The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. Your answer may be different, but you must still face this challenge. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.
Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn't, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? As long as you continue to experience meaning as a problem, you are bound to suffer from the smart-ache that plagues so many smart people.
We've begun now. I hope I've given you some food for thought. If you'd like to continue thinking about the themes I've raised in this introduction, following are some questions for you to answer.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
At the end of each chapter, I provide a few thought-provoking questions. If you want to do a little writing on the issues presented, choose one or more questions to address.
Even if you tackle only one question, you will learn a lot about your situation and point yourself in the direction of answers. Remember that answering a question is not the same as taking action. If in your answer you identify certain work that you ought to do, then by all means, do it!
1 What are your first thoughts about the challenges I've identified and how they do or do not apply to you?
2 Do you agree that a smart person is at greater risk for meaning crises?
3 How do you interpret the phrase value-based meaning-making?
4 Since meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience, what do you suppose you can do to create more of it for yourself?
5 How might the very idea of meaning that you create help you deal with meaning crises?
1
SMARTNESS DISPARAGED
Countless infants are born into a social class, ethnic group, religious group, family of origin, or other set of circumstances or environmental factors in which their native intelligence either counts for little or is held as a negative.
Only a few theories of personality, primarily those influenced by Marxist economic ideas, have taken into account the challenges to personality development and expression created by these environmental circumstances. Yet that disparagement and negativity are hugely significant. If you have a good brain and the world you grow up in demands that you shut it down, you are bound to suffer.
Imagine the following sort of day in the life of a young girl with lots of native intelligence. Her household is in chaos, the kind of chaos that poverty, acrimony, addictions, and unfulfilled lives produce. Surrounded by threats, impulsivity, and zero tolerance for free thought, she somehow manages to get to school—and into another anti-thinking environment.
At school, more chaos prevails and, despite the idea that school advocates for thinking, she is confronted with a shrink-wrapped, fact-based, topic-based, and test-driven curriculum that no adult with the freedom to leave would tolerate for an instant.
After school, she goes off to parochial instruction and gets a narrow religious education that demands obedience, allegiance, and more thoughtlessness. Her evening involves her in more chaos, and to escape it she shuts her door, if she is lucky enough to have a room and a door, and finds some stress relief and some self-soothing by watching hours of ready-made, low-level television programming that further numbs her and dumbs her down. Finally she sleeps, only to awaken to another day just like this one.
What will happen to her brain potential in these circumstances? We can imagine. Likely, the best that she can do is bury herself in her books and become a good student, a grade seeker, a dreamer, or a mini-expert in some niche area of thought like spelling or puzzle solving, all of which is a far cry from becoming the deep, free, satisfied thinker she might have become in other circumstances.
That's probably a best-case scenario. More likely, she will not think much, even though she has the ability to think, and when confronted by tasks that require her to think, she will find herself too anxious and too unprepared to meet the rigors of thinking. As a result, she will fail, disappoint herself, dream small, and begin to form an identity that includes a huge doubt about whether she is as smart as she thought she was.
This child is bound to grow sad, bound to act out or to sabotage herself, bound to show the symptoms of one mental disorder or another, from childhood depression to attention deficit disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder. We may see her try to gain some control of her life through anorexia; we may see her run away, get pregnant early, marry early, try college and drop out, and throughout these years maintain a love-hate relationship with thinking, at once craving it and avoiding it.
A child can't really meet these challenges herself. No six-year-old or nine-year-old or eleven-year-old can change this situation for herself—even if in a corner of her awareness she knows something is seriously wrong, even if she recognizes that there is a better way just out of reach, and even if she tries to stubbornly ignore her environment and entertain dreams and goals for her future.
These negative outcomes are lamentable, but they are also natural. They are exactly what you would expect to see if at every turn you prevented a child from thinking freely and deeply. If you put a good brain in a brain-unfriendly environment, it should not surprise you to see that brain get sad (a state that will eventually be labeled chronic depression), respond impulsively and carelessly rather than thoughtfully, doubt its abilities and its options, and choose a station in life a notch or two below the one it might otherwise have chosen.
Let's follow this child and give her a new lease on life, say, when she is twenty-seven, has had to survive the consequences of these environmental challenges and her own spotty past, and comes into contact with a psychology like natural psychology that alerts her to the fact that the place she has arrived is rather to be expected.
The language of natural psychology—with which we talk about original personality, formed personality, and available personality, about meaning investments and meaning opportunities, about the unfortunate but completely normal (as opposed to so-called abnormal or disordered) consequences of environmental challenges, and about distress relief rather than the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders—can help her think about what has transpired and about what is now required of her if she is to reduce her distress.
In the language of natural psychology, she has an original personality that came with a good brain, a desire to think, and a propensity to think; a formed personality that has had to deal with all the impediments to thinking put in her way and which has dealt with those impediments relatively unsuccessfully; and considerable available personality that possesses an intuitive memory of her original personality and enough awareness of the contours of her formed personality to make real, significant changes.
She can use her available personality to learn how to tolerate the anxiety that now accompanies her efforts at thinking; she can seize thinking as a meaning opportunity and make conscious meaning investments in some thinking domain, whether it's a profession that she thought was out of her reach or a body of knowledge that she would love to study but didn't dare begin for fear of failing herself again. These are the sorts of efforts and changes that she can commence to make.
In addition to learning to deal with the deficits that are part of her formed personality, she can also learn to deal with environmental factors that have not gone away. If she goes back to spend a day with her family, she will again have to deal with that anti-thinking environment. If she has not left her church, she will have to deal with that anti-thinking environment. If her friends sneer at thinking, she will have to deal with them. If she turns on the television to relax, she will have to deal with the anti-thinking programming filling every channel. That she heroically works on herself doesn't prevent environmental factors from continuing