Which one's Kate? The triumph of love over fear.

It can be a painfully distorted condition.

But at its best it’s the most powerful statement a couple can make as to their mutual faith in the power of love over fear.

I’m happy for William and Katherine, royal bride and groom.

I hope they’re able to build something of sense in the nonsense of their societal context.

And therein lies the rub.

No gifts for the gifted

I wish I could doff a union jack hat

Happy birthday, big guy! You're looking great!

and join the Royal Wedding Party.

But I can’t. It would feel like sharing a bottle of scotch with a chronic alcoholic in order to celebrate his birthday.

Typically gifted, I can’t bring myself to support destructive behavior when it is clear before me.

And the royal wedding is emblematic of the destructive nature of the English monarchy.

To try and explain

The value of the monarchy can be challenged on four grounds, of which I think the fourth is the most significant:

• Morality. It is unfair. And even if nature is unfair that’s no reason to build unfairness into human institutions.
• Absurdity. The idea that the desired qualities of a head of state can be passed on genetically is nonsensical. Just look at your children – or your neighbor’s children – to see how different they are from their parents.
• Democracy. Democracy, a delicate flower at best, can only exist within a meritocracy. Once people are granted powerful positions by right of birth, or by association with it, any hope of democracy goes out the window.
• National wellbeing. This is the reason that drives me most powerfully. It is also the one that will probably speak loudest to other gifted individuals because we tend to be highly motivated to correct those things that we see to be causing damage.

A necessary caveat

When it comes to the English royal family it’s almost impossible to separate the people from the posts.

Calls to end the monarchy are often greeted with responses such as: “But the Queen’s a wonderful woman and does an impossible job incredibly well.”

Indeed she is and does. But it’s not a job that she should be required to do. Or her offspring.

It’s hard to look desperate when you’ve two palaces and a couple of castles to run and hide in. But the reality is that the royal family is locked into an impossible (as in non reality-based) situation by determinants way beyond its control.

And the collective English public responds in a classically co-dependent way to take care of them.

Let Wikipedia explain:

Trapped into a fiction. The ever-smiling Windsors in the co-dependent zoo.

Wikipedia includes, as part of its definition of co-dependence: “It [codependency] also often involves putting one’s needs at a lower priority than others while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.”

The English public demeans its own needs by embracing a form of social structure in which inherited wealth and, in particular, inherited titles are recognized as being of higher social standing than real-life achievements.

This is anathema to the gifted. And, I believe, poison to all the healthy.

Bowing and scraping

The English routinely put their own healthy needs aside to maintain the fiction of the superiority of the royal family.

Gender confusion? More bow than curtsey but still the achiever deferring to the inheritor.

At royal events, powerful achievers from many domains demean themselves as they bow or curtsey to a royal person who has done nothing to earn his or her position.

The goal of a knighthood or some other royal-bestowed honor is a singular focus for legions of politicians, business-people, and even entertainers.

And this means that their behavior and their methods are constrained because in the end their actions can’t be allowed to threaten the possibility of the desired  outcome.

What a neurotic and codependent way to force conformity.

What a brilliant way to ensure that nobody of real excellence or creativity will ever get close to power.

And yes, that includes you and me, fellow gifteds.

A new king at (tennis) court

People have a lot of difficulty with the idea that the monarchy is so destructive.

So here’s an analogy to try to explain how fundamental the problem is: how it ultimately distorts the psyche of every cogniscent being.

Imagine this:

Rafael Nadal wins the men’s tennis championship at Wimbledon. As he lifts the cup over his head he proclaims:

King Rafael I. By Divine Right, with all his successors, Eternal Champion of Wimbledon and all other tennis venues.

“From now on, this cup will be won each year by me or one of my children and by one of their children thereafter down through the generations.”

The spectators cheer.

The officials nod their approval.

King Rafa is born.

And from now on into eternity the rules of the game and the reporting of the game will have to be constantly amended to keep up the appearance that King Rafael and his offspring are indeed the best fitted to be the crowned heads of Wimbledon.

• Better players will have to be persuaded to take second place or take up another game.
• Promoters will constantly have to present the Nadals as the highest tennis family in the world.
• Legions of amateur players must be taught to start seeing themselves as subjects of the tennis monarch, a personage whose athletic supremacy cannot be questioned even if s/he’s in a wheel chair.
• Millions of people must distort their thinking and build aberrations into their inner psychological architecture so as to accommodate the tennis fiction.

This is exactly what’s happened in the English game called “Head of State.”

Its ramifications are destructive from the highest family in the land to the lowest (to borrow a royal designator).

Also, though it may not seem relevant, this perverse structure threatens the integrity of everyone in the world.

Humans cannot tolerate an unlimited number of logical inconsistencies and, let’s face it, the English queen is pretty much queen for the world.

