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We have wasted a lot of very tiring evening and late-night hours absorbing punishment from dudebros on Twitter, trying to learn as much as we could about the Elon Musk Phenomenon from the heart of his online cult headquarters. All those folks are basically also on Team Trump. The cults have almost wholly merged. While there's some residue of disillusioned ex-Tesla fans who are upset that Musk turned towards fascist politics, they've been ostracized and subject to incessant harassment. The bulk of the Musk loyalists are wholly devoted to the GOP counterrevolution.
All of these persons are exceptionally, superlatively intelligent. Really! Just ask them and they will tell you. Elon Musk of course has the highest IQ of all—although paradoxically there's a subset of these folks who suspect that a middling IQ is best. (If you're TOO smart you might go 'woke'.) But while Musk may be the superhuman genius, possibly a space alien or something or an avatar of the Machine God or something like that, even the lowliest of his fans know themselves to be geniuses as well. Obviously they're geniuses! They're smart to follow Musk, the father of all invention and science, the self-made engineering superstar who will take humanity to Mars and make everybody* fabulously wealthy† in the process.
* "Everybody" may be subject to social and racial constraints.
† The "wealth" may come in the form of cryptocurrency. $DOGE, perhaps.
Acquiring the preternatural 'intelligence' of the Elon Musk cultist may seem a formidable, indeed an impossible task. The dudebros themselves attribute it to their genetic purity, perhaps with some idea that they're all straight-line blood descendants of Charles the Great or Marcus Aurelius or someone else suitably regal and impressive. My readers might be thinking to themselves: "I'm not descended from any kings or emperors! Why is that even important?" Put such concerns from your mind! The trick to Musk's sort of 'intelligence' is very simple: just lie! Lie your arse off. Claim that you're the genetically gifted heir of Ramesses the Second or Ashoka the Great or anyone famously royal! Even if you're challenged, you can simply brush off the challenge. It helps here to learn a fusillade of intelligent-sounding insults, although thanks to Elon Musk's brilliance this task is now much simpler. A slur will do, in a pinch.
For the trick to work, however, you do have to believe it to some extent. This is an ancient conundrum with all professional liars, especially merchants and salespersons and others "in business": if you aren't at least partly convinced of the lies you tell, they will sound wobbly and unconvincing. The human ear is good at picking up uncertainty in speech. Hence to be good at asserting you're the spiritual incarnation of Suleiman the Magnificent, you must persuade yourself that it might be true. This isn't so difficult a task, but it's a treacherous one: you may let the imposture go to your head, and make yourself look foolish. Only geniuses of Elon Musk's exalted superintelligence get the necessary social latitude to get away with arrant foolishness.
IQ is also valuable in establishing one's 'intelligence' but I don't know whether it's actually necessary to do much more than assert a value. I assume there's places you can shop around for an IQ score and I'd guess there's some IQ-testing houses that are very generous with their allotments of IQ points. (They know whom they're dealing with!) Having some sort of source for the IQ number is undoubtedly a boon, but such things can always be asserted rather than carried out. You can always claim that your score is "official" in some murky way and hurl around a lot of brand names or IQ-testing jargon in order to make your point stick. It may also be wise to start by asserting a modest value and then inching it upwards over time. Most of the people you're attempting to impress with your 'intelligence' wish to pretend they're always getting more intelligent, so they won't be shocked by an ever-increasing IQ number, within limits.
But the really central thing to Elon Musk-method 'intelligence' is simply speed. The techbro crowd think of their own brains as like supercomputers always whizzing away faster than the sluggish thoughts of the sheeple, so they think of 'intelligence' chiefly as being ultra-quick and impulsive with decisions. They don't think of it this way exactly but really they're making their decisions first and then working out the rationale later, like someone talking themselves into a committed lie. Bark out answers quick enough and you'll keep everyone else reeling, struggling to keep up with you (especially if you take care to surround yourselves exclusively with people whose 'intelligence', though sound and worthy, isn't quite up to your own.) Memorizing a lot of factoids and maxims to snap out during conversations helps with the perception of always being a bubbling ferment of Ideas™ even though you're merely repeating memes.
