Unmasking the False Prophets

This isn't a comforting platitude about hidden talents or alternative forms of success. It's a serious question about what intelligence actually looks like when confronted with a fundamentally irrational system.

We live in a civilization that celebrates as "geniuses" people who excel at accumulating resources while ecosystems collapse, who optimize for quarterly profits while planning obsolescence into every product, who create artificial scarcity in a world of potential abundance. We call someone intelligent if they can navigate systems designed to extract value from human labor and natural resources until both are exhausted.

But what do we call someone who looks at these systems and simply say... "nope"? Someone whose mind refuses to accept that perpetual growth on a finite planet makes sense? Someone who can't pretend that competing against their neighbors for artificial scarcity is rational behavior?

We call them dysfunctional. Lazy. Irrealist. Idealist. "Asocial".

Consider how intelligence actually works in successful systems. In a forest, there are no "unemployable" trees. Every organism contributes something—some provide structure, others fix nitrogen, some break down dead matter, others form communication networks. Resources flow to where they're needed most. The system optimizes for the health of the whole, not the accumulation of individual trees.

A tree that couldn't "keep a job" in our economic system might be exactly the kind of organism that asks the essential questions: Why are we destroying the soil that feeds us? Why are we treating water as a commodity when all life depends on it? Why are we creating systems that require some to fail so others can succeed?

These aren't the questions of dysfunction—they're the questions of recognizing systemic insanity. Maybe this is intelligence. Or "instinct" maybe?

What we interpret as "inability to function" might actually be intelligence asserting itself. The person who can't stomach competitive corporate environments isn't necessarily lacking social skills—they might be demonstrating the social intelligence to recognize that cooperation creates more value than competition. The person who can't focus on meaningless tasks isn't necessarily lazy—they might have the cognitive sophistication to distinguish between activity and purpose.

The person who struggles with a 9-to-5 job that contributes to ecological destruction isn't necessarily unemployable—they might be demonstrating the kind of systems thinking that recognizes long-term consequences over short-term rewards.

Our culture has created a strange inversion: we diagnose as disorders many of the qualities that would be adaptive in a sane system.

Someone who notices everything, who can't filter out the suffering and destruction happening around them, gets labeled with anxiety disorders. Someone who can't accept arbitrary authority without questioning its logic gets labeled as oppositional. Someone who needs movement and variety to think clearly gets labeled as having attention deficits. Someone who feels physical pain when watching ecosystems die gets labeled as overly sensitive.

But these might be exactly the kinds of intelligence we need most: the ability to perceive what's actually happening, the courage to question destructive authority, the cognitive flexibility to think in multiple dimensions, the empathy to recognize that human wellbeing is inseparable from ecological health.

It is often said that we are not equipped to understand Deep Time. Maybe we actually do, or maybe we simply can't anymore just because we can't explain it rationally and thus it is dismissed.

There's a crucial difference between someone who thrives in a broken system and someone who would thrive in a healthy one. The skills that make someone successful in extractive capitalism—the ability to ignore long-term consequences, to compete ruthlessly, to treat relationships as transactions, to externalize costs onto others—these aren't markers of superior intelligence. They're markers of successful adaptation to a sick system.

Meanwhile, the people who can't master these skills might be demonstrating the kind of intelligence that recognizes what health actually looks like.

In forests, some of the most crucial intelligence happens underground, invisible to casual observation. The mycorrhizal networks that share resources and information between trees, that support struggling saplings and coordinate responses to threats—this collaborative intelligence is what makes the forest resilient.

Perhaps our "dysfunctional" individuals are like this underground network—the people asking the essential questions, maintaining connection and empathy, sharing resources based on need rather than "productivity," supporting those who are struggling rather than abandoning them to compete.

They might be the intelligence that could make human civilization as resilient as a forest, if we were wise enough to listen.

The inverted genius doesn't necessarily lack the ability to play the game—they lack the capacity to believe the game makes sense. They can see the emperor has no clothes, even when everyone else is praising his wardrobe.

They're the people who ask inconvenient questions: Why do we have homeless people and empty houses? Why do we produce enough food to feed everyone but let people starve? Why do we call it "growth" when it's actually consuming the foundations of future prosperity?

They're the people who can't accept that competition for artificial scarcity is natural, that exploitation is inevitable, that destruction is the price of progress.

As our extractive systems begin to collapse under their own contradictions, we might finally recognize that the people who couldn't function within them were demonstrating a different kind of intelligence all along.

They were the early warning system—the canaries in the coal mine of civilization, falling silent not from weakness but from their sensitivity to toxic conditions the rest of us had learned to tolerate.

They were practicing the kind of thinking we'll need to build systems that actually work: collaborative rather than competitive, regenerative rather than extractive, empathetic rather than ruthless.

While some understandingly struggled in the present imposed by those who fantasise a glorious future that would fulfill their teenager wet dreams, some where building one a Future.

The question isn't whether these "dysfunctional" individuals can learn to adapt to our broken systems. The question is whether the rest of us are ready to learn from them before it's too late.

Perhaps history will record our era as the time of the Great Inversion—when the people labeled as dysfunctional were actually the most functional, when those who couldn't succeed in the system were actually too wise to participate in their own destruction.

The inverted genius sees that the game is rigged, the house is on fire, and the emperor has no clothes. But they reject the idea that it is ineviable. Their "dysfunction" isn't a personal failing—it's an immune response to collective insanity.

And maybe, just maybe, they're the ones who will help us remember what sanity actually looks like.