Create your context

As with all things gifted, we must develop strategies in order to remain unaffected by this massive daily absurdity.

To protect yourself, first recognize that you didn’t create this situation and that there is something you can do about changing it: http://www.republic.org.uk/

Change won’t happen fast but it’s very relieving to make a healthy assertion in the face of a suffocating national neurosis.

Then recognize that you are unique and that if you adopted the same labelling system as the royal family your uniqueness would be as obvious in your name as it is in theirs.

Not just Tom, Dick or Harry but Thomas I, Richard III and Henry VIII. One only of each.

Selling your birth . . . right

The Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha family – or the Windsors, to use their alias -  have done a brilliant job of selling their birth up, making it into a luxury brand that supersedes all others.

Each one a bold and unique work of art. Keith Tyson's "Large Field Array"

And you can do the same. Make of your giftedness a golden crown of specialness. Be grateful for it and humble in your accepting of it. Noblesse oblige.

Too often we gifted individuals suffer so much that we become angry and resentful (Moi? Surely not!).

Instead, we can try to be gracious, recognizing that we have been given much.

Don’t let the sheer size of the world’s population defeat you. Instead of seeing yourself as lost in a crowd, or a loner outside the crowd, imagine yourself as a unique object in a collection of unique objects: an original artwork of the MaPa school.

And wait, there’s more . . .

Do the other things the royal family does.

• Epithet yourself. To differentiate yourself is to take power. I’ll be Christopher the Gifted, worthy successor to Ethelred the Unready or William the Conqueror. And happy counterpoint to dreary Edward the Confessor. When you pick your own designator make sure it feels just a litle bit ostentatious or surprising. Ivar the Boneless might not sound too terrifying (except in a Stephen King kind of way) but he was a potent Viking whom we still remember.
• Point to the Divine Right of the Gifted. This is your source of power. Put simply, it means you recognise that you are a child of the universe and it is to the universe that you owe your accountability. And no-one else.
• Publicize yourself and your message. Put: “By the grace of the universe, Gifted and Defender of the Truth” on your metaphorical coinage.
• Have a Gifted Wedding. Learn to appease the multitude – or your immediate family – with flags and geegaws while you get on with the serious business of consolidating your power.

You will not perpetuate codependency by doing these things. Unlike the poor old royal family, you have fundamental truth on your side. Truth – as in natural law – must ultimately prevail. Even when we don’t know what it is.

A toast to the happy couple

And so a toast, to send them on their way:

"I wish I'd been less of a gent, more of a Robespierre. For the good of the country, of course."

“Good luck to you both.

“May you have a long and happy marriage.

“And I hope you, William, will never be king and you, Kate, will never be queen.

“I hope you’re freed to head off and enjoy the billions you’ll inherit without fear of paparazzi or having to live within the constricting shell of a forced persona.

“If this happy state of affairs should come about, please recognize the debt you owe to the gifted who’ve been pushing for it for centuries. John Ball; Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Paine and all the rest.

“Set up an Institute to Promote the Interests of the Gifted.

“And I’ll forego the Baronetcy.

“Ciao!”

cjc

Wendell Berry

Berry’s words have particular meaning for gifted, creative and talented individuals. We have all experienced that sense of despair when our vision of the world seems so at odds with everyone else’s that we wonder if we’re going crazy.

That’s when the last two lines of his poem seem most significant. We can take joy in the notion that although baffled we are employed. We are not dead-alive.

And more, we have probably all experienced the exhilaration of feeling our creative intelligence driving us over the edge of an impediment into a whole new way of seeing and understanding. Or into creating a whole new category of solution.

This is something we are uniquely well-equipped to do. It is also something we are uniquely entitled to take joy in and to prosper from if the circumstances support it.

Redirect the negative

If it simply isn’t possible to soar into a new paradigm, then it becomes necessary to manage the inevitably negative emotions building within you.

If you have the skills you can use them to write, create music or paint. If not, perhaps you can direct them into physical activity or, in a different direction, into intense but focused thought.

If you’re like me, sometimes you may have to do all three!

However you approach your personal bafflement, remember the image of that stream. Nothing can stop its flow. It can only be redirected into something more compelling.

Just like you.

We’ve all said it, often with additional expletives: “How could they be so stupid?!” “They” are often in authority – the government, the boss, the school board – but they can also be peers or subordinates. It seems that friends, spouses, children, and employees are all capable of behavior that strikes us, uncharitably, as ‘stupid’.

For gifted individuals, as for all those who are unafraid to see that the emperor is indeed naked, living in a ‘stupid’ world is particularly painful. Many things that could improve life are so obvious and yet so overlooked. This article takes a look at the reality behind ‘stupidity’ and what we can do to reduce its impact on ourselves.

