I wrote the following to a "senior statesman" of Mensa around the time that I resigned officially from the Society. He has been a Mensa member for some four decades. He is as moral as he is brilliant and has tried his utmost to steer the Society in the direction of moral self-government that is characterized by as little bureaucratic structure as possible – to very little avail.

Hillel, kHz, dB, and Humility.
What Have These in Common with Mensa?


Your most recent posts on M-Pol cause me considerable sadness and even shame for you.

Surely after all of the years that you are in Mensa you must realize that the vast majority of people who do well on those standardized tests that measure one's ability to think inconsequentially are morally average and some are even below average. Think about who the people who devised those tests are and you will have an encyclopaedia of information at your fingertips.

You have written about considering Mensa as a control group of subjects that you are performing an "experiment" on to see if people with IQ's about 150% of the average will act morally in tandem. I am reminded of the old joke about the experimenter who concludes that upon having its four legs cut off the frog can no longer hear the command "Jump!".

Apropos hearing: You have twice referred to the Sage Hillel in posts to the Yahoo! Group M-Pol. Amplifying the dB of the words of Hillel by quoting him now twice will avail you nothing when you speak to those people. His teachings are tens of thousands of kHz out of their moral hearing range. At most they will feel unsettling vibrations if you increase the amplitude, but they will not hear the words. They will not react with happy appreciation for being enlightened. They will react with anger and fear at having been unsettled. And why can they not understand such sentiments? It is because Hillel devoted himself to becoming as humble and as meek as one could - words not found in the M-Pol archives. Moreover, he drove anger from his heart entirely. Are you familiar with this famous story about Hillel?:

http://tinyurl.com/dsssl

The people in Mensa, as individuals, have not exerted themselves in the struggle against hubris, impatience, self-serving, etc. They have amassed data and this for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and advancement, not wisdom. You are speaking to people who are encrusted in egos they have cultivated for four decades and more. How can you reasonably expect them to act wisely, and in the interest of the Society, in tandem?

I lived on kibbutz for five years. I learned from the general assemblies held once every week that the sum total of morally averageness is a whole lotta moral averageness. The result of every general meeting I attended was either cacophony or a harmonic wave of amplified nothing.

It simply does not follow that because many of the moral giants of the world were brilliant that the brilliant are necessarily moral giants (and let's face it, most of the people in Mensa aren't exactly brilliant). Even people in Prometheus consider ethics only perfunctorily, because they think it is de rigueur for intellectuals to give a nod to such matters, not because the desire for justice and truth wrenches their guts.

You are addressing people who have drinking problems, people who openly and unashamedly admit that they came to Mensa for their own (not very noble) purposes, people who imagine themselves to be witches, i.e., people who, thank God deludedly, are trying to empower themselves by tapping into negative energy sources. Is it any wonder that their political behavior is what it is?! Do you really expect people like that to be decent enough to post a correction giving credit where it is really due? It may seem like basic decency to you, but it is not for them. No one seems to tarry putting up posts in their own defense.

It hurts me to see people write to you disrespectfully, with no reverence at all either for your age, your tenure or for that which you have endeavored to do during the decades during which you have been an active member of Mensa. I'm sure that recalling your achievements is not very pleasant for you. Have your exertions been rewarded with success? Will further exertions be rewarded with success?

They don't know what you're on about, and as I said above, increasing the dB level will avail you nothing if you speak in a moral range above their ability to hear.

I resigned from Mensa rather than allow myself to be excoriated, as you are being raked over the coals, for having the "arrogance" (the buzz word used by Mensans to shut people up when they speak out for the right) to evince the requisite self-confidence needed to express moral principles and adjure others to comport themselves in accordance with them. The members of the Society would have tried to drag me into the sophistry of "moral relativity".

While I respect your choice to remain in the Society and suffer the insult of those who do not begin to approximate you as a Man or as an intellect, your decision is inscrutable to me.

Peace,
Doreen

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com