Tag: intelligence

Historical Inevitability

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The idea that history is cyclical has been put forth by numerous historians, philosophers, and fiction writers, but one Italian philosopher, named Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), wrote that a fall is also an historical inevitability. In his book La Scienza Nuova, Vico suggested that evidence of this can be found by reading history from the vantage point of the cyclical process of the rise-fall-rise, or fall-rise-fall recurrences, as opposed to studying it in a straight line, dictated by the years in which events occurred. By studying history in this manner, Vico suggested, the perspective of one’s sense of modernity is removed and these cycles of historical inevitability are revealed.

To those of us who have been privy to the lofty altitude of the information age, this notion seems impossible to the point of being implausible. If we are willing to cede to the probability of a fall, as it portends to a certain historical inevitability, we should only do so in a manner that suggests that if there were a fall, it would be defined relative to the baseline of our modern advancements. To these people, an asterisk may be necessary in any discussion of cultures rising and falling in historical cycles. This asterisk would require a footnote that suggests that all eras have creators lining the top of their era’s hierarchy, and those that feed upon their creations at the bottom. The headline grabbing accomplishments of these creators might then define an era, in an historical sense, to suggest that the people of that era were advancing, but were the bottom feeders advancing on parallel lines? Or, is it possible that the creators’ accomplishments might, in some way, inhibit their advancement?

“(Chuck Klosterman) suggests that the internet is fundamentally altering the way we intellectually interact with the past because it merges the past and present into one collective intelligence, and that it’s amplifying our confidence in our beliefs by (a) making it seem like we’ve always believed what we believe and (b) giving us an endless supply of evidence in support of whatever we believe. Chuck Klosterman suggests that since we can always find information to prove our points, we lack the humility necessary to prudently assess the world around us. And with technological advances increasing the rate of change, the future will arrive much faster, making the questions he poses more relevant.” –Will Sullivan on Chuck Klosterman

My initial interpretation of this quote was that it sounded like a bunch of gobbeldy gook, until I reread it and plugged the changes of the day into it. The person who works for a small, upstart company pays acute attention to their inbox, for the procedures and methods of operation change by the day. Those of us who have worked for a larger company, on the other hand, know that change is a long, slow, and often grueling process. It’s the difference between changing the direction of a kayak and a battleship. 

The transformational changes we have experienced in technology, in the last ten years, could be said to fill a battleship, occurring with the rapidity of a kayak’s change of direction. If that is true, how do we adapt to them at such a breakneck pace? Those 40 and older can adapt to change, and we incorporate those changes into our daily lives at a slower pace. Teens and early twenty somethings are quicker and more eager to adapt and incorporate the latest and greatest advancements, regardless the unforeseen, and unintended consequences.

Some have suggested that if the technological changes we have encountered over the last 10 years occurred over the course of 100 years, we might characterize that century as one of rapid change. Is it possible for us to change as quickly, fundamentally, or is there some methodical lag time that we all factor in?

If we change our minds on an issue as quickly as Klosterman suggests, with the aid of our new information resources, are we prudently assessing these changes in a manner that allows us to examine and process unforeseen and unintended consequences before making a change? How does rapid adaption to technological change affect human nature? Does it change as quickly, and does human nature change as a matter of course, or does human nature require a more methodical hand?

These rapid changes, and our adaptation to them, reminds me of the catch phrase mentality. When one hears a particularly catchy, or funny, catchphrase, they begin repeating it. When another asks that person where they first heard that catchphrase, the person that now uses the catchphrase so often now that it has become routine, say they don’t remember where they heard it. Even if they began using it less than a month ago, they believe they’ve always been saying it. They subconsciously adapted to it and altered their memory in such a way that suits them.  

Another way of interpreting this quote is that with all of this information at our fingertips, the immediate information we receive on a topic, in our internet searches, loses value. One could say as much with any research, but in past such research required greater effort on the part of the curious. For today’s consumer of knowledge, just about every piece of information we can imagine is at our fingertips. 

Who is widely considered the primary writer of the Constitution, for example? A simple Google search will produce a name: James Madison. Who was James Madison, and what were his influences in regard to the document called The Constitution? What was the primary purpose of this finely crafted document that assisted in providing Americans near unprecedented freedom from government tyranny, and rights that were nearly unprecedented when coupled with amendments in the Bill of Rights. How much blood and treasure was spent to pave the way for the creation of this document, and how many voices were instrumental in the Convention that crafted and created this influential document?

