We have arrived at an interesting moment in the evolution of our species when a smart person in a first-world culture is pestered by two contradictory feelings: first that he is as special a creature as nature has yet produced and second that he's not very special at all, just excited matter here for a while and off again into universal dark matter.
This first feeling inflates him and makes him want to puff out his chest and preen a bit. This second feeling makes him want to crawl in a hole, act carelessly, or sit inert on the sofa. How unfortunate for a creature to be buffeted in such contradictory ways!
These twin feelings lead a person to the following pair of conclusions: that while he is perhaps quite smart, he is nevertheless rather like a cockroach, trapped with a brain that really isn't big enough for his purposes, perhaps trapped in a corner of an academic discipline, a research field, a literary genre, or in some other small place, trapped by his creatureliness, and trapped by life's very smallness.
I would like to dub this the god-bug syndrome: the prevalent and perhaps epidemic feeling of greatness walking hand-in-hand with smallness that plagues so many people today.
This is not, to use old-fashioned language, some sort of neurosis or neurotic belief. This is the quite sensible apprehension that there are two ways to look at life, as poignantly special and as pitiably worthless; that both views, while they clash, are entirely real and appropriate; and that a person can cycle between these two views almost minute by minute, feeling equal to life and up to life's challenges one second and pathetically inept and unequal to even thinking about making dinner the next.
This mix of reasonable self-pride and reasonable self-pity, in which what may be a completely healthy narcissistic attachment to one's own specialness collides with existential reality, produces people who look confident one moment and ineffectual the next, motivated one moment and apathetic the next, sober and hard-working one moment and self-indulgent and addicted the next. How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome.
It is startling that the same person can feel so grand and also so very small. Yet we see that picture all the time, as evidenced by the chronic sadness, mood swings, cycles of effort and lethargy, and secret self-soothing vices that so many smart people manifest. This college professor is famous for his theories and his addictions; this painter is exhibited everywhere and is a chronic hoarder at home; this physicist is brilliant by day and an insomniac night crawler; this lawyer can't be out-argued but has ballooned to three hundred pounds. This is the god-bug syndrome in action.
Traditional psychologies have considered this tension a disorder and have coined phrases like delusions of grandeur and inferiority complex to try to capture something of this so-called pathological dynamic. But at heart what we are talking about is not pathology but an intense conflictual knowing, a knowing that we are worthy smacking up against a knowing that we are just passing through: a knowing, that is, that we matter and that we do not matter. This is a true and not a pathological understanding. Every smart person possesses this understanding and can't help but feel distressed by this understanding.
In the past, this syndrome has indeed been pathologized. In the language of Adler, a disciple of Freud's, what we are looking at is a superiority complex driven by a hidden inferiority complex—or an inferiority complex driven by a hidden superiority complex. Adler put it this way: “We should not be astonished if in the cases where we see an inferiority complex we find a superiority complex more or less hidden. On the other hand, if we inquire into a superiority complex and study its continuity, we can always find a more or less hidden inferiority complex.” Adler's god-bug is made up of two complexes. In natural psychology, we see this phenomenon as unfortunate and, in the existential sense, absurd—but we do not see it as a mental illness.
In natural psychology, we expect to see this. The self-inflation that Adler dubs a superiority complex and that the psychoanalytic thinker Karen Horney calls the idealization of the self, and the self-deflation that Adler names an inferiority complex and that Horney identifies as the despised self—each in their estimation located in a walled-off unconscious place that puts the person out of touch with his self-inflations and his self-deflations—in natural psychology we see instead as the quite reasonable outgrowth of the experience of singularity and uniqueness, on the one hand, and contingency and shortfalls, on the other.
We are god-bugs. That is the nature of this current experimental model of our species.
Natural psychology also proposes a way out of this dilemma—or, if not a way out of it, a way to deal with it as effectively as it can be dealt with. If you construct an idea of meaning that takes these very matters into account, so that both your next accomplishment and your next disappointment are accounted for in your personal picture of value-based meaning-making, you can get off your high horse and you can also get up from the dirt. By taking charge of your construction of meaning, you can maintain a steady identity, one characterized by a new modesty and a new strength.
