hate is an indicator of unintelligence

8 min read

Just now

Listen

Prejudice is a Poverty of Mind: How Bigotry Became the Ultimate Tell

I used to think hatred was purely a moral problem—a failure of empathy, a corruption of values, something separate from intelligence. Then I started paying attention to how prejudice actually functions in the mind, and I realized I'd been looking at it backwards. Bigotry isn't just morally bankrupt; it's intellectually lazy. It's what happens when thinking stops.

This realization came slowly, uncomfortably, during a period when I was examining my own assumptions about everything from art to politics to the people I'd casually dismissed. I noticed a pattern: wherever I caught myself relying on shortcuts—"people like that always," "that kind of person never"—I found mental atrophy underneath. Not evil exactly, but something almost worse: the absence of curiosity. A preference for the ease of categorization over the difficulty of actually seeing.

Intelligence, in any meaningful sense, is the capacity to observe the world as it is and draw conclusions from evidence rather than convenience. It requires holding complexity, tolerating uncertainty, updating beliefs when new information arrives. Prejudice does the opposite. It replaces observation with a template. It says: I already know what you are because of what you appear to be. No further investigation required.

And that—that refusal to investigate—is where intelligence dies.

Think about how children learn. They encounter something new—a spider, a word, another child who looks different—and they ask questions. They test. They revise. "I thought all dogs were friendly, but that one bit me." "I thought all girls liked pink, but Sarah hates it." This is intelligence forming: the ability to let reality shape understanding rather than forcing reality into pre-existing shapes.

Prejudice is what happens when we stop doing this. When we decide that our inherited categories—about race, sexuality, gender, class, whatever—are more reliable than the evidence in front of us. It's a kind of mental retirement, a decision to stop processing new information because processing is hard and stereotypes are easy.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story," she describes how reducing people to stereotypes robs them of dignity—but it also robs the storyteller of accuracy. When you insist on seeing only what you expect to see, you literally cannot perceive what's actually there. Your vision narrows. Your thinking calcifies. You become, in the most literal sense, less intelligent about the world.

There’s a moment in To Kill a Mockingbird that’s always haunted me: Scout, confused by the hypocrisy she’s witnessing, asks her father how people can be so certain about things they don’t actually know. Atticus doesn’t tell her that racism is simply mean or wrong. He suggests it’s a kind of blindness, a failure to see other people as fully human and therefore fully complex.

That failure isn't separate from intelligence; it's a symptom of its absence. Because intelligence isn't just knowing facts or solving equations. It's the capacity to recognize that other people contain the same interior complexity you do. That they can't be reduced to a handful of characteristics any more than you can.

When you encounter someone and immediately slot them into a category—"gay people are like this," "Black people always," "trans people want"—you’re not thinking. You’re avoiding thinking. You’re using a mental template because actual observation and analysis require effort you’re unwilling to expend.

This is what I mean by unintelligence: a refusal to use the cognitive tools available to you. A preference for the comforting lie of certainty over the uncomfortable truth of complexity.

I've been thinking about this in relation to emotional intelligence too—that term we throw around without always examining what it means. Emotional intelligence is, at its core, the ability to read emotional reality accurately. To perceive what someone is actually feeling rather than what you assume they're feeling based on who they are.

Homophobia, transphobia, racism—these require a stunning lack of emotional intelligence. They demand that you ignore everything someone tells you about their own experience in favor of what your stereotype dictates they must be experiencing. "Trans people are confused" requires that you completely disregard when trans people tell you they're not confused. "Gay relationships aren't real love" requires ignoring every gay person who describes loving their partner.

This isn't just cruel; it's cognitively incoherent. It's choosing your preconception over observable reality. It's the same mental process a flat-earther uses: when evidence contradicts belief, dismiss the evidence.

Get Celia Solstice’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

And here’s what makes this particularly insidious: this kind of thinking spreads. Once you’ve trained yourself to ignore reality in one domain, it becomes easier to do everywhere. Climate denial, conspiracy theories, medical misinformation—they all rely on the same muscle: the ability to prefer your narrative to the evidence.