Being able to punch these questions into a smart phone, and receive the names of those involved can give them a static quality. The names James Madison, Gouvernor Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and all of the other delegates of the Constitutional Convention that shaped, crafted, and created this document could become nothing more than answer to a Google search. Over time, and through repeated searches, a Google searcher could accidentally begin to assign a certain historical inevitability to the accomplishments of these otherwise disembodied answers. The notion being that if these answers aren’t the correct answers, another one could be.

Removing my personal opinion that Madison, Morris, Hamilton, and those at the Constitutional Convention the composed the document, for just a moment, the question has to be asked, could the creation of Americans’ rights and liberties have occurred at any time, with any men or women in the history of our Republic? The only answer, as I see it, involves another question: How many politicians in the history of the world would vote to limit the power they wield, and any future power they might attain through future endeavors? How many current politicians, for example, are likely to vote for their own term-limits? Only politicians who have spent half their life under what they considered tyrannical rule would fashion a document that could result in their own limitations.   

How many great historical achievements, and people, have been lost to this idea of historical inevitability? Was it an historical inevitability that America would gain her freedom from Britain? Was the idea that most first world people would have the right to speak out against their government, vote, and thus have some degree of self-governance inevitable? How many of the freedoms, opportunities, and other aspects of American exceptionalism crafted in the founding documents are now viewed as so inevitable that someone, somewhere would’ve come along and figured out how to make that possible? Furthermore, if one views such actions as inevitable, how much value do they attach to the ideas, and ideals, created by them? If the answers to these questions attain a certain static inevitability, how susceptible are they to condemnation? If an internet searcher has a loose grasp of the comprehensive nature of what these men did, and the import of these ideas on the current era, will it become an historical inevitability that they’re taken away in a manner that might initiate philosopher Vico’s theory on the cyclical inevitability of a fall?

I’ve heard it theorized that for every 600,000 people born, one will be a transcendent genius. I heard this quote secondhand, and the person who said it attributed it to Voltaire, but I’ve never been able to properly source it. The quote does provide a provocative idea, however, that I interpret to mean that the difference between one that achieves the stature of genius on a standardized test, or Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, and the transcendent genius lies in this area of application. We’ve all met extremely intelligent people in the course of our lives, in other words, and some of us have met others who qualify as geniuses, but how many of them figured out a way to apply that abundant intelligence in a productive manner? This, I believe, is the difference between the 1 in 57 ratio that some have asserted is the genius ratio and the 1 in 600,000 born. The implicit suggestion of this idea is that every dilemma, or tragedy, is waiting for a transcendent genius to come along and fix it. These are all theories of course, but it does beg the question of what happens to the other 599,999 that feed off the ingenious creations and thoughts of transcendent geniuses for too long? It also begs the question that if the Italian philosopher Vico’s theories on the cyclical nature of history hold true, and modern man is susceptible to a great fall, will there be a transcendent genius who is able to fix the dilemmas and tragedies that await the victims of the next great fall? 

A Simplicity Trapped in a Complex Mind

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“That’s David Hauser,” my friend Paul said when I asked about a man who sat in the corner of the liquor store talking to himself. “He’s crazy, an absolute loon. Went crazy about a year ago. People say he got so smart that he just snapped one day, like that!” Paul added snapping his fingers.

I loved The Family Liquor Store, because I loved anomalies, and The Family Liquor Store was a veritable breeding ground for them. I knew nothing about anomalies before I started going to The Family Liquor Store. I thought I did, but the patrons there informed me that I had no idea. I knew people who succeeded and others that failed, but my definition of the two measures was relative to my dad’s. We considered his friend’s promotion to department store manager the pinnacle of success. I knew as little about the definition of success as I did the depths of failure and despair I encountered in the liquor store owned by my friend Paul’s parents, where Paul was employed.

Even while immersed in that world of despair, I encountered pride, coping mechanisms, and lies. A customer named John told me that he once played against Wayne Gretzky in a minor league hockey match, Jay informed me of the time he screamed “Go to Hell JFK!” to the man’s face, and Ronny told me of the various strength contests he won. The fact that I flirted with believing these tales informed the regulars in The Family Liquor Store that I was as hilarious as the fools that told them.

