Ur Intelligence v. Modern Intelligence or The Naivete of IQ
Oppenheimer's Colonel Boris Pash as Shit Lib Sledgehammer
“This is a man who has killed communists with his own hands.”
General Leslie Groves on Colonel Boris Pash in Oppenheimer
Casey Affleck is a damn fine actor. Would have loved to see him re-visit Boston PI Patrick Kenzie from Gone Baby Gone for instance, but instead we’re punished with Daniel Craig’s vapid Foghorn Leghorn veneer of an interesting detective in another Knives Out movie. Alright, back to task.
If you’ve read Eugene Lyon’s The Red Decade, Whitaker Chambers’ Witness, or at least listened to Yarvin’s greatest hits remix tape, you know that practically everyone in the elite circles was a communist (AKA “progressive”) in the 1920s and 1930s. If you weren’t, you weren’t elite. It was an aristocratic means to distance yourself from the streets or perhaps elevate yourself from those streets and get some of that juicy status.
Our titular protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was born elite, lived elite, and died elite. A great man™ of history usually requires this kind of elite environment. Consider this educational and professional trajectory:
Ethical Culture Fieldston School (Ivy Prep School)
Harvard
Cambridge (then he tried to poison the guy and then whatever)
University of Gottingen
Cal-Tech
University of California, Berkeley
If the elite milieu was “progressive” politics, how could someone like Oppie not (a) absorb progressivism by osmosis and (b) subsequently view anyone or anything else as backwards or even worse, gauche? Just like the hipsters of a decade ago, the greatest fear of these types is that something uncool may break out at any second.
Nonetheless, Oppenheimer’s excellence in his field surpasses his curious allegiances and affiliations. General Leslie Groves understands Oppenheimer and his ego. He knows that Oppenheimer doesn’t see him as much, but he murders his own ego to ensure that he gets the right guy to put the mad commie scientist on blast.
Enter Boris Pash: a guy whose moral compass is set to North by fuck you.
We’ve all had that “you’re not in trouble” office call. Now raise the stakes. No one likes going to the principal’s office. Now imagine that the principal is a spy hunter whose ambrosia is the blood and cortisol of communists.
This emotion is evocative of my experience in Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. Especially when you figure out that all that “intelligence” of yours amounts to a hill of beans. For reference, SERE is a military exercise where they drop you in the middle of the woods. Your instructors chase, capture, and torture you. It’s a course where everyone gets an “F” by design.
Now, in a brilliant piece of body language and blocking, Boris Pash is seated next to Oppenheimer—not across from him—when they first meet. He eases Oppie in with flattery:
“General Groves has placed me in a great responsibility, and it’s like having a child who I can’t see... by remote control.”
Every interview is either a puff piece or a hit job. This scene is the latter. Constrictive feeding. Pash is a python. He drains the oxygen from the room and from his target. Even the flattery is hypnotic. Oppenheimer slips into tonic immobility. He’s in a jungle but thinks he’s in an office.
And why shouldn’t he feel comfortable? He’s been in offices like these his whole adult life and dominated them via cleverness and argumentation. The idea that the tranquility of offices can be subverted is foreign to him.
The inter-splicing of the scenes running the meeting simultaneously with Oppenheimer’s conversation with his handler General Groves leads to the realization that he fucked up.
Every admission from Oppenheimer and each subsequent question from Pash tightly coils around Oppenheimer, precise and timed with his heartbeat:
Pash: I gather you’ve heard there are other parties interested in the work of the Radiation Lab...
Oppenheimer: Well, a man attached to the Soviet Consul indicated, through intermediate people, to people on this project that he was in a position to transmit information they might supply.
Pash: Why would anyone on the project want that?
Every Oppenheimer answer (like every breath) is a cry for life, but it just enables Pash to tighten the coil.
Oppenheimer: Frankly, I can see there might be arguments for the commander-in-chief informing the Russians. They’re our allies. But I don’t like the idea of it going out the back door- it might not hurt to be on the lookout for it.
Pash: I’m not the judge of who should or should not get information. My business is to stop it going through illegally. Could you be a little more specific?
Blood circulation is gone and breath is absent.
The questions and answers become more rapid.
Pash: These other people you mentioned, were they contacted by Eltenton direct?
Oppenheimer: No.
Pash: Well now, could we know through whom that contact was made?
Oppenheimer: It would involve people who ought not be involved in this.
Pash: Is this person a member of the project?
