What We Made It

Among the many clichés perpetuated in Mensa lore, none can be more common than this: "Mensa is what you make it." At all levels and in all contexts, we remind ourselves and others that Mensa is a do-it-yourself organization. "Mensa is what you make it" is one chorus we all join in, one flag we all salute. It is so much an article of faith among Mensans that it nearly becomes a second thing we all have in common.

From our early days onward, we have affirmed this creed so often and with such conviction that it is hard to see how we could have overlooked its implications. Yet we have, I believe, fallen short of seeing an important truth. We use this expression to speak to the future, but it is equally true of the past. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, Mensa was what they made it—the "they" who were Mensa then.

In the U.S., Mensa was what Peter Sturgeon and John Codella and Evelyn Glor Malpas made it, what E. Jimmee Stein and Andy Di Cyan and Henry Miller made it, what Gloria Saltzberg and Sander Rubin and Mary Jane (Watson) Stevens made it. What Victor Serebriakoff made it. And what Margot Seitelman made it.

They and hundreds and thousands of others, some of whom are still us.

The implication is clear, if not obvious: when we say what Mensa is, when we try to define its qualities and describe its character, we can't go very far before we're talking about what someone made it, a long time ago, recently, and right now. And that is the only Mensa there is. There is no other Mensa.

What this means is that there is no right Mensa, no wrong Mensa, no Mensa the way it's supposed to be, no true Mensa and no false Mensa. There is only Mensa being made by the people who make it.

In the light of this realization, I see a major mistake of my own. I was wrong to believe that the real Mensa was lost somewhere between "then" and "now." Appealing to an older model of Mensa for a definition of what it should be, decrying the present state of the organization as a degraded version of its true self—that's emotionally honest, perhaps, but it's an error of thought. If I remember Mensa a certain way or want it to be a certain way, for whatever reason, there is no fault in that; but it is nothing but what I want. It isn't what Mensa is.

Mensa is being made by the people who make it, right now. That's us. We don't have to be officers to be among those people, and we don't have to be editors or directors or coordinators or any other titled individuals. If we believe our lore, Mensa is a round-table society where no one has special precedence. To make Mensa, then, we only have to be Mensans.

And then we have to know what we want to make it; for it follows, in the most existential of ways, that we make it what it is whether we have such an intent or not. And it is better that we choose.

This is a difficulty if we feel that we must all want the same thing, because we don't, we won't, we never will. The dangerous philosophies of the world, to me, whether little or great, are the ones that define their mission in universal terms; if their goals are something to which they require others to subscribe, then one of their aims must be the eliminating of nonsubscribers, by conversion or whatever it takes. The problem is not that you think A and I think B. The problem comes if one of us thinks we should both think just A or just B.

But if Mensa is what we make it, then it must be free enough of forms and definitions to be what I make it and also what you and she and he and they make it. It must not be controlled by one set of choices in preference to another.

The Mensa of my vision is no longer a hallowed memory, a lamented lost Mensa of yore. The Mensa of my vision is just there, formless though not void, as open and free of definition and restriction as possible, as hospitable as it can be to the people who will add to it and enrich it and love it and treasure it and protect it and occasionally shake it up (but only when necessary). If Mensa is what I make it, I am directing my actions toward making Mensa the Mensa of my vision — just as we tell each member that he or she can do.

Those Mensans who joy in form and structure and legislation, whose commitment to a business model is absolute, who have forgotten what "leadership" is and think it means to govern, who endorse a Mensa priesthood that dispenses and withholds member privileges selectively, whose idea of Mensa mandates denial of others' idea of Mensa, are true Mensans as much as you and I. There should be a place in Mensa for them to carry out their missions and further their goals. Their goals, which are not Mensa's goals. But it should be done in their name and not in the name of Mensa.

In April 1967 an article entitled "Mensa: Formless and Searching?" appeared in Intelligence: The Mensa Journal. Author Roy Jackson calls for members to embrace Mensa's potential to serve their needs not by mirroring conventional structures but by devising our own, enabling Mensans to achieve successes by measures other than those of recognized societal norms.

"The basic aim," writes Jackson, "should be self-development and fulfillment of personal goals that are usually barred in the outside society. ... Mensa should encourage all gifted people, including underachievers and social drop-outs, to know and to do what they want to do, not what society expects them to do."

The obstacle to reaching that ideal state, he says, is this: "The kind of people that are likely to gain central policy-making power [in Mensa] are precisely the overachievers whose administrative and executive skills should serve the organization and its proper goals—instead of controlling it."

True Mensans though they be, these members—people who are neither fools nor villains but who are used to having their way and are simply doing what they already know how to do instead of applying their considerable powers to the discovery of new solutions that serve us all—pose the greatest threat to the formlessness that is the root of Mensa's strength.

To survive as an entity in the world, of course, Mensa must not be altogether formless. Mensa must have just enough form so there is coherence in the use of resources to provide members with access to one another and to protect members collectively and individually—and only within reason, not absolutely, because too much protection costs too much in freedom—from abuses of that access, as well as to take responsible care of the resources. In the Mensa of my vision, the leaders and stewards and support staff focus their efforts on taking care of it, doing as little as possible to it, with it, or for it beyond the true necessities of sustaining it. They don't think up things for it to do or be. They don't try to make money to buy us more of them or to save money on things we should be doing in order to spend it on things we shouldn't be doing. They don't pattern us after organizations created to deliver ROI for investors when we are a society that exists to afford people access to one another. They don't force artificial growth on us by hormone injection or grafting. They let Mensa be what we make it—all of us, and not just them. With their talents and energy and ambition, they facilitate that and just let the rest go.

This is what I want because I believe that this Mensa will continue to be malleable, to let us make of it what we make of it. This Mensa, undefined, unconstrained, unprescribed and uncommitted—in a word, protean—can be what each of us makes it day by day. It is a work in progress.

When we limit our options, when we take a path that commits us to one definition to the exclusion of another, and when we create laws and structures and systems that work increasingly to forbid choices rather than multiplying them, we are forfeiting our precious plasticity. Our form hardens. "What we make it" loses all meaning. Our favorite Mensa cliché turns to falsehood. In its place, then, we will hear this: "The making of Mensa…is finished."

—Meredy Amyx