Your brain can conceptualize ideas as abstract as the relationship between energy and matter; it can produce strings of words and strings of musical notes that evoke tremendous feeling; it can place itself in the vast universe and see itself living and dying. It can imagine, calculate, remember, and more. It has to feel special. At the same time, it knows perfectly well all about its limitations and its fleeting nature. This god-bug syndrome is completely natural and exactly what you would expect a creature like us to experience. Now we must deal with it.
Here are two reports that illustrate this distressing natural phenomenon. Sandra explained:
My parents always told me that I was very bright—that everyone in our family was very bright but that I shined the brightest. Maybe this ought to have pleased me, but I didn't really feel all that bright, not compared to the kids at school who were super-quick at math or super-quick at memorizing and especially not compared to the geniuses I would read about both in school and in my spare time. I got a little obsessed with reading about all those geniuses because I had this powerful doubt that I was anything like them, and I guess I wanted to confirm that to myself.
So I thought to myself, Where can you be smart but you don't have to be really super-smart? I decided that I would become a concert pianist. That sounded so cultured and, even if it wasn't the doctor or lawyer my parents wanted me to become, it was at least in a category of jobs where I'd associate with doctors and lawyers. I knew even then as a little girl that I was making a very odd decision, one that had to do with feeling somewhat special but also not feeling special enough to try something amazing. So I ended up choosing something that was perhaps the very hardest thing I could have chosen, because I didn't love practicing and I had performance anxiety.
I played pretty well, people praised me, I ended up going to a good music school, and part of me started to feel a bit grand—I even remember how I would put down other instruments and music that wasn't classical and all sorts of things—and I think that most people probably found me a little bit arrogant. At the same time, I didn't really feel like anything special at all. I felt more like an awkward, unfocused, lonely person on some pretty meaningless path.
Finally—and fortunately—I began to see that I would never become a great solo concert performer, and I had a breakdown of sorts. But I would have to say that I almost needed that breakdown, that I had been living an odd lie, and that all of those questions about whether I was great or nothing really had to get answered in some sensible way if I was to continue to have some sort of life. I had a bad year and even had to go back home to live, where of course I kept hearing about how it wasn't at all too late for me to become a lawyer and how easy it would be for me, since I was so smart.
During the course of that hard time I began to see what had been going on. I wasn't either a diva or a failure. I was simply a person, one who didn't know herself very well and who needed to deeply change her relationship to life. I started thinking not just about the things I could do but also about the ways I could be. I concerned myself not so much with my next job but with the idea of me being the best me I could be. At the same time, I made the adamant decision that I wouldn't get too enthusiastic or too dismissive about my prospective choices. I wanted to just think calmly about how my future might look. This took many months of thinking—fortunately, I had my parents' home and resources to support me during this period of reflection.
What I realized was that I wanted love and a life and to be of a little help in the world. That sounds so simple, but its modesty was very new to me. I found myself smiling. I didn't need to be super-great, and I also didn't need to be nothing. I decided to start a small business playing the piano (actually a keyboard that I could take with me places) and talking about women composers to any group that wanted to hear me. I'd go to elementary schools, retirement homes, even big conferences. And what happened was, I actually fell in love with the music.
There was little money to be made from this beautiful work, and I really couldn't have continued it without the independent income I have from a trust fund set up by my parents. I understand exactly how privileged that makes me, but that truth doesn't send me either to the diva place in me or to the failure place in me. My path makes sense to me—it is a useful, authentic, and good-feeling way to live a life. I have additional things that I want to try to be the human being that I want to be, but I'm also convinced that I've made a decent start.
Jared, a computer engineer, explained:
I grew up knowing that I could really do math. I had that kind of mind. That was clear to me from a very early age. I could do any sort of computational problem in my mind faster and better than anyone else. I was proud of that ability and pretty puffed up about it. At the same time, I had zero common sense or attunement to what was going on around me. My parents could keep any secret from me they wanted—I was just completely unaware. You could easily have sold me the Brooklyn Bridge. And I knew that about myself exactly as well as I knew that I could compute. So both powerful feelings built up in me, that I was singular and great and that I was also wretched, embarrassingly naïve, and somehow unlovable because of my awkwardness and unmanliness.