“Why would they lie about things like that?” I asked to top off the joke.

“Wouldn’t you?” they asked when they reached a break in their laughter. “If you lived the life they did.”

The unspoken punchline to this ongoing joke was that I might be more lacking in street smarts than any person they ever met. The answer to the question that was never asked regarding my standing in their world was that a thorough understanding of their world could be said to be on par with any intellectual study of the great men of the book smarts world, in that they both involve a basic understanding of human nature.

“You see these guys here,” Paul’s father confidentially whispered to me on another day at The Family Liquor Store. “I could introduce you to them, one by one, and they’d tell you wild stories of success and failure, but the one thing you’ll hear, in almost every case, is the story about how a woman put them down. They all fell for the wrong woman.”

Knowing how this line would stick with me, I turned back to him in the moment, “What’s the wrong woman?” I asked.

“It varies,” he said. “You can’t know. All you can know is that you don’t know, because you’ll be all starry-eyed in the moment. Bring them home to meet your dad, your grandma, and all your friends, and listen to what they say.”

I met a bunch of fussy fellas, since hearing that advice. Some of them wouldn’t even look at a woman below an eight, on the relatively superficial scale of physical appearance. Others looked for excessive class, intelligence, strength and weakness, and still others were in a perpetual, perhaps unconscious, search for their mama. For me, it’s always been about sanity. I’ve dated some phenomenal women throughout my life, and I’ve also had an inordinate attraction to that sassy mama-who-could-bring-the-drama, but when those ultimatums of increased involvement arrived that sage advice from Paul’s father wormed its way into my calculations. I wouldn’t limit this warning to women, however, as I would put just as many men through the FrootLoopery index I developed for those with whom I choose to surround myself.  I did this, because as much I like crazy, and I do enjoy their company in near-spiritual manner that could only be called a like-minded bond, I did not want to end up in an incarnation of my personal visage of hell, otherwise known as The Family Liquor Store, where it appeared a wide variety of bitter, lost souls entered, but none escaped.

For all of the questions I asked in The Family Liquor Store, and I asked a ton of them, there was one question that I dare not ask: Why would a normal family, with normal kids, want to open a liquor store on the corners of failure and despair? I never asked this question, even as a young man with an insufferable amount of curiosity, because I knew that the answers I received would reveal some uncomfortable truths about the one who answered. One harsh answer I learned, over time, was that if we surround ourselves with failure and despair, we feel better about ourselves and our meager place in the world.

“How does someone become so smart that they go crazy?” I asked Paul, still staring at David Hauser, the man who appeared to be having full-fledged conversations with himself.

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “They say he had a fantastic job, prestige, and boatloads of money, but he got fired one day, and no one knows why. His wife divorced him when he couldn’t find other work, and he ended up sitting in the corner over there, talking to himself for hours on end, drinking his brew.”

Among the possibilities he listed was the idea that a woman might have led to David’s fall. I latched onto that possibility, because it bolstered Paul’s summation of the men in The Family Liquor Store. I was satisfied with the answer, but Paul and those who informed him, said it was more complicated than that. They wouldn’t let that too-smart angle go in regard to David Hauser’s condition. They declared that was the, “The nut of it all.”

Talking to yourself was a common practice of The Family Store patronage. Those who didn’t do so were the ones who stood out. The interesting and defining factor that separated David Hauser from the pack was that he not only talked to himself, he listened, and he appeared to be a good listener in those one-sided conversations, a characteristic that made him an anomaly in a world of anomalies. There were times when David looked to a speaker no one else could see, but he reserved those shared glances with the speaker for the introductory portion of the speaker’s conversation. When the purported speaker’s dialogue progressed, David Hauser’s gaze took a diagonal slant, and it morphed into an outward glance, followed by an inward one that suggested he was contemplating what the other was saying. At times, David Hauser and the purported speaker said nothing at all.

Prior to David Hauser, I assumed that everyone who spoke did so to fill a void. In a world of people with no listening skills, most intangible friends are excellent listeners. David Hauser filled that void, but he and his companion created other voids, what some might call seven-second lulls. At times, the lulls in those conversations ended with active-listening prompts on David’s part. This display suggested that the purported speaker ended the lull, and David’s listening prompts encouraged the speaker to continue. At other times, David stopped speaking abruptly, as if the purported speaker just interrupted him.