‘Mediocrity Rules’: Get used to it!

If you’ve ever felt that this is a mediocre world society run by and for mediocre people, you deserve credit for your readiness to see the truth, even when it hurts.

After all, if everyone in the world is to survive, its tasks and requirements have to be manageable by very nearly the least capable among us. That means such tasks are unlikely to challenge or produce results that consistently satisfy the healthy demands of the most highly-resourced individuals.

P.T. Barnum famously declared that “no-one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public”. That same observation applies equally to the world at large, with the result that those motivated by money and temporal power focus their efforts on the lowest common denominator. This doesn’t leave much over for those who would prefer something more challenging than a night out at “Jurassic Park” followed by a Big Mac.

A basic principle

The sad truth inherent in the above example helps to explain why the more able or visionary among us feel so lonely, rejected and undervalued. We are genuinely in a minority, thinly distributed among much greater numbers of humans with less of every quality – thoughtfulness, integrity, reflectiveness, vision, insight, etc – we hold dear.

This sounds shocking to those of us brought up to believe in democracy and the belief that we are all equal. However, equal rights to exist as best we can are not the same as equal personal resources. Those are in the hands of mother nature, the universe, or God, depending on your preference, and they are not evenly distributed or evenly applicable.

Those most richly endowed with personal gifts are in a minority, so it is unlikely that they will predominate in power or even influence. It seems as if they should – after all, evolution alone might be expected to prefer the exceptional over the ordinary – but evolution, like democracy, takes a more cautious middle path. It’s just not fair! And it can be painful to endure.

What makes it hurt?

The reason for the pain can be shown by example. A good many sci-fi films have included a sequence in which a robot, given two opposing instructions, goes into a spin shouting: “Does not compute!” and eventually blows its own head off. Our human equivalent is called ‘cognitive dissonance’ – the attempt to hold two opposing ideas – and it causes us great pain.

You can see the signs of this in someone given conflicting instructions. Perhaps they’ve been told they have to produce a piece of work by a given time and simultaneously informed that an essential resource is unavailable to them. They stop in their tracks, wrinkling their forehead, scrunching their face, scratching their head. They’re simultaneously stressed and perplexed. And it hurts.

I believe a similar pain is caused when we experience the conflict between what we can see of how life could be and how it actually is. Call it: ‘existential dissonance’. Of course, the reality is that it can’t be other than the way it is, but this doesn’t mean that our visions are based in unreality. My sense is that we typically incorporate the tools and structures that are already to hand when we develop our visions of a practical utopia. It makes it all the maddening when ‘they’ get it wrong.

Our task is to find a way to live with this painful reality.

Recognize and accept

Most people have some acquaintance with the statistical concept called a normal or “bell” curve. This curve results from the observation that most direct measures of varying traits in human beings and most psychological measures, such as IQ scores, have been found to approximate closely to a mathematical model called the ‘normal distribution’.

The graph of this normal distribution is a continuous, symmetrical, bell-shaped curve. Frequencies tend to concentrate around the median and become fewer and fewer at either end, resulting in a frequency curve which is high in the middle and low at the ends.

The bell curve looks like this:

The Normal Distribution

The numbers at the bottom aren’t a measure of anything specific. They are simply to be used for reference. The mark in the center is the median, where ‘most people’ predominate. Those at the right hand end of the curve have more of whatever is being measured than most, while those at the left hand end have less.

You could imagine the bell as a moving entity, going to the right. Whatever it encounters, the right hand end (where the the pioneers and early adopters live) finds it first, the bulk meets it a little later, and the tail reaches it last. Thus inventions form in the mind of the inventor (on the right), then reach the university research lab, then trickle into industry research labs before finally finding their way out as products into the mass of the public. Late adopters – those at the left hand end – will acquire ‘the latest things’ just before they turn obsolete.

The point of this bell curve is that it applies to everything. It can be the distribution of intelligence, or integrity, or independence or autonomy or awareness; it can be physical capabilities or IQ or EQ. It stands to reason that if you are of exceptionally high intelligence, integrity and intellectual courage, then you are going to be sitting right up at the front end of the bell curve of those qualities.

That would mean you’re likely to be pretty lonely. It means you’re not going to be immediately understood by more than a handful of fellow humans. Worse, it means your contribution probably isn’t going to be valued by many people because most of the world (all those ‘behind’ you on the curve) won’t recognize its significance.

If you want to maximize your chances of being rich, happy and successful in every way, make sure you’re born into a space round about the +1 mark. Then you’ll be just ahead of the masses sufficient to profit from them coming along just behind, and not so far ahead that their relative lack of vision will bother you too much.

