Enéas Carneiro stated that “the difference between a janitor and an astrophysicist lies in the amount of information.” The phrase reflects the spirit of the 1980s and 1990s, when it was believed that free access to knowledge — driven by the internet — would raise the average intellectual level of society.
The premise failed.
It was expected that, with easier access to knowledge, people would place greater value on education, become more intelligent, and that we would have a society as prosperous as the present one—a view even held by Hindemburg Melão Jr., who later acknowledged that the masses did not develop this perspective.
Information became abundant and accessible; the capacity to process it is innate, and the less capable an individual is, the less accurate is the truth he discovers. Today, individuals in radically different occupations have access to the same sources. What separates them is not the available information, but the cognitive capacity to operate it at abstract, deep, and integrated levels.
Information is not intelligence.
Intelligence is the capacity to generate and manipulate models of information.
Two individuals can start from the same data and arrive at completely different results. This occurs because cognitive abilities — innate, and sometimes refined — vary significantly. IQ, although an imperfect calculation, remains a functional indicator of this variation.
To claim that a janitor with an IQ of 90 can achieve the same theoretical performance in astrophysics as an astrophysicist with an IQ of 145 is as absurd as defending competitive equality between an athlete who is 1.40m tall and another who is 2.00m tall in professional basketball.
Exceptions may sometimes exist. Individuals of exceptional intelligence may occupy positions incompatible with their capacities due to social or personal contingencies — such as Christopher Langan, estimated to have an IQ of 195, considered one of the most intelligent men in the USA, who worked as a nightclub bouncer. This does not invalidate the rule; it merely demonstrates that intellectual capacity and social position do not always coincide, either briefly or for long periods when it is a personal decision.
The central error of society was to confuse equality of access with equality of capacity. Information has been democratized. But it is not possible to alter someone’s cognitive capacity.
Yes: people are better than others.
The world advances through brains of higher quality, not through those that are greater in quantity.
The brain is a system of calculation. Every thought, decision, learning process, or creation results from internal operations — a mathematics not yet formalized and incompatible with current syntax. The brain is an extreme processing machine, and some are objectively more powerful than others.
Each brain has a unique structure and, therefore, specific inclinations: physics, painting, music, logic, abstraction. No brain is repeated. Therefore, no set of attributes is repeated. Even if two individuals reach the same result, the cognitive path taken to reach it is always exclusive.
What differentiates individuals is not only the result, but the invisible trajectory of thought — impossible to observe, copy, or reproduce. This is what makes each human a unique universe.
However, not all mental universes have the same operational value in the real world. Some produce or discover more accurate truths, produce more beauty, and more progress. The greater the cognitive capacity, the greater the production of these structures.
This is genius.
