“Too Intelligent to be dangerous.”

In the modern era, the West has a complete obsession with intelligence. It’s reflected in TV shows such as Sherlock or The Mentalist, in our fixation on college and IQ, and our cultural worship of tech founders. I too, carry an immense reverence for mental ability and the acquisition of knowledge and skills (both crystalline and fluid). And I’m grateful we live in a society that pushes for intellectual excellence and growth. Imagine living in a country where all the educated professionals have been hunted down and murdered; who is left to perform surgeries, build bridges, or fly planes?
(Thanks to communism, you don’t need to imagine too hard, see the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.)

However, I was recently listening to a Dan Carlin Hardcore History podcast and he mentioned a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis where Nikita Khrushchev (then leader of the U.S.S.R.) supposedly mentioned to his aides during the Vienna Summit that John F. Kennedy (then president of the USA) was “Too intelligent to be dangerous”. He was, of course, wrong about that, but I had a sudden realization - our complete obsession with intelligence and the cult of genius worship is absurd. Intelligence is just one piece of a puzzle - you don’t find decisiveness, sacrifice, or courage there. Which is to say, there are problems you cannot solve with intelligence alone.

JFK is a great example. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, his advisors - some of the most respected generals on the planet - were almost unanimously pushing him to conduct direct military intervention in Cuba. Soviet troops were on the ground building the missile launch sites, and this would have put the US in direct military action against the troops of another Nuclear power. Which raises the impossible question, “How many Soviet casualties is enough to spark a nuclear apocalypse?”. And despite caving to what the leading military minds of the day were pushing, JFK showed immense courage and resolve at the precipice.

JFK had his brother open a backdoor channel with Nikita Khrushchev, where they worked out a deal. The US would secretly remove its missile sites from Turkey (close to the Soviets), and the Soviets would back out of Cuba. It was perhaps JFK's greatest hour, and were it not for his bravery, determination, AND intelligence, the world as we know it may not exist today.

Intelligence may help you model outcomes—but only character can decide which ones are worth risking everything for. While this may not have been as profound to you, dear reader, as it was for me, I hope it offered a reminder - there are problems you cannot solve with intelligence alone.

Thanks for reading,
-Alec