Useless and actively-harmful intelligence (and creativity, and technologies)

Intelligence is a means to an end - but when the aim to which intelligence is harnessed is a useless, or actively harmful, one... well intelligence simply accelerates the damage.

And that is precisely the situation that has increasingly prevailed in The West for the past 200 years.  In such a situation, intelligence becomes a social evil, and extreme intelligence even more so.

Add to intelligence creativity and inner motivation, and you have (pretty much) genius. A genius may be completely ignored - but if attended-to the effect of a genius is sometimes multiplied to an equivalent of hundreds, thousands or even millions of non-genius people.

So, if a genius is evil-motivated, or even simply self-ish and short-termist in his aims (or is appropriated by such people); then he may inflict truly colossal damage on societies. There are also an abundance of examples of this phenomenon over the past couple of hundred years, but particularly in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Picasso, Schoenberg...

(After which geniuses began to get rarer - and now they have largely disappeared from public discourse; although some exist, mostly disregarded.)

My point is that the problems of the Modern West cannot be solved by intelligence, nor by geniuses; because of the pervasiveness of evil motivation - especially among the middle, intellectual and ruling classes that contain most such people.

Only when or if there was a Christian spiritual awakening that reorientated people from aiming-at evil towards aspiring to Good; would brains and creativity become valuable.

And what applies to human psychological capacity, applies equally to technological capacity: we cannot be saved but only have our doom accelerated by progress in science, computers, medicine, or any other mechanism or technology.

And this also applies to politics, to administration, bureaucracy, management and mass media.

When the End is evil, better means only make matters worse.

It's Common Sense, really - but easily forgotten.