Intelligence is the ability to respond aptly to the situation at hand, whereas cleverness is the ability to manipulate abstract concepts in your mind. 1
Intelligence can involve a lot of cleverness, particularly in complicated domains such as making sense of our world, or next to no cleverness, when I realize that I have been speaking too much and instantly know to shut my mouth, without even thinking about it. Conversely, cleverness can be used in intelligent ways, or it can be misused and make you more miserable, or lead to more problems, because you are trying to impose your ideas onto Reality.
Intelligent people have the ability to ponder about the deep questions of life, such as the ones dealing with love and death, and become the type of person who can be loving, and face their death with courage, nobility, and light-heartedness.
Clever people on the other hand can only deal with questions which they can answer by adding more to their self. Cleverness deals with complication, which means that they tend to do well, materially speaking, in the complicated world of the technological system, but their way of approaching every problem through addition makes them terrible at love, humor and courage, which require a surrender from us, rather than mere methods and knowledge.
This is why in practice, merely clever people do not think that love and humor are very important, and believe that death is something bad which should be avoided at all costs, and which society should try to eradicate. Those people tend to lack character, which is distinct from intelligence, but virtues tend to come together, since they arise from the same soil of consciousness.
The biggest impression that merely clever people leave is how trivial they are when you get to know them personally, and how detached they are from any important matters. They are terrible at judging how important things are relative to their entire life, because their attention is typically very narrow, focused on isolated, well-defined problems, an ability which the system selects for.
This is why merely clever people spend their free time in niche hobbies, like tabletop RPGs, or playing chess, which do not develop them as a person, but only make them more lopsided, which is why their love life tends to be terrible, why they are not very interested in anything except their narrow area of expertise for which they get paid for, and why they tend to double down on the same old strategies again and again when they are outside of their area of specialization.
They know a lot of things when their knowledge can serve them, but they are not very curious, not very observant about people and themselves, which is why talking to them can feel more like talking to an encyclopedia composed of random facts which have very little to do with their daily experience, their conscious experience of life. They are mediated people, relatively comfortable to live on the screen, which greatly benefits cleverness since computers deal with information, but when it comes to their internal life and their character, there is very little there.
Another way to distinguish between the two is that cleverness is about what you know, whereas intelligence is how you behave when you don't know. It is not learnt in school, or added to the self, but rather recognized in your consciousness by letting go of self.
Or, as John Keats puts it:
It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Why is it so important to be able to sit in uncertainty, in mystery? If you could simply have the answer, would you really need negative capacity? The problem with such a view is on many levels. First of all, at the level of the mind, we are always going to be ignorant on an increasing number of issues. Every question which elucidates matters also brings forth new questions we haven't asked ourselves before, therefore the ones pushing the boundaries of knowledge necessarily need to be good at navigating uncertainty.
But on a deeper level, the mind by itself is simply limited in what it can perceive. Literal language is constrained by certain principles, as described here which means that if we constrain ourselves to only perceive through the abstract mind, bound by literal language, we reject experiences simply because we cannot articulate them in dualistic, consistent and causal terms. This means we end up rejecting the Unity of Reality, and its paradoxical, non-causal nature, and everything that springs from that: the astounding directness of experience, the mystery that anything exists at all, the I who can hear and see, even though they are at the basis of our conscious experience!
Intelligent people thus see the value of the abstract mind, but do not constrain Reality to fit within its boundaries, because they recognize that it has inherent limitations and blind spots. This is why negative capacity is so important, because to be willing to perceive reality through another lens requires a totally different approach than the usual path which our world promotes, it comes from a surrender of knowledge rather than its addition, and it's what allows us to appreciate the tree for what it is, rather than as a set of parts which connect together to form an organism, which I can cut down and extract for my own utility.
The mind by itself does not see Reality, and intelligent people take that as a very important thing to acknowledge and overcome, if the situation demands it. Sometimes, only having representations of Reality is fine, but if you take that same approach in your relationships, your lover is going to be miserable, because you are never going to be with them, but only your idea of them, and who could love an idea?
Schopenhauer gives a succinct but revealing description of genius. He says:
Talent hits a target that no one can. Genius hits a target that no one can even see
Merely clever people cannot recognize the type of genius that Schopenhauer describes, only the talented people in their own field. Intelligent people can see the genius in someone's work, even if they do not personally like it, even if they have strong disagreements with the creator, because they have access to something which is beyond their mere likes and dislikes.
A clever person on the other hand will like someone else's work because "they really speak to me", which is to say, they like people who think, feel and live like them, whereas an intelligent person will attempt to feel into the deeper Reality which the creator attends to (or doesn't attend to, as in the case of second rate work).
Thus, a clever person is utterly blind to their own preferences, and takes those as reality itself, or some type of universal yardstick on which to measure all of us. A Christian will judge other people based on how good of a Christian they are. A scientist will judge people based on how good of a scientist they are. A spiritualist will judge people based on how good of a spiritualist they are. An atheist will judge people based on how good of an atheist they are, and so on.
