I feel like I’m being crushed to death a little bit when I talk to someone 1SD less smart or decoupling than me for more than fifteen minutes about something that isn’t the weather or the attractions of their hometown. I’m not smart enough to be open about this crushed-to-deathness without being seen as stupid and obnoxious (and I 80% support the social mechanisms that cause this). Still, that’s what I am: an only moderately smart person who feels angry when they really talk to a mildly smart person.
My dad is also like this. A defining childhood memory is of fleeing to the opposite end of the apartment because he was yelling at someone on the phone for being dim. I hated yelling. He’d suddenly snap in the car if my mom said something illogical. If she dropped something (he saw as) crucial from her context window during response formation.
I always found it strange how much he shouted because of this. It didn’t serve his goals and made everyone unhappy. Why could he not just refrain? Hubris! I am now the person too-angrily jumping on illogical statements in the car. I feel an impulse to rip apart the wrong thing so strongly that my willpower, the bleats of instrumental rationality, and the imploring restraining caresses of civilization cannot stop me from arraying my arguments and blasting them at my beloved life partner like a machine gun.
Once, my dad tried to help me with the algebra I was learning it through a workbook. I was in elementary school and voluntarily studying a year ahead in exchange for computer time – six pages of problems to an hour, something like that. I didn’t get the concept of running equivalent operations on two clusters of objects (not yet castable in my mind as ‘one object’) on either side of a symbol. He yelled at me in frustration when I didn’t get it after multiple explanations and stormed away.
Poor parents. Some do all the hard routine parts right for years and years, and are still remembered mostly for stuff like that evening. My parents gave me a great education and sent me to America even though it basically meant the end of our relationship. Because of distance, and because on a scale from -10 to 10 where 0 is utility equivalent to the utility of non-existence, I find time with them to be of -3. I would simply prefer being dead to experiencing many of those days. My mom chooses not to see it; my dad sees it and withdrew. We talk twice a year.
I don’t want to call him more (he never responded to the last heartfelt vulnerable loving thing I said to him in 2020 or so), but at 32, I feel large and unprecedented empathy for him. As a parent, I more understand the tragedy of a small child who loves you unconditionally turning into an adult who despises you. But I also feel connected to him because of the, you know, hate.
If genes affect qualia somewhat more intensely than they affect behavior, I may be the person in the world who most knows what he feels when someone says something obviously stupid: an intense burst of violent contempt that makes you an enemy. To that person, yes, but it also makes you into an enemy – a generically enemy-shaped person, a wrong kind of human being to be.