Intelligence has become synonymous with capacity for attaining capital. The vulgar American understanding of the wealthy rests on an almost cult-like faith in their abilities–regarded as superhuman–to allocate resources and solve problems.

This isn’t elitist perjorative. The default metric for the severity of problems is the capital losses which they incur, or otherwise the requisite capital costs to fix them. But this reasoning has lead to the rise of a perverse set of suppositions about the nature of intelligence that has impressed itself down to the roots of society, beginning with pre-K instruction and continuing until we die. The success of the individual at every step is measured not substantively in terms of problem-solving capacity directly, but instead proxies for money-making activities (e.g. perenial complaints about memorizing formulas in math class).

What are we but cogitators?

All of the steps that the collective took to get here are understandable; I’d argue that this is directly the problem. Each rung of this bureaucratic ladder was installed because it had the least resistance, but when will it end? Why is it intelligent to be complacent?