Courtesy of Ron Hoeflin
[Note: This is a web-only supplement to Jeannette Cooperman’s feature “Lonely Brains Club,” which appeared in SLM’s October 2009 issue.]
Take Mensa’s 132 IQ minimum, add almost 60 points, and you’ve got Ron Hoeflin, who reports an IQ of 190. Now living in New York, he grew up in St. Louis and joined Mensa in his teens. He went on to create several IQ tests—because above a certain level, the standard tests don’t suffice—and found seven high-IQ societies, including the Prometheus Society and the even more rarified Mega Society (its members land in the top thirty-thousandth percentile). Hoeflin’s Mega Test was published in Omni back in 1985 as “The World’s Most Difficult IQ Test.”
He’s been told that when he was a baby, he stared into his grandmother’s eyes with such concentration, she murmured, “You won’t have to worry about this one. He’s got plenty upstairs.” At 6, he announced that his ambition was to know everything. Then he added one caveat: “‘Except for the formula for soap.’ Because I figured that must be very complicated.”
He stunned his kindergarten teacher with the speed of his mind, sailed through first grade—then crashed. They put him in the slow readers’ group, not realizing that the problem was a detached retina. His vision stabilized, but his reading speed remained incredibly slow. That didn’t stop him from earning a perfect score on a reading-comprehension test in eighth grade, though, or scoring in the 99th percentile on every section of a standardized test in high school.
Hoeflin’s mother was an opera singer, his father an executive for Union Electric. They divorced when Hoeflin was 5, but he remembers his father’s rigidity (“He didn’t miss a single day of work in 28 years”) and disdain for anyone who wasn’t mentally alert. He’d snap, “Quit futzing around like an old washerwoman” whenever someone moved too slowly for his taste. And Hoeflin says that when he was 4, his father woke him from an unintended snooze in a movie theater by picking him up and slamming him down hard on his feet, then letting him crumple to the floor.
After Hoeflin’s freshman year at Clayton High School, his mother packed them up and moved to California to remarry. He went to eight universities before earning his Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. He’s written a three-volume Encyclopedia of Categories that’s based on cybernetic loops and comes pretty darn close to his goal of developing a theory of everything. “Most philosophy you learn in bits and pieces and never get the whole picture,” he explains, “which seemed too chaotic for me.”
Asked if it’s possible to make any generalizations about people with high IQs, Hoeflin says, “When you get to really high levels, probably maladjustments occur, because you are not really on the same wavelength. I have become very introverted, unfortunately. I just never did fit in—although, in recent years, I have developed some friendships.” He wishes he’d had a mentor; his father was soon absent, his mother preoccupied with her singing, and his dim vision made it hard to learn by imitation.
Asked what advice he would drum into a kid like himself, Hoeflin answers instantly, “You have to find your niche.” His turned out to be operating high-IQ societies: “Initially, it was a starry-eyed vision, and then, after I quit being a librarian, it was a way to make a living.”
The day after we talk, he emails an addendum: “I thought of a characterization that I think fits virtually all highly intelligent people: They all tend to be hyperalert. This can be inconvenient, inasmuch as they tend to notice things that one would prefer not to have noticed, such as one’s flaws and shortcomings. It could be awkward to operate high-IQ societies when one is hypersensitive to other people’s noticing one’s flaws, but I manage it as the Wizard of Oz managed his affairs, from behind a screen, since I operate my societies by mail.”
Hoeflin dreads media interviews, he confided when ours was over: “The last one was with the Financial Times of London. They weren’t very impressed with my apartment.” He pays $150 a month for rent in a one-bedroom in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and sublets the large kitchen.
“A lot of people say I talk too fast,” he says suddenly. (His pace is that of a radio announcer rattling off possible side effects in the last three seconds of a drug commercial.) “People don’t want to listen to you finish your sentences, so I probably learned to speed up my speech to avoid getting interrupted.” Now 65, Hoeflin never married, although he did have a love affair with a woman who claimed to be one of Picasso’s illegitimate children. “She was too much of a control freak,” he confides.
“According to my profile [off the charts on ‘sensitivity’], people like me like routine,” Hoeflin says. “The nervous system is so high-pitched, any additional inputs cause sort of an overload.” He goes every day to Wendy’s and eats the same meal, for $2.91: spicy chicken wrap and iced tea. “They give you a lot of good ingredients, like chunks of lemon in your tea,” he says. “I often get into these ruts, but after two or three months, I may try something else. I may go back to Wendy’s chili. I stick to routines, but you have to have some excitement.”
How does he endure all the less-intelligent people around him? “Well, I just don’t expect much of them,” he admits. “I don’t befriend them, because I know it’s going to be frustrating. America’s not an intellectual society, obviously. It’s very sports-oriented, and my interest in sports is zero. Intelligence is probably favored more in more ambitious societies.
“I don’t know why we’ve been ahead so many years,” he adds, half to himself. “Although we’re crumbling now.”
He sounds positively cheerful about it, even though he’s an atheist with no afterlife to console him. “I told my friend the contessa, who is a direct descendant of Catherine the Great and believes in God, ‘Just tell your friend God that death wasn’t such a good idea.’”
What difference does intelligence make in his life? “I think it gives me a greater aesthetic feeling for science fiction and classical music,” he says. “And you can think about just anything, see the big picture.” Hoeflin, whose vision remains dim, often uses sight as a metaphor: “I want to see the whole universe as best I can,” he says eagerly, “and get a good picture of the world.
“It would be nice if people were more intelligent,” he adds. “I guess you can only force your brain so far.”
