Blue Collars vs. Ivy Leaguers

What exactly is intelligence?

I started out my adult life as a long-haired, hard partying blue collar guy. I pulled thousand pound carts of linen around for several years. It was a great daily workout, and kept me in shape. And I was paid for it. It didn’t take long for me to be the last White Man standing, except for management. I was immersed in “diversity.”

I must have heard “man, you are so underemployed” a thousand times. I was urged to go to college. I did make a half-hearted attempt at community college, but predictably wasn’t diligent enough. I preferred spending my free time writing songs and poetry, and sporadically working on the Great American Novel, which eventually became The Unreals. I wish more of you would read it. I have other, more polished novels, but it doesn’t look like anyone wants to publish them. They say that every first novel is autobiographical, so you could probably learn a lot more about me from reading it. If you want to. You might feel you know too much about me already. I’m an open book. I’d reveal the skeletons in my closet before anyone else had a chance to.

It did frustrate me sometimes, to see my peers going to real colleges, and getting better jobs than I had a chance for, because of that magic degree. Meanwhile, I was doing intense physical labor, and learning the intricacies of other cultures, especially Black culture. My innate hatred of the rich fit in perfectly. I despised “the Man” more than all the nonwhites could ever hope to. And “the Man” looked down on someone like me, who was stuck in a job like that. In their eyes, I might as well have been cleaning toilets. When I got my real estate license in 1985, I continued to work this blue collar job for a few years on a part time basis. It was difficult to juggle two such disparate avocations. My customers would have dropped me instantly if they knew.

A few times, I came directly from a real estate showing to my blue collar job without changing from my suit and tie. Of course, I couldn’t do that kind of work in a monkey suit, so I carried a change of clothes. Like the Flash. I decided to try an experiment. I delivered some pharmacy items to a few nursing stations, in my professional outfit. The same nurses who normally never gave me a second glance, lit up like fireflies, to paraphrase one of the many great lines from It’s a Wonderful Life. Not to be conceited, but I was a pretty handsome lad in those days. However, I was just as handsome in my uniform with the nametag. It was the suit and tie. It advertised a different status level. And that got their attention.

Eventually, I moved on to IT, as a computer operator. At that time, this was a very respectable job. Certainly light years above my former position as a physical laborer. And real estate became the part-time gig. It still is. I continued to hate and disrespect “the Man,” even if I was treated a bit better by him. If I’d ever somehow become one of those highly paid Vice Presidents in Charge of Looking out of the Window, I don’t think it would have altered my instinctive animosity for pomp and power. I couldn’t possibly have uttered “Great idea, JR,” with a straight face at one of their pointless meetings, even if it meant losing a six figure Christmas bonus.

So, as someone who worked and interacted with hundreds of nonwhites at the bottom of the employment ladder (well, okay, we were above the likes of fast food workers and ditch diggers), but also with realtors who were making a half million dollars a year, I feel qualified to make some informed observations. In many ways, the blue collar workers had more dignity and class about them. Some of the white collar professionals were shockingly vulgar, and displayed their animal impulses if they got to know and trust you. There were as many adulterous affairs going on as there were at the blue collar level, and even more family dysfunction.

After my very first real estate closing, the other agent, who was a fairly attractive but much older woman, asked me if I wanted to go for a drink to celebrate. I thought her motives were obvious, but then I do have a big ego. Maybe she just wanted an innocent celebratory drink. At any rate, I kindly declined. Would I have declined, if she’d been younger and really attractive? I’d like to think so, but again I am highly susceptible to flattery. I couldn’t picture any older woman, in my blue collar setting, hitting on me like that. Were the women with less income more principled? Or was it my ridiculous uniform with the nametag?

On the blue collar job, and later in IT, I didn’t hesitate to share my rabble rousing views with my co-workers. My fellow blue collar workers mostly loved it. The few who didn’t were usually working part-time while attending college, and bound for bigger and better things. One of them became a hospital administrator. I can still see him sleeping off a hangover on top of one of the Gomco suction machines, when he was being paid to work. Somehow, I doubt he’d tolerate that kind of thing in his future role. We did get away with a lot of stuff like that. I always came in a little late, and left a little early. There was a lot of flexibility and numerous perks. But the perks weren’t financial, and there was clearly no future in it, as everyone kept reminding me.

In IT, there were different perks, but it took a while to adjust to the stricter rules regarding time. They really monitored when you came in and when you left, and only gave you a seven minute courtesy window. But most of them were interested in my always provocative views, although the ratio wasn’t nearly as high as it had been on my blue collar job. I began to realize that the way we look at the world is significantly influenced by what we do for a living. Physical laborers know they’re doing hard work for little pay, and that “the Man,” or the system, sucks. In IT, there was a bit of that feeling among the operators, and the Help Desk, but not so much with the analysts, and certainly not in those with positions of real authority, making great money.

In real estate, I found only a few other Realtors who related to my radical thoughts. Most were preoccupied with money, and material possessions. The ones who were the really big agents, the top sellers in the company, wouldn’t talk to me any more than the directors at my blue collar job would have talked to me. In every industry, as there is in society at large, most people are very, very class conscious. They know where you stand on the totem pole. And if you’re well below them on that totem pole, they aren’t going to be friends with you. Or in many cases, talk to you. The doctors at the hospital where I labored as a blue collar worker literally didn’t acknowledge my existence.

