UPDATED Esquire on the man with the world’s highest IQ, who has publicly come out as a white nationalist

By some accounts, Christopher Michael Langan is the smartest man in America. He is certainly the smartest nightclub bouncer in America, endowed with an IQ that has been measured at 195, give or take a few points, a score that puts him on a par with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and René Descartes, three of the brightest minds in human history.

A great minotaur of a man with a basso profundo voice, Chris is six feet tall and weighs 275 pounds. A former cowboy, construction worker, and Park Service firefighter, he has a fifty-two-inch chest, twenty-two-inch biceps, a cranial circumference of twenty-five and a half inches—a colossal head, more than three standard deviations above the norm.

*** This is standard amongst Nordics, esp. the high forehead

Known in his younger days to play a mean lead guitar, Chris has light-blue eyes, a dry-look Elvis pompadour, and a bit of a chip on his shoulder, something you come to understand once you hear his story.

“It ain’t easy being green,” Chris likes to say, resigned yet undiscouraged—the cocky, perverse, somewhat defensive assuredness of a person who has always been the smartest in any group, perhaps the loneliest, too.

The distribution of IQs through the population forms a bell curve, with the very smartest on one side, the severely disabled on the other. The IQ of the average human is about 100. The IQ of the average college graduate is about 120. IQs like Chris’s exist among us at a rate of roughly one in one hundred million. In a world designed for average, folks like Chris don’t always fit very well.

Forty-two years old, he pulls down $6,000 a year. He lives in a tiny, cluttered one-room cabin overlooking a field of heavy machinery in Eastport, Long Island—a short drive from the tony Hamptons—which he shares with his cat, Ramona, and his 1985 shovelhead Harley-Davidson, parked near the sink in his kitchen.

Thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, Chris knows he is not alone. Over the last fifteen years, about a dozen affinity groups for people with superhigh IQs have been formed. More exclusive than Mensa—which accepts those with a minimum IQ of 132, one of every fifty people—clubs like the Triple 9 Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society (with IQ requirements of 148, 164, and 176) provide electronic fellowship to an eccentric, far-flung population known as HiQ Society. Though the clubs, like all subcultures, have become a petri dish for ego squabbles and political infighting, they nevertheless supply the comfort of fraternity in a world that doesn’t think fast enough, doesn’t get the reference, doesn’t get the point.

Welcome to the HiQ Nation. Walk a mile in the shoes of genius. Physicians and Ph.D.’s, bar bouncers and postal workers, cosmologists, philosophers, mothers, and mimes, their brain powers haven’t exactly taken them to the places you might expect.

Chris’s mom was a spirited young woman, the black-sheep daughter of a wealthy shipping executive, who frequented San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, rubbing shoulders with the Beats. His dad, the story goes, died of a heart attack before he was born. To this day, Chris isn’t sure if his mother was telling the truth.

Chris began talking at six months of age, reading at three years.

*** Same here

Read the ingredients off an A-1 steak-sauce bottle in my high chair and my parents stopped chewing. 😉

***

He skipped kindergarten through second grade, started his schooling in third. Though his IQ was never tested when he was a child, he says, “it was simply recognized that I was some kind of kid genius. My schoolmates saw me as the teacher’s pet, this little freak.”

When he was five, his mother—who’d in the meantime married and divorced a struggling Hollywood actor and given birth to two more sons—married a mean, hard-drinking tyrant. “He figured the best way to raise three boys would be to set up his own military platoon,” Chris says. “Living with him was like ten years of boot camp, only at boot camp you don’t get the shit beaten out of you every day with a garrison belt, and in boot camp you’re not living in abject poverty.”

At six each morning, his stepfather would sound reveille on a bugle, line up his little soldiers at attention, heels cocked at 45 degrees, thumbs along trouser seams. He’d stand before each of the boys and feign a punch, usually a right jab that he’d stop an inch or two shy of their noses. If one of the kids flinched, he would sock him for real. Chris’s body was always covered with welts. The fresh ones were pink and red, the older ones black and blue, the oldest green and yellow. “I looked like a Jackson Pollock painting,” Chris remembers.