I remember making lists of how I could be more like a man or acquire more common sense or be more aware of my surroundings. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. My clothes were ridiculous. The way I wore my hair was ridiculous. But I was a whiz in school, won everything that could be won, and was on my way to some high-paying computer job or, even loftier, some start-up idea that might make me billions. The kids around me sort of intuited that about me, that I was a pathetic loser who might also become a billionaire—and their employer. It was weird. I was both a pariah and put on a pedestal.
I had a miserable college time, but life started to get better when I got out into the real world—where my thinking skills were actually valued. But although things got better because I was valued and because I could spread my wings, I was still pretty miserable with respect to anything that wasn't related to computers or start-ups. I drank too much, even though I had no desire to drink, and I ate too much—that was my real place of self-soothing. I had no girlfriends, no real friends, and no connection to anything going on in the world.
Worst of all, I started collecting comic books. That felt pathetic and ridiculous, and I knew that I was becoming a kind of crazy hoarder. Then one day I had a realization. I realized that I had taken the path of least resistance by focusing on my mind and not my heart. A light went on. I sold all my comic books—no single act in my life has ever felt better. I joined a dating service and, although I felt like an idiot every time I went out, I did go out. Slowly, over time, I felt myself becoming a person. Well, to tell the honest truth, it was even more than that—I began to feel like a man. Making money was never the issue; living was. Now I am on the tougher path of actually living.
There are countless opportunities for a smart person to puff up a bit and begin to incline in the direction of arrogance, grandiosity, and unhealthy narcissism. At the same time, there are an equal or greater number of opportunities for a smart person to feel minimized, inferior, helpless, and completely unimportant. That ironic smirk or sarcastic smile that a smart person sometimes can't help but turn toward the world can turn in an instant into a grimace of pain as she plummets from a grand sense of self to a much lowlier feeling.
What might help alleviate this pain would be smart people supporting one another. But smart people do not make a village. The 1.5 billion people who constitute the top smartest 15 percent of the world's population do not amount to an affinity group. They are diverse and, while perhaps quick at addition or imaginative or good at abstraction, they are not brothers and sisters, not by a long shot.
One smart person will devote himself to radical selfishness, and another smart person will feel compassion for her fellow human beings. One smart person will find himself tied in knots by anxiety, and another smart person will feel little anxiety and wonder if the anxiety her friends complain about is even real. One smart person will experience no particular meaning problems and fall right into a life that brings him the psychological experience of meaning with such regularity that he has no idea why there's so much fuss about meaning—while another smart person will experience chronic, severe problems with meaning. Smart people are all over the map.
They find themselves on the right and on the left and everywhere in between, in every profession and manifesting every personality trait. As Mensa, the organization for bright people, puts it: “There is simply no one prevailing characteristic of Mensa members other than high IQ. . . . As far as occupations, the range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers—the diverse list goes on and on.” It goes on to include every sort of human being imaginable.
Nothing in particular ties this 1.5 billion–person conglomerate together except a certain endowment. Just as tall people do not form an affinity group just by virtue of being tall, smart people do not form an affinity group just by virtue of being smart. Like tall people, who may share certain challenges—they need to watch out for the blades of fans and for low doorjambs and have to tolerate the question, “Do you play basketball?”—smart people also share certain challenges. That, after all, is the premise of this book. But that they share certain challenges doesn't make them a village.
This fact, that the next smart person you meet is not only not automatically a friend or a compatriot but may hold beliefs diametrically opposed to yours and may even prove to be your enemy, produces additional pain. Many smart people pine for community, even as they recognize that they themselves do not necessarily make good villagers and even as they realize with some chagrin that while they support humane institutions, they do not particularly enjoy people. They suppose that other smart people might constitute that community they seek—and that they don't is at once another inflation and another deflation. Without that village, you are once again singular and small.
What is the short answer as to what to do? Countenance neither feeling and neither state. Just as you want meaning to trump mood as you spend more time making meaning than monitoring your moods, you want meaning to trump identity. You want to spend more time making meaning than locating yourself on some scale of importance. You are not at one end or the other end of that scale: you are simply (and quite importantly enough) a human being. That is the short answer—we will look at the longer answer shortly.