, such as removing critical thinking from American education gradually come to pass.
• Individuals at elite schools the ruling class sends their children to have repeatedly shared with me that the educational process there is very different (e.g., it fosters critical thinking).
• Award-winning teacher, John Gatto, extensively wrote about how American education had been transformed4 so that when children were in the prime of their life to learn and develop their own identities, they were instead locked into a rigid and sterile environment which disconnected them from all the interactions and experiences of life that allowed them to develop their own identities and become highly functional members of society.
Likewise, Ivan Illich made the salient observation5 that once people are “taught” within a rigid framework, they lose much of their inherent capacity to “learn.”
Note: One of my favorite math teachers in college once shared with me that his Ivy League students frequently complained to administrators about his teaching style which encouraged us to derive solutions to problems rather than giving us steps to memorize.
I believe these points explain why we keep spending more money (and years of schooling) on education, yet have worse and worse outcomes (not unlike modern medicine). Likewise, much of my success as a student came from a desire to develop my mind and the recognition the schooling processes was frequently counterproductive to that — ultimately leading me to seek out the style of education I much later learned pioneers like Gatto and Illich had also advocated for.
Note: Vaccines also provide a critical facet of this picture as the microstrokes and autoimmunity they create frequently create neurological injuries. In turn, suppressed data shows vaccination has profoundly altered the minds of America (e.g., the particularly dangerous DTwP vaccine was released, a wave of misbehavior, developmental delay and violence rippled through the country as each vaccinated generation grew up), forcing the educational system to completely restructure itself. Sadly, this happened so long ago those changes have now been normalized and forgotten.
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Counterproductive Cognitive Algorithms
Two approaches are often used to solve problems:
• “Right Brain” thinking — Engage the creative capacities of the brain (and unconsciousness), be able to see the broad picture in front of you, and then be able to arrive at an innovative solution to the problem you are facing. This allows immense insights to be gained, but simultaneously, those predisposed to it often struggle to address the practical day to day needs we face.
• “Left Brain” thinking — Memorize a series of lists, hyperfocus on a few reductionistic details, and then forcefully execute a chain of logic or algorithm which utilizes those lists to come up with a solution. This is effective at getting necessary things done but frequently locks the user into being unable to see critical details outside of their framework.
Note: I’ve also observed that the widespread neurological damage from mass vaccination predisposes those injured to left brained thinking.
Many in turn have argued excessive left brain thinking (which schooling drills into us) is the root cause of many ills in our society. I agree and believe balanced left and right brain thinking is essential for our society (e.g., this is why I try to show both the forest and trees while I write).
The problem with left brain thinking is that it tends to lock one into a “solution” which excludes the best answer from being considered. For example, in medicine, I frequently see brilliant doctors who are remarkably skilled at executing their clinical algorithms but cannot help patients their algorithms simply aren’t applicable for.
Likewise, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve debated with whose logic starts from the premise there is no conceivable way any viewpoint besides their own could be right (which inevitably results in them concocting absurd arguments).
Note: This is somewhat analogous to a hamster trapped in a cage with a hamster wheel. If the hamster does what it knows to do (run on the hamster wheel) no matter how fast it goes, it will never be able to escape the cage, whereas if the hamster got off the wheel it could see an exit and leave the cage.
In turn, when I watch how people’s minds often as they try to execute a flawed algorithm they were given to solve a vexing problem they face, it often seems as though a wheel in their brain is working in overdrive in a futile attempt to solve that problem.
Debating Cognitive Algorithms
I’ve gotten into more debates than I can count with ardent defenders of the orthodoxy. In each case, I’ve noticed three salient features:
1. Their arguments are extremely repetitive, to the point I often can predict over 90% of what they will say by the time they finish their first few sentences (which is why I always subtly approach the argument from an angle they are not expecting rather than directly confront them). Remarkably, whenever I question them about this, they have little to no recognition they are regurgitating someone else’s talking points.
Note: Somewhat analogously, when patients see specific specialists (e.g., a neurologist) we can predict with high accuracy give or take everything the specialist will tell them.
2. Frequently when they engage these scripts, to varying degrees they disassociate and enter a hypnotic state where they lose awareness of many things outside the immediate point they are discussing — especially if they are confronted with evidence that overtly disproves their existing belief system.
3. Typically, the “algorithm” they follow is to quickly scan through everything you present to them until they find something can attack (e.g., because they already know a script for attacking it) at which point, they become unable to see the rest of your argument and hyper focus on their point of attack.
In short, their focus is not on discerning what is true, but rather on finding a way to prove they are “right.” One of the most important things about this phenomenon is that, typically, the more educated or intellectually intelligent people are, the more aggressively and reflexively they do this.
In turn, whenever I observe these behaviors, I often will send them one of my favorite articles on the subject — Stanovich’s “Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot.”6
Blindspots, for reference encompass errors in reasoning where someone has an inherent bias that causes them to miss something which is otherwise obvious (e.g., the hamster is so focused on its wheel it cannot leave the cage) and that in many cases, the presence of blindspots appears to be a consequence of them not wanting to make the effort to think through a problem and instead simply asserting the first thing that jumps to mind.
