In my cliques or social circles, one hears fairly often that children are born geniuses, but that one way or another, the adult world shapes them into dolts. The American poet Gene Fowler comes to mind, with his Regeniusing Project and Waking the Poet. Is there a way to reverse the dumbing down?
Picking up on this thread, I'm trying to think of ways I might've had specific powers I had to water down or ignore. Without claiming to have any kind of photographic memory, I feel I listen pretty closely to what people tell me, and file their remarks away in my memory bank, such that when we meet again, I'm feeling pretty well-versed on what they've said already.
What struck me as a growing child, then, was how adults didn't seem to bother to keep track of who they'd told what, such that they'd be perfectly OK with repeating themselves endlessly, as if we'd never met. I'd say things like "yes, you told me" or "yes, I know that" but these remarks came off as rude. The social practice was to repeat oneself with wild disregard for the audience. Adults had no responsibility to keep track of prior utterances and rely on shared memory banks.
Now that I'm an adult, I'm better positioned to make their case. Firstly, talking something out is therapeutic sometimes, so if you have a willing ear, a productive way to take advantage of the opportunity is to retell one of those signature stories. Just hearing oneself retelling may lead to new insights.
As a guy who narrates the same slide deck over and over on my YouTube channel, I know the value of this kind of exercise. It's the same with music. No one takes the attitude: we've sung that song already, and we all know how it goes, so why sing it again?
Also, there's the obvious rejoinder that adults get to know exponentially more people and trying to keep track of "who they've told what" becomes empty overhead after awhile. That's great if you have a great memory. A lot of people do not.
So that someone in your presence starts down the same road for the umpteenth time is intelligent behavior on their part. They're not presuming you're a genius in other words. None of us should presume that of another -- and so the great dumbing down begins.
The metaphor I'm coming to is not original. A diamond in the rough. Shine on you crazy diamond (Pink Floyd). I'd say the productive path in adulthood is to recognize and not adulterate your specific superpowers, whatever they are, and I'm deliberately weaving in all the superhero comic book images in calling them that.
I don't need to stump for the supernatural in making some space for the extra-sensory. We experience the limitations of our senses constantly, and through instrumentation we know about workarounds.
I'm siding with Nietzsche in thinking having a chip on one's shoulder, holding it against some invisible unspecified "society" or "the adults" that one is dumber now, slows one down. Recall your native / natural abilities and cultivate them as you see fit, but with an eye to being constructive and helpful to your fellow humans and to yourself.
I'm thinking this was Bucky's secret in large degree: when you couple your gifts to "helping all humans" versus gaining advantage over them, in a zero sum game, you have less of an upper lid on how you might apply them.
The evil genius is by definition a tad less of a genius, simply because "being evil" comes with more overhead, a greater cognitive load. Superpowers become more burdensome when it's all about gaining triumphal vengeance over one's foes, although I don't deny the latter impulse may be temporarily motivating.
In the Work, ala Maurice Nicoll, one's true foes are internal states and perennial complexes, well known to psychology as potentially ruinous (e.g. hubris and so on). To the extent you want superpowers, cultivate their virtuous use in some internal jihad, which doesn't equate to becoming self hating.
Any martial arts guru will teach you that much. And being virtuous need not equate with simply being a good doobie.
