Intuition: Hit Or Miss

If you take a guess, and you turn out to be right, you call it intuition. I just knew it, you say to yourself. If you guess wrong, you say: bad luck. Why don’t you say it was simply good luck when you guessed right? Why is that suddenly supposed to be intuition? The fact is, you didn’t have the slightest idea either way. You just got lucky.

Use that nutshell on your shoulders, you crazy ape.

This is nature at its most haphazard. Homo sapiens use positive reinforcement as a survival tactic: when something works, we do it that way again. But often enough, it was just plain luck. The next time you play the odds without knowing the odds, think about that for a moment. Use that little nutshell on your shoulders. For Christ’s sake, don’t trust your intuition. You intuition is a bloody roulette wheel.
Billions of crazy little apes playing roulette in the Great Casino of Life… and we wonder why our world is so fucked up.

Intellectual Fascism

I once spoke to my father about how some people aren’t that intelligent. That’s probably thirty years ago, so forgive me, dad, if I don’t remember exactly what you said. I’ll bet you don’t remember a damned thing about it. The gist of it was, though, that I, young whippersnapper that I was at the time, said, more or less –my God, what a sentence– that those who couldn’t keep up intellectually, well, damn them… tough tits and all.

To which he said: that is intellectual fascism. And he was right. Even then I knew he was right, he had misunderstood me, which was forgivable, because at the sweet tender age of 17 I did not express myself very well, or I expressed myself all too well, with intent: rile the old bastard, just for the hell of it.
The point being? I know very well, and knew it then, that there are countless people who can look down on me from olympian heights when it comes to intellect (in the sense of pure thinking capacity). And I know too that that is not the most important thing about being… well, what shall I call it? About being a good person. A good human being. Intellect is important to me, but it isn’t crucial. I’ve met plenty of wonderful people who couldn’t hold a candle even to my humble intellect. I once fell in love with someone who, well… just didn’t get it. And why? Because she was a wonderful person. A beautiful human being. Perfect, in her way.
She, just like so many people, had other capabilities. For example she knew how I felt, even though I didn’t. There are times when my smart-ass brain convinces me of God knows what, for example that I am feeling fine, though things aren’t quite right. But she would notice that immediately. And then she would ask me, perfectly innocent, if everything is okay…? She knew it wasn’t.
How did she know? It escapes me. Somehow she knew what I was feeling, and this is a capability I do not possess, generally. Of course I notice when people feel uncomfortable with a situation, and all that, but she knew, though I didn’t even feel uncomfortable yet. She saw it coming, before it even had the chance to become a thought you could nail down on an intellectual level. Gad, what a capability. I envy her for that to this day, though she hardly understood a fucking thing I said. Not only that, she had lovely eyes. She drove me crazy with her intuition. Drove me to drink, in the end. They all do.