We are inspired by all that we read to think about ourselves in both fantastical and critical ways. I often wonder why someone is no good at something that seems easy to me, I’m sure that thought has hit you too at some point where you’re maybe watching another member of your household trying to hang a picture and they’re just making holes in the plasterboard. There must be different types of people that suit different types of disciplines, but does that mean that things cannot be absorbed that are sought, or does it mean the velocity of assimilation is varied for different persons?

I’ve been trying to play a guitar for years, mostly unsuccessfully. Yes I can bang out a few chords and run down the pentatonic scale, but a guitar player I am not, or am barely if I am being kind. Paul McCartney wrote blackbird when he was a teenager and was a famous and accomplished musician in his early 20s, yet I doubt his efforts were greater than mine. I’d like to know why something seems to come naturally to one person and it does not to another. This is continuing my objection to Matthew Syad’s postulate of tabula rasa (the blank slate) where he imagines that all are capable of all things and that it is effort that makes the distinction.

Why can my partner Em imagine the flavour that is not there, the one that is missing when she tastes the soup or the stew? My gran could do this also, yet I cannot. I can know that it is not good, but I cannot know what it needs for it to become good. I could attend a cooking course to learn the sciences of food, then I would learn via a method, that it’s paprika it needs, or mint that will separate it from blandness, but that is not what the aforementioned people are doing, they just know. I assume they have a database of flavours in their heads, one they can call on to remember the taste and the olfactory effect of the items, they can then apply that to the taste they have just had as if in a scientific experiment, the result is that they fixed the dish. All this happens in their head, in a simulation. I can’t do this, they can, it’s not a learned behaviour it’s the wiring they were born with, enhanced by an experience that I have also had without that wiring, so it doesn’t in my case do the same thing.

Imagine the room in three colours, this one any artist can do, again I cannot. Fascinating to someone who can’t reach this in their mind, but again possible if there is an education of sorts to make it possible. Is it the same thing though? If I learn what goes with what on a Dulux paint chart so as to make the same or similar decisions to a person who didn’t have that education? Are we now equal?

Pot a pool ball by judging the point at which to hit it with another pool ball (the white ball). How come some people can do this and others spend a lifetime trying? If it were a learned experience then how come experienced players sometimes get it wrong, if it were a natural occurrence then how come great players get it wrong too? It must be a mix of the two factors, skill and judgement, but within circumstance and dependent on other factors such as the pressure to do so.

Each time you watch somebody struggle to do something, remember there are things you too are bad at. We are all able and unable. To punish ourselves and others for only our limitations is itself a limitation of judgement. I happen to be a computer technician, so you would imagine I’d be good with logic and mathematics, and you’d be right, I am. I happen to also work alongside professional carers and nurses, you’d imagine their strengths were not predominantly in the technical, and again you’d be correct, but that doesn’t mean they are lesser than me, unless that is the only criteria you chose to judge them on. I couldn’t be a carer or a nurse, I know this, I’m not psychologically strong enough for that role. If I was judged on my ability to provide care I would be a failure. Could I learn all about it in a classroom, likely yes, but would that make me equal to someone who just knows how to find a way to communicate with a dementia patient, or calms a person who is suffering life after a head trauma? I doubt I could learn the little things that come naturally to some people who haven’t been to a classroom, other than learning them thematically. Again, would I be equal?

I find the notion that everyone is capable of all things to be nonsense, and it makes even worse the nonsense of enablement and sycophantic progression. People cannot be titled or chosen into being capable, and conversely, they cannot always be educated toward professional level ability. People also cannot be assumed because of one expertise to be capable of an unrelated one, or the opposite, we cannot assume persons incapable of one thing because they have not excelled at what we happen to value. Yet we keep allowing these mistakes to happen, especially in the political sphere.

We trust the word of a doctor on health because they have learned experience and we hope they have aptitude, but we may also over value their opinions that don’t arise from the same matrix, making an assumption that smart is smart across the board. A smart person is only a smart person within the criteria you use to test them, they are likely not smart at everything, and a capable person is only capable within the disciplines you use to assess their capability. Einstein said that “you can’t judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree”. This does not mean that they are not able or capable in other areas, they may happen to be of course, just that ability in one sphere does not indicate ubiquitous ability.

I think only stupidity is ubiquitous, stupidity is not the lack of knowledge it is the resistance to knowledge, the refusal of learning. Very few people successfully achieve stupidity, but I’ll bet you know one….

Paul S Wilson