Brain Wave

by Poul Anderson

He washed as thoroughly as you could ask a ten-year-old to,

He was well on the way to inventing differential calculus when his mother called him down to breakfast.

Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you.

And ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences.

People think a lot more today, but they aren’t thinking straight.”

There are many times more possible interneuronic connections than there are atoms in the entire cosmos—the factor is something like ten to the power of several million.

You take a typical human, a worker in factory or office, his mind dulled to a collection of verbal reflexes, his future a day-to-day plodding which offered him no more than a chance to fill his belly and be anesthetized by a movie or his television—more and bigger automobiles, more and brighter plastics, onward and upward with the American Way of Life. Even before the change, there had been an inward hollowness in Western civilization, an unconscious realization that there ought to be more in life than one’s own ephemeral self—and the ideal had not been forthcoming.

He saw the miserable inadequacy of his life, the triviality of his work, the narrow and meaningless limits of his beliefs and conventions—and he resigned.

Any society was necessarily founded on certain more or less arbitrary rules and restrictions. Too many people had suddenly realized that the laws were arbitrary, without intrinsic significance, and had proceeded to violate whichever ones they didn’t like.

You’ve taken millions—hundreds of millions—of people who’ve never had an original thought in their lives and suddenly thrown their brains into high gear. They start thinking—but what basis have they got? They still retain the old superstitions, prejudices, hates and fears and greeds, and most of their new mental energy goes to elaborate rationalization of these.

Briefly, there was sadness in him. So far, people hadn’t really changed much. The wild-eyed dreamer simply built higher castles in the clouds; the hard-boiled racketeer had no vocabulary of ideas or concepts to rise above his own language of greed.

He reached for the phone and called over the web operated for him alone.