A pattern I’ve observed is people who are relatively high in intelligence but low in social skills often have trouble finding other highly intelligent people with whom they can converse as equals, thus having something to offer, and so they find people who have something fairly wrong with them and trade acceptance for friendship. I believe this generalizes, which may be the more interesting part, but I want to focus on the particular example for the moment.

The problem that a highly intelligent person has is that they are not naturally interesting conversational partners for more ordinary people. They tend to engage with subjects on a level of detail that doesn’t work for most people, and when they make the basic move of friends—attempting to share the good they see in the world to share in its enjoyment together—with ordinary people they tend to do it in ways that don’t work for the other person. Now, finding the level that works for the other person and adjusting to it is a learnable skill, but it’s not an easy skill, and many intelligent people aren’t good at it. Which means that, with most people, they don’t have much to offer as friends. It doesn’t matter that this is because they can see so much more; the relevant point is that, as a friend, they offer very little. And worse, the highly intelligent person doesn’t just offer less. Because they will talk at length in ways that are hard to follow, they actually cost more.

Now, if the highly intelligent person can find another highly intelligent person, they can offer quite a lot as a friend. But especially when people are looking locally, they just don’t run into other such people very often. So what is the highly intelligent person to do, given that they have relatively little to offer as friends? (Other than read extensively where they can meet other intelligent people who are removed by time and space, I mean.)

One common solution is to look for desperate people. People who have something wrong with them. It’s not hard to find desperate people who are a bit more intelligent than average, which will give the illusion of compatibility. And in exchange for the other person accepting the more intelligent person as a friend, the more intelligent person can give acceptance of whatever is wrong with the desperate person (terrible social skills, self-destructive behavior, crippling self-doubt/fearfulness, and complete unwillingness to see things from other people’s perspective are relatively common, from what I’ve seen). There’s a decent chance that the highly intelligent person can do this because their high intelligence allows them to bridge more gaps.

I suspect that this generalizes towards significant differences in social status where the higher status person is not accepted by the current hierarchy, at least not as high as they want to be. So they can trade (at least apparent) acceptance of an out-group for support by that group which can potentially elevate them to the level that they want. This may well describe many cases of “advocacy” that we see, where a person attempts to make themselves a hero for some group or other. The fundamentals are an apparently asymmetric trade where the lower trading partner is generally under-valued and so the higher trading partner is able to get greater value than it seems like they would.

I strongly suspect this general pattern is visible in many places in life. It is also highly distinct from true condescension (in the etymological sense of coming-down-to-be-with, as in the Incarnation, for example) where the higher person lowers themselves for the good of the lower person.