Idiots, Morons and Imbeciles

‘An idiot, a moron and an imbecile walk into a bar…’

Those words have been on my lips all day. It sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it?

If I may finish, however, ‘An idiot, a moron and an imbecile walk into a bar – who’s the most intelligent?’

Surely all three are as intellectually barren as each other? Not true. On the ‘Binet Scale of Human Intelligence’ which looks at a person’s IQ score, a moron is vastly more intelligent than an idiot. IQ scores between 50 and 69 indicate a moron, whilst scores of 20-49 expose an imbecile and a score below 20 forms a fully fledged idiot.

It may cause some amusement to learn that being labelled a moron is a far superior honour to being labelled an idiot. However, revealing that these terms have been updated since the test’s inception to represent more modern attitudes reveals a lot about how our society has changed. ‘Morons’ have become ‘moderate’, ‘imbeciles’ have become ‘severe’ and the poor old idiots have become ‘profound’. The first thing you’ll notice is that the modern terms are much less subjective – they don’t describe the person directly; but rather describe the state of their mind. They are not a label. ‘Idiot’, on the other hand, is a label, and not a nice one either.

Does this seemingly insignificant change in descriptions of human intelligence represent how our society has become much less subjective and much more conservative? In such an interconnected world, everything we want to say requires an internalised review process before we actually say it. We have to ask ourselves whether what we say is likely to be controversial, subjective or offensive. To someone. Somewhere. Naturally, it will be: the world seems to be full of people actively looking for something to take offence to. And it’s not always their own fault – young people have become too sensitised to people’s opinions and words, immediately becoming triggered when they find out other people have different attitudes to their own. Shocker.

Just look at this video from August 2016 of Met Police Officer Marcus Tyson telling Kurdish protesters they can’t tell him what to do in his own country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyXX6SRxnnA

Indeed, they can’t tell him what to do – regardless of whether he is being told this by Brits, Kenyans, Turks or Russians, Britain is ‘his’ country (it’s where he was born and where he lives) so he has every right to defend his civil liberties, as does everyone else in Britain, regardless of background.

The irony of the situation though is that the protesters attacked PC Tyson for asserting his sovereign rights in Britain whilst they are fighting to gain sovereign rights for Kurds – how hypocritical can you get? As a result of people on the internet thinking they are taking the moral high ground and acting in a politically correct manner by immediately condemning PC Tyson as a racist, the officer was suspended by the Metropolitan Police. He was the only victim here. A decent, hardworking officer of the law.

Despairingly, I think the world has already become too sensitive – we are no longer free to express our real opinions or say anything that’s somehow not politically correct.

Because some people think that just because something is politically correct, it is actually ‘correct’…