That's rather defeatist. I'd say humanity doesn't have a chance of surviving if it doesn't figure out how to address the concerns of smart, disgruntled people.
Keeping them in check just delays the inevitable meltdown.
I'd say smart, disgruntled people aren't as smart as they think they are.
The societal problem is convincing everyone that they're a genius. When life hands them less than the best and they have to overcome it, they just get disgruntled, because "they're too smart" to deal with it.
Parents, remind your children that there's always going to be someone smarter/faster/stronger/etc than them, and that they should focus on doing as well as they can with the circumstances they're given. There's more good in being the best you can be than there is in being the best; for a lucky few, those things are identical, but for the rest of us they aren't.
> there's always going to be someone smarter/faster/stronger/etc than them
However in this country (the US) the gaps are wider and the deck is stacked more than in any other industrialized nation in pretty much every category.
Why don't we hear more about people flying planes into buildings in China? Or students (or even teachers!) losing it and shooting up their schools?
Is it just that they have better control of their media (so we don't hear about it), better control of the people (so they don't get a chance to do it), or something else?
By the way, there were also some incidence of pupils shooting up their schools in recent years in Germany. I guess you are just much more exposed to American incidents than to the rest of the world. (E.g. have you heard of the whole ugly neo-nazi stuff in east Germany in the 90ies? It still goes on, though at a much lower level of intensity. It's quite hard to find English language sources on the anti-asylum-seekers riots in Hoyerswerda in 1991 but http://www.jstor.org/pss/4146935 is on.)
The societal problem is convincing everyone that they're a genius. When life hands them less than the best and they have to overcome it, they just get disgruntled, because "they're too smart" to deal with it.
Parents, remind your children that there's always going to be someone smarter/faster/stronger/etc than them, and that they should focus on doing as well as they can with the circumstances they're given. There's more good in being the best you can be than there is in being the best; for a lucky few, those things are identical, but for the rest of us they aren't.