The 10% of your brain thing is a commonly repeated, even by scientists, myth, with no basis in fact.


I also don't see people as content. I think people today are constantly wanting to prove themselves. The world, the Western world, anyway, is a perpetually improving place at this point in history. Things, nearly everything, are really getting better; crime is going down, murder is going down, divorce is going down, tolerance is rising, college education is more common, the standards of living are up, we have an increasingly powerful internet. Wikipedia, for the love of God. Do you know what Socrates would've done for something like Wikipedia? And I-pods. Christ, I'm of the generation that is supposed to take this shit for granted and I'm constantly amazed. It's approximately five billion times better to be alive in a first world country today than in almost any other place and time in history. Based on this, I'd say our intelligence certainly isn't evil to us. Intelligence causes people to think things through more thoroughly and be more humane/good, in my experience. Intelligence is, however, highly over-rated, in that a lot of people underestimate how common it is and tend to inflate their opinions of themselves on account of this.