Smart Ass, as in Donkey

I don’t know its heart . . . another paradox for humankind—and all life on the Earth. 

The smart ones don’t want to learn what they don’t already know. Its like they have climbed to the top of one shelf and don’t know there are more—they don’t want to struggle to climb another. They conclude they are smarter than others, knowing all about everything.  

If you focus on how to make money for yourself you are smarter than those who don’t. Money makes them all knowing. Then, if something needed doesn’t bring you money, it isn’t worth doing. They believe themselves to be smarter than everyone else, especially those who work for money. Only investment profits own and control money. The only ones smarter than themselves are those who make more money than they do. They call this respect. All those beneath their ‘smart’ are servants of their wealth.

Then there are preachers and such who know themselves to be smarter than knowledge. They think they know how to make others better, not smarter. Knowing is not believing, and only believing is important. They know what’s right and wrong—others don’t believe and therefore don’t know what they know”. All others are sinners or worse. They know sinners to be better than non believers. Non believers have no human standing.   

Then there are the strong and the beautiful, the athletes, the winners who take over the front row of reality in physical space in competitor’s glory. The physical is the top of the animal breeding, thus taking over smart with push-and-shove in beating the will and dominating the skill of another to win the tournament of who is better. The body’s success without the mind. Muscle over knowledge. Physical doing over understanding is at the heart of the brawl. The will to endure physical pain, even death before submission, grunts in the stubborn body.  Smart can’t beat strength and win. Strength can bypass smart.

Something yet remains in us from those times where hairy bodies settled the quest of power in physical beating’s competition like in the battle of meat-and-eat-first, while the smart hung back in the distance—out of reach, waiting for opportunity at the edge of the kill, watching, waiting, applauding the testosterone juices of Alpha’s success—the raw eating first in his possession. The others, younger and weaker with less protein muscle, waited with the smart ones for their place at the table of primal wealth’s favor.