TOO WISE

Ever met somebody who was honestly way too smart? Well I’ve known a few self-appointed geniuses in my day. I say self-appointed because honestly they were the dumbest smart people I ever knew.

I’ve even met a couple of child prodigies in my life. The type who graduated from college at an younger age than I did from high school. Oh they were brilliant in some ways, but honestly they were total morons in some practical aspects of life. So if you took them out of their element they were pretty useless.

What I would really like to find is some ordinary average person who was in reality too wise in terms of things that we encounter every day. I’m sure there must be a couple of them out there.

But in my situation all I have ever found was people who were in their own opinion too wise. They loved to prove it to you by sharing their wisdom. The only problem was that their idea of proving it amount to them quoting a bunch of really worn out clichés and not really doing a thing to demonstrate they were all that wise.

I tried to be polite and not upset or insult them. After all, their real wisdom seemed to exist in their ability to lie to themselves. And I suppose considering yourself to be to be a genius is a good thing as long as you don’t have to face the stupid things you do all the time.

In the day to day routine of life such perils of reflection are a wonderful defense mechanism for some people. They allow them to get through life and be buffered from the reality of just how much their life truly sucks.

As a politician I look for such people because they make wonderful audiences for my speeches. They are so skewed in their thinking that I can give a speech appealing to their prudence and wisdom that is total baloney and I can see the nods. Which are saying, “Yep he knows us real well.”

Now that is when I can use my first class baloney that any real smart and thinking audience would more than likely get upset to hear. But not this bunch. And you know what the all too wise folks are found in a lot of places. Such a mindset infects a wide cross section of society. I’ve seen it with young, old, rich or poor. Which is definitely a plus for somebody like me.

My biggest fear is to run into the person that is informed, as opposed to deluded by their own greatness. Those are the ones I dread because they know the facts. And that means they do rely upon illusion or lies to get by. They really are such a pain to deal with in terms of the questions they ask that require more than crap to answer.

My only salvation is that such people are really rare and always outnumbered by the too wise crowd. So my best defense is to find some too wise person and ask them a question. I can be assured that they will normally bored everyone with their self-serving monologue that I won’t have to bother worrying about the informed person afterwards. And that for me is really being wise.