Dangerous Intelligence

Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are designed to hide. So it becomes inconvenient. Then suspect. Then threatening. The world does not persecute insight because it is rare, but because it dissolves the fragile simplicities that people require to remain psychologically upright. To understand is to unmake comfort, and comfort is now a political resource.

So intelligence shifts from asset to burden. It isolates. It slows. It complicates. It makes participation costly. Those who see clearly begin to look like obstacles, not guides. And when fear is ambient, obstacles become enemies. Not through malice, but through defensive reflex. People do not attack insight because they hate truth. They attack it because truth dissolves the stories that allow them to function. To be intelligent, under such conditions, is to become structurally misaligned with the emotional economy of the age. It is to carry a form of cognitive excess that cannot be metabolised. That excess will not be celebrated. It will be pathologised. And eventually, it will be feared.