A Day in the Life of...

I have found society at large to be anti-intellectual as a whole. Einstein and Newton are both posthumously accused of having Asperger's Syndrome. Likely, high intelligence is equally nature and nuture, partly genetics and partly due to the environment you were raised in. Generally, people who are highly intelligent question why things are as they are. Since societies tend to want people not to ask questions, but to conform, intelligent people are "troublemakers". The sneaky way to control them now, since religion doesn't work any more, is to malign them by giving them a disease, as if intelligence wasn't enough of a social curse. The Jargon File perfectly summarizes this socialization in Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality:

"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’."

It's this same line of thinking that has me wondering why women are overmedicated with pills. In the 1970's and 80's, it was Valium. Now the preferred pill for your wife or Mom is Prozac. Women generally become even more intelligent after giving birth.* (Despite some women acting less intelligent than they really are to attract a mate.) Intelligent people tend to become more depressed than the general population, probably from utter frustration. Rather than dealing with what is making them depressed, these women are sent to the doctor, or go willingly. The doctor doesn't have time to deal with them or only treats the symptoms, so he prescribes Prozac or some other drug to bring them into line. The insanity here is that society promotes this drug-induced happiness, while prosecuting "illegal" forms of drug-induced happiness. So, as people become more and more unhappy for whatever reasons, what next? Manipulation through religious beliefs, social beliefs, and fear will only work so long.

* Unfortunately, I can't find the research for this claim. But I've seen it personally with one woman, although I can't rule out her deceiving her husband.