I was intrigued with David Hauser when he first sat down to discuss whatever he felt compelled to discuss with his imaginary friend, Paul’s description of the man’s fall fascinated me, but the more I watched the man and studied his progression, the more obsessed I became with him. I knew Paul would mock me for it, and I knew he could be brutal, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know what this guy was saying.

“I have to know what he’s saying,” I told Paul.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Paul said. “Why?”

I thought of telling him that I thought it was funny, but I tried that in the past and Paul spotted the ruse for what it was. He knew I was always on the hunt for primary source information that I couldn’t learn from books. I went through a whole cavalcade of excuses in the brief pause between us, and I came out of that saying, “I don’t know,” which was about the most honest answer I could’ve said, because I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. 

What I think I needed to know was if David Hauser needed to talk to an imaginary person to help him through this moment of devastating failure in his life, or if that moment led him to become mentally impaired “Like that!” as Paul described it. Did David Hauser speak to himself to sort through internal difficulties, as a form of therapy? Did he recognize how odd it seemed to us on some level, and he needed it so much that he didn’t care what we thought, or did he genuinely believed he was talking with someone else.

I didn’t know what I would see or hear to satisfy my questions, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t pursue this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Is there a word that can inform another that a person genuinely believes another person is there? I wondered. Is there a word, or series of words, that will inform an observer that a person has manifested another person to satisfy their needs? The latter was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, but I figured David’s mannerisms, his tone, and the context of his active-listening prompts would form some sort of conclusion for me.

“Be careful,” Paul said after mocking me. Those two words slipped out as if he was repeating a warning he received when he considered investigating David Hauser further. To pound his warning home, Paul dropped some dramatic repetition on me, “Be careful.”

I thought of mocking him for being so cinematic, but I couldn’t shake the idea that Paul’s warning held some merit, and my curiosity in this matter might prove dangerous. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What if he says something so intellectual that it gets trapped in your brain and you go insane trying to figure it out?”

“Could that happen?”

“How does a guy go insane by being too smart?”

Paul could’ve been messing with me, and my obsession with David Hauser kept me from seeing it, but it was more likely that he believed it. We were both avid fans of the horror genre, and we were both irrational teenagers who still believed in various superstitions, black magic, curses, elements of dark art, and the supernatural. Our minds were just beginning to grasp the complex, inner workings of the adult, real world, but we were still young enough to believe that that there could be a reality occurring in our world that operated from an altogether different premise.

Long story short, Paul’s attempts to warn me, followed by his questions, did set me back, and I did try to avoid the subject of David Hauser for a spell. I was not what one would call an intellectual young man. My curiosity was insatiable, and I was an observant sort, but tackling highbrow intellectual theory or highbrow literature was beyond me. I was ill equipped for that, ill-equipped, naïve, and vulnerable to the idea that a thought, like a corruptible woman bent on destroying, could leave a man incapacitated to a point that they frequent a low-rent liquor store for the rest of their days speaking to non-existent people.

In the brief moment that followed Paul’s warning, I focused on this idea that David Hauser reached some sort of intellectual peak and went over it. What is an intellectual peak, I asked myself. It seemed like one of those foolish, theoretical questions we ask ourselves just to be provocative, but I found it fascinating, and as Paul said I had a real life example of it before me.  If there was an intellectual peak, I figured that I hadn’t even come close to mine at that point in my life, but I thought that I should work through the dynamics of it in the event that I ever brushed against that border. Will a person know when they’ve arrived at the border of an intellectual peak? I wondered. Is there a maximum capacity one should be wary of crossing? If they do cross it, do they risk injury, similar to athletes who push themselves beyond the limits of their physical ability? I thought of a pole-vaulter, sticking a pole in the ground, attempting a jump he should have reconsidered and the resultant physical injuries that could follow.

When I put those irrational fears aside, other irrational fears replaced those, as I walked over to David Hauser. Paul’s “Be careful” played in my head, along with the realization that prior to building the courage to step near David Hauser my fear of him was speculative in nature. It dawned on me that all I was doing was braving the fears of the unknown. I had no idea how I would deal with whatever reality lay ahead, but I braved those fears and began to cautiously approach David Hauser.

