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Writer's pictureScott Robinson

In the Mind of the Nerd


  

So, we’ve looked at how nerds are defined and seen by others. But what, in the mind of the nerds themselves, are the distinctions? How do we see ourselves?


J.F. Sargent provided some clues in a 2013 article in Cracked magazine.


“I’m not a pleasant person to be around,” he confides at the top of the article. “I mean, I’m mostly OK on the outside, but it sometimes seems like the person who lives in my brain and presses the buttons that make me do things is just trying to see how far he can push the envelope before society exiles me to a desert island with nothing but a few years’ worth of snacks and a solar-powered laptop so I can play Fallout 2.


“I’m basically just like any other sociopathic nerd, and I’m guilty of every one of the behaviors I’m about to explain. What’s worse, I don’t have even a suggestion of a solution for any of them. So we’re going to have to figure it out together, because this whole ‘nerds are awesome’ phase isn’t going to last forever. And when it collapses, we’re all going to be hanging from flagpoles by our underwear.”


Sargent proceeds to outline some of the inner thoughts of nerds. While I don’t think his profile is necessarily ubiquitous, I have to admit that some of it applies to me. And I can think of many people who betray evidence of those that don’t. It’s up to you, as a raiser of nerds, to determine which of these vines you want growing in the brain of your offspring.


Then again, it might not be up to you at all...


Nerds Feel the Universe Owes Us That Which We Love


Sargent argues that nerds want their favorite stuff in perpetuity, and expect the artists who produce it to render it ad infinitum.


Okay, check. Yes, I gotta say I have those thoughts all the time.


Once Gene Roddenberry promised us new Trek at his 1976 appearance at Freedom Hall in Louisville, where I and my other nerd pals heard him expound on his not-quite-sane vision of a better tomorrow, I fully expected that Trek would return. It did, three years later. And again in 1982. And again. And again. And then we had NextGen. And then Roddenberry died, and it fell to Rick Berman to feed my fetish, with DS9 and Voyager, etc. And the baton was handed to JJ Abrams, and Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman. I’m holding them personally responsible. They’d better put out!


Star Wars people (I guess I’m one) have given up on George Lucas fulfilling his obligation to them by now, but they’ll hold Jon Favreau’s feet to the fire, I have little doubt.


This pattern of thought extends endlessly. There’s a fantasy series about a Chicago wizard-for-hire named Harry Dresden. The Dresden Files are among the most popular fantasy books out there today. I was introduced to them by my ladylove Kit, who tells me that Dresden’s creator, Jim Butcher, actually has the temerity to take as much as a whole year off between books, to the great ire of the Dresden fan base. How dare he?


Nerds Want to Keep Our Favorite Artists All to Ourselves


Sargent’s argument is that once an artist (in any genre) makes it big and becomes hugely popular, the nerds who love them will lose their intimate connection to that artist, and the art itself will change. And in their deepest hearts, without apology, nerds eschew that success.


Okay, again, check.


Sargeant cites Metallica’s sell-out album ...And Justice for All (I could cite The Who’s sell-out album, The Who Sell Out). He then gets more personal, selfishly hoping to hoard a band that one of my own sons fiercely clings to:


“My favorite band is Coheed and Cambria, at least partially because they wrote [‘21:13’], which is like a standard pop-rock song if you ran it through a wood chipper and Scotch Taped it back together while drunk. But then they had kind of a hit with [‘A Favor House Atlantic’], and they started writing [songs like ‘2’s My Favorite 1’], and now more people have heard of them and... I dunno, I just occasionally catch myself coming up with reasons to be mad about that, like it makes any fucking difference in my life at all. By any sane metric, I should be happy that those guys get to have some financial security in their lives, because they wrote some of my favorite songs. But I’m not. My gut instinct is to say ‘Fuck their happiness, I just want them to make albums like The Second Stage Turbine Blade again. And I want to touch that big ol’ fluffy hair so bad.”


For me, it was Klaatu. The Canadian prog trio that put out 3:47 EST and Hope in the mid-Seventies was, for me, the perfect band: a progressive concept group that mined sci-fi themes. Were those themes cheesy and obvious? Yes. Did I care? Not a bit; this was progressive rock with the production values of Pink Floyd and the accessibility of Yes, telling amazing stories that seemed to jump right out of the pages of, well, Amazing Stories.


