It’s Not Just About Trump: Unteachability Is a Mental Illness

Let’s look at what IQ means. It is not an innate, unchangeable trait. It is a measurement. If a kid at age 10 knows what a typical 15-year-old knows, then he has an IQ of 150; that is, he learns 50% faster than the average kid.  IQ is a measurement of speed of learning, and that speed can change. Further, the measurement is keyed to the educational system. It uses a standardized curriculum as the milestones. Hence, IQ cannot be measured beyond, typically, age 18, because there is no standardized college curriculum. The only test that works for adults is Terman’s Advanced Concept Mastery Test, which he calibrated against his original test group.

One might assume that one’s IQ remains unchanged during one’s life. No, it changes. It won’t go up, but it can easily go down. A rule of thumb definition is that a mental illness is whatever lowers your IQ, that is, the speed at which you can learn anything new. If you cannot learn anything new about what is important, then your IQ is effectively zero.

I had noticed long ago that some people seem to stop learning anything new, except for specific , practical facts, some right after high school, some right after the BA, some later in life. What they have in common is that they believe they know an absolute, final truth, beyond which there is nothing else to learn. As Scott Peck described this pattern, such people have a map of reality, which they sometimes think was hand-drawn by God, and which they refuse to revise when faced with new facts. Rather, when told a new fact that does not fit into their map, they will “shoot the messenger,” claiming that the messenger is, for example, a tool of the Enemy, and hoping that the message will then go away. It never does, and the map becomes steadily less realistic. Another good rule of thumb is that a mental illness makes one less able to deal with reality.

Fairly recently, my friend Alex said at an AA meeting, “You have to be teachable to get sober.” It was an Aha! moment for me; those earlier observations fell into place. Getting and keeping sober requires you to realize that everything you thought you knew about yourself was wrong, so wrong that it was killing you. Getting sober requires rethinking all of it and creating a new “map of reality.” That is, unteachability manifests as addictive behavior. It also manifests as a belief that everyone who is not a member of the community that shares your beliefs is an enemy.

Anyone who is a True Believer in any system of belief has become unteachable and will exhibit such behavior. Being teachable requires one to be openminded. It does not matter how “liberal” or “conservative” beliefs are; it is being closedminded that generates the pathology.  People may believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, or that unregulated free-market capitalism could work, or that Jews or lizards from out space or the Illuminati are secretly ruling the world, or that Repubicans can govern the US for the benefit of the people—it does not make any difference. The point is that they have been taught to not question authority, to not value objective truth, to not accept any fact that contradicts what they already believe. This is why Trump’s followers are impervious to any negative facts about him.

Trump is not a fool. He is intelligent, cynical, and evil, in the precise sense that he enjoys harming people. He is purposely using people’s unrevised maps, unquestioned belief systems,  unexamined assumptions, against them, in order to exploit them. It is only people who share their beliefs, but who are openminded enough to pay attention to reality, who have any chance of persuading Trump’a aupporters how dangerous Trump is.

At this moment, it looks as if Trump will lose the election, badly. But then the illness will remain. The first step toward curing an illness has to be recognizing and naming it. Then we can begin to see what factors generate it, and then how to change those factors. Doing so will obviously not be quick or easy.