David Hauser’s volume lowered a bit, as I neared his sphere of influence. I considered that a coincidence and I progressed, pretending to look at something outside the window behind him. As I neared closer, his volume dropped even lower, until he stopped talking. I didn’t think that was a coincidence, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if he was trying to prevent me from hearing what he was saying.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I was more than a little relieved. I felt brave for nearing him even though I was afraid. I was wary of getting too close, because I feared the idea of having one of his overwhelming theories implanted in my brain. I assumed such an implantation might be equivalent to an alien putting a finger on a human head and introducing thoughts so far beyond that brain’s capacity that it could cause the victim to start shaking and drooling, like what happened to that kid in The Shining. I considered it plausible that I could wake in a straitjacket with that theory rattling around in my head, searching for answers, until I ended up screaming for a nurse to come in and provide me some relief in the form of unhealthy doses of chlorpromazine to release the pressure in my head.

I later learned that David Hauser achieved an advanced degree in some subject, earned from some Northeastern Ivy League school. I never found out if that was a fact or not, but if it was, it placed him so far above those trapped in this incarnation of hell, known as The Family Liquor Store, that I figured everyone involved needed a way to deal with his story, and everyone loved the story.

I wasn’t there when David Hauser told the story of what happened to him, so I don’t have primary source information I wanted regarding his fall from grace, but the secondhand stories of how this once prominent man, of such unimaginable abilities, fell to a level of despair and failure was on the tip of the tongue of everyone that heard it. “Like that!” they said, with a snap of their fingers to punctuate the description. Bubbling beneath that surface fascination were unspoken fears, confusion, and concern that if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us. David was also our symbol for impairment, and the idea that the luxury of physical and mental health frees us up to achieve the luxury of individuality. This isn’t to say that impaired individuals can’t achieve individuality, but that they’re more distracted by trying to maintain health. We don’t appreciate this luxury as much as we fear the possibilities of the opposite. In doing so, we search for answers. No one knew who came up with our answer first, and no one questioned if that person knew what they were talking about when they dropped their prognosis, but no one truly cared whether it was a fact or not. We just needed an answer, or some way to cope with the enormity of it all.

My guess was that even if we could’ve convinced David Hauser to sit down, in a clinical setting, or create some sort of climate that would assure him that no one would use his answers to satisfy some sort of perverse curiosity, we still wouldn’t get any answers out of him, because he probably didn’t have any.

The man who spent most of his life answering the most difficult questions any of us could imagine, hit a block, a wall, or some obstacle that prevented him from finding the answer that could prove beneficial to his continued existence. His solution, therefore, was to talk it out with a certain, special no one for answers.

That led me to wonder if that had anything to do with David Hauser lowering his voice and silencing as I neared him. If David Hauser’s mind was once as strong and complex as those in The Family Liquor Store suggested, and he had one question stuck on repeat in his head, to the point of needing to manifest another presence to help him work through it, how embarrassing would it be for such a man to have an eavesdropping teenager, who knew so little about the world, find that answer for him? 

I had an answer for what happened to David Hauser, we all did, but I’m quite sure our answer didn’t come anywhere close to solving the actual question of how a man could fall so far. I’m quite sure it was nothing more than a comfortable alternative developed by us, for us, to try to resolve the complexities of such an complicated and intricate question that could’ve driven us insane “Like that!” if we tried to figure it out and it trapped itself in our brain.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy the other members of the seven strong:

The Thief’s Mentality

He Used to Have a Mohawk

That’s Me In the Corner

You Don’t Bring me Flowers Anymore!

… And Then There’s Todd

When Geese Attack!

The Eye of the Fly

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In a study published in Journal Science, researchers found that flies have the fastest visual responses in the animal kingdom. The study suggests that this rapid vision may be a result of a mechanical force that generates electrical responses that are sent to the brain much faster, for example, than our eyes, where responses are generated using traditional chemical messengers. The fly’s vision is so fast that it is capable of tracking movements up to five times faster than our eyes.

I realize that the fly would trade this one strength for even twenty-five percent of our brain power, but one has to wonder why the fly was given such an incredible eye compared to our relatively weak one. Why would we be granted the most complex brain in the animal kingdom, and not have the physical advantages inherent in the eye of the fly, the ears of the owl, the various sensory receptors of the snake, or the nose of the bloodhound? Wouldn’t we use those gifts better than those mindless animals, and insects, that don’t know enough to appreciate it?

