“I like a phrase that the Navajo Indian uses, by the way. He has in his language a very interesting phrase which means ‘enterprising pony’ and even translates kind of smart into English, easy. ‘This pony is an enterprising pony. This pony has enterprise.’ And they favor these enterprising ponies very highly.
“And they will take a whole bunch of ponies and they’re tied to a hitch rack* or something of this sort. You can tell how smart the pony is by the knot with which he’s tied to the hitch rack. And you go down a hitch rack and you’ll see if there’s five or six knots in display. Well, the most complicated knot will tell you that you have come close to the enterprising pony. …
“I don’t know what percentage of the human race are enterprising ponies. But I don’t know that there’s any ceiling on brilliance. That’s what’s odd. I don’t know but what we aren’t being very foolish to try to measure brilliance at all. Maybe people are at different levels of infinity of brightness. …
“Well, to what degree does the ‘I don’t know’ series of postulates—to what degree is this the determining influence of intelligence? … I’m just going to leave that up to you to solve and settle and find out and suit yourselves about entirely. But I will tell you that there’s a second method in addition to education for handling this thing. And that happens to be just mocking-up and improving one’s ability to handle confusions and unknowingnesses by any process. And as his ability to do this grows, his intelligence grows. Just as easy as that.”
— L. Ron Hubbard
*Hitch rack: a post or rail used to tie the reins of a horse to.
Excerpted from the lecture Native State and Postulates 1, 2, 3, 4 delivered on 21 October 1955. This can be found in the 4th London ACC lectures. Track 12.
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