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Rulers: Intelligent?

or Cunning, Opportunists?

March 23, 2025

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One fine morning, in the forest of news channels, I came across a question. A journalist asked his guest: "How can a man as intelligent as Emmanuel Macron fail in almost every field?" The journalist's reported remarks, taken from people who knew the president privately, testify to his immense intelligence.

Beyond political considerations, this question reveals a problem: is there an incompatibility between being very intelligent and making many repetitive mistakes?

I want to ask another question: Is Emmanuel Macron very intelligent or very cunning?

To help answer this question, I propose defining cunning as, among other things, a sense of opportunity, even opportunism. A survival instinct observable in humans and animals such as monkeys, wolves, and felines.

Let's watch a feline cautiously approach its prey, then freeze. It's waiting. What's it waiting for? The slightest opportunity .

Its strength lies in its ability to detect the right moment. It follows a procedure that has been repeated almost blindly for thousands of years. This procedure is not always successful, and the number of its failures often exceeds its successes.

Human intelligence, on the other hand, is about adapting, sometimes in creative, unexpected ways, without waiting for millennia of failure to abandon losing procedures.

Cunning can look like Intelligence, creating confusion, a "false friend."

So what are our leaders? Very smart? Or very cunning and very opportunistic?

Please fight the temptation to answer "both" or, even more, to answer "both AT THE SAME TIME" (an answer that is supposed to be complex thinking [1] but turns out to be simplistic thinking).

MEYER

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References

[1] see the “ Complexity ” series, among the introductory series to Model-2L