A human being might be excused for naming the ultimate problem of human beings "stupidity." After all, self-reflexive culture tends to wallow in that particular uninformative platitude. Parroting remarks blaming any or all problems from the superficial to the severe on plagues of stupidity or worse the imagined genus of stupid people would seem one of the least controversial conformities, a socially-acceptable habit of ingratiating self-effacement, genuine self-loathing, or outwardly-directed bitterness.

But voicing such complaints really does seem more reflex than reflection. It seems to me unlikely that lack of intelligence among human beings could be the considerable problem others claim — to remedy which malady, most can only produce the hokum of "more money for [state] education."

"There is nothing so stupid as the educated man
if you get him off the thing he was educated in."
— Will Rogers

For the serious difficulty about the notion of stupidity, besides collective generalization, rests with the absurdities of an appreciable, singular objective intelligence. (And of course, its measure.) In fact it seems that virtually everyone commands some forms of mental capability in substantial amounts, and that virtually all of those employ many of these talents somehow and frequently with great energy — regardless of the potential they may let fallow, and regardless of how myopically they work away at their favored proficiencies in life.

Personality theories have explained some of the different ways this intelligence manifests itself, illuminating different strengths and weaknesses of aptitude in any one person. These often take the form of a personality typology making distinctions between dispositions (inevitably linked to various kinds of mental capacities in different patterns) such as the Jungian distinction between the practical, hands-on Sensates, and the big-picture, theoretical Intuitives. Jung also brought us the well-known distinction of Introvert and Extrovert. (Myers-Briggs typology is mostly Jungian, e.g. Keirsey.) Enneagram studies found nine types, each with its variants and transformational dynamics among them. In ancient days some Greeks spoke of arête, an excellence at something, in a sophisticated ideation later conflated, cudgeled flat and forgotten with the bluntly martial Roman virtus — and the later Italian virtú which so concerned Machiavelli, until finally becoming the moralist virtue. The divination of four humors typed people in medieval times. In recent years, the Gardner evaluation of multiple intelligences has identified (at least) seven specific intelligences linked to ways of learning, including spatial, body-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical and linguistic. Really, we could probably invent an endless string of models and methods for the dissection of human behavior into different typologies, showing endlessly distinguishable kinds and qualities of aptitude, with corresponding inclinations of character. Many of these would even prove useful. But the innumerable complexity at hand, while interesting, seems rather beside our present concern. The difficulty relates to how people employ these many intelligences they may have in varying degrees (if not always intellects, exactly).

This underdeveloped faculty is not what I would call intelligence but meta-intelligence, those capacities beyond the capacity to work at a particular kind of thinking, or in other words the neural system of a person ruling over and helping to direct each specific capacity a person has. Meta-intelligence relates to awareness, adaptability, and the relative comparisons of different mental frameworks, models, and sets of behavior.

This 'arch-faculty' of our highest-level self remains awake concerning personal subjectivism or "perspectivism," the universal situation of unique subjective perceptions defining our person, and can manipulate our perceptions almost as though past them. Robert Anton Wilson discusses something like this as a "meta-programming circuit" among other 'circuits' in the 'computer' of the mind, in his book Prometheus Rising. "The meta-programming circuit... simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself." (p. 224) As he points out, it has many names and transcends the descriptive power of language (and any other model we can appreciate). While it might seem to Wilson perpetual and constant in comparison to malleable perspectives, like an anchored reference without any perspective's bias — and thus Wilson suggests it has been named soul or void in some ancient traditions — such fixed ideas might become misleading. Meta-intelligence should not be mistaken for some uncharacteristic or invariable faculty, something the same across humanity or the same across a human lifetime. Most likely there would be as many forms of meta-intelligence as intelligence (practically innumerable), and a combination for every character, and development possible to change every combination. Most likely meta-intelligence is best understood as fully integrated with forms of intelligence in a person, reacting to them and developing with them in a whole person as part of character — in fact any separation from intelligence seems useful but artificial (one reason why I distinguish only with 'meta'). I respectfully disagree with Wilson on the wisdom of depicting constancy here simply because of our present immaturity at discerning its hues and mutations, and I cannot imagine the faculty of fluidity not fluid itself.

In any case such an ability can do an enormous amount for people. Meta-intelligence enables a person to understand when their brain is wasting its time, or working against their interests. Meta-intelligence keeps a person from digging themselves into a hole with their abilities. Meta-intelligence provides perspective. It offers strategic understanding from a high vantage above more usual strategy (itself a particular set of intelligence aptitudes). In a military analogy, this is like finding a high hill to look down on the battlefield (intelligent strategy) only to find not only a higher hill above that, but an entirely new lay of the land apparent from it with new objectives (meta-intelligent strategy).

Also, while by no means equivalent to freedom of will, meta-intelligence is an instrumental contributor to the perceptible freedom of will evidenced in self-expression, a catalyst recognizable as the exploration among semantic and other conceptual "maps."

Meta-intelligence prevents people from becoming married to a metaphor — the way they see the world. The excesses of metaphor range widely, from the names for things in language becoming more noticed than the referents themselves, to the symbology of religion, for example, becoming more important than its root message. People argue incessantly over words, especially over emotionally connotative words like God, crime, sin, sex, pleasure, profit, capitalism, freedom, justice, equality, morality, rights, socialism, libertarianism, patriotism, government, America, right, wrong, good, bad, left, right, etc. ad infinitum, and mostly in misunderstanding; by allowing them to 'step outside' of a particular mindset that gets in the way, meta-intelligence can tell people what other people really mean by their words, and what they really hold in common beyond and underneath semantics and what they do not hold in common. Such a capacity is essential for looking beyond the limited view, the parochial view, the prejudiced view, the small-minded view, the dogmatic view, and the self-evident (accepted) view which every view can become.

Potentially, meta-intelligence also would help people avoid applying their brilliances to destructive, dangerous, counterproductive ends. For indeed if one examines history one quickly realizes that like any stunning advances, the worst problems, greatest dangers, and most far-reaching syndromes holding life back came not often from stupidity, but from clever, probably brilliant individuals at what they affected, quite possibly geniuses at that thing. Stupidity at something generally trundles along keeping things however they were; advancements in appreciable retrogression require intelligence, just like advancements in appreciable progress. If for example human beings accomplish the ends of making life not worth living (although most likely, not with that intent), or the ends of terminating human life altogether, then it won't be because they weren't 'clever' or 'smart' in each of their own ways. It will be because they were not meta-intelligent. For if intelligence means that we humans, we naked primates are smart, meta-intelligence would make us wise.