Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is more important: kindness, empathy, or intelligence?

Rick Rosner: It depends on the context, but kindness is the most important in building a decent society. If people are consistently kind to each other, society can function well. You don’t have to understand others fully to be kind to them. Empathy extends the reach of your kindness. If you can only understand people like you, that limits who you’ll be kind to. But if you can work on empathy, it broadens your range. Intelligence is probably the least important when it comes to holding society together. Intelligence is for finding solutions when there’s no obvious solution already in place.

Jacobsen: That makes sense. So, to use something like your personal example, maybe, if someone is mildly gifted and can create problems up to, say, three and a third standard deviations above the norm. Still, you’re four or five or more standard deviations above the norm; you might overthink the problem and see patterns that weren’t meant to be there. You’ve probably walked through life seeing this happen, where even the most complicated occupations don’t require that high of an intelligence—personality might matter more. There’s a dual factor here—intelligence and personality. 

Rosner: Trump and many of his supporters aren’t morons, but their personality makes them effectively moronic. They’re the “do your own research” people who lazily look into things or accept crappy arguments because they lack the curiosity or energy to poke holes in those arguments. They embrace ideas that support their prejudices without critically engaging with them. They aren’t so dumb that they couldn’t be taught that their views are based on faulty information. They don’t care enough to change their minds.

That’s true in life strategies, too. You can have average or slightly above-average intelligence and still succeed by following the standard behaviours that society lays out. One place where I went wrong was spending too much effort on failed strategies—like trying to get a girlfriend before I was boyfriend material.

Jacobsen: That’s an interesting point. The marker of being “boyfriend material” is constantly shifting, however.

Rosner: True. But I remember being in 4th grade, and I was despairing because I had just learned how to jerk off, so I was still around nine and a half. I thought, “This is years away from being able to have sex with someone else!” It was way too early to be that concerned about it. But even then, I was worried about when and how I’d get a girlfriend. Other people around me didn’t seem worried, which confused me.

Jacobsen: That’s a lot of pressure at such a young age.

Rosner: It was. I went back to high school several times after graduating and saw a big difference. My class, the class of ’78, was horny. We bought into the idea that you shouldn’t leave high school with your virginity intact. But it was different when I saw the classes of ’79 and ’86. Many people didn’t seem to care as much about hooking up, which annoyed me. One guy in particular, who was cool, had a cool car and a decent personality. He wasn’t focused on hitting on girls at all. He spent his weekends hanging out in parking lots with his car buddies. When I asked him why he wasn’t worried about not having a girlfriend, he said, “You can’t worry about everything, man.” That attitude probably served him well later in life.

Jacobsen: It’s funny how sometimes simple advice like that can be exactly what we need to hear.

Rosner: If someone had told me back then, “You’ll be fine. Just do some basic things like lift weights, stay in shape, and be funny,” I probably would’ve been more chill. You’ll meet somebody. Just follow the path that most people follow—live your life, lower your standards, and meet someone perfectly acceptable. You don’t have to be brilliant to do that. It’s not a philosophy; it’s just about not worrying about stuff like that. It’s more of a passive strategy that people of all IQ levels follow.

And it has to work. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have 8 billion people on Earth. In my younger days, I’d spend at least 100 nights a year in bars—during the era when that’s where you went to hook up. I was mostly getting paid to work at bars, so I wasn’t just some sad case, spending two nights a week forlornly hanging out in a disco, hoping to hit on someone.

Jacobsen: At least you were getting paid to be there.

Rosner: Even if I didn’t meet someone, I was making money. And sometimes, I’d catch a fake ID or two, which I loved doing, or get involved in a brawl, which was usually fun.

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

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