The phrase “smart people think alike” starts with one of the greatest misnomers in the history of smart people. Seeing as how, in a thesis statement, exaggeration, hyperbole, or statements taken to be true that, otherwise, are not possible to corroborate, was intensely frowned upon in my elitist boarding school years and then went on to be expressly forbidden within the first week of ‘Expos’ in my ivy league college years, I figure doing exactly this is an excellent way of getting smart people to sit up and listen.
Hell, if the smart people want to sit down and listen, or fall over and listen, or plié and listen, I’m totally ok with that. But the point is it’s about time we debunked the myth that conformity marks intellect. Because, I have to say it, if “fools rarely differ” then why in the hell are there so many words for stupid?
There’s social stupidity (idiotic), fiscal stupidity (fiscal is just another word for financial – so that would be everyone these days - moronic), professional stupidity (unethical), romantic stupidity (a far cry from and a near death of social stupidity: platonic), and autonomy (autocratic stupidity is redundant). Isn’t modifying the word ‘stupidity’ and giving it random definitions FUN?
Being all of 25 years old, I have an excellent grasp of these nuanced failings. I’d like to try to convince you that (being 25) having fewer woes in the world has left me with a significant amount of free time with which to analyze the stupidity around me. But I doubt you’ll need any serious amount of research to be convinced of that so instead of cold, hard facts, I’m providing tepid, fuzzy anecdote(s).* *(I have yet to decide how much I really want to write on this topic. Have I mentioned I'm 25?)
While riding from the upper east side of Manhattan on the infamous 4,5,6 subway line, I observed a rather attractive man gesticulate wildly and proclaim to his party, “35 is totally the new 25!!” Having a short commute and an even shorter attention span, I took this to be the proximal statement of my time and failed to note any further pontificating coming from his direction. The statement alone made me think about how not only was I not newly 25, but I also wasn’t
the new 25! I’m the old 25!!! Can we talk about this minor setback in a major way? Ok, I’ll talk, you listen.
Being an OLD 25 before I’m a NEW 25 is mildly disturbing. And not in some communicating electron time warping kind of way. It’s just that if 35 is the new 25, then that only leaves me nine years to rest before I have to do 25 all over again! I was really looking forward to those centuries in purgatory to rest and recuperate before being sent back for a do-over. “Centuries” seems like a decent amount of time to get to chill out before I have to be 25 again, yeah?
Needless to say, this assumed 35 year old freaked me the fuck out. Thinking about all the ways in which he could mean something other than 600 thousand 35 year olds flooding Murray Hill until 4am and hitting the diners “late night”, I finally stumbled upon a way in which I wasn’t the OLD 25, but was also not the 25 to which he referred.
There are two kinds of knowledge sets we steep in throughout life. (This is irrefutable for the sake of my argument.) There are the facts, the rules, the mechanics and the institutions. But then there are the eye brow raises, the stunted emotions, the back stabbing relationships, and the nuances of foreplay that basically exist in the interstitial space left by the structured, static facts and rules and mechanics and institutions. I think we can all agree that the first 10 years of our lives we’re basically absorbing the first set of bylaws and absolutely fucking up the second.
So if I construed for an age approximation what that man meant as a
wisdom approximation, then he can have his new 25 and he can reclaim it, too. I concur! 25 years old and 15 years wiser to the second kind of knowledge set! A new gradation system that the 75 years old, 60 years wise gals on the upper east side would absolutely eat up like coffee creamer on their canary diamond studded pinky fingers.
I would absolutely not mind being stripped of a decade. I wasn’t using it anyway. And what I lack in decade accumulation and thereof fractional equivocation, I make up for in verbosity. I can officially say that I won’t be newly 25 for another 9 years because what really defines age is second-set-wisdom. Are you convinced that the conventional age is bifurcated by institutionalism and that we should all be pro-rated a decade?
I’m thinking no. If you’re a close reader, there were two things that may have seemed improbable in the aforementioned warm, fuzzy anecdote that led to this prophetic conclusion. Perhaps these two things indicate it was a fabrication? I will let you utilize (a fancy word for ‘use’) your own best judgment here. But remember: smart people and fools all think.
The first close reader might wonder why the 4,5,6 subway line is infamous. I can only say that if you’ve never been to Manhattan, you won’t understand even if I tried to explain it. And if you have been to Manhattan, then you know: what isn’t infamous on
the island.
The second close reader might have noted the use of the ‘attractive’ modifier of the ‘man’ in the anecdote. What can I say? I heart attractive people. They make me work harder, criticize louder and wax more poets than I ever thought possible. They make the world a better place as they’re a constant reminder that no matter how high up you get, you’ll never make it to the top. And if you never make it, you’ll never be disappointed with the view from where you are. Thus, attractive people are indispensible to the hording of small dreams in our back pockets. (A tight squeeze after a winter of food-festing and gym-fasting.) But I’d take two dreams in the wrong pocket over having nothing left to squeeze into there- and I can think of a few trillion other people who would agree. Mmmm. Thanks attractive people!
That said, back to my wildly absurd posit that the greatest misnomer in all smart-person history was that “smart people think alike”: clearly the greatest misnomer has to do with chickens and eggs and a post-coital cigarette in bed. I think the real problem here is that we’re modifying the un-modifiable. “People.” Smart people…Pretty people, Polish people, pleasant people, poor people, pesky people, psychotic people (the greatest would-be alliterative spree- thwarted!!), tall people, chubby people, clumsy people, insightful people… There really is no such thing as a modifier of ‘people’ nor is there a degree to which the modifier can be applied – as a scale completely undermines the unity of the modifier and the Venn diagram would be as useless as a frat boy at an S&M convention. So akin to the diversity among the stupids, unless you’re listing every attribute of a single person scaled by a billion, you’re grouping an un-group-able. Put in yet another way, this gross oversimplification is inaccurate, it lacks precision, and it’s generally about as useful as this last bit: it’s vague. Trying to define a group of people in less than twenty seven million pixels (I hope that’s a lot of pixels) is like trying to divide ocean front property between ISTJ’s. QED: ‘Smart people’ don’t exist (and neither do the stupids).
This phenomenon I’m ranting about, now, after pretending to talk about something entirely absurd to being with, namely, age, might be the single most frustrating field of study within the study of phenomena and I think they call it ‘labeling’ or ‘marginalizing’ or ‘generalizing’ or ‘profiling’ or 'substandardizing'. But I’m not quite sure; I wasn’t ever all that bright. Good thing I have a few years left until I'm 25. (again)
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