I’ve been re-reading the Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weiss’ Dragonlance books; meanwhile Varg Vikernes was discussing Dungeons & Dragons on Twitter, bringing back many memories to this old dog. D & D character generation was my favourite, as it didn’t involve other people (I usually couldn’t find people to play with, so had to be both game master & player, which isn’t much fun and probably drove me insane). Each character had six attributes; for each, you had to roll a 6-sided die three times and total the scores – so, somewhere between 3 and 18.

The 6 character attributes were:

Constitution (health, toughness)

Strength

Dexterity

Intelligence

Wisdom

Charisma

As with Vox Day’s sociosexual hierarchy, categories can be useful, as long as one bears their limitations in mind. As a child/teenager I wasn’t sure how to distinguish intelligence, wisdom, and charisma, since some people are charismatic precisely because of their intelligence or wisdom. I also wondered where intelligence becomes wisdom – is it possible to be wise but stupid, or intelligent and foolish/unwise? As a teenager, I didn’t get it.

I would now say wisdom and intelligence are two quite distinct categories. Indeed, since the intelligent (let’s say, in D & D terms, those with an Intelligence score of 13+) are more likely to attend Marxoid higher “education” and be pumped full of anti-white, anti-Western lies, you could argue that the less intelligent may well have a higher Wisdom score. It would be interesting to, D & D-style, quantify “Marxist Idiocy” from 3 to 18 and see how it correlates with Intelligence; my guess is, there would be some at the 16-18 Intelligence level who would exhibit little or no Marxist Idiocy, being intelligent enough to see through it; however, they would also require a higher Wisdom score, since wisdom guides the intellect: in a sense, wisdom is the pilot and navigator of intellect.

I was puzzling over a definition of Wisdom, and decided for myself: Wisdom is the realisation of intelligence in a man’s daily acts & decision. Thus, the highly intelligent people who make routinely disastrous decisions and end up ruining themselves & others lack wisdom; and the less-intelligent or dim who apply what intelligence they have can be wise. For the latter, one does not require a high IQ to know that a woman who has a different boyfriend every week, and has no friends for longer than 6 months, is trouble. The highly intelligent are more likely to fail to apply their intellect to the most important matters. For example, Saul Bellow and his gorillion fucked-up marriages. Or perhaps they abuse intellect, to explain away the conclusions of Wisdom and pursue their own folly.

The highly intelligent often seem to limit their actual intellectual activity to highly abstract affairs – mathematics, logic, chess, philosophy, science. In the Dragonlance system, Raistlin’s Intelligence is 17, his Wisdom 14: I find this quite plausible, as he is wise enough to know what will make him happy (power, especially magical) and to largely eschew all else.

There seems no easy schooling for wisdom. It’s mostly instinct honed by painful experience.