I read about an interesting study the other day. It said it that intelligence was not linked to wealth. My response was monosyllabic.
Duhhhh.
According to a recent Ohio State University study published in the journal Intelligence, there is no connection between brain and earning power. You’d think this revelation would have been self-evident. Making money usually requires work. But a large accumulation of monetary or material wealth requires stinginess, greed and a sense of entitlement more than hard work or intellectual prowess.
One’s propensity for stinginess and greed has to be rooted deeply enough to override his or her more noble impulses, and one’s sense of entitlement has to be so pronounced that it squelches rationality and stunts conscience. Once the wings of our better angels have been clipped, we are free to covet, grub after and hoard the spoils of Capitalism in relative peace.
It’s not very ethical and it’s arguably not very smart, but it’s the only game around these days, right?
Wrong.
There are primitive tribes living in the Amazon basin that would probably fill you full of poison-tipped blow-darts if you told them the world was round, but they’re smart enough not to base success in their societies on having more than their share, using more than they need or screwing over the folks in the wigwam next door to get ahead. They haven’t been introduced to the American Way and, obviously, this makes them at least a little better and smarter than us. Especially since they live in harmony with their habitat and we’re destroying ours (and theirs).
They don’t have a written language. They don’t know algebra. They don’t live in high-rises, posh lofts or quarter-acre chunks of suburban heaven. They don’t have air conditioning, hot showers or alarm clocks. And they don’t have bank accounts or private property. But they know how to survive in the natural world and they have sense enough to care whether or not how they’re living impacts their home.
For years we’ve done our industrialized best to root them out, perhaps because they are the antithesis of what we’ve become. We are consumers; they are conservers. We are wasting, poisoning or destroying every natural resource we utilize. They live in harmony with their habitat.
With various forms of environmental peril impending with each step of Western progress, perhaps it’s time we looked to them for wisdom.
We’re not smarter than them. We’ve just been exposed to more ideas. We mistake almost universal technological dependence for progress, rote sophistication for complexity and reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal at Starbucks (while sipping on a Frappuchino) for intellectual development.
We consider these primitives brutish, savage and ignorant. But they’re not killing each other over fossil fuels, rotting away from dozens of stress-related ailments or searching everywhere except inward for truth, God and the meaning of life.
And speaking of God, I have it on good information that Jesus Christ was a pretty sharp primitive himself. In fact, one of the only things Christians get right these days — at least in their portrayal of Christ — is his material modesty. He’d give away anything he had. He’d share his last morsel of sustenance rather than hide it from others or hoard it for himself.
True Christianity is the antithesis of Capitalism. Capitalism is based on using one’s energy, talent or cunning to acquire wealth. This was beneath Christ. It’d be nice if it were beneath us. Or at least not held up as what determines our worth.
Saying that the acquisition of wealth requires intelligence is like saying that murder requires courage. If we can’t find a kinder, gentler system of commerce or economic relations — a system that doesn’t reward insatiable greed, perpetually inflated profit margins, ruthless self-interest and reckless over-consumption — then we are murderers and cowardly ones at that. Of primitives, of this planet and of our own natural integrity.