Can We Admit That Low IQ People Exist?
There are different classes of people. Different cognitive bands. Different capabilities. Some are smarter, some are simpler. They tend to congregate into groups.
Saying this out loud makes you a monster, but I'm saying it because we all know it’s true.
And it is: IQ distributions are bell curves. The middle of the curve, the part most of us live in, sits between roughly 85 and 115. About two-thirds of people are in there. The other third splits into the tails. One tail noticeably below the middle, one tail noticeably above. The shape of the curve is not contested. The honesty about what it means is contested.
I worked this out at Meatstock - a meat festival that tours Australia, and a ‘Destruction Derby’ at a rural racetrack. I’m talking about authentic events, in rural environments. Not your typical urban show where the country comes to the city. A different sort of human goes to these rural shows.
Meatstock came to Lardner Park, an hour and a half southeast of Melbourne. It’s an open plains area, the kind of paddock that runs cattle eleven months of the year and trade shows on the twelfth. The Sydney version of Meatstock runs at Olympic Park: modern, urban, and surrounded by professionals living in medium density townhouses.
The Melbourne version runs in a paddock, and the crowd it draws is not the crowd that turns up at Olympic Park. I rolled in wearing a 2XU tracksuit, thinking I was toning down my usual edgy athleisure style (Lululemon etc).
I thought leaving the Volvo XC40 at home and taking the Ford Ranger with the bull bar and all terrains was not just a wise weather and terrain choice but would also help me fit in. To appear less of a city slicker.
Turns out, my tracksuit was too nice, my car was too shiny, and my brain was too high functioning.
The thing is, I am not a city slicker. I farm. I run cattle. I spend all day tensioning barbed wire. I scrape cow poo off my face after it flings off tractor tyres and into my eyes.
I know more about welding, farming, fencing and machinery than most people who walked past me at Meatstock and Destruction Derby.
Many of them were neckbeards with a caravan. Their bodies screamed the evidence of a lifetime of sedentary video gaming and TV watching, not trades or farming. They must love meat as much as I do!
Despite my efforts at dressing down, it wasn’t enough to fit in. I also had to translate myself:
A singer-songwriter was singing on stage, performing a country song with a presentation that contradicted her lyrics, a pretty obvious artistic move. Sometimes her songs would back-to-back conflict with each other in psychological framing. Another fascinating insight inter her tapestry of personality and life experience. Other times she’d make typical stage-remarks we are all used to: ‘you’re singing so well’, despite nobody singing.
Then she’d display remarkable authenticity and vulnerability by admitting to and owning errors wholeheartedly. What a captivating display of emotional and cognitive performance, tension and contradiction in real time! I wondered why she would cover over some things, and expose others. Did she want to signal transparency? Or polish? Or both – and why? What drove her in those fleeting moments of micro-decision?
But I couldn't say a word about any of this. Not because the people around me would have disagreed. Because they would have been embarrassed. Can you imagine if I turned to the friendly neckbeard in the VB shirt next to me and remarked on the cognitive dissonance of the performer, wondering whether she was experiencing a fluctuating confidence state as her set unfolded? Would he even understand the concept of cognitive dissonance?
Or was I simply revealing my prejudice, assuming his lower cognitive ability? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t take the chance.
I believe the observation itself would have made him feel exposed. Stupid. Big words, big concepts, wholly inappropriate for the setting. So I held it all in.
The same thing happened at the Destruction Derby I attended in a similar rural setting. There appeared to be some kind of uniform enforcement because everyone was wearing all black. Black jeans, black shirts, the occasional heavy metal or beer logo. Not charcoal. Not grey. No colour, no stripes, no patterns. Just solid black. And all the same – black jeans and hoodies. Maybe the local Kmart didn’t stock any other style.
I overheard their conversations as we sat on the grass, with my highly paid and credentialed doctor friends, who attended with me. My wife heard them too, sitting in her classic sundress. We stuck out like we didn’t belong, because we didn’t. The banter I overheard proved as much.
The things they said around me were not stupid, just visceral. Simple and without abstraction. They were running at full capacity in their register, open and authentic with their friends and family. Direct, grounded, and fluent but certainly not abstract. Not cognitively challenging. Not at all curious, just statements of observation and fact. Never a question.
At both Meatstock and at Destruction Derby, I was the one shedding cognitive load to fit in and meet everyone where they were at. And I had to shed a lot.
This is the part nobody wants to admit. There are different classes. There are different cognitive bands. The people I was around genuinely could not have processed an abstraction about staging psychology or daytime-versus-nighttime audience framing, or fashion semiotics. I was certain they didn’t notice their communal uniform and the group dynamics that it forces, especially when someone fails to comply. But I did.
Not because they are lazy or undereducated. They may be those things – I don’t know – but more critically is that a cognitive operation isn't one they run in their head. They run others. They run trucks, they run brisket pits, they run fencing rigs and chainsaws and welding gear. They run social cues and hierarchies unconsciously, and probably claim them to be ‘self-evident’. Except they’re not self-evident.
Just like any other human group or class, they were taking part in a sociological ritual, their decision making shunted toward particular paths.
And here's the move most people make, and the move I refuse to make:
Most people, having admitted the cognitive gap, immediately reach for a balancing equation: ‘Sure, they can't think like me, a lawyer, but I can't milk a cow, so…’
This is a cheap admission. It's pity dressed as humility. It pretends the two capabilities are equivalent, that the ledger balances out, that nobody is actually behind on anything because we're all just specialists.
That’s not true. And that's not what I saw. I saw that they were genuinely behind in abstraction and cognitive depth. Genuinely.
And it doesn’t matter, but not for the weak reason I just explained some people reach for.
It doesn’t matter because their worth doesn't rest on it. Worth is not stored in cognitive horsepower. Worth is not stored in earning potential or vocabulary range or analytical capacity, or urban worldliness. It's stored somewhere else entirely. In being made, in being human, in being here.
The capability gap is real but the worth gap is not. The problem comes when you notice a capability difference and then erroneously conclude that you are ‘better’ than someone else. That you are worth more than they are.
You’re not.
Once you can hold both ledgers separately, the whole tension relaxes. You can look at someone genuinely less cognitively able than you, poorer than you, less experienced than you, less aware than you, and still not need to flatter them, rebalance the ledger, or manufacture a counter-skill that proves they're really your equal.
In some domains, they are not your equal.
In fact, cumulatively, they might be objectively less useful than you. They may be less intelligent than you. They may be less valuable to the capitalist system than you. Their entire table of talents may be smaller than yours.
But that still doesn’t touch their dignity, moral worth, right to a vote and a voice (no matter how uneducated).
I really enjoyed Meatstock and the Destruction Derby. I enjoyed the conversations with stall holders and the guy who won the award for best mullet. Top bloke.
Sure, I had to park my brain for most of the day but accepting that this was a realm I would never be understood in, and our minds would never meet, was a relief.
Maybe I’m smarter than them. I don’t know. Maybe they’re ‘physically’ smarter than me, at practical things. I don’t know.
It doesn’t matter. I’m not balancing the ledger anymore.
I’m telling the truth.
Low IQ people exist. So what?
