It is important to argue that humans don’t have transcendent intelligence. Fascist discourse thrives on praising human brilliance, and by proxy, the so-called brilliance of the world’s leaders.
Rather than there being a general skill called “intelligence”, humans can do 3 things: 1. Observe objects, 2. track their movements in memory, whether internal or external, and 3. reason about the recorded movements of objects. This reasoning takes the form of a) objective accounting and b) extrapolations, i.e. educated guessing.
Accounting alone is insufficient for survival. There is no such thing as an ability to guess correctly in the general case. In that sense, intelligence doesn’t exist.
Claims of greater intelligence is either greater diligence in (1), (2), (3a) and/or (3b), self-delusion, or a power play to claim authoritarian supremacy over others. It is when we overcome the delusion of intelligence that we can dedicate ourselves to true diligence in practicing (1), (2), (3a) and (3b) with full transparency about what we are doing to ourselves and others.
Personally, I do believe in human brilliance, but it’s a kind of brilliance that can’t easily be praised through cheap bluster. Any cheap bluster you come up with to praise STEM skills, for example, is liable to being co-opted for figures like Musk. It is precisely the cheap descriptions that are transferable to fascists, not the behaviors themselves. Musk is not himself an engineer.
I’m with Spinoza in seeing the knowledge of specific things as our salvation. It would make me happy to see progressive mass movements sweep society, but since the world functions through feedback loops, such silver linings inevitably distract us from the clouds gathering on the horizon. Lasting joy is a quiet thing that comes from seeing your own despair slotted seamlessly into the world, seen like a set of interconnected Lego bricks.
This in no way implies we should not try our utmost to secure temporal happiness. Being idiots about it is one of the avenues that lead to fascism.
Snapshots of the Labyrinth 