I have been thinking about this subject a lot since we started these conversations.
Two observations.
1) What I don't think pretty much anyone gets right, is the level of intellectual functioning of the average person 100/200 years or so ago, and going all the way back to the beginning of civilization 15,000 years ago.
As a group humans were pretty stupid until we had public education!
Below is a video of a person asking Russians which country they don't like. Don't pay any attention to the answers, but notice that none of them really has the capacity to think very well, and one could never engage logic with them.
I think this was what the average human was like 200 years ago.
2) In my own educational evolution I was pretty much an average student. I studied with my friends and know what grades they got were just like mine. And we seemed to learn at the same rate-all of us,I saw no difference at all!
And we were all pretty much in the average range. I am guessing anyone with an IQ of 86 or above, which is 84% of the population (one standard deviation below the mean) would do fine in college with a little work.
The only difference between me and others later in life was that at 24, when I first realized the extent of my ignorance, I became a prolific reader. I was motivated by my curiosity to understand my existence.
I read many more, substantive books than any of my friends, Bertrand Russell's biography, Whitehead, Tolstoy, Andre Malraux, McLuhan, Huxley, everyone I could think of, Time and Newsweek, cover to cover every week, and for the rest of my life.
And still I did not see "existentialism" until I was 35 even though I always got A's in the subject and knew I was one! Point being it takes a lot of study to see abstract ideas well.
My point is that we greatly underestimate what the "average" human is capable of when they study! |
