# Was Mustapha Mond right? Is it socially dangerous for too many