You Think What

I was born August 1952, after according to my mother, 30 plus hours of labor. When I was about to be born the doctor wasn’t there so they had her close her legs and try to keep the baby, me in.

My mother was later outraged by this because she learned that either preventing the baby from coming out, or protracted delivery of 30+ hours, can cause brain damage. What was the combined effect of both?

My mother was worried for me. And I am sure there may be siblings or acquaintances that believe the worry was justified, but however that may be her fears proved ungrounded because I turned out to be the brightest in the family, and one of the brightest amongst most my acquaintances as well.

Whether this is because I was actually more intelligent, I doubt, or because I was better educated and had a keener interest in, and appetite for learning – this is possibly the truth – it is difficult to conclusively know.

I nowadays believe most children are considerably brighter than we give them credit for. I dare say all of them, or most of them are near geniuses. Our society I believe is at fault here. For it somehow manages to dissuade, to discourage all or most natural tendencies towards intelligence, and turn them off like switches one by one until what is left is a very dull ordinary individual.

We celebrate the genius, the intelligent at all odds, while deliberately mass-producing the plodding mediocrity and wonder why it could not be different.

We don’t need, as in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, to add chemicals to the egg or fetus, or the newly fertilized embryo to suppress intelligence; we systematically do this within our culture and education system within the first five years.