A practical example of the impact of the normal distribution is my practice. The psychological types who predominate among my clients are the IN** types and those numerically close to them. Those four types, out of a possible sixteen, total only 10-14 percent of the USA and probably world population.

This means my constituency is only about a quarter of the size it would be if we were ES** types, who add up to nearly fifty percent of the population. It also means that if you are an IN** type, you must look harder to find like-minded individuals to partner with at work or home. (You might find them among the varied gatherings of those classified as ‘core cultural creatives’).

Generally speaking, however, if you feel lonely it’s probably because you’re seriously outnumbered by people who don’t think or feel like you at all.

What can you do about it?

Such an imbalance calls for a considered response. I feel sure that as children we were all full of our greater vision and insight and shouted it loudly from the school desk or the dining table. Until, that is, we learned that it wasn’t wanted. Then we went into a state of hurt and resentment and a sort of ongoing bafflement as to the nature of these weird people who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see the obvious.

Sometimes, our caretakers were so blind they actually put us at risk. Pretty scary. This brought additional intensity into our experience of existential dissonance. Often, we would compensate by assuming it was us who were wrong in every way.

Today, we can easily find ourselves in similar positions: with workmates, acquaintances, and even our spouses. This is very troubling, recreating the old mix of pain and frustration at not being able to make ourselves understood.

Managing this pain is much easier if you can find yourself in a mental and emotional place of lowered expectations, both for yourself and for others. Some of these thoughts might help move you there:

* Remember, wild animals that are outnumbered and not respected by the rest of the animal kingdom tend to lie low until they‘re sure it‘s safe to proceed. Self-protective IN-types do likewise!

* Recognize where your understanding is on the bell curve and accept the fact that those more than a short distance behind you are simply never going to understand what you‘re talking about. Yes, this does have huge implications.

* Acknowledge your difference to yourself and don’t try to bring the full force of your competence to bear in an environment designed for less-resourced individuals. It can only bring you grief.

* Accept that you aren’t going to change the world of mediocrity you’re forced to live in. Find a task space, a hobby or preferably a career, where you can genuinely stretch yourself and be challenged by the possibilities. This is easier for academically-oriented individuals than for action-oriented ones.

* Be ready to discover and acknowledge the aspects of life in which ‘they’ sit further toward the front of the curve than you do. In acceptance, perhaps, or courage or pragmatism, or physical strength.

* Accept that in a couple, the person further back in the curve, no matter what the subject, is going to set the operating standard. This is because the one behind cannot easily adjust their position forward, but the forward-dweller can operate at a stage further back. In real terms, this control-from-the-rear dynamic is often seen in couples whose risk-tolerance is widely divergent. There, the most risk-averse partner controls risk-related issues and can apparently prevent the readier risk-taker from achieving his or her goals.

* Don’t make the mistake of believing that your competence can compensate for a work- or love-partner’s relative incapacity. Forward-dwellers are often so lonely they underestimate their own exceptional qualities and embrace less adequate others, mistakenly believing they can fill the gap or bring their partner on. Sooner or later, this breeds resentment and ongoing recrimination, resulting in partnership breakdown.

* Recognize that the wayward behaviors that forward-dwellers are prone to – such as addictions, eating disorders, alternative sexual practices, compulsions, paranoid responses and reclusiveness – are a natural response to being in a very difficult position. These behaviors may not make it any easier to make friends, but they aren’t anything to be ashamed of in themselves.

* Most of all, don’t blame yourself for what you cannot change. Recognize that your powers to effect change are disproportionately small compared to your vision and understanding and that you didn’t make it this way. Push where you can but don’t blame yourself if the wall doesn’t budge. Put real effort into finding others like yourself and be creative in your adaptations to life in what amounts to an alien world.

* Trust the universe to know best. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads: “Don’t believe everything you think.” Like many people who sit and think a lot, I have a tendency to imagine I have a personal line to the truth. (‘Eureka’ moments come so much more frequently if you don’t risk exposing them to others’ inspection!) However, it’s worth remembering that all our ‘thought’ is just conjecture. None of us have the superior perspective to truly understand this universal system that’s been chugging along contentedly for around 14 billion years.

* Oh yes: a healthy sense of humor helps, too.

Summary

One of the intrapersonal dynamics I encounter very frequently arises after a client has seen something clearly yet has had their observation refuted. Alone, perhaps even disparaged, they then attempt to explain it away to themselves as some error of their own.

In order to live the life and produce the work of which only you are capable, you must develop a substantial faith in your right to your own judgment. A good starting point for this is to accept that you feel differently and see differently for a good and natural reason: you are different.

As you grow in confidence and articulation, you will find others of like mind who will respect and appreciate you, just as you do them. Your peers are not plentiful but they are there. Don’t be afraid to let them know about you, too. Then the blindness of so much of the world won’t seem so painful.