Can High Intelligence Be a Burden Rather Than a Boon?

HughPickens.com writes David Robson has an interesting article at BBC on the relationship between high intelligence and happiness. "We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness," writes Robson. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest." As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." The first steps to studying the question were taken in 1926 when psychologist Lewis Terman decided to identify and study a group of gifted children. Terman selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the "Termites", and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day. "As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman's expectations – there were many who pursued more "humble" professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average." According to Robson, one possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. During the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations (PDF).

Comments

Re:What the fuck are you talking about?

[radtea]

Their high priests and emperors would cut the hearts out of living individuals, and then make those victims eat their own still-beating hearts before burning them.

Your slip into hyperbole here is not helping your case, which is otherwise pretty accurate.

The human heart is very well protected. Humans only have ten of fifteen seconds of consciousness without blood flow. Even granted they were using stone knives, which are insanely hard and sharp, cutting through the rib cage, severing the aorta, the vena cava and the pulmonary veins and arteries is not the work of ten or fifteen seconds.

It is also likely that the victims were too busy screaming to be properly said to eat anything.

So while the New World was in fact dominated by a blood cult that was carried out more formally in the politically organized areas, and it is not impossible that a few still-beating hearts were shoved into a few still-working mouths, the ritual of "feeding the victim their own heart" was a ritual, not a literal thing, and is best described as such.

You probably know all that, but the people who believe the myths about non-European cultures likely don't.

The blood cult was practiced all over the New World, much as the Norse Pantheon is recognizably related to the Sumerian one. Ideas travel. So even amongst the pre-political peoples of what is now Canada the practice of ritual torture, sacrifice and cannibalism was common, as was the denuding of entire landscapes for the sake of game.

The notion that North American native peoples lived in any kind of harmony with nature is simply false. We have overwhelming archeological and ethnographic evidence to the contrary, and anyone who believes otherwise is engaging in Creationist levels of evidence-denial.

Re:What the fuck are you talking about?

[Runaway1956]

"Why the fuck do you make the idiotic claims that you do?"

Useful idiots are useful idiots. Ever notice that those who denigrate European and US culture are almost always leftists? They are communism's "useful idiots".