There was a post making the rounds recently, and if you spend enough time on certain forums, you can probably guess the type immediately. The story itself wasn’t especially interesting. It was really just delivering two messages at once: first, I’m buying a home in Shanghai; second, unlike other rich people, I actually have brains.
What’s worth talking about is not the post itself, but the logic underneath it.
This kind of discussion shows up all the time. And the supposedly objective angle is often the same: turns out having money doesn’t necessarily mean being intelligent. I’ve been skeptical of that line since I was young. Why do people love returning to this topic? Is it really an honest observation, or is it just what people reach for when they can’t beat someone in terms of money, so they decide to crush them with “IQ” instead?
I was very good, from a young age, at “comforting” people—especially when there was no real basis for comfort, or when the person being comforted didn’t particularly deserve it. I had a talent for consoling losers and making them feel like winners anyway.
As a kid, there were always group competitions. And where there are competitions, there are wins and losses. The real skill was figuring out how to comfort people who had clearly lost badly, while still convincing them that they were somehow the real victors.
Take a relay race. If someone dropped the baton and the class lost because of it, that student would instantly become the target of everyone’s frustration. To rescue that accidental culprit, you had to invent a new culprit: the students from the next class were standing too close, that’s why our baton got dropped. Once you identify a proper third party to blame, internal conflict disappears.
Then you add the soothing narrative: If they hadn’t interfered, we definitely would have won. And if you ignore the order of finish, our class actually had great rhythm the whole time. If that still wasn’t enough, then you piled on the flattery: Their class sent out all their elites. Our class just grabbed a few random people and we still only lost by a little.
Back then, they probably didn’t know the story of Tian Ji’s horse racing. But the logic was already the same.
At first glance, this kind of consolation seems totally different from saying, I’m smarter than other rich people. But the core mechanism is identical: you just choose a comparison where you can come out ahead. If you can’t compete with someone’s wealth, then compare IQ instead. IQ is especially convenient, because unless there’s an actual test report with a number on it, anyone can claim to be the smart one and declare the other person an idiot.
There’s a very common way of dealing with life that people rarely state openly, even though plenty of them rely on it all the time: if you can’t compare upward, compare downward.
In plain terms, you take your strengths and place them against someone else’s weaknesses, and that’s enough to numb yourself into feeling like you’ve won.
Someone else has a son and you have a daughter? Then compare yourself to people who can’t have children at all.
You’re single and lonely while someone else gets married? Then compare yourself to the families where the married couple cheats on each other. At least, you can tell yourself, no one can cuckold you if you’re not in a relationship to begin with.
Most of the time, my own method of “comforting” people relied on exactly this kind of comparison. The listener feels better, and the speaker can easily end up believing the performance too. That’s the dangerous part. Sometimes the person listening starts to realize something is off, while the person doing the comforting is still fully intoxicated by their own cleverness.
At that point, there’s almost no point saying, I can tell you think I’m stupid and you’re trying to placate me. It can be more interesting to just play dumb and wait to see who ends up deceiving themselves more thoroughly.
Anyone with a little sense should be able to spot the flaw here: all of these consolations rely on one-way logic. But people love arguments that sound like clean judgments of right and wrong, so they accept them anyway.
If we compare our longest edge with someone else’s shortest edge, then naturally, without ever saying it aloud, our own shortest edge gets mentally balanced against their strongest point. No explicit comparison is made, but people still walk away with a strange sense of relief.
That’s why, when I was younger, I would bluntly ask people who used rich people are all low-IQ as a form of self-anesthesia: So does being poor automatically make someone intelligent?
The response I got was never a serious answer. It was usually adults scolding me for being rude.
But if I had asked more politely, would that somehow have made them look smarter?
That’s the hole in this whole Tian Ji-style game of comparison: the comfort only works in one direction. Reverse it, and it collapses. People just don’t like admitting that the flaw is there.
Rich people are all stupid.
Then what does that make you—poor and brilliant by default?