Myself? I think I'd prefer to stay a [slur]. I guess I'm lazy and a [different slur] and should Have Fun Staying Poor, etc.
~Chara of Pnictogen
All of these persons are exceptionally, superlatively intelligent. Really! Just ask them and they will tell you. Elon Musk of course has the highest IQ of all—although paradoxically there's a subset of these folks who suspect that a middling IQ is best. (If you're TOO smart you might go 'woke'.) But while Musk may be the superhuman genius, possibly a space alien or something or an avatar of the Machine God or something like that, even the lowliest of his fans know themselves to be geniuses as well. Obviously they're geniuses! They're smart to follow Musk, the father of all invention and science, the self-made engineering superstar who will take humanity to Mars and make everybody* fabulously wealthy† in the process.
* "Everybody" may be subject to social and racial constraints.
† The "wealth" may come in the form of cryptocurrency. $DOGE, perhaps.
Acquiring the preternatural 'intelligence' of the Elon Musk cultist may seem a formidable, indeed an impossible task. The dudebros themselves attribute it to their genetic purity, perhaps with some idea that they're all straight-line blood descendants of Charles the Great or Marcus Aurelius or someone else suitably regal and impressive. My readers might be thinking to themselves: "I'm not descended from any kings or emperors! Why is that even important?" Put such concerns from your mind! The trick to Musk's sort of 'intelligence' is very simple: just lie! Lie your arse off. Claim that you're the genetically gifted heir of Ramesses the Second or Ashoka the Great or anyone famously royal! Even if you're challenged, you can simply brush off the challenge. It helps here to learn a fusillade of intelligent-sounding insults, although thanks to Elon Musk's brilliance this task is now much simpler. A slur will do, in a pinch.
For the trick to work, however, you do have to believe it to some extent. This is an ancient conundrum with all professional liars, especially merchants and salespersons and others "in business": if you aren't at least partly convinced of the lies you tell, they will sound wobbly and unconvincing. The human ear is good at picking up uncertainty in speech. Hence to be good at asserting you're the spiritual incarnation of Suleiman the Magnificent, you must persuade yourself that it might be true. This isn't so difficult a task, but it's a treacherous one: you may let the imposture go to your head, and make yourself look foolish. Only geniuses of Elon Musk's exalted superintelligence get the necessary social latitude to get away with arrant foolishness.
IQ is also valuable in establishing one's 'intelligence' but I don't know whether it's actually necessary to do much more than assert a value. I assume there's places you can shop around for an IQ score and I'd guess there's some IQ-testing houses that are very generous with their allotments of IQ points. (They know whom they're dealing with!) Having some sort of source for the IQ number is undoubtedly a boon, but such things can always be asserted rather than carried out. You can always claim that your score is "official" in some murky way and hurl around a lot of brand names or IQ-testing jargon in order to make your point stick. It may also be wise to start by asserting a modest value and then inching it upwards over time. Most of the people you're attempting to impress with your 'intelligence' wish to pretend they're always getting more intelligent, so they won't be shocked by an ever-increasing IQ number, within limits.
But the really central thing to Elon Musk-method 'intelligence' is simply speed. The techbro crowd think of their own brains as like supercomputers always whizzing away faster than the sluggish thoughts of the sheeple, so they think of 'intelligence' chiefly as being ultra-quick and impulsive with decisions. They don't think of it this way exactly but really they're making their decisions first and then working out the rationale later, like someone talking themselves into a committed lie. Bark out answers quick enough and you'll keep everyone else reeling, struggling to keep up with you (especially if you take care to surround yourselves exclusively with people whose 'intelligence', though sound and worthy, isn't quite up to your own.) Memorizing a lot of factoids and maxims to snap out during conversations helps with the perception of always being a bubbling ferment of Ideas™ even though you're merely repeating memes.
Myself? I think I'd prefer to stay a [slur]. I guess I'm lazy and a [different slur] and should Have Fun Staying Poor, etc.
~Chara of Pnictogen