mayhem.
It is natural and predictable that our environment may pressure us to not think. This pressure will produce pain as we intuit that we are missing out on a native opportunity and will negatively affect our personality, producing everything from math anxiety to depression. If you were born to think and got pushed off that path, then one of your chief jobs, if you want to experience less distress, will be making use of your available personality to craft a new, friendlier relationship with your brain.
A child who grows up in an environment that disparages thinking, that actively works to shut it down at every turn, and that begins to track him and tell him what he is good for and what is beyond his reach, will then find himself in the jaws of his society's work machinery. He will be fit for one sort of job and not another, he will be aimed into one social class and not another, and he will find himself with limited, disappointing options. Here is how Jonathan in England explained it:
I don't know how it works in other countries, but where I live, there is a life-tracking effect in place, where if you happen to be somehow put on the wrong track, as regards your intelligence, it can be a nightmare trying to put it straight later in life.
One of my fellow Mensans complained that she encountered resistance from potential employers because she had been forced to take CSE exams at school instead of the more prestigious O-Level, even though she had later gone on to acquire the professional certifications necessary for her chosen career.
It cannot simply be left up to a young school dropout who has been mistracked and educationally disserviced, and who has been let loose on the world of industry, to now suddenly redevelop the self-esteem that has been robbed from her, to expect her to solve her finances (probably by now on an entry-level job in the service industry) so she can go to college and make it through a degree program as if everything had all been fine and dandy.
It can take years to recover from such a mauling, and even when the emotional and personal side of things is resolved, there is still the matter of no degree and no proper career. Unfortunately, industry and academia both act as if the highest level of educational attainment that was available to a person when young represents the maximum worth of their mind. That's kind of tough when it wasn't your fault.
There needs to be more help for adults in such situations, perhaps via fast-track apprenticeship programs, so that they can get into suitable careers. Many of us in this situation actually read and study a great deal independently and so don't want to sit through classes just for certification. The unresolved situation in my case is a lack of a suitable career that taps in to my interests and aptitudes. I am getting older and remain a highly gifted autodidact unsuccessfully searching for a job in the neurosciences.
A smart person has a desire to think, a need to think, and an ability to think. But the nature of family, school, and work; the structure of society; and the proclivities of the people around him often conspire to put out his intellectual fire.
His family is unlikely to inspire him or flame his desire to think; school is unlikely to inspire him; his job is unlikely to inspire him; his pastor is unlikely to inspire him; mass entertainment and his other relaxations are unlikely to inspire him; the uninteresting conversations around him are unlikely to inspire him.
He can't help but recognize the headline truth about his life and his environment: “Little thinking allowed here.” Yet he may be surprised to learn just how deep this antipathy runs. In fact, in most societies thought is not just disparaged; the thinking person is targeted as an enemy of the people. He is mocked as elitist and effete, his progressive views are hated, and if he lives in a society run by tyrants, he will be silenced and may be imprisoned or murdered.
Tyrants hate intellectuals, for intellectuals as a class see tyranny for what it is and can articulate what they see. They know when freedom is being violated and stolen. They are better attuned to knowing that they are being fed lies. They recognize to what extent the majority opinion is an anti-intellectual one.
Attacks on thinking and attacks on smart people occur all the time. Here is one report from contemporary Iraq, as reported by the watchdog group A Face and a Name: Civilian Victims of Insurgent Groups in Iraq:
Some Iraqi academics see the current attacks as a way to destroy Iraq's intellectual elite. Precise figures are difficult to obtain, but studies suggest that doctors and academics are particularly at risk. A study by the Iraqi Ministry of Health concluded that armed groups have abducted between 160 and 300 Iraqi doctors since April 2003, and killed more than twenty-five. Nearly 1,000 doctors have fled the country, the study said, with an average of thirty more following each month. To stem the outflow, the ministry broadcast a public service announcement on television in spring 2005, with a message that said: ‘Dear Citizens, please do not kill doctors—you may need them one day.’
Professors at Iraq's once prestigious universities are also under attack. According to an April 2005 United Nations University report, assassins have killed forty-eight academics since 2003, and many more teachers and professors brave daily threats. Hundreds of academics and professionals have been threatened with death and told to leave Iraq. According to the Association of University Teachers, 2,000 professors have left Iraq since 2003, joining the 10,000 professors the association says left the country in the twelve years after the Gulf War.
Attacks on people who can think occur in every culture and in every epoch. Rebellious feminists in Russia are labeled with mental disorders made up on the spot for the purposes of incarcerating them. Scientists who point out the environmental dangers caused by business are ridiculed as fear mongers. Every age and every culture has its versions of cultural revolutions, inquisitions, and Scopes trials.
It is impossible for a child who is born smart to have any inkling that her abilities are likely to be disparaged, that thinking itself will be envied and hated by some in her society, or that she may be targeted by her government because she has chosen a thinking profession. What smart child building with blocks or surfing the Net could possibly suspect how unfriendly her species is to thinking and to the fruits of thinking like science, culture, and freedom? Such a notion would make no sense to her. Yet those are the abiding truths about our species that perennially contribute to the distress that smart people experience.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
1 Was your smartness disparaged as you were growing up?
2 What messages did you receive about your capabilities and talents?
3 What messages did you receive about whether it was admirable or unseemly to be smart?
4 If you received mixed messages about your smartness, what was the bottom line or ultimate message?
5 Given that those messages and that upbringing necessarily influenced your formed personality, what do you need to do now to recover your rightful smartness?
2
SMART WORK AS OXYMORON
We can imagine a situation far back in time in which nothing in a person's life could be singled out as one's profession or line of work. If you had to grow or catch your own food, make your own clothes, dream up your own metaphors for the night sky, heal your own injuries, make your own love matches, concoct your own stimulants and sedatives, and in every way imaginable take care of yourself and amuse yourself, you had no profession or line of work. You were simply living; you were simply a human being.
You weren't a baker or a homebuilder or a utensil maker or a natural philosopher; you were all those things. Now such a life is virtually impossible. While you can be several things—a lawyer during the day and a painter on Sunday; a grocer during the day, a cabinet maker in the evening, and a fisherman on the weekend; and so on—there is an undeniable sense in which our species has sorted itself into jobs, professions, and lines of work.
Smart people, if they get the chance or make the chance, will find themselves needing to choose from among a standard menu of work opportunities with names like doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist, novelist, entrepreneur, and so on. Each job on this list