Then the whole world noticed how great they were. And how they sounded... familiar. And how “Sub Rosa Subway” sounded just like a Paul McCartney song. And how the band had curiously never been photographed, nor were the names of the individual band members printed in the album notes or songwriting credits, and...


Klaatu must be the secretly-reunited Beatles!!!


The rock press jumped all over it, the band’s anonymity was compromised, and they eschewed their sci-fi themes in favor of more standard pop. And though they managed another three albums, it was never the same.


They’d have done better just to have given me what I wanted. What I deserved!


Nerds Feel the Need to Protect Our Stuff from Others


“We’d like to think we’re above it, but the reality is that a lot of our anxiety boils down to us being worried about other people taking our stuff. Even on a biological level, we define value by scarcity: Our bodies love sugar because it used to be really hard to find, and we love sex so much because it’s really hard to find someone who doesn’t have icky cooties.


“Therefore, when we like something, our strongest impulse is to hate-stab the ever-loving fuck out of anyone who starts eyeing our prized goods because we’re pretty sure that they might take it, and then where will we get ours? Logic dictates that this doesn’t apply to art, which in the digital age is an infinite resource – but nobody told our brains that.


“Actually, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t tell my brain.”


Here, Sargent is arguing that when he comes across a fanboy nerd in the real world who’s wearing a Coheed and Cambria t-shirt, he’s being infringed upon – and though he realizes this is irrational, his heart still burns with anger. Coheed is his band, dammit! Keep your grubby Gen Z mitts off them!


This is one I don’t share, by the way. I’m not proprietary at all; I’m just fine with the world coming around to my way of thinking after decades in the wilderness. I was wearing the Trek t-shirt way back when it caused my classmates to walk up and lift the bushy hair over my ears to see whether they were pointed; I’m perfectly happy to smile and nod to the latecomers who are just now realizing that Trek is awesome and have the shirt to prove it. Our goal here is, after all, to form a United Federation of Planets; that ain’t gonna happen if we don’t hold our treasures loosely.


Nerd Knowledge Makes Us Special


Knowledge is nerd coin; the more you have, the greater your value. This is Sargent’s argument, and he concedes that it is a baseless conceit – but a truth, nonetheless. I think he’s right.


Example: there are the nerds who love Game of Thrones; then there are the nerds who read all the George RR Martin books before Game of Thrones. Same for the Outlander books. And Lord of the Rings.


The more knowledgeable nerd is the one who did the deep-dive before the other nerds picked up the scent of whatever. This, per Sargent’s reasoning, causes the uber-knowledgeable nerd to believe that they are somehow the leader of the pack.


“They’re the ubernerds,” he argues. “They’re super-pretentious, and they (fine - we) are insufferable. Not because of our taste for obscurity, but because of our arrogance. We act like knowing more about the artist makes us better, even though all it really means is that we spend our free time differently from ‘normal’ people.


“The most uncomfortable part (to me) is how this superiority complex makes nerdiness so similar to sports stuff,” he wrote. “One of the most annoying parts of sports culture (to me) is the ridiculous degree people identify with the teams. They take every loss and win personally, and they’ll even get mad at other football fans when their favorite team plays well. I always felt like that was silly, and I assumed that we nerds were better than that because... oh, goddammit, I’m doing it again.”

Yeah... gotta cop to this one. I’m one of those.


When I first connected with my Trek tribe in 1976, I wasn’t shy about having discovered Asimov and Ellison and Heinlein before I stumbled into Trek. I was reading “The Cold Equations” and “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “The Martian Chronicles” before I knew what the letters NCC-1701 meant, and I paraded my literacy. This didn’t make me an alpha in any way, of course; my pals just signed up for The Science Fiction Book Club, as I had done, and ordered their own copies of The Gods Themselves and Rendezvous with Rama. So it all worked out in the end, my ubernerd aspirations aside.


All of this takes us into one of those gray areas of parenting, of course; do you teach the kid to clean their plate or just stop when they’re full? There’s some latitude, of course, and the science isn’t clear.


Then again, as I’ve already pointed out – none of this might be up to you, in the long run...

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