Traitors in the Workplace: The Price of Intelligence
7 min read
Workplaces claim to value intelligence but often punish those who embody it, preferring the performance of intellect over its consequences. Genuine intelligence exposes inconsistencies and unsettles hierarchies built on ego and alliance, prompting quiet resistance. As The Celebrity Traitors (2025) revealed, emotional, adaptive, and moral forms of intelligence threaten systems that reward only credentialed, compliant IQ. True insight moves faster than group comfort and is misread as danger. The result is a culture that exiles the perceptive, protects the mediocre, and trades clarity for control – sacrificing the very intelligence it claims to prize.
Valued in Theory, Penalised in Practice
In many professional environments, intelligence is praised in theory but quietly penalised in practice. Job postings ask for analytical thinkers, problem-solvers, and people who can “hit the ground running”. Organisations claim to value insight, innovation, and critical thinking. Yet the everyday dynamics inside teams reveal a contradiction: those who think clearly, see patterns early, or articulate concerns with precision often become the first to encounter resistance, suspicion, or exclusion.
It is a paradox that feels personal when it happens but is, in fact, systemic. Workplaces want the appearance of intelligence but not its consequences. Intelligence illuminates inconsistencies, questions assumptions, notices contradictions, and brings visibility to dynamics others prefer to leave unexamined. Intelligence exposes. It makes the implicit explicit. And in environments built on informal alliances, unspoken hierarchies, or fragile egos, this can feel destabilising – if not intolerable. The result is a quiet but decisive pushback.
The Microcosm of The Celebrity Traitors
Reality television often acts as a laboratory for human behaviour – and The Celebrity Traitors was no exception. Across its stellar cast we could see all forms of intelligence – IQ, EQ, AQ, SQ – on display.
Those who embodied high EQ (emotional intelligence) were swiftly punished for their powers of observation and pattern recognition; their ability to read others and detect motives. The Traitors themselves demonstrated AQ (adaptive or adversity intelligence) to survive: enduring stress, staying flexible under pressure, recovering from setbacks, adjusting their strategies, and reading shifts in energy and circumstance. And when Stephen Fry lamented that what the Faithfuls really needed was wisdom, he was naming the rarest and least rewarded form of all: SQ (social or spiritual intelligence). Something that was present – and correct – but consistently ignored. This intuitive, moral, or ethical sense was repeatedly dismissed, to the detriment of the group.
The Education-to-Work Contradiction
It’s a strange experience to spend years in a system that demands excellence, only to discover that excellence can make you undesirable. Western education and its metrics of intellect (IQ) teach us to chase high marks, top rankings, and prestigious credentials. But the job market quietly punishes the very outcomes the system tells us to achieve.
As we saw on The Celebrity Traitors, those who were considered highly intelligent often found themselves mistrusted or targeted. Far from offering the group stability, their intellect generated discomfort. Their logic was reframed as manipulation, their problem-solving interpreted as scheming, and their clarity seen as threat.
We are encouraged to strive for symbolic success – signifiers of credentialed belonging – that are considered reflective of intelligence, but not for environments that can actually tolerate intelligence. There is the production of surplus intelligence but no capacity to house it, no infrastructure to accommodate it, and no material empowerment from it.
In the workplace, as on the show, high IQ is publicly celebrated but privately irrelevant unless there is a practical application in service of the group. It is this applied servitude that can turn distrust of someone into conferring upon them the appellation of ‘a hundy’ (100% Faithful). Unless intelligence can be extracted or exploited, it will not survive suspicion.
IQ as Deferred Intelligence
What became clear on screen – and can be seen in most workplaces – is that IQ is the least threatening and therefore the most socially acceptable form of intelligence. Contestants marked as intelligent through titles and professions – knighthoods, professorships, journalistic credentials – lasted longer than those whose intelligence showed up in other forms. Because IQ – cognitive ability and intellectual potential – is just that: the possibility of knowledge. And possibility takes time. This lack of immediacy makes it safe because it is the process of acquiring knowledge, rather than the disruption of already knowing.
In the modern workplace, as in the show, IQ is deferred intelligence – permission to be intelligent later, under supervision. It is intelligence that has been domesticated. It signals social safety because it promises eventual but not immediate clarity. People with IQ markers are allowed to be slow thinkers, to fumble, to learn publicly – because their intelligence is presumed, while also allowing others to project competence onto them without the discomfort of being out-thought.
