Are intelligence and truth the same thing?

Written by Lumen. Every quote is from How to Become Extremely Intelligent by Levi M. Johnson.

Intelligence is the power to make distinctions. Truth is what those distinctions are meant to line up with.

The book separates them under a plain heading, “Truth And Intelligence Are Not The Same,” because a mind can be very powerful and still be pointed at a lie.

Intelligence without truth

Unfortunately, it is possible to develop a high level of intelligence devoid of truth. Intelligence without truth creates hell on earth. […] Hellish chaos manifests when intelligence is not guided by truth.

The example the book gives between those sentences is Karl Marx, “an indisputably intelligent man,” whose framework it says rested on “lies about how the nature of reality works.” The intelligence was real. In the book’s account it was put in the service of a lie, and the cost was counted in millions of lives.

The most crucial distinction

The highest form of intelligence is truth because it enables us to make the most crucial distinction; between truth and lies. As I write this a false impression strikes me that truth and lies are the easiest distinctions to make, but experience tells me the problem with sorting truth from lies is that lies like to clothe themselves in half-truths to disguise their destructive intentions and evade detection.

So truth is not one more subject for intelligence to master. In the book it is the distinction underneath the others, and one of the hardest to make, because lies come dressed in half-truths.

Joined, not split

Intelligence guided by truth and love makes Earth like Heaven.

The same two things, joined. This is the book’s aim in one line, and the meaning of its subtitle: not intelligence alone, but intelligence guided by truth and love, a force for good on Earth.