The motivation of the “nerd” to be the smartest guy in the room is really no different than that of the track athlete to be the fastest, or the football player the strongest and most agile. You want to be the best, and nearly everyone, in competitions of all sorts, harnesses aggression to get there.
The aggression of “jocks” is “I am bigger and stronger and more popular than you”. The aggression of nerds is “I am smarter than you.” You have no doubt seen engineers and certains kinds of scientists do this. Intellectuals do this too.
And I think a part of this underlies the dynamic by means of which the truly abhorrent, anti-Liberal and morally incoherent ideas of the Left have taken over college campuses. If you want to be seen as “smart”, then you have to buy into them, no questions asked about the fundamental reasoning. If you don’t buy in, you may as well have a Southern accent and have grown up in a trailer watching Jerry Falwell and the Bakers on TV, right?
I FEEL the fear underlying all this GroupThink. And I continue to try and understand what motivates it. I myself came very, very close to living that life, where my whole existence was dedicated to publicly demonstrating the specific sort of intelligence demanded in the Academy. Note, I don’t say intelligence outright. It is a certain sort demanded, and certainly not creative intelligence, or unorthodox intelligence. It is what I may term Track Delineated Intelligence. And they do call it a Tenure Track, don’t they?
I was just going in to meditate this morning, and I FELT why I was so attracted to superheroes, to Conan, to powerful men with swords when was a certain age: they embodied power I lacked emotionally. This is why weak people like nerds like strong men. And presumably it is why they like dictators, who can do the bullying they want to do, but lack the power and will and overt psychopathy to perform on their own.
So my work right now is FEELING this lesser-ness, this humiliation, and doing so directly and consciously.
So I sit here for a moment, thinking “I don’t want to go in there”. But then I do.