A superiority of animals over humans

The usual assumption is that humans are superior to animals on quite many things, and when some animals can be superior in some specific skill, that is only specific animals while so many others remain behind humans on that skill. A specific ability in which humans seem much superior to most animals (except maybe dolphins), of course, is language.

But, without making any careful study on animals (sorry), here is one skill on which I guess that most animals are superior to most humans ; and the irony is that this curse of humans precisely comes from the very ability in which humans are supposed superior, namely language:

The ability to recognize intelligences higher than one's own

Indeed, animals are usually quite good at this skill, namely to understand how much more intelligent than themselves humans are, precisely because they have no language to rely on to figure this out. So, without the help of language, they can simply observe humans and see the power of humans to do intelligent things.

As for humans, so many of them turn out to be often quite unable to discern cases of higher intelligence of other humans, precisely because of the terrible mistake of expecting the use of language to provide the means of measuring this.

Why it actually fails : when someone listens or reads someone else's discourse and tries to assess the intelligence there, what he actually measures is not intelligence but only sameness of thought. Because it is the natural illusion for anyone to see one's view and discourse as the most clever stuff which can be said on a given topic. Any really higher intelligence having naturally other topics of interests, or other ways of explaining stuff, will express them in ways only such higher intelligence can be interested in and follow without dying of boredom; by necessity it will appear in less intelligent ears as confused, unjustified, etc.... and at least terrible in pedagogical terms.

A lot of curse of human societies comes from this fundamental mistake:


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