I think you have a very good point about the backlash from liberals. It’s not one I thought of. Thank you.
Let’s move on.
Do you know why so many people just love this idea of emotional intelligence? Same reason they love the idea of the law of attraction and Jesus Christ is coming back to rescue them. Just let’s be clear, my IQ has been measured between 165 and off-the-graph, and let’s be equally clear that I could not be the writer I am if I did not understand the human condition. And I come from a family of gifted people, and all my close friends are gifted to the same capacity. And, sorry, but you have completely the wrong idea of leadership and high intelligence.
Do you know why people take exception to high intelligence? Because they don’t have it. Because they’re scared of it. And because people who are smarter than they are, can see through the lies, their fantasies, etc.
When you’re talking about leadership, you’re thinking about parenting – about people who can get other people to do things. When I’m talking about leadership, I’m talking about the ability to figure out we stop climate change, how we stop a virus from spreading, how we feed people without the impact of zoonotic diseases. That does not take emotional intelligence. That takes brains – lots of it.
People don’t develop complex reasoning. It’s a structural (physiological) difference in the brain. Someone may come from a family of conservatives, but as the brain develops, that person will switch to being liberal. You need to go look at the science.
The reason there is little reasoning, or not reasoning of an acceptably sufficient standard is that average intelligence is not capable of Einsteinian reasoning. You clearly do not get that these things are genetic and structural. We’re born with them. No education system can convert a child without the genes into that of a child prodigy.
Least you think I’m arrogant in saying this, you might like to read the following article. I’m well aware that most people can do perfectly well without gifted intelligence, but, sorry, without it, they do not have the capacity to problem solve complex problems.
Neither self-awareness nor emotional intelligence helps you to understand what is involved in changing the economic system from neoliberalism to one of being resource based. You need heightened intelligence and a damned good intelligence to do that
The people who make the decisions certainly need to be aware whether their decisions will kill other people, destroy our planet, be responsible for the 6th mass extinction of all species currently going on, etc, and they need to have the intelligence to tie all that together and find solutions.
Your sentence “The people who make decisions need to be considering the impacts their decisions make on the very real and visceral experiences of other people. IQ doesn’t even touch on this. EQ, however, does.” You are talking about parenting. It has nothing to do with leadership. There is no way on earth that decisions made at presidential and international level won’t hurt some people. That’s called ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison.’ One can only make provision for those that are caught in the fall-out. Leaders aren’t there to make ‘value judgements.’ They are there to administer solutions to things like figuring out how to convert from the personal ownership of cars to mass public transport.
Let’s talk about human suffering – the suffering that has come from excessive profit making, lowering of taxes, ignoring climate change, and the mishandling of the virus. Let’s talk about Trump’s emotionally intelligent awareness of other people’s feelings when he said “I knew the virus was dangerous. I just didn’t want to panic people.” So now nearly 700,000 are dead and one third of those who got it have permanent damage life long damage. That’s what having emotional intelligence has. It makes you pay intelligence to people’s feelings and not to a dangerous situation. Priorities are completely out of wack.
Your current leaders all have high emotional intelligence. WTF do you think so many voted for them? Psychopaths have extremely high emotional intelligence. They know exactly which buttons to push to make people like them. They are charming people. You confuse principles with emotional intelligence.
Since when is political leadership about value-judgements? It’s not about determining whether something is a good idea or a bad idea. It’s about creating a plan, a solution, a path forward in terms of survival - not on figuring out whether abortions should be legal or not.
You said “Bear in mind self-awareness and emotional intelligence are not static traits people are simply born with, or not. These are traits related to conditioning and parenting and people with a desire to can improve them at any time in life.”
Actually, behavioral studies suggest that character is also genetic. Perhaps you might like to read up more about that.
