“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”— Ayn Rand
The reason many otherwise intelligent people often seem to behave foolishly, is because they have inaccurate maps of human nature, and the reason they have inaccurate maps of human nature is because they are not psychologically strong enough to handle the consequences of their own intelligence. Imagine analysing your environment and working out a number of things which horrify you so much you do not wish to believe they are real – do you continue to go down the rabbit hole exploring them, or do you use your mighty intelligence to build walls to protect yourself from the darkness?
When intelligent people are mentally fragile, they misuse their intelligence to build ever more elaborate delusions which reject reality with a coherent but untrue logic set. Meaning they self-construct or buy into a framework which is coherent within its own closed system, but does not survive contact with reality because it is foolish and thereby untrue. Ergo they are logical (a sign of intelligence), but not accurate in the application of that logic (and thus foolish).
You need to stop thinking of intelligence and wisdom as the same thing, when wisdom can be absent in very intelligent people, just as it can be present in not so intelligent people. Because it is truth preference which determines the level of wisdom a person has, not intelligence, although of course a high truth preference high intelligence person will have higher resolution maps that grasp reality with a greater degree of nuance, a high truth preference low intelligence person will understand reality better than a low truth preference high intelligence person simply because their maps are more accurate.
Laymen refer to these differences in a fuzzy and unrefined way as book smarts and street smarts, but street smarts is really just a crude way of saying wisdom, whilst book smarts simply means inherent intellectual horsepower, cognitive ability and the capacity to parse higher order abstraction and complexity.
What determines the level of wisdom a person possesses is more a combination of how their character has parsed their experiences and observations rather than their intellect – that is to say, their truth preference – meaning their desire to know the truth, and their ability to embrace it and endure it and accept it rather than reject it because they do not like it.
Arguably, a mid curve person with high truth preference is going to be wiser than a right curve person with low true preference, which is why, for example, high IQ women tend to be more delusional than mid IQ men – and so women often find themselves in the amusing situation of being led by men less biologically intelligent than they are, simply because they are less delusional than they are, and thus by extension, wiser, more reasonable and more mentally stable than they are.
Truth preference is the apex governing trait which determines how wise someone will be, and therefore how accurate their maps of reality are. And the trait which determines the likelihood of being high truth preference is neuroticism – that is to say, the more neurotic you are, the more delusional you become to cope with reality, and the less neurotic you are, the more accepting you are of reality.
A common trait both women and narcissists share is their intolerance to even the most well intentioned of criticism about themselves. This is because high neurotics see truth as the enemy rather than as an ally (because it hurts them) and so they habitually lie to themselves to make themselves feel better about things. They actively choose delusion over reality to cope with the harshness of reality, so for example, the narcissistic man will tell himself he’s a strong and powerful man even though he has meltdowns when someone insults him, whilst the average woman will tell herself she’s a good person even if she’s just been very cruel and unfair to someone because she convinces herself she’s a victim defending herself.
This is why I consider women and narcissists to share many overlapping traits – although I want to express quite emphatically I am not saying all women are narcissists (I know some of you will be quick to make that leap and misunderstand me) – what I am saying is that there are certain traits inherent to the neurotic, and that neuroticism arrests psychological development at an early stage which discourages truth preference, ergo the neurotic are immature and it’s this ego driven immaturity which is the basis of much of the overlap.
Neurotic people experience negative emotion more intensely, and therefore are less able to see past that emotion whenever it is triggered, even if the thing that triggers it is truthful and unmalicious. This is why women are on aggregate more delusional than men are, and also why narcissists are more delusional than everybody – those who are governed by neuroticism are most intolerant to truth – especially the unflattering truths which make them look bad, and feel bad about themselves.
Generally speaking if someone is not capable of introspection, it is because they are too neurotic to handle it and are thus at a lower level of human mental development (aka less psychologically mature). Same way you don’t tell a child hurtful things or you tip-toe around a narcissist as not to elicit their rage, you likewise self-censor around women for the same reason.
Ego is there to protect you from predators and give you the spine to stand up for yourself, but in doing so also blinds you to the truth of whatever it’s protecting you from when it’s overactive and employed injudiciously as a consequence of fragility. This is why the most neurotic people tend to be the most egotistical people, who are in turn the least mature and least mentally stable people.
If you are introspective enough and mentally stable enough to handle the truth without rejecting it because you do not like it, or going crazy because you have accepted it – you can count yourself amongst the ranks of those rare and special humans that have high truth preference, and for your efforts and suffering wisdom will make itself available to you, raising you above the majority who lack it, in turn positioning you to lead them as you embrace the information asymmetries truth empowers you with to make more effective decisions whilst they nestle in their ignorance to derive comfort in escape from reality’s brutal and unforgiving harshness.
In the bible it is stated:
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”
And not everyone can bear that burden – which is why truth preference is more a reflection of the character and strength of a soul, than it is of one’s biological intelligence. And it is this my friends which distinguishes book smarts from street smarts, or more elegantly put: intelligence from wisdom.