By the time he was twelve, Chris got into lifting weights. “When you’re the littlest and the smartest, and you’re wearing rags, and you come to school with a fat lip and all these marks on you, you’re treated like scum by the rest of the kids. I just decided enough was enough. I developed my strength, worked on my hand speed. I learned how to beat up kids that were twice my size. I got a reputation for being a tough guy. By that time, I was mostly doing independent study—they didn’t know what to teach me anymore, but nobody was going to take me out and put me in college on the fast track, so I just did what they told me. I went to study hall and worked on my own, taught myself advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that. Meanwhile, all the parents were taking their kids out of study hall because they didn’t want them anywhere near me. They thought I was going to beat them up.”

One morning when he was fourteen, Chris awoke to a flash of white light, followed by intense pain across his eyes. He jumped out of bed half blinded. Just home from an all-night drunk, his stepfather had wrapped his garrison belt around his fist and punched Chris while he slept. Since he was four years old, Chris had never once talked back. It was always, No, sir, Yes, sir; he’d never even said boo. Now he just went mental. Chris flew at him, knocked him across the room, against the wall, out the door. He beat down the old man in the front yard, told him never to return. He didn’t.

Chris’s adulthood continued in much the same vein. He got into college on a scholarship. He lost the scholarship when his mother forgot to sign the financial forms. He took a year off, earned money fighting forest fires, enrolled at another college. Then his car broke down in the middle of winter. He had no money to fix it. He had to walk fifteen rural miles in the snow every day or face failure. At neither school were officials willing to give him a break.

“There I was, paying my own money, taking classes from people who were obviously my intellectual inferiors,” he says. “I just figured, Hey, I need this like a moose needs a hat rack!”

“I could literally teach these people more than they could teach me, and, on top of that, they have no understanding, they don’t want to help me out in the least. To this day, I have no respect for academics. I call them acadummies. So I guess you could say that was the end of my formal education.”

*** We had special schools for character

And there they learned to be workers, reliable, sturdy, and sociable, not loners holed up with books all day, ending up as nerds making $6,000 a year  with a 1 in 100-million IQ, and incels who don’t know how to talk to a girl.

WHAT USE IS BRAINS WITHOUT SELF-CONFIDENCE, A WORK ETHIC, HONESTY, HUMILITY AND A DESIRE TO SERVE THE FOLK, NOT SELF?

Over the years, Chris developed what is known in the literature as the double-life strategy.

“On one side, you’re a regular guy,” he says. “You go to work, you do your job, you exchange pleasantries. On the other side, you come home and you begin doing equations in your head. You kind of retreat into your own world—you make it work for you the best you can.”

When Chris isn’t busy doing temp work as a bartender, or training such summer luminaries as writer Tom Wolfe at the local health club, or wrestling with spoiled, flush-pocket drunks, or chatting up the young ladies—the very young ladies, his self-avowed major weakness—he is often found hunched over his homebuilt computer, drinking tepid tea from a spaghetti-sauce jar, working on something he calls the CTMU, his Cognition-Theoretic Model of the Universe.

The result of ten years of solitary labor, the CTMU—pronounced cat-mew—is, says Chris, a true “Theory of Everything,” a cross between John Archibald Wheeler’s “Participatory Universe” and Stephen Hawking’s “Imaginary Time” theory of cosmology.

Simply put, the CTMU explains the meaning and substance of reality. It resolves—once and for all time, he says—“many of the most intractable paradoxes known to physical science while bestowing on human consciousness a level of meaning that was previously approached only by religion and mysticism.”

A culmination of the modern logico-linguistic philosophical tradition, the CTMU “reunites the estranged couple consisting of rationalistic philosophy and empirical science.” Though Chris has invited criticism of his theories from all quarters, he has yet to hear a valid argument against his conclusions or computations. Neither has he found a publisher.

“There are a lot of bad breaks you can get in the real world,” Chris says philosophically. “A lot of very smart people are going to get a bunch of those breaks—it’s the law of averages, you know? It’s just going to happen. And I was one of the people it happened to, simple as that. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling it like it is. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be ordinary. Not that I’d trade. I just wonder sometimes.”