I don't get it. 'Intelligence' is just a structure, template to be applied to something, filled with some substance. I bet Josef Mengele had plenty of intelligence. So what?

This excerpt immediately struck me -- both in style and substance -- like something Orwell would write.

it comes from that special place that assumes Intellect leads directly to Right Moral Action. I think this place existed only in Aristotle's head but that's not the point. The point: smart people are just as likely to get dragged into stupid actions as anyone else. This is kind of why it sucks to be human or smart; you can recognize that what you're doing isn't all that great an idea but still be completely unwilling or unable to change your actions.

BLIND AMBITION is truely blind. ( and as always the cruelest strumpet of them all) One should not equate intellegence with character.

Since someone mentioned him, I'd add that Orwell touched on this from another angle in Shooting An Elephant. Specifically, I refer to his passage about how once he sent for the gun he had to shoot the elephant, even though he knew that there was no reason to do so and it was stupid. (The elephant had quit rampaging and was out of town, all that had to be done was to send for its master.) He couldn't not shoot the elephant with all the villagers looking on because to do so would make him look unsure of himself or mistaken in his original judgment.

That was a canny insight of imperial behavior.

Carry on.

I'm glad the WaPo post was useful. Maybe this will be too.

Intelligence does not by itself protect anyone from their own stupidity. Michael Shermer writes about something similar to Avnery's observation in his book Why People Believe Weird Things. He has a whole chapter on why smart people, in particular, sometimes hold unbelievable beliefs. He asserts that "[s]mart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs," even beliefs "they arrived at for non-smart reasons." He identifies tendencies towards ideological immunity and confirmation bias, among others, as contributing factors and refers to a study by psychologist David Perkins "in which he found a strong positive correlation between intelligence (measured by a standard IQ test) and the ability to give reasons for taking a point of view and defending that position; he also found a strong negative correlation between intelligence and the ability to consider other alternatives." In other words, Shermer writes later, "smart people are better at rationalizing their beliefs with reasoned arguments, but as a consequence they are less open to considering other positions."

Exactly. Excellent quote, Gnome.