The obvious answer, from the Darwin perspective, is that humans don’t need these extra senses for survival to avoid predators. The more interesting perspective, I believe, is that having an extra sense would prove such a distraction that it might inhibit the tedious, arduous process of developing the complex human brain.

In every young human child’s development, there is a constant push and pull. Parents and teachers push children to develop habits that they hope will eventually develop that brain as it matures. They know that if that child is going to find any measure of success within the species, they will need to push the child to help them develop that brain to capacity in a manner that can be painstakingly, gradual. Some would argue that no human ever reaches the maximum capacity of the brain, but it’s not much of a reach to suggest that if we were distracted by a super sense we wouldn’t come as close as we currently do.

On that note, this theoretical argument rises whenever I watch a Superhero movie. It’s great that this person (or these people depending on the movie) have these superhuman powers, but shouldn’t there be a countering deficit? If the natural world granted this individual powers we can’t fathom, shouldn’t there be some sort of deficit? Shouldn’t they be dumb as a rock, noticeably awkward socially, or some deficit to counter the natural, biological and/or personal focus?  It could be argued that there have never been more distractions, pulling children away from the painstakingly, gradual process of brain development that provide more instant gratification. Yet, there have always been distractions. It could also be argued that while there are more distractions now, there have always been distractions, and coaching or teaching children how to avoid distractions has remained constant.

I am not a Superman aficionado, but Ma and Pa Kent probably spent their lives developing Clark’s brain before he began relying on his superpowers, Spider-Man was a teen-ager when the radioactive spider bit him, so while his development to adulthood may have been hindered, he likely had a decent foundation. Some of the superheroes, in the various universes, were superheroes since birth. They have various natural powers but no deficit in human development. It just doesn’t seem well-rounded to me. 

Although there are numerous benefits to a young child engaging in athletics, it could be argued that it is an impediment to the optimal development of the brain. There are exceptionally gifted athletes, of course, but most athletes had to kinesthetically learn the craft. They had to do it so often that they developed muscle memory and whatever we call the level of muscle memory that allows them to hit a fastball that is relatively difficult for others on their level to hit. The point is that when a child is focusing so much of their time and energy to achieving on an athletic level, it often leads to less focus placed on academics. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, as some achieve All-American status in athletics and All-Academic in the classroom, but most children learn to focus on one area to the detriment of the other. 

“Keep your grades up if you want to maintain eligibility,” the adults surrounding the gifted athlete will say, but they rarely coach them to achieve academic excellence, and this is eventually displayed in the post-game interviews of those few elite athletes who have achieved the professional level.

The same distractions can be found among the beautiful. Both genders learn that beauty is power, but most would acknowledge that the beautiful female has far more power in the room than anyone else, including the beautiful male. Most beautiful females learn, at some point in their lives, that no matter what they do in the classroom, their mental prowess will always be considered secondary to their physical attributes, and that they would be probably be better off if they just sat there and looked beautiful. They subsequently learn to speak less often, so as to silently soak up the power their beauty wields in the room?

Both of these superficial exaggerations could be called distractions in human development, and those who have these physical characteristics learn to employ their own distractions to keep people from focusing on their lack of intellectual development by criticizing those who wasted their time devoting precious resources to developing the brain.

“Did you read Lord of the Rings when you were a kid?” 

“No,” the beautiful reply, “I was out getting laid.” 

“At fifteen?” the nerdy brainiac asks, “because I read those books at fifteen.” 

“Yes,” the beautiful person responds. 

“You were getting laid so often that you didn’t have time to read?” 

“YES!”

That exchange is not a direct quote from the TV show Friends, but it’s close. It encourages the idea that meaningless sex trumps any other activities of youth. “I was out climbing trees, playing football, listening to KISS, and collecting Star Wars cards.” 

“Really, because I was out getting laid.”

Sex between immature individuals should be the goal in life. It is the end game, and the end of the conversation. No one ever thinks to ask, “What did all that sex end up doing for you?” 

“Doing for me? What are you talking about? I was having sex when you were reading Tolkein, the comic strips Dondi and Peanuts, and all of those stupid Chose Your Own Adventures you nerds read.” 

