I've been fascinated for the past few weeks about something I call intellectual superiority. I'm not sure what the actual name for this might be, but I feel what I call it fits. To me, what intellectual superiority describes is an event that happens and someone will give a justification as to how a) the people that suffered in the incident were not intelligent and/or b) how they would never have been taken or suffered from the incident.

People do this a lot and most of the time when we do it, and we have to be honest about it, there actually is an external factor with the person to make them fall victim to the event. I can think of some of the scams that happen in the early part of the e-mail era, where they were told they could win a lot of money if they did some little thing or a prince needed their help and if they gave $500 they could share in $50,000. Those are scams and people can have economical, plain greed or other reasons for thinking they could beat the odds. I would place this in the same category as people who do payday loans. Most people know they are a rip off, know they are nothing but trouble but economics can cause people to figure they can beat the system. Not many people do but the lure of getting money to help themselves out of financial difficulty makes them feel they are smart enough to get the money and come out ahead.

When we hear stories about people running afoul of those types of scams, quite a number of us have little sympathy for the person. If an old person is taken in by the scam, I have to think in my heart of hearts many of us will have compassion for them. We will figure the technology or plain old age prevented the person from being on their guard. When we see younger people falling for it, however, we tend to be less sympathetic. Even if the reason the person has for trying the scam is a belief they can beat the system because of financial need, a good number of us would look down on the person feeling it is what they deserved.

What made me think about intellectual superiority today had to do with a new movie called Compliance. It is based on the fast food incidents of a few years ago when a caller pretended to be a police officer, claimed to the manager that an employee had stolen some money, then the caller got the manager to confront the employee and do a strip search and other degrading things. At a screening, the movie was so disturbing to some that at least eight to ten people walked out of the film. In the question and answer session, some audience members felt no one would do such things unless they weren't intelligent.

See, people don't like to think they can be manipulated even though it happens to us every day. The audience members that didn't believe the events on screen forgot the director didn't dream this stuff up, it really happened. Some of the audience responding that the people weren't intelligent or implying that fast food workers are less intelligent, says a lot to me about how some of us can pretend we would never fall victim to a scam.

Like I said we fall for it all the time. Check your Facebook page. First of all, you have a Facebook page. Do you have it because you need it or because it's the trendy thing to have? Look at the posts you have. Do any of them give you information about the person who sent them to you? Remember, when Facebook started, when Twitter started, and you can even go back to MySpace, AOL or CompuServe, those were set up for people to communicate with one another. It was a way to have a social forum, a nice park with a soap box where people could give their opinions. What they turned into were advertising tools. They sell us stuff. They try to persuade us to have a certain point of view. I probably shouldn't use the word 'they' because we have become the advertisers best delivery tool. We are just as guilty of selling stuff to our friends and families, but we would also be the first ones to probably claim we aren't stupid enough to do something like that.

On any given day, putting aside the regular advertisements done my the companies, I have friends who who will invite me into their exciting game, will try to get me to click on a link to an event, a program or a social cause. Call it what you want but the truth is they are shilling for someone and they either don't know they are shilling, don't care they are shilling, or they truly believe in the cause. I always wonder when people give me a link to something, why don't they explain it in their words to me. Too many times I've had people tell me to sign a petition but they don't tell me why. I'm suppose to click on the link to learn more. It's like the issue is so important but they can't tell me why it's important.

Some are the same friends who said they would never do anything like that years ago. My hands aren't clean in this. I use social media to try and get people to go to my website. I do what they do. I try to rise above it a little. I have a website so when there is something I'm passionate about I write about it. It is in my words but I'm still doing the same thing, shilling.

The social media example is slight compared to larger issues where people take the intellectual superior high ground. After the Aurora shooting, how many people claimed, either in blog responses or in interviews, that if more people had guns the the injuries would have been less? They are just like the people who talked about the fast food incidents. From a calm, distance reference they believe they wouldn't have fallen victim like the others did. There is the feeling in some that if the roles were reverse their intellect could have saved many. There's no evidence that would have been the case because while they will show up on the high profile incident, there are hundreds of small incidents that don't get attention, that don't get press coverage and some people get out OK and some people suffer. When push comes to shove we really don't know what we would do, or if we would be manipulated in a way that would make us a victim.