What Was the Meaning of the High-IQ Society Movement?

The Gift of Fire

Starting from the 1990s, with the help of the internet, some of the brightest minds in the world managed to find each other through high-IQ societies such as the Mega Society, the Triple Nine Society, and the Prometheus Society. Never before had so many highly intelligent peers enjoyed the opportunity to crack jokes no one else would understand. These HIQ individuals who normally live such isolated lives now had the opportunity to socialize, to meet, to read each other’s articles, and study one’s websites.

Observing the latter society’s publication, The Gift of Fire, which I subscribed to, I conclude the heyday of the high-IQ gatherings is practically over. On top of that, the fracturing of a once universal internet under the pressure of geopolitical conflicts, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, means the highly intelligent around the world may (soon) never again have this opportunity to get in touch with one another so easily.

Indeed, high IQ individuals may also find each other outside of the IQ societies using any means of modern technology. The point is that a Heraclitus of Ephesus wouldn’t have heard of Confucius but that a modern-day Heraclitus most certainly will have heard of a modern-day Kǒng Qiū.

But what is the significance of this event which Heidegger might have called Das Ereignis (the self-generating event of history itself)? In a social insect colony, individual members don’t have a brain, and social insects are not aware of the thought processes of their colony’s hive-mind. Likewise, the high-IQ individuals who, historically briefly, ‘bounced’ off each others’ minds during this age of connectedness, might not have been aware of the Super-Mind they briefly represented.

In Gift of Fire #171, Garth Zietseman concluded his article titled The Measure of Man wondering, “Who knows what these people [with IQs over 188] think about or what they think of the rest of humanity?” Being a not-so genius philosopher, I might provide the answer by posing more questions: What is the point of thinking once you’ve already thought of everything? Zietseman could have posed a different question, namely: What lies beyond thought?

I mentioned ants for a reason. Once in a while, during mating season, a minority of winged ants (who also possess some more intelligence) meet each other in wild orgies. The males die off after the act but females, if successful, go on to found new colonies, new Super-Minds. A human Super-Mind with an incomprehensibly high IQ of 20,000 points or more presents an intelligence beyond anything we can imagine. Might such a mind be able to think up an entire universe from start to finish?

Our physical reality (male) could die off one day but a mental reality (female) could live on to start a new universe such as ours. Perhaps, then, physicists have got it all wrong. Perhaps our universe didn’t come into being in the form of a ‘Big Bang’ with constants and immutable laws of physics. Perhaps universes were always born of our imagination.