The unkindly intelligent

Denotative, connotative meanings of words have experienced a distinct semantic shift

The intelligent people are always unafraid to be kind.— de Medeiros

 

The denotative and connotative meanings of words have experienced a distinct semantic shift in this age of our too much exposure to digital screen. Great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy says: “The more intelligent a person is, the more he discovers kindness in others.” As every technological revolution catalyses transformative changes in man, today to be intelligent means to be remorselessly sharp, clever and manipulative for personal advancement. Or rather to be best put, intelligence is Francis Bacon’s simulation and dissimulation.

Simulation is pretending what one is not and dissimulation is hiding what one really is. Today people use all their brain energy and life time in order to appear what they are not, and hide what they actually are. By a little stretch of ethics, it can be diagnosed as hypocrisy. To be what we really are is the summum bonum of real intelligence.

Though simulation and dissimulation lends the person a momentary saccharined elation of victory over others through a smoke screen, actually it creates hollowness that grimaces at us in loneliness. Wasif Ali Wasif, a great thinker and writer of many books, says: “The blessed is the one who transforms his loneliness into solitude.” Semantically, loneliness bears negative connotation while solitude, positive one.

The socials (hypernym for social media and small video apps) have overexposed our youth to the digital screen, and consequently deprived them of blissful moments of mindfulness. The fear of missing out (FOMO) and addictive scrolling digital pages up and down have turned mind into a galloping horse. The fidgeting itch to hanker after knick-knacks of information without chewing the cud to assimilate what has been learnt makes our youth in the digital world “information nomads” who lose their moorings in the realm of mindfulness, and develop blindspots of self-knowledge.

The lure of digital world dehumanises the users of digital screen that they end up becoming the epitome of Machiavellian cunning amorality: the end justifies the means. The digital landscape is deluged with misinformation, disinformation and mal-information (MDM), which has burgled into the credibility of the sources of knowledge by making our critical and analytical faculties hibernate for good. Everything is taken at the face value. The influx of hoax stories and proselytising videos engenders in the consumers the content-based negativity.

Epistemologists categorise one’s quest for the ultimate truth as a series of information, knowledge and then wisdom. But unfortunately our Generation Z remains mired in all too pervasive information. Their screen-induced hyper arousal makes them addicted to multi-tasking which leaves few moments of metacognition. In 2004, communication researcher Jeff Hancock conducted a study to predict where people tend to lie with liberty. The findings revealed that lies made up 14% of emails, 21% of instant messages, 27% of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37% of phone calls or video chat. Obviously, distance facilitated deception. It is rightly said that instead of doing social, one must strive to be social.

Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle explains that online we only want to share opinions that our followers will agree with, it is a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. In her magnum opus The Empathy Diaries, she writes on page four: “Technology is implicated in an assault on empathy. We have learned that even a silent phone call inhibits conversations that matter. The very sight of a phone on the landscape leaves us feeling less connected to each other, less invested in each other.”

This disconnect prepares ground for apathy making us think linear for our own vested interest, and wherever and whenever one’s own self is prioritised, one by default becomes unkindly intelligent and intelligently unkind.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24^th, 2023.

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