One thing I learned is that formal education is not an indicator of intelligence. Certainly not of common sense. The most uneducated blue collar worker I knew had far more “street smarts,” and was far less likely to be fooled by propaganda, than the most successful Realtor I encountered. At one point, the hospital spent millions of dollars on a new automated cart system. After years, and more millions spent on worthless “consultants,” that system ran for ten minutes. Every single blue collar worker knew it wouldn’t work, and we took bets on how long it would last. It was that obvious that their carts wouldn’t fit into the spaces designated for them, but the well paid college graduates couldn’t see what the high school dropouts could.

This has been reinforced in my mind many times over the years. I’ve discovered so many brilliant voices out there, who never graduated from college. On the other hand, the hardest people to wake up, to even a single aspect of the overwhelming corruption and tyranny, are those who graduated from a really impressive university. The more “graduated” they are, the harder it gets. Those with a master’s degree are even more indoctrinated, obviously. And those with PhDs are usually hopeless, but not always. Consider someone like Naomi Wolf, for example. I would imagine the most brainwashed would be the Ivy League graduates.

If you were stranded with others on a desert island, who would be more valued; a rocket scientist that couldn’t forage for food or build a shelter, or a crude talking guy that had never read a book, but could build or fix anything? I certainly wouldn’t want to be stuck with me on an island, as I complained and ranted, and whatever I could construct collapsed as inevitably as my childhood attempts at a treehouse. There are different kinds of intelligence. The “book learning” kind doesn’t come in that handy in a real crisis. The kids who get the best grades in school are not always (or even usually) the smartest. But they are the best at following the rules, and obeying instructions. And that’s what counts in the world of “education.”

I read The Bell Curve years ago. I’m familiar with the statistics regarding the relative IQs for different races. But again, my experience has taught me that those Blacks who worked in the basement of a large hospital alongside me, had a far more informed perspective of what was really going on in the world. They saw the corruption that Yale graduates can’t. Or won’t. Whites may have the highest average IQs, alongside Asians, but what kind of intelligence causes such an intense self-hatred of your own “kind” that it results in inevitable extinction? “Educated” Whites are the ones primarily selling, and buying, the nonstop lies. The average, uneducated and street smart Black knows they’re being lied to.

White women especially are the ones who have bought into the false narratives most religiously. While simultaneously often giving up their own religious faith. This includes the most hypocritical of the Born Againers. Just don’t mention that “camel through the eye of a needle” passage from the Bible to them. Whites and Asians, just as they excel above other groups on average in school, are the best students for mainstream media propaganda. So who’s really “smarter,” the Asian or White engineer with a 135 IQ, who accepts that all questioning of authority is a “conspiracy theory,” or a Black warehouse worker with a 90 IQ who is totally “awake” to all the tyranny and corruption?

There is a lot of wisdom in the old redneck canard, “I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks.” Really working for a living- and I don’t consider most high level, highly paid positions to be “work” in the literal sense of the word- is an education in and of itself. You learn so much about human nature. You see people treated differently, not because of their skin color or religion, but because of their job title. And because physical laborers are subjected to this kind of classism, they are far more likely to be awake to other kinds of corruption, than those who have been treated much better by the system. I’ve noted many times that it’s difficult to get a person to understand the system is rigged, when it’s been so good to them.

I explored different aspects of this theme in my books Survival of the Richest and Bullyocracy. The classism and wild financial disparity I delineated in Survival is directly related to the high school social hierarchy that creates and enables bullying. Is snobbery that different from popularity? There can’t be any popular people, without unpopular ones to contrast them with. What is wealth without poverty? Beauty without ugliness? Yin and Yang. The hierarchy has changed, with the advent of the transgender madness. Uniforms used to reveal your status in the hierarchy pretty clearly. What are the uniforms now? Social media “influencers” worth millions dress in the “new normal” with slovenly clothing and unmanaged hair.

Regardless of what we wear, society ultimately judges us by how much we’re paid to do whatever it is we do, and how much wealth we’ve managed to accumulate. It doesn’t matter how you accumulate it. When it comes to money, the ends do justify the means in the minds of most people. Just win, baby! I will never accept that an individual’s worth is tied to how much fiat currency they’ve accrued. Echoing Martin Luther King a bit, the size of a heart should be a lot more important than the size of a bank account. But intelligence is measured the same way by the vast majority of the public. He must be smart- look at the size of that house! I’ve never met an impressive executive in my life. But then again, I’m pretty prejudiced.

I know there are outliers. I haven’t really heard from them, but I’m sure there are probably regular readers of my work that have accumulated significant wealth. There’s at least one former Harvard professor who loved The Unreals enough to contact me. But far more often, I hear from those who are struggling. “Losers” in our rigged casino economy. Ones whose minds are open enough to let in even the most subversive notions imaginable, from the minds of Thought Criminals like me. These are my people, and always have been. You’ll never find me in a country club. I’m with those who scoff at the rotten system even as it holds them down. Forget IQs, and degrees, and titles. In my mind, that’s the true measure of intelligence.