Making sense of high-IQ people being simultaneously desirable and disfavored

This is an attempt to explain an experience that will be familiar to anyone with a high IQ during a dysgenic period (e.g. the last 150 years), and especially high technical ability. It’s based on yesterday’s insight re: positive morality vs. negative morality. During a dysgenic period it’s very low-status to be able to do anything (probably a recognition that high IQ marks a reproductive loser by definition), so people generally don’t want to associate with you, but they also see you as a tool to get what they want. This leads to some behavior that appears strange and inadvisable from the outside.

The mark of high status is people give you things as an act of love and worship. Back at the strip club, the head manager struggled with his weight primarily because every day people were bringing him all kinds of food, ranging from baked goods to full meals. Often people would bring him takeout because they were getting takeout and thought of him. He ate most of it to be polite and, in my opinion*, because he put in 10k-12k steps per day walking up and down stairs and didn’t bother packing a lunch.

The mark of high competence is everybody thinks of you when they want to start a business. Everybody I know wants to hire me for something or other, and even back when I was just an average high-IQ sperg who couldn’t make anything happen people still got dollar signs in their eyes when they heard I had some free time. Because, after all, an Omega male’s time is also free as in free beer, and I’ve always at least been industrious.

Once I started winning in a serious way, I learned that Tex was being absolutely, 100% truthful when he reported that business people’s eyes would bug out when he quoted his hourly rate (which is, to be frank, a lowball bid for a contractor with his skillset). On the one hand, people want him around because their multi-billion dollar businesses would fail otherwise (you really, really need those embedded systems to keep running). On the other hand, people’s business decisions are based on very, very primitive feelings: tl;dr- if a slave engages in salary negotiation, that’s a status challenge that needs to be answered decisively. “No, you eat what we give you and then you say thank you.” Sure, production is still down but at least you’ve assuaged that ancient existential fear that the slaves are working up their courage for a revolt that may end your bloodline.

If a slave asks for more money than the manager himself is making that provokes a response that, depending on the manager’s emotional stability, ranges from incomprehension to narcissistic injury.

We are, fortunately, entering a less dysgenic period where people don’t actually care anymore if you look like a try-hard, they only care if you get what you want (AKA real power). You might get explicitly criticized out of habit but underneath there’s a grudging acceptance that wasn’t there in 2018, so there’s no teeth in it anymore. You can be Mr. Unironic Sigma Grindset and still sit with the cheerleaders at lunch if you’ve got a 4.0 and a chance at a football scholarship. When I was a kid the Gen X morality was still pervasive: what you did was relatively unimportant, what mattered was that it at least appeared effortless. Low effort was considered the mark of an honest person.

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*I can understand impulsively eating something you shouldn’t in that scenario because I did the overnight restocking shift at Kroger for months before I figured out why I couldn’t stop myself from eating a box of Pop-Tarts every night. Discipline in that area had never once been a problem for me before but a paleo diet just plain can’t fuel the rice farmer lifestyle.