Incident in a Church
He came across, so drunk he could hardly stand up. He spoke of private things, distressed at being a sinner, wanting to do good for others: to change but not having the strength.
Then he separated me off, to talk of other things. "I'm one of the most intelligent men you'll ever meet on the planet, he said. A bold statement which would have thrown most people, but as he talked to me of nuclear physics and a myriad other things at this level I recognized an all too familiar problem. Never mind the top 10% who went to grammar school, the MENSA IQ. What I was facing again was the isolation of the top 2%: the person whose brain far exceeded the ordinary school, the manual job of the father who raised him, the average conversation of the average person who neither understood nor had the capacity to empathise with his situation. To them, he was just a drunk, lost in the bottle that consoled him. To me he was what the world needed most but would never accommodate as he, like the graduates who have become call center fodder and the true geniuses limited by mediocrity, lived out their lives in their own personal torture. Throbbing brains somehow more of a curse than a blessing, talents wasted because they could see no way.
I advised him as a best I could and he stumbled out back into the street, whilst I a teetotaler lunged towards a glass of water and some fresh air, lungs bursting from passive alcoholism.
I hoped that I had been of some little use; I hoped that he would take some of my advice and have the strength to use it. Secretly, I doubted it but I prayed on it, for him and all the other people I have come across â€' young and old â€' whose own intelligence which was meant to help and bless the rest of us, had become imprisoned in their minds, largely by the limited perceptions and mundaneness of a society which produces it but does not recognize its worth. A loss to humanity; purgatory for the individual, isolated and bored because the rest of us lack the capacity to recognise them and provide for them, or we lack the courage because we fear that they will outshine us instead of helping top stretch and inspire us.
Such people are born to be leaders in their field. The trouble is that there is no field for them to lead in and, with no training in leadership, they stagnate and we are the poorer for it.