Merely clever people basically view humans on a one dimensional axis, with the stupid ones on one side of the spectrum, and the intelligent ones on the other. 2 Many of them genuinely do not understand that people could be different, and not necessarily stupid, because to understand differences requires the ability for your self to step back and appreciate a reality which is beyond its usual comfort zone. Thus an atheist thinks that theists are stupid for believing in God, or a humorless curmudgeon thinks that people who seem happy and are prone to laughing a lot are utter morons, or an introverted person thinks that being social and outgoing requires you to be dumb, or a programmer thinks that those who take an interest in literature don't have the intelligence to interact with code, and so on.
They view everything in their own standards because their self is so rigid that all they see are their own crude representations of Reality, and whatever society beams at them. The hallmark of intelligent people then is that they take interest in a variety of things, and can even appreciate that which they do not personally like, whereas merely clever people surround themselves with copies of themselves, and their character is so hollow that it has become replaced with a shallow personality, entirely built out of likes and dislikes, the type of stuff that people advertise themselves with on dating apps.
Have you ever witnessed someone around you who keeps changing all sorts of habits, beliefs, and other things in their life, and yet, when you look at them for who they are, nothing seems to really change? Changing the surface is something which the ego really loves, because it broadcasts the pretense of change to it and the people around it, without having to do anything seriously threatening to how it operates. This is why chasing novelty of all sorts is so popular in our times, because it is both pleasurable and comfortable.
Focusing on habits can be a more subtle version of rearranging the surface so as to not change the deeper parts. On one hand they are very important, because evidently we are shaped by what we do day in and day out. But it can become another form of avoidance because habits are so often done mechanically, which is to say not consciously, which allows the ego to remain unchanged, while it feels like it is getting better, because it gets rewarded for such behaviors.
Another strategy to hold the pretense of change is to look for a book or any resource which they could copy and mechanically follow so as to obtain the desired result. Thus they approach dating by following a flowchart, or they envision their career as a series of discrete steps with various metrics to track and meet, or they reduce down spirituality to various methods which they then practice like they would for exercising at the gym.
It's not just that they are too dumb to think for themselves, it's that there is a legitimate fear of being outside of the beaten path, of not knowing what to do, which is why clever people tend to feel very comfortable in schools and at work, where a person in authority constantly tells you what to do, and even what to think. Cleverness works within within a box, intelligence knows how (and why it's valuable in the first place) to step outside of it.
This is why clever people are so keen on comparison, whether how much money they make, or their elo in a certain game, or how much they score in this or that domain, whereas intelligent people are often so unique that comparison does not even make sense to begin with, 3 or they simply don't care, because real intelligence is in touch with the source of quality, consciousness, and there is not much of a need to win at worldly games when you are touched by a love for life and the people around you.
We live in a world that has already been dominated by cleverness rather than intelligence for many centuries already, and the rise of so-called 'AI' has made that distortion even more apparent and problematic.
It's ultimately impossible to express to someone who is merely clever what real intelligence amounts to, because the contrast lies in how they respond to that which is beyond their self, which is impossible to describe to someone who is only their self: their ideas, their likes and dislikes, their ambitions, etc.
Intelligence is rare because it is not useful for the system. It is much better for companies to have people work in their narrow area of specialization, rather than have people who can think deeply and broadly about the situation they are within, and how it affects the rest of the world. When you only think about a narrow problem, that is when you can disregard your externalities on the rest of the world, which is how every institution operates nowadays, which is why we live in such a mess.
Cleverness is essentially machine-intelligence, and it has become successful not so much on its own merits, but because it is good at creating and maintaining power, and rearranging Reality so as to remove that which it cannot grasp. This is why children are not allowed to be free and innocent and have to be rigidly disciplined in school, this is why the innate intelligence that women have is not rewarded in our world, and modern 'feminism' pushes women to pursue (male) careers in the system, and why the love we have for one another is secondary at best to the endless quest of technological progress. Cleverness doesn't need such things, and so it does away with them.
Eventually however, this insane game must come to an end, because cleverness, by its refusal to engage with Reality, is destroying the very same conditions which allows it to exist in the first place. The system has seemed untouchable for the past centuries because of all the physical energy, social institutions, and technological infrastructure it has built, but its way of operating, being largely dependent on the extraction of nature and coercion of human beings, is too rigid to adapt to the very same problems that it creates.
This is why, in the midst of the twilight of the technological system, our institutions keep doubling down on the same worn out methods and attitudes that got us in this mess to begin with, pushing for more and more technology to solve the very same problems that were created by it, because the system is not intelligent, it is merely clever. It has no ability to face its own limits, which is why we have to pretend that death somehow doesn't exist as a collective, or that we can keep growing forever on a finite planet, and therefore it will never respond appropriately to the situation, because ultimately, no one is in charge. The train keeps picking up speed, people put their faith that our problems will be resolved, but there is no one, no thing which could alter our course. Better to collapse now and avoid the rush. 4
1 Barry Long's distinction, which Darren Allen expands upon in his book 'The Apocalypedia'.
2 The word 'intelligent' being used differently here than the rest of the piece, because it's used from the point of view of a merely clever person.
3 Unique in their character and presence, not the outside personality which they present themselves with. Think of how people used to be dressed up largely the same, and yet often had far more individual character than people now, because they weren't plugged into their screen, and their mind influenced by the same set of memes which appeal to the lowest common denominator.
4 A book by John Michael Greer of the same title.
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