Dumbing It Down - Part 2

Society is being re-engineered for the man/woman/child who can’t think past the next dopamine hit. Every major institution is now optimized for the lowest cognitive load; designed for the lowest common denominator.

• Schools today teach to the middle, and then they lower the middle to accommodate the chaff below. When the SAT is eliminated to accommodate the low-IQ set, we should take notice.

• Media speaks in slogans short enough to fit between two ads, and sound bites rule over substantive reporting. Can anyone even read a long-form article today? Scroll, scroll, scroll…

• Corporate HR designs company policy and procedure so the slowest thinker in the room never feels left behind, recognizing poor performance as the cost of a society of inequitable processes. It’s not you, sweetie, it’s the system…

• Politics runs on feelings and tribal signals because complex trade-offs require more working memory than the median voter is willing to spend, and more airtime than what a post on X can accommodate. Some in the political set can barely transmit thought into sentence form.

The result is a systematic thinning of the air.

Example 1: My local middle school has 84 cheerleaders. They eliminated tryouts - just sign up, and BOOM! You’re now a cheerleader. I will guarantee you that life for that #84 is rougher than if she’d gone through a tryout and been told she didn’t make the squad. Why? Because kids know. People know. That #84 does not belong, and she is rightfully being told she does not belong. Am I a bully? No. I’m a realist, and I know how the world works. The world does not work with 84 damn cheerleaders.

Example 2: Some states and a long list of universities have abandoned the SAT and ACT as hard requirements. They call it “equity.” What it actually does is remove one of the few remaining objective filters that separate high cognitive ability from the slop. When you strip out a standardized measure of abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and working memory, then admissions collapse toward softer criteria - mainly demographic checkboxes. The high-IQ kid who can actually think in systems is no longer sorted upward by measurable ability; he is diluted into a pool optimized for the lowest common denominator. The result is classrooms, majors, and eventually professions where the ambient cognitive temperature is deliberately obliterated for the mere goal of ensuring so no one feels left behind. Excellence becomes socially expensive - at the very gate where it used to be measured.

Extrapolate that across a business environment. A high-IQ man steps into this environment and immediately feels the pressure drop. Conversations stay at first-order level by design. Incentives reward the person who can merely perform the baseline, not the one who can map second- and third-order consequences - you know, the things that will increase the company’s market cap. Abstract thought is treated as elitism. Pattern recognition that stretches beyond the current fiscal quarter is called “overthinking things.” Long time horizons, projections, and outlooks look like arrogance to people who are locked in weekly survival mode.

In the workplace, the high-IQ man watches promotions flow to either the politically fluent or the DEI puppets, not the competent. In social circles, he learns to sand down his speech a bit so the room does not glaze over.

Example 3: Can you relate to that conversation where you know the person you’re speaking with is so far behind you feel as if you’re suddenly speaking Swahili? Then you get to the end of what you’re trying to say, and realize the person you’re speaking with is struggling with the reason why you’re even saying what you are trying to say. Brutal!

In relationships, the high-IQ man discovers that most folks experience his natural mode of thinking as cold or judgmental. The culture tells him the problem is his lack of “emotional intelligence.” The truth is simpler: our society’s ambient cognitive temperature is actively being lowered, and he runs hot.

This is the real cost of engineering our society to the lowest common denominator. You do not merely dilute excellence; you make excellence socially expensive. The man who can see systems, incentives, and delayed consequences becomes a stranger in a strange land - a foreigner in his own country.

Of course, he is useful when the system needs results, but inconvenient the rest of the time. So the system isolates him—through meetings that go nowhere, through language that has been scrubbed of precision, through status games that punish clarity. Hell, they even punish high performance.

Example 4: I was a victim of this at Apple, to the point that when I became inconvenient, I was replaced by a young man 30 years my junior with minimal experience. My managers gave him my accounts and my desk, leaving me absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to do it. If something did come up that required my attention, I was forced to work in the breakroom, and my “desk” was the table where people at their lunch. Why did this happen? I was inconvenient. Far too good at my job (high performance punished), and in Apple’s culture far too white, masculine, alpha, conservative, and far too smart - smarter than managers who struggled to understand even the initial parameters of my job (and thus isolated by the system).

Financial life reflects the same pattern - look around. How many debt products, rewards points, subscription traps, and status consumption packages are engineered for the first-order thinkers? Victoria’s Secret literally sells a 3-pack of panties on a plan of 4 easy payments (hey, the signs are all over the mall, brother.) The man who refuses these offers is treated as a freak or a killjoy. Literally laughed at.

Example 5: I recently entered into a discussion where I claimed credit card reward offers are a trap designed to increase your spending and dependency on a credit card company you have no business dealing with. (It’s true). I was laughed out of the room. Of course, every genius in the discussion was the one genius who’d figure out how to beat Visa/American Express at their own game - yet the geniuses either couldn’t or refused to walk me through the math. The math was treated as a given - a baseline of truth. The entire room was working on the first-order and refusing to move beyond. Everyone simply lined up to snort the dopamine. Astounding!

Career paths that reward ownership and compounding skill are greatly narrowed. Credentialed mediocrity is subsidized. Social relationships that require matched levels of thinking are rarer and more fragile - culture insists all gaps are merely “communication issues” that can be fixed with better feelings. Keep an ear out for that feelings word… oh, you’ll hear it!

Speaking here to high-ability men - yes, you notice this. And you are not suffering from arrogance; you are suffering from accurate perception in an environment that has made accuracy costly.

There is no soft solution. You can’t reform a machine built to flatter the lowest common denominator into suddenly valuing the upper tail. You can only refuse to live inside its horizon.

Choose domains - work, money, close relationships - where the cognitive floor is high enough that real exchange is possible. Accept that most public spaces will remain hostile to depth. And for Pete’s sake, stop apologizing for seeing further than the room is willing to look! One day you’ll end up on the break room table with nothing to do while a 28-year-old kid struggles to ski in your wake. Move on.

The culture will keep calling that arrogance. So be it. The alternative? You’ll slowly starve the part of yourself that can still think past the first move. You don’t want that.

You know where to find me,

Todd