Why Smart People Hurt. Eric Maisel

the French government to launch a massive campaign of insecticide spraying, the mosquito population shrank dramatically until those mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide had the chance to grow in numbers. But those resistant mosquitoes turned out to be easier prey for spiders than their forebears were. They were more resistant to insecticide and also less adept at avoiding spiders. This is the way of nature, and how could anyone predict such things?

      So we must pity our imaginary evolutionary futurist his job. But our job is simpler. It is to look at this exact brain in a naturalistic context with an understanding that it is not the best it can be but simply an evolved, imperfect contraption. It does not come with an off switch that might allow it to get a good night's sleep every single night. It does not come equipped to solve math problems beyond its capabilities. It does not come equipped to prophesize and know for certain that this love will last or that this enthusiasm will prove a meaning opportunity, even though it is supposed to say—and mean—exactly such things at the altar and on job applications.

      We must understand that we are evolved and not designed. With that understanding comes a huge sigh of relief as we suddenly realize that we are bound to manifest shortfalls and that we will regularly dismay and disappoint ourselves. It also brings an equally huge warning sign as we recognize that neither we nor the rest of our species are adequately equipped to handle personal, communal, or species-wide challenges.

      This warning is twofold. We remind ourselves that we must be alert to the many challenges that we will have to meet with respect to this experimental brain. We also remind ourselves that our fellow human beings are not who we would like them to be but who they are, and that we are going to be challenged by their brains. To take just one example that repeats itself throughout the history of our species—and that will continue to repeat itself until we are different creatures—we will have to deal with those of our fellow creatures who have become either authoritarian leaders or authoritarian followers.

      Theodor Adorno, the German-born sociologist associated with the phrase the authoritarian personality; Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychoanalyst and German émigré; and the UC Berkeley social psychologists Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford championed investigations of the authoritarian personality back in the early 1950s. They took as their starting point the Freudian model of the psyche and argued that a certain sort of punitive, rigid, and conventional upbringing produced a child, and then an adult, forced to control his roiling id with a punitive and rigid superego. They argued that certain traits arose from this particular and precise dynamism, traits that coalesced into the authoritarian personality.

      They concluded that the authoritarian personality comprised nine qualities or psychological orientations including anti-intellectualism, cynical destructiveness, a superstitious nature, and exaggerated concerns about sexual activity. Whether or not their model is accurate, the phenomenon can't be missed unless you close your eyes to it. We may not genuinely understand why authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers come to be, but we are obliged not to act like we don't see them. They too are the fruit of this experimental model and are one of the ways that our brain is taxed as we try to fathom how to live in a world full of brains dreaming up ways to dumb us down, rule us in bed, and restrict our freedom.

      We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature. It is easy to see how we might have evolved into exactly this situation—and then be stuck here. This amounts to a really terrible stuck place: imagine a machine that, grinding away at jobs too hard for it, progressively wears itself down and, possessing no off switch, never gets a moment's peace off the line.