Hank said
I treat that as a sign that their intellect is not as impressive as they perceive it to be. Like I said, self-awareness is an essential quantifier for intelligence. How do we measure sapience in other species? The mirror test. Self-awareness allows one to recognize their individuality and creates the ability to perceive other creatures as separate entities and accurately compare them to oneself, or assume their viewpoint. It is the force that drives empathy, the greatest achievement in human psychological evolutionary development. It is also necessary to accurately judge yourself, like the magpie who recognizes that the bird in the mirror is a reflection of itself, and looks down at its own chest to see the dot that has been painted on it, observed in the mirror. Being able to create a mirror for your own personality and judging yourself, your capabilities, and your intelligence accurately, and having enough awareness and empathy to open yourself to input from other individuals (and being able to judge accurately), is the most resonating characteristic of a highly intelligent human. People like these militant atheists from the fedora brigade, who incessantly bash conservative Christians and insult their intelligence, have not tried to understand the Christian viewpoint. Making claims like "because I am enlightened by my own intelligence" shows a lack of self-awareness, since it is not their own intelligence that has allowed them to rationalize the non-existence of God or whatever, but the intelligence of prominent scientists and atheists before them. Humility and pride are both virtues but someone like that possesses neither and is guilty of hubris. By bashing the Christians and subjecting them to bigotry, they show that they also lack the empathy and awareness in others to engage in dialogue, making them just as guilty of being dogmatic and close-minded, which is exactly what they accuse the religious of. They could very well be smart, academically gifted, capable of powerful abstract reasoning or any other number of savant skills, but the essential characteristic of human intelligence, that which has made us a pioneering species, is weak in them.
All very true, particularly the part about dogmatism. Ultimately though, I think that just how intelligent they are is irrelevant not because they lack self-awareness, but because intelligence alone is not a quality that receives enormous respect. My previous post basically boils down to Adler's psychology; if you feel inferior, you either have an inferiority complex or a superiority complex. The fedora brigade is a perfect example of the latter.
In this case, self-awareness would actually feed into the complex more. The ability to look in at your douchey behavior and realize how much of a joke you are obviously would do nothing but further your feelings of inferiority, thus making you that much more desperate to do something (incredibly stupid, usually) to make yourself feel like you're better than everyone else.