Bigotry, in this sense, isn't just a standalone moral failure. It's practice in being wrong. It's training yourself in the art of not-thinking.

I keep returning to a line from James Baldwin: "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." But what struck me, rereading it recently, is that Baldwin links ignorance with power, not with evil. Because ignorance—the refusal to know, the insistence on not-seeing—is a kind of power. It protects you from having to change your mind, having to complicate your worldview, having to do the difficult work of actually understanding.

Prejudice offers the intoxicating feeling of knowing without the burden of learning. You get to feel certain, superior even, without ever having to think critically. That's its appeal. And that's precisely what makes it unintelligent.

True intelligence demands exactly what prejudice refuses: the willingness to be wrong, to update, to see more clearly. It requires what Carol Dweck calls a "growth mindset"—the understanding that your current understanding is always provisional, always open to revision based on new evidence.

When you meet someone who challenges your stereotype and your response is to dismiss them as an exception, you're not protecting your worldview; you're protecting your right to not think. You're choosing comfort over accuracy. And intelligence, real intelligence, chooses accuracy every time.

This doesn't mean intelligence solves everything. Intelligent people can still be cruel, still make harmful choices, still participate in unjust systems. But prejudice specifically—the reduction of complex humans to crude categories—is a cognitive failure before it's anything else. It's the mind at its laziest, taking the path of least resistance.

I think about this when I hear people defend bigoted views as "just their opinion" or "how they were raised." As if beliefs are somehow separate from thinking, as if we're not responsible for whether our conclusions actually map onto reality. But that's exactly what intelligence is: the responsibility to test your conclusions against the world, to revise when you're wrong, to develop independent judgment rather than inheriting assumptions.

If you cannot look at a Black person without your mind immediately flooding with stereotypes you've never examined, that's not just prejudice—it's a failure to think independently. If you cannot encounter a trans person without reducing them to talking points you've absorbed from others, you're not forming conclusions; you're repeating them. And repetition without analysis is the opposite of intelligence.

There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean, the therapist, tells Will that real knowledge comes from experience, not books. But I think there’s something even deeper: real intelligence comes from the willingness to let experience change you. To meet someone who contradicts your assumptions and think, "Huh, maybe I was wrong," rather than "They’re the exception" or "They’re lying."

That willingness—that intellectual humility, that openness to being corrected by reality—is what prejudice kills. It replaces the question "What can I learn from this person?" with the statement "I already know what people like them are like."

And in doing so, it doesn't just harm the people being stereotyped. It diminishes the thinker. It keeps them trapped in inherited categories, unable to see the world as it actually is, forever encountering only what they expect to encounter. It's a kind of prison, really. A self-imposed narrowing of perception and possibility.

I started this essay believing hatred was primarily a moral problem, and I still think morality matters deeply. But I've come to understand that prejudice is also—maybe fundamentally—an intellectual failure. It's what happens when we stop doing the work of thinking, when we trade observation for assumption, when we choose the ease of certainty over the difficulty of truth.

And perhaps that’s why confronting prejudice feels so hard, so personal. Because it’s not just asking us to be better people. It’s asking us to think more carefully. To actually use our minds rather than letting them run on autopilot, recycling whatever categories we inherited without examination.

Intelligence is, ultimately, the capacity to see clearly. And hatred, in all its forms, is a refusal to look. A decision to remain comfortable in ignorance rather than brave enough to know. That's not just wrong—it's a poverty of mind I can no longer ignore. Not in others, and especially not in myself.

Because if I want to think clearly about anything—art, politics, love, the spider crossing my desk right now—I have to be willing to see what's actually there rather than what I expect to be there. And that willingness, that intellectual courage, is precisely what every form of prejudice asks me to abandon.

I'm not willing to abandon it anymore. The cost is too high—not just morally, but intellectually. And I've spent too long trying to think clearly to voluntarily make myself stupid now.