“Did you forge the relationships you had with these people in such a way that helped you have more meaningful experiences that helped shape your life in profound ways in life?” 

“No, I was having sex with them.”

We’re not to question the idea that if we could’ve had more sexual experiences when we were young, we’d be better individuals now, or at least cooler people. Others drop the philosophy that if we had sex more often as young people, we wouldn’t be such a stick in the mud now. Some of us did have such opportunities when we were nine or ten-year-old, but we turned them down because we were scared, and we weren’t ready. So, if we said yes to that incredibly beautiful sixteen-year-old babysitter, we’d be better people now? 

Due to the fact that so many people laugh at such admissions now, we’ve been conditioned to feel shame, regret, and embarrassment about that fact. We feel shame admitting that, and we regret it almost every day. Why, because we have been conditioned to believe that that exchange of fluids would’ve somehow made us better people. This line of thinking gives credence to the idea that we never truly escape high school. We all wanted to be the cool kids in high school, and no amount of rationale will ever defeat this. Even when we reach our forties, and beyond, and we begin to appreciate our nerdy, reading youth for what it was, we still find it difficult to defeat the superficial, hyper-sexual Friends mentality.

On the flip side, no one would say that reading the Lord of the Rings series is an essential component of a child’s development, it does put that child on the road to every parent’s holy grail: The love of reading. A goal made all the more difficult by the instant gratification philosophy put forth by the Friends show. It did not, nor will it ever make a person better or cooler person 

For most of us, the opportunities to be sexually active at a young age were there, but some of us were too busy being kids, doing kid’s stuff, and as I wrote, we were simply too scared. When this Friends joke came along and told us that if we were truly cool, we should’ve been doing that all along, we regretted being that nerd who was too scared, enjoyed reading fantasy books, and mindlessly enjoyed our youth. We thought we missed out on something fundamental that made them better than us. In truth, such a philosophy will eventually catch up to them when the one thing that separated them from the pack, sexual activity, becomes more and more meaningless to them as they age. Like a drug user, they might vie for more and more of it for more meaningful sexual interactions, to try to recapture the euphoria they felt when they were virgins touched for the very first time. At some point, after a number of ruined marriages and meaningless encounters, they might realize that their life has amounted to nothing more than a series of superficial indulgences that have amounted to nothing more than a superficial life.

That’s another question I might have for these Friends’ types, if I agreed to have sex with my babysitter when I was nine or ten, would sexual interactions prove less meaningful throughout my life, or would it prove so meaningful that I developed a sexual addiction? Another question, on the same plane, would sex become such a primary driver for me that the rest of the otherwise normal, youthful activities I experienced between 10 and 18 be rendered comparatively meaningless?   

It is for all these reasons that some of us find it difficult to sit quietly through those superhero movies that depict an exceptionally gifted men and women, gifted with the eye of the fly, the ears of the owl, the various sensory receptors of the snake, or the nose of the bloodhound who are also exceptionally gifted intellects. There is just no way, some of us want to shout. Some of them might be smart, for there are always exceptions to the rule, but not that smart, not that exceptionally gifted in intellectual arenas. There’s always a trade-off, especially if they’ve been an exceptionally gifted, physical specimen since birth. Some may have been trained by their parents, or pseudo parents, to avoid relying on their gifts, but we have to think they would’ve accidentally, or incidentally, relied on their special gifts to the detriment of optimal brain development. There would’ve been some point when they realized that they didn’t need to go through the painstakingly arduous, and at times embarrassing, process of gradual development. In human nature, as in nature, there is always a trade-off in this sense.

An interesting question some sci-fi movies explore is if we only explore 10-13% of our brain, an appraisal some neurologists suggest is a well-travelled myth, what if we trained our focus on attaining the eye of the fly, or the hearing of the owl, or the nose of the bloodhound. Would it be possible if we sent our son to eye of the fly school and our daughter to ears of the owl school, and those schools focused as much effort on those characteristics as they do brain development in school? Even if it were, why would we do it? We don’t need such characteristics for survival, and while they might prove useful in some arenas, it would pale in comparison to the importance of overall development of the brain. The eye of the fly might prove beneficial to some Fortune 500 companies in some way, the military, and the revival of the modern carnival, but it would probably also diminish the place atop the animal kingdom that our brains have attained.