The idea that intelligence, or quick wits as it used to be known, is important is perhaps no more than 120 years old. Consider the United States in old days; qualities like perseverance, fortitude, courage and determination were more prized than quick wits, and perhaps rightly so. Intelligence is certainly important in the modern world, but I think that most people regard intelligence as merely the absence of stupidity.
As a child develops physically, parents hope that the child will learn to walk, become house trained, eat, and then learn to read and write. All that is necessary is that the child is competent in these things and has no obvious impediment; there is no need to excel.
If we define intelligence as merely the absence of stupidity, then contributors to the MMM forum are intelligent. The Anti Mustachian Wall of Shame and Mockery describes instances of stunning stupidity on the part of the barbarians beyond the Great Wall of Mustachianism.
We admire competence in specialist in the trades and the professions, just as our ancestors admired competence in living off the land. In Australia, aborigines describe wild food in the landscape as ‘bush tucker’, tucker being slang for food. Go back 500 years, and aborigines in Northern Australia would have had trouble living off the land in southern Australia, if suddenly transported there, and vice versa, because of the differences in the landscape and climate.
As an aside, I recommend the Australia movie ‘Ten Canoes’ set somewhere in northern Australia long before white settlement. It is a Stone Age soap opera, and well done, and available on Youtube.
Modernity, that is science and engineering, and the type of society that emerges from science and engineering, relies on taking advantage of the forces of nature to work for us. Machinery becomes a form of inanimate slave labor. A parallel is investment, and living off dividends is the equivalent of living off robotic effort. Robotic effort will be wide spread in the near future. Before the Civil War in the southern states, no white man would be seen digging a hole or carrying a heavy bag if there was a black slave to do it for him, and the equivalent today is using machine labor rather than your own. The parallel is living off investment income rather than working, and it is now clear that most non mustachians have difficulty with this idea, and are not comfortable with saving and investing, and eventually living off dividends.