The paper7 highlights a key facet of blindspots — while people are very good at recognizing them in others, they typically cannot see their own blindspots. Additionally, as Stanovich showed, individuals who demonstrate one type of blindspot are more likely to demonstrate other types of blindspots.
Most importantly, cognitively sophisticated individuals (“intelligent” people) aren’t protected from falling prey to these biases, and if anything, are more likely to engage in them. Here are two examples:
1. Throughout COVID, there was such a strong focus on proving the narrative that any argument supporting it would be accepted regardless of its absurdity.
This was best shown by the Surgisphere scandal,8 where one of the top 5 medical journals published a paper “proving” hydroxychloroquine was dangerous, without realizing the data set it came from could never have been obtained and had numerous red flags indicating it was a forgery — eventually leading to the Lancet retracting it.
Recently I came across a thread9 where a leading hydroxychloroquine researcher (prior to the retraction) had shown why the Surgisphere data was likely fake — at which point one of the world’s most well-known “skeptics” (a doctor who for decades has relentless attacked anyone who questions any orthodoxy) inserted himself into the discussion to slander the researcher for claiming fraud rather than admitting that data proved he was completely wrong about hydroxychloroquine saving lives.
2.
Note: I sampled around 1000 comments and found the majority of them came from people who could not see what was actually happening because they had such a strong anchoring to their initial impression (due to it validating their belief system).
In short, Stanovich’s paper10 provides an explanation for why more intelligent people are less able to see the things in front of them which challenge their existing beliefs. Likewise, I believe it helps explain why they will frequently adopt incorrect logical premises which they then use as a basis for their arguments.
Anchoring to Reality
“If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything.”
When I’ve looked at what causes people to get led astray, I’ve found the most common thread is a lack of connection to reality, causing them to lose the reflex they would otherwise have reject what something absurd they are being pulled into. For instance:
• Over the years I’ve been asked to work with numerous people who got pulled into a dangerous spiritual cults. One of the most common threads I’ve noticed is that those individuals had a pre-existing disconnection from themselves (e.g., they weren’t “grounded”) and that the cult had them engage in a variety of unsafe spiritual practices which further exacerbated that disconnection.
In turn, I’ve found to help them, rather than attack and criticize the cult (which often simply reinforced their devotion to it), it was critical to guide them into reconnecting with themselves, as that would both give them the capacity to recognize the cult’s shortcomings and the strength to listen to their inner voice and free themselves from the cult’s grasp.
Note: The above also applies to political cults.
• When individuals are very intelligence in one domain, they reciprocally are deficient in the others (e.g., I know numerous geniuses who are emotionally challenged and lead dysfunctional personal lives).
• A key points Gatto made was that by schools cutting children off from the broader society they lost the anchors which were necessary for them to develop their own sense of self, self-esteem, empathy for others, and capacity for creativity and self-awareness. In turn, he consistently found his middle school students profoundly benefitted from assignments like hundreds of hours of community service with adults in the community.
• Recently, I discussed how countless empires throughout history have followed a consistent pattern — a meteoric rise followed by a period of decadence and collapse roughly 250 years after the empire’s founding — something almost identical to what America is currently experiencing.
The English general who created this model theorized that it resulted from each empire’s immense success making the empire fabulously wealthy, which in turn led to the empire’s citizens focusing on making money rather than advancing the empire, giving rise to an age of intellectualism (since they needed something to spend their money on), which then gave rise to the fatal era of decadence.
In my opinion, that transition from intellectualism to decadence is due to the “elites” of society becoming disconnected from the struggles of the empire which built it up and the hardships of day to day life its subjects needed to engage in before they became fabulously wealthy.
As a result, their conception of reality switched to being an intellectual idea in their minds where all they really cared about were the merits of their ideas (e.g., “being right”) and before long, they became led down a variety of dysfunctional ideologies, which while at odds with reality, were easy to intellectually rationalize (provided the appropriate cognitive biases were in place). In turn, I would argue that essentially synopsizes the situation our society currently finds itself in.
Conclusion
I was raised to believe that all types of intelligence mattered and that excessively developing one at the expense of the others was highly detrimental. This was because beyond it creating massive blindspots, it would create an imbalance within you that could cause the excessive type of intelligence to become deranged.
Likewise, my teachers repeatedly taught me that if your goal was to develop one type of intelligence (e.g., intellectual intelligence) it was often far more effective to cultivate a related type of intelligence that would support your primary target than it was to just focus on refining the desired intelligence.
Presently, our society is going through a period of immense instability, and I believe much of that is being birthed from how unbalanced much of our culture is. Fortunately, COVID-19 has awakened the public’s eyes to the rot that’s existed behind the scenes and there is now a genuine enthusiasm for a more balanced and expansive way of looking at the world around us, something I believe has a real potential to profoundly improve our society.
Author’s note: This is an abridged article. In the full version, I discuss the above points in more detail and explore more of the strategies that allowed me to cultivate a balanced intelligence. For more sources and links on this subject, click here.
A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional insight on a wide range of topics, and I’m grateful to share them with them. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.