Story at a Glance:
•Many important types of intelligence besides “intellectual intelligence exist.” Without them, we cannot connect to our deeper wisdom and are easily lead astray. Likewise, if our intelligence remains unbalanced, our knowledge will almost always be patchy and incomplete.
•A century ago, American education was hijacked by oligarchs like Rockefeller who replaced cultivating critical thinking and deep knowledge with training widespread compliance.
•Education trains us to have a very linear form of intelligence which often misses critical details because it lacks the ability to see the broader picture. This for instance characterizes many problems in medicine.
•Those trained to have excessive left brain thinking are often challenging to have a dialog with because they are both aggressive in asserting their ideology and simultaneously incapable of seeing anything which does not prove they are right.
•This article will discuss the importance of balanced intelligence and strategies for cultivating it.
Throughout history, many different types of intelligence have been recognized (e.g., physical intelligence and coordination or emotional intelligence). In contrast, our society worships a very specific type of intellectual intelligence that as far as I know has never previously been so highly valued by a society.
In my own experience, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve interacted with who I know are much smarter than me, yet when I compare and contrast our ability to get things done, to correctly interpret data we are exposed to, help patients, or live a happy life, I come out far ahead of them. Likewise, I’ve lost count of how smart people I’ve met who simply don’t “get it” and frequently are misled by something quite obvious.
Years ago, when I discussed these experiences with a spiritual teacher (as I was frustrated with how easily many of my medical colleagues were being misled) and was told to stop getting upset because “intelligence does not equate to being resistant to mind control.”
Note: discovering how to bio-hack the sleep cycle to rapidly memorizing large volumes of information was what essentially allowed me to largely boycott the educational system but simultaneously get through it.
That skill set was immensely valuable during my medical training as it allowed me to devote myself to learning what would help my patients rather than be swallowed by the allopathic model. Likewise, both college and medical school followed a similar script. They only wanted you to replicate exactly what your teacher had shown you and harshly reprimanded ever presenting an independent approach to the problem.
Note: numerous medical school deans and residency directors I’ve spoken have lamented that the newer crops of medical school graduates lack the critical thinking which is needed for them to effectively function as doctors during medical residency—yet they simultaneously fail to recognize how their own actions are removing critical thinking from their trainees.
Ultimately, I was driven by a deep yearning for as much knowledge as possible. Since you’ll never have enough time to study everything, I gradually realized:
1. It’s critical to recognize during the knowledge accumulation process when you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns and aren’t learning much more of value regardless of the effort you are putting in. Many however become attached to what they know and simply spend all of their resources reaffirming their existing knowledge base with extraneous details.
2. In contrast, it’s also important to recognize which things actually have a depth and value to them that justifies spending years, if not decades developing mastery in them. Note: doing this often requires adopting a broad focus that allows you to see and accept the contradictions within the subject so you can gradually unravel the mystery behind it.
3. If you can eventually grasp the fundamental processes that ultimately underlie something, that knowledge can often make it possible to rapidly understand many seeming unrelated phenomena because while many things on the surface appear different, at their heart they are often the same.
4. People often assume that if they follow the path society lays out for them that everything will “work out,” when in reality it often does not. For example in medicine, many of my classmates chose specialities they fell into or simply for the money—and most of them are now miserable because their heart was not in what they ultimately had to do professionally. Likewise, many I know blindly took the COVID vaccines without questioning them because the medical system they believed in told them to—and quite a few of them suffer every day from that decision.
Over the last century, there’s been a systematic dismantling of the educational system as its focus shifted from creating an empowered electorate to producing subservient citizens who only existed to fill their pre-designated societal roles. To illustrate:
•In 1903 John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board, which over the decades (with Carnegie’s foundation) gave billions to schools around the country until in 1973, the Department of Education was created. These foundations reshaped American Education, transforming it from a locally managed process to a rigid and mandatory centrally controlled one.
Note: The director of Rockefeller’s “charity” admitted their goal was to have this new model of education train the populace to be compliant slaves who lacked critical thinking.
•In the 1960s, one of my relatives was given documents by a group that preceded the World Economic Forum which detailed a global plan to impoverish America so that everyone would willing submit to low paying and backbreaking corporate jobs to get by (e.g., consider Corporate America’s recent vaccine mandates), hence ensuring the American people would be compliant and do whatever the ruling clash wished. I learned about this as a child and have been astonished to see each part of the plan, such as removing critical thinking from American education gradually come to pass.
•Individuals at elite schools the ruling class sends their children to have repeatedly shared with me that the educational process there is very different (e.g., it fosters critical thinking).
•Award-winning teacher, John Gatto, extensively wrote about how American education had been transformed so that when children were in the prime of their life to learn and develop their own identities, they were instead locked into a rigid and sterile environment which disconnected them from all the interactions and experiences of life that allowed them to develop their own identities and become highly functional members of society. Ivan Illich made the salient observation that once people are “taught” within a rigid framework, they lose much of their inherent capacity to “learn.”
Note: one of my favorite math teachers in college once shared with me that his Ivy League students frequently complained to administrators about his teaching style which encouraged us to derive solutions to problems rather than giving us steps to memorize.
I believe these points explain why we keep spending more money (and years of schooling) on education, yet have worse and worse outcomes (not unlike modern medicine). Likewise, much of my success as a student came from a desire to develop my mind and the recognition the schooling processes was frequently counterproductive to that—ultimately leading me to seek out the style of education I much later learned pioneers like Gatto and Illich had also advocated for.
Note: vaccines also provide a critical facet of this picture as the microstrokes and autoimmunity they create frequently create neurological injuries. In turn, suppressed data shows vaccination has profoundly altered the minds of America (e.g., the particularly dangerous DTwP vaccine was released, a wave of misbehavior, developmental delay and violence rippled through the country as each vaccinated generation grew up), forcing the educational system to completely restructure itself. Sadly, this happened so long ago those changes have now been normalized and forgotten.
Two approaches are often used to solve problems:
•“Right Brain” thinking—Engage the creative capacities of the brain (and unconsciousness), be able to see the broad picture in front of you, and then be able to arrive at an innovative solution to the problem you are facing. This allows immense insights to be gained, but simultaneously, those predisposed to it often struggle to address the practical day to day needs we face
•“Left Brain” thinking—Memorize a series of lists, hyperfocus on a few reductionistic details, and then forcefully execute a chain of logic or algorithm which utilizes those lists to come up with a solution. This is effective at getting necessary things done but frequently locks the user into being unable to see critical details outside of their framework.
To read the rest, go to: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/balanced-intelligence-and-knowledge?publication_id=748806&post_id=148944183&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Senators who privately oppose Israel’s brutal war on Gaza will vote to advance Israel’s interests over the will of their constituents because they know that AIPAC will destroy their political careers if they do otherwise, according to Senator Bernie Sanders.
