| Cliqueless  [+ favourites]
I recently visited an organization's website called "Stormfront" (http://www.stormfront.org). It's a "white power" website, but doesn't seem to preach hatred but rather pride in being white.
As I browsed their message boards I immediately perused the "Opposing Views" forum to see how unwelcomed ideas are welcomed.
After reading for a while, i had an epiphany.
I don't believe anyone can dissagree with the fact that there exist extremely coherent and intelligent "white supremists". Similarly, I doubt anyone can dissagree that there also must exist genius-like "black supremists".
So then i started wondering... how could two hypothetically intelligent people have such conflicting beliefs?
And it occurred to me that anyone who is incredibly intelligent, no matter what their beliefs, will indeed get along with anyone else similarly intelligent.
Back to the boards... as I browsed responses to criticism of white power it became apparent there there are two different types of responses to unpopular beliefs (note that this seems to exist not only on message boards, but in society and discussions, and over a wide variety of tabooed subjects).
The first kind of response, which generally is the most popular and common, is group-based bashing. Unintelligent responses that attack one specific point made which declare the speaker stupid. Personal attacks and attempts to make the poster insecure are generally the motives behind such posts.
The second kind, which is rare and might exist once in an entire thread is a well thought out response that may have a dissmissive attitude in it, but is generally simply a logical rebuttal to what was posted.
Hypothetically speaking, therefore, if the primary response types were eliminated from existance, a discussion about white power vs black power between two extremely intelligent and opposed people would progress at a very quickened pace, and end with a definite conclusion.
In fact, the discussion would likely progress to a psychological analysis of why they do in fact have opposing views (which would likely pertain to environmental upbringing), rather than argue about the validity of their views.
And therein lies the epiphany I had. That if two diametrically opposed but intelligent people were to encounter one another, they would innevitably dissolve into extremely similar people, and any opposition that would exist between them would lie in the unavoidable discrepancies of their past.
This truth, if assumed, leads to the conclusion that everyone intelligent will always believe the same things given similar histories.
This also leads to the fact that concepts such as racism, patriotism, age prejudice, educational prejudice, monetary prejudice, sexual prejudice are all extremely similar concepts that do not actually exist. That conceptually, an intelligent poor man put in a room with an intelligent rich man will become friends, as will a black supremist and a white supremist, or a man and a woman, assuming they are all intelligent enough to understand that the reasons they belong to any specific group that differentiates them from any other group is solely the result of a difference in historical lifestyle, and does not actually have any bearing on them as people.
So... everyone intelligent is exactly the same as everyone else that is intelligent, and any method of grouping that alienates anyone else can only be grasped truly by unintelligent people.
"Hating everyone protects me from elitism."
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