BEING GROUCHY

"Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member".

(Attributed to Groucho Marx.)

I was asked by someone to join MENSA years ago as my IQ ‘score’, established via several different testing methods when applying for jobs and in internal assessments in jobs I had, qualified me. IQ tests try to put a number to a person’s intelligence and identify whether you are exceptional, ordinary or, frankly, dumb. A lot of people rated exceptional like to join organisations like MENSA in order to fraternise with others with high IQ’s. Interestingly enough mensa in Spanish means stupid so, like Mitsubishi who unsuccessfully tried to introduce their Pajero into South America (pajero in Spanish means wanker), they should have researched the name a bit before deciding on it.

Psychologists who don’t teach psychology, or, who don’t go on to study medicine and become psychiatrists, tend to get jobs in personnel departments of commerce and government. They tend to use IQ tests to justify their existence and to keep tabs on employees. Sometimes, as a sideline, or when they are made redundant, they sell the tests on-line and in books to make a bit of money. Fear and reward are the triggers that they use to induce people into spending money on them.

I have a problem with accepting all of this. Obviously the ‘store bought’ charlatans peddling their trash need to be avoided, but companies who sort staff into categories, or refuse to employ people who don’t come up to their arbitrary IQ mark are also suspect. It is kind of like school where all the students at my secondary school had to sit a pre-secondary school test which dictated the class they were in and even, within those classes, the seating order was in rows numbered by the ranking of the individuals performance. (No wonder I never saw Richard (of RBB) for the 5 years that I was at the same secondary school in the same years).

I can see that tests given to people who share the same culture and who have had similar education might be a means of seeing who has retained some of the knowledge and how they might have learned to evaluate things and to solve problems, but what about people from different countries, cultures and languages? I’m pretty sure that people from ‘third world’ countries that haven’t had the benefit of education would score very low on most, if not all, of the various intelligence tests. Are they all stupid? I think not. MENSA and equivalent organisations are elitist and a little bit scary. They can lead to some pretty bad things.