It Takes Application, A Fine Sense Of

Few Great Men Could Pass Personnel.

It Is Hard To Grow Up In A Society In Which One's Important Problems Are Treated As Nonexistent. It Is Impossible To Belong To It, It Is Hard To Fight To Change It.

We Define Boredom As The Pain A Person Feels When He's Doing Nothing Or Something Irrelevant, Instead Of Something He Wants To Do But Won't, Can't, Or Doesn't Dare. Boredom Is Acute When He Knows The Other Thing And Inhibits His Action, E.g., Out Of Politeness, Embarrassment, Fear Of Punishment Or Shame. Boredom Is Chronic If He Has Repressed The Thought Of It And No Longer Is Aware Of It. A Large Part Of Stupidity Is Just The Chronic Boredom, For A Person Can't Learn, Or Be Intelligent About, What He's Not Interested In, When His Repressed Thoughts Are Elsewhere.

In The Modern World, We Americans Are The Old Inhabitants. We First Had Political Freedom, High Industrial Production, An Economy Of Abundance.

The "brightness" Of The 15 Percent Might Or Might Not Indicate A Profound Feeling For The Causes Of Things; It Is Largely Verbal And Symbol-manipulating, And Is Almost Certainly Partly An Obsessional Device Not To Know And Touch Risky Matter, Just As Freud Long Ago Pointed Out That The Nagging Questions Of Small Children Are A Substitute For Asking The Forbidden Questions.