Oppenheimer: A member of the faculty, but not on the project.
Pash: Eltenton made the approach through a member of the faculty here at Berkeley?
Oppenheimer: As far as I know- there may have been more than one person involved. If I seem uncooperative I think you can understand that it’s because of my insistence in not getting innocent people into trouble.
It’s surprising Oppenheimer doesn’t faint here, but at least he stops mindlessly answering.
Pash: You see me as persistent.
Oppenheimer: You are persistent, and that is your job. But my job is protecting the people who work for me.
Pash: Instead of us going on certain steps which may come to your attention and be a little bit... disturbing to you... I’d rather discuss those with you first. I’m not formulating any plans, I’m just going to have to digest the whole thing.
“Digest” exemplifies this sequence of devouring. Pash is patting his stomach and enjoying his after dinner mint.
Pash’s work is swift, bloodless, overwhelming.
At this point in the film, Oppenheimer is at the height of his power running the Manhattan Project with his 190 IQ. Yet, we see past choices are beginning to manifest. Its his first notice from the universal creditors of his delinquent checks. Mr. Genius, the first man to literally split the atom, is also aligned with perhaps the stupidest political philosophy ever devised.
One can’t flippantly join a Party that is receiving funding from a foreign power and whose organizing principle is the overthrow of one’s own government. You may not have been a full-on witch but you were a little too close to Sigil Making. No matter how high you float, you are still mortal, limited, and gravity is undefeated.
How Cool is IQ?
It’s cool you’re on the right side of the bell curve. It’s cool you’re not a Midwit. But intelligence is not enough.
As Tom Bereneger taught us in The Substitute regarding intelligence and high verbal IQ: “flattery” - all them smarts - “will get you killed.”
Look, IQ is cool. It’s nice to have a metric that quantifies and helps predict certain outcomes. But we’ve been seeing a lot of IQ-related content out there these days and much of it is reductive.
Adam Carolla once said something along the lines of “smart is overrated” and “when I look for a smart person, I look for a guy who knows what he’s doing and just does it.” Notice that he’s not citing Mensa IQ, SAT, GMAT, or other standardized test scores. He’s talking about agency, action, and flourishing.
Let’s imagine that IQ was the foundational principle in one lurid scenario, Black Hawk Down. Surrounded by Somali terrorists in Mogadishu, Josh Hartnett rallies his men and says, “Don’t worry fellas, they’re low IQ; we can take ‘em!”
This actually equates to the arrogant attitude of the strategic geniuses in the DoD from 2003-2021 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, looks like the booger-eaters and goat-herders had the last laugh. Goal achievement requires cunning, resourcefulness, and agency, not pure intelligence.
Imagine there’s an entity with infinite recall and pattern recognition abilities. Let’s pretend that this entity is trapped in lines of code and broadcast across the world wide web, which is a series of tubes. We’ll call this thing “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI” for short. Let’s call this entity something clever, like “ChatGPT” or something. In this thought experiment. Let’s ask this so called “AI” what its so called “IQ” is.
“On tasks like analogies, vocabulary, or logic puzzles, I can often perform at what would be considered a 130–160+ IQ level for a human. But I also have glaring blind spots: I don’t “intuit” or have gut feelings, and I sometimes lack common sense or emotional nuance in ways a 12-year-old could easily surpass me. So TL;DR: I’m really good at trivia night, terrible at guessing whether your tone is sarcastic unless you spell it out. Kind of like a savant with no body and no vibe.”
It’s just as Devon Eriksen predicted! At the beginning of his novel Theft of Fire, the protagonist Marcus muses on AI in the 22nd Century. It boils down to this: even the most advanced machines still don’t understand context. They can recognize patterns and regurgitate, but in my words, “AI has no mind, morality, guts, or balls. No intuition.” Does this sound like any A+ student that you went to school with?
To be clear, I am not championing ignorance over competence, I am arguing that “smart” is not a trump card. In fact there’s a real card named Trump, who seemed to outsmart the smarts, despite being unsmart, and is now holding all the cards. Dumb? Maybe not. Perhaps dumb is the new smart.
In fact, there’s an Orwellian truth to the Cult of IQ: “There are some ideas so bad only intellectuals can defend them.” You’ll often find that the most intelligent among us use their prodigious powers to reason themselves into bad positions. The brightest among us often use their gifts to talk themselves into disaster.
Just ask Oppenheimer.
Haven’t seen the movie but this makes me want to.