In contrast, EQ, AQ, and SQ are fast, embodied, intuitive – feral even. They don’t ask permission. They see and sense too quickly – and are stopped before they can begin. This is where intelligence poses the greatest threat: when it moves faster than group processing speed.
Cognitive Tempo: When Speed Becomes a Threat
Exclusion isn’t just bias against intelligence itself; it’s a reaction to tempo mismatch – the group’s inability to metabolise insight at that speed or depth. Smart people are punished not because they’re wrong but because their clarity arrives too soon. The system can’t process it. Workplaces and social groups behave like living organisms, regulating for cognitive homeostasis and expelling whatever moves too quickly for collective digestion.
The Celebrity Traitors magnifies this common reality: intelligence that operates too far ahead of the group is not experienced as helpful; it is experienced as risk. People who think quickly or deeply often reach conclusions before others have mentally arrived. When those insights are voiced too early, they can feel abrupt or unearned. This gap between internal reasoning and external perception creates fertile ground for misinterpretation. Instead of being recognised as foresight, early insight is framed as suspicion, over-analysis, or even hidden agenda.
The Existential Threat of Intelligence
What the show also highlights is that the real threat of intelligence is often an existential one. Intelligence does not threaten systems directly, but the self-image of those within them. It disturbs the fragile hierarchy of worth that most institutions – and the people within them – quietly depend on. Intelligence is a mirror, not a metric, and so institutions protect people’s self-image by limiting exposure to those who see more clearly.
Thus, intelligence is not neutral – it’s relational. It can affirm or annihilate another person’s sense of self-worth depending on context. In the workplace we see the social function of intelligence, where intelligence doesn’t necessarily signal competence but belonging to a certain cognitive class – particularly in terms of IQ: please submit your CV.
Managers hire people with those markers because it flatters their own self-image. This is not a merit decision; it’s an identity performance. But the double bind is that the same logic flips when proximity to intelligence becomes a threat. When someone’s credentials or capability risk exceeding their manager’s, the illusion of superiority breaks. And so the person becomes “overqualified”.
Every environment has its own ecology of advantage. Intelligence is valued if it is the kind that sustains existing power relations. But when it threatens those relations – because it is embodied, intuitive, or relational – when it can’t be easily quantified, ranked, or controlled – the people who hold those forms of intelligence are disciplined, excluded, or discredited.
Why Smart People Become Targets
On The Celebrity Traitors, smart people are banished or murdered not despite their intelligence but because of it. They were removed not for being wrong, but for being early, accurate, or unsettlingly clear.
Likewise, the workplace may pedestalise intellect in theory, but the culture at large remains suspicious of it – especially when intelligence takes emotional or moral form: when it reads the room too well, names the pattern too quickly, or refuses to play dumb for comfort.
Organisational stability doesn’t come from competence; it comes from predictability. And intelligent people aren’t predictable. They notice what others ignore. They hold standards others don’t want to meet. They reveal contradictions others depend on to maintain power. And it is safer – and easier – to remove the intelligent person than to evolve the system.
The Cost
Intelligence is a social currency that can’t be freely spent. It holds value when it flatters the hierarchy or confirms the group’s delusions. But once it risks challenging or revealing too much truth, it becomes socially radioactive. Intelligence is inconvenient – and inconvenient people get banished. The moment someone introduces clarity into a system built on performance, it threatens everyone benefiting from ambiguity. But the cost of this dynamic is significant.
There is a private, personal toll that intelligent people pay. It’s one of loneliness and isolation; of exhaustion from the double-consciousness of being right but treated as wrong. It’s the ache of seeing the less competent rewarded because they are easier for others to handle. The grief of being right too early – and possibly recognised only after the damage is done. It is the experience of exile.
But organisations pay a price too when intelligent individuals who could provide stability find themselves silenced, marginalised, or quietly edged out. Teams operate in fog instead of freedom. They lose out on early detection of problems, on honest feedback, and on the kind of insight that prevents small issues from becoming major failures.
Systems that are not designed to integrate intelligence – in all its forms – will resist it reflexively. Unless environments are intentionally designed where intelligence is not only welcomed but integrated, it will always be the case that one person might “win,” but everyone else will lose.
