The problem is this: the smarter a person is, the more aggressive and creepy they are.
You can’t have smart without creepy.
The smart, the talented, the perceptive—these are highly prized and necessary for the ingenuity and force which builds a comfortable society. But unfortunately, the smart, the talented, and the perceptive, are not, as a rule, nice.
The tales and sentiments of woodsmen, who reject society, and monk-like, tread the wilderness, appeal because this is one solution to the dilemma—raw nature cancels out the unnatural.
But in the cities, in the electronic boulevards of society, the unnatural breeds and flourishes, for the aggressive qualities of the talented have no outlet and exist in exaggerated ways, separated from the virtuous qualities which serve that very society. Forceful energy, on one hand, and rapidly efficient intelligence, on the other, which combine to burn with a lively, successful, flame, also go, when the work is done, in two different directions: As virtuous intelligence helps, and earns praise, its jealous brother, the necessary energy of pitiful desire, pursues avenues garishly lit.
War and love share qualities—and this sharing overthrows human happiness.
Efficiency and intelligence are synonymous. The efficient is the same as the smart within temporal/spatial existence. The efficiency of time-saving is the soul of every invention.
Love, by its very nature, doesn’t fight—war must fight for love, condemning both to exist, always.
Love and war, as a twin necessity, finds, as this unfortunate twin necessity, an unfortunate life in the hearts and minds of the intelligent—the efficient—as the same activity: love and war at the same time.
Love and war are practiced simultaneously by the intelligent, because of its efficiency, which is all the smart really know, and this is the reason why creepy and rapey are common in refined and respectable society, in the otherwise successful institutions and practices of civilized life. Women who are assaulted by the creepy are being assaulted by war and love at once, in the name of efficiency. Men are trained to fight, and they fight women in the name of love, just as they love men in the name of war (deceive men, by “loving” them, since deception is the most efficient weapon in war).
This is the number one problem facing society—how can we have intelligence without the creepy?
The intelligent, we would think, would be “intelligent enough” or “smart enough” to know not to be creepy.
But this is to confuse intelligence with refinement—they are not the same at all, and we confuse them at our peril. As explained above, the smart is efficient only, not virtuous or decorous.
So the sad truth is, that the man who, without ceremony, hits on women, is displaying intelligence, and the successful man will tend to be creepy in the same ratio as his intelligence.
But can’t refinement and virtue live with intelligence?
No.
They are opposite qualities.
The refined, by deferring pleasure through art and manners, is highly inefficient.
Virtue, by deferring pleasure through self-sacrifice, is also highly inefficient.
This is why the religious, who put their faith in repetitious iconography and ceremony, are viewed as stupid by highly efficient and crafty intelligence—crafty intelligence which does whatever it takes to win.
This is why women, who traditionally guard against the immediate gratification of pleasure by aggressive males, for the sake of pleasure-deferring childbirth, and serve a higher purpose divorced from the smart, the intelligent, the efficient, and the crafty, are mocked by society as stupid.
We mentioned at the beginning of this essay the man of nature, living ingeniously outside of society, as one solution to the problem. The “off-the-grid” sensibility is inefficient—like those who are religious, or fashionable, or poetic—and in the religious, the fashionable, and the poetic, we find the ignorant, who are holy and sweet and kind and nice.
The woman, who is condemned to be virtuous—as a counter to aggressive male intelligence practicing the efficiency of love and war at once—is protected by clumsy and artificial societal constraints—clumsy, because society further punishes the woman when it keeps her from the dangerous territories where intelligence/efficiency aggressively dwells; society condemning her further to her ignorant female existence, and also clumsy because in a “free society” women are victims of love/war creepiness and aggression.
All that a woman is—protected as the virtuous receptacle of pleasure-deferring childbirth; or somewhat protected, by law and rules of decorum; or not protected at all as a complete person free to integrate herself into love/war intelligence and cunning—makes no difference to society. Society does not give a fig for nature or woman qua woman, and never will; society will always be a walled fortress against nature, the very efficiency which nature cannot, and does not, understand.
Nature, out of necessity, forms woman as the central child-providing device.
Society, in a moment of ingenuity, will bring men together as lovers, who adopt, taking up into their care, in double fatherhood, unwanted babies—or any combination society efficiently desires.
Society is too clever and ingenious for the natural to withstand.
Society laughs at the cow-like stupidity of all that is natural, and this includes the “living-to-serve-mankind-as-a-mother” woman, who, in taking seriously this role, is inevitably religious—and the religious is always mocked by sophisticates and progressives as backwards and naive. Precisely. The virtuous, in society’s eyes, is always ignorant—which is the tragic state of things we are attempting to elucidate in this essay, as forcefully and as simply as we can, by pointing out that the smart is efficient and unkind, and this is always so. Intelligence and creepiness always co-exist.
The religious essentially imitates the time-honored precepts of nature—which is why it is mocked, victimized, and betrayed whenever society reaches a certain level of love-as-war and war-as-love sophistication.
In the same manner, aesthetes—whether in fashion or art—also imitate nature, as they reproduce natural qualities found in colors (flowers), order (perspective), romance (birdsong) and the sublime (mountains, oceans). As with the religious, in the artist we often find virtue and naïveté and all those sensitive qualities which at first may attract us, but which society finally mocks and condemns.
The virtuous poet and the virtuous woman fall in love: she is rich in maternal qualities, ablaze in physical and spiritual loveliness—he is docile and sensitive, with a sweetly unsophisticated freedom in his humble expression and shy desire—both belong to nature; he, in the worship of all that is orderly and beautiful; she, in the obedience to divine child-birth, and in her love for all that contributes to a happy family.
But this relationship cannot survive in society—an outburst of laughter, a single whispered word, destroys it forever.
Destroyed, it lives on in refined and outdated books, but not in the city—where knowledge reigns in a glance, and millions of men and women hurry anxiously to and fro.