Good Meal Is 98% Talk for Mensa Diners

The question around the restaurant table seemed straightforward enough: “Why Does Good Triumph Over Evil?”

The answers, however, proved complicated, contrarian, digressive, and premise-challenging, and sometimes walked a fine line between sublime and absurd.

But then, what else could be expected of a dinner discussion that began with one participant pointing to his meal and observing, “This is depicted on the menu as ‘half baked chicken.’ It’s really ‘half a chicken, fully baked.’ We in Mensa tend to notice those things.”

The occasion was the January bread-breaking of a Greater Los Angeles Mensa subgroup that for two years has been convening every month to chew on chicken and salads and topics commensurate with Mensa intellects (by the admission rules, among humanity’s top 2 percent).

Recent topics included “How to Analyze a Problem,” “The Taxonomy of Philosophy” and “The Nature of Consciousness.” On the agenda for 1998 are “Science as a Religion,” “Children as an Addiction,” and “Melding Biological and Cultural Sexuality.”

The group calls itself Epiphanies, Epistemology and Ample Eats. It gathers at Leon’s Steak House on Victory Boulevard, says discussion leader Richard Kapnick, “because the food is cheap.”

At the January session, for the first time and strictly on a trial basis, members of the general public were welcome, even those in the nether 98% of the mental candlepower range.

Only two persons of non-documented intelligence made it to the January gathering, to join 10 regular attendees. It was a much smaller turnout than usual, Kapnick said. The youngest of the regulars was 42. The oldest was 77. Among them were a clinical psychologist, a playwright, a mechanical engineer, a commercial insurance account manager, a retired clothing store owner, a retired dress designer.

Kapnick, an abdominous man of 56 who produces radio and television ads and is a weekend disc jockey at High Desert Country Music station KTPI in Palmdale, prepared the talking paper on the day’s topic.

In a nutshell, he argued that good, stripped of shifting moral interpretations, is the creation of assets. Evil is the senseless destruction of assets. Because humankind clearly has been steadily amassing assets, good is triumphing over evil.

The ensuing many-voiced conversation, near as an overmatched notes-taker could come to keeping up with it, went a little something like this:

* “Inherent in your paper is that you’re concentrating on Homo sapiens’ view of good versus evil.”

* “If a comet slams into the Earth and destroys half of it, is that evil?”

* “Well, there would be the greater good that is the reordering of the universe.”

* “You’re saying that good and evil are separate concepts, when they’re the opposite sides of the same thing. The whole notion of good and evil is a human construct. It exists only in our minds.”

* “It’s arbitrary and circumspective.”

* “Good and evil are not always opposites. There is the example of cars, which are assets, sliding into one another on a wet day.”

* “But that’s good for the body shop.”

* “Let me suggest another word--advantageous. Genghis Khan came through Europe and slaughtered people right and left, but he was good for his people back home. But, really, I feel in my heart there is a universal direction for good--and I’m an atheist.”

* “ ‘Asset’ is a limited term. Is enjoyment of the beauty of nature an asset? Or is the asset my ‘ability’ to enjoy it?”

* “Both are.”

* “Well, I think good and evil are very personal. How can you say they’re different sides of the same coin?”

* “I didn’t say that.”

* “June said that.”

* “It’s an algebraic equation. You have pluses and minuses both, and end up with a sum that’s either plus or minus.”

* “That’s my point. The sum is positive.”

* “How long is it going to take us to reach this utopia?”

* “That’s not my word.”

* “The concept of a world without evil and with just good is ridiculous.”

* “Nononono. We’re ready for a new paradigm.”

* “You say good will triumph. How could it? Why should it? We’re going to have a world with just light and no shadow?”

* “You’ve got to have both to know what each is.”

* “What I’m saying is that in the end good triumphs over evil, although not necessarily in every instance in the meantime.”

* “You haven’t defined ‘triumph.’ ”

* “Everything you say is so militaristic, like it’s war or something.”

* “It’s a form of war. Or is war a form of it?”

* “All right, does anyone believe that evil triumphs over good in the end?”

* “Some have said that good will always triumph over evil because the winning side will always pronounce itself ‘good.’ ”

* “If you become too universal, maybe there is no such thing as good or evil.”

* “I’ll give you this: Good increases energy and evil drains energy.”

* “Then you’re getting into entropy; we’re all dissolving into a gray morass.”

* “The tendency is to focus on the evil, but the human spirit seems to be a good spirit, basically.”

* “I think it’s all sinking down to a gray morass.”

* “Well, then, why not commit suicide?”

* “Because life’s fun.”

* “That’s an asset!”

A poll was taken. In the end, six of the conversants in North Hollywood agreed that good was, indeed, triumphing over evil. Three disagreed. One abstained. That was that.

Chocolate ice cream was served for dessert, and it was a real asset.