Smart Society

BY Alvin Kumar

I am probably smarter than you. No, no, don’t try to argue – it is a universal truth, and if you are indeed trying to argue with a poster in the middle of the street, that only proves my superior intelligence. But apart from tending not to pick arguments with inanimate objects (at least not arguments I would lose), I have further proof of my immense cleverosity. I have recently become a member of Mensa.

For those of you who don’t know, Mensa is the society for those with an IQ higher than the 98th percentile – those of us who are amongst the smartest 2% of the population. You can join by showing them the results of an accepted IQ test, or by sitting their own test. I took their test, and two weeks later in the post I received my membership papers, ID card and secret magic special decoder ring. (Sadly that is a lie… it took three weeks and my decoder ring went missing.)

Prior to joining, I knew very little about Mensa, apart from that it was a fancy-pants club for the super-smart. Then, on Celebrity Who Wants to Be A Millionaire a few years ago, Molly Meldrum surprised us all by getting to the final question and it was revealed that he was a member. I was outraged. How could this bumbling, stumbling slow-witted fool in a hat, who had famously forgotten Prince Charles’s name live on air, be smarter than 98% of Australians? I would not and could not let this lie, and so took it upon myself to prove myself the former Countdown host’s intellectual. A mission I am proud to say I accomplished.

There is a stereotype of the typical Mensan, much along the lines of the stereotype of a ‘genius’. A skinny, weedy little man with beady eyes protected by thick prescription glasses, wearing a white coat from his job at ‘the lab’, awkwardly stuttering and stammering his way through even the simplest form of social interaction before scurrying home to his parents’ house (where he still lives despite being 35) to play Dungeons and Dragons, and spend hours on the internet playing World of Warcraft (his character is a level 15 night troll) and debating the relative merits of Kirk and Picard in chatrooms with his friends, none of whom he has met in real life).

As a scruffy outer-suburban Guns’n’Roses fan, I do not fit any part of that stereotype. But I thought this could be a good thing. Because the other Mensa/genius stereotype is the shy, retiring librarian of a woman, just waiting to take off her glasses, shake out her hair and release a white-hot fire of repressed sexual energy. A fire that she would never waste on the usual suspects who frequent her ‘genius club’, but one that might be ignited by the scruffy yet devilishly handsome newcomer. (Shut up – I can dream, can’t I?) Another thing I was hoping for in this, my first gathering of Mensa, was intellectual conversation. We could pontificate about world events, geopolitics, economic theory, and if the stereotype of a Mensa member proved to be correct, why the last season of Buffy wasn’t as good as the previous ones. We would chat, laugh and I would leave with a new circle of extremely smart friends.

Alas, it was not meant to be. And I for one blame my high expectations, for what I actually got at this lunch meeting was five middle-aged men, (no, my librarian goddess didn’t show up), all in suits carrying briefcases, sitting around a café in the CBD discussing the problems their companies had had in the past with their email servers. Make no mistake, all the people I met were extremely smart and were pleasant and friendly enough to me, and the email problems were not the only thing we talked about. But ultimately it was all rather uneventful. It was not the Algonquin, nor was it a symposium of nuclear physics. The people I met weren’t über-geeks, nor were they Captain Cool. And I suppose I should attend a few more meetings and meet many more Mensans before I make this judgement, but all I can say is that compared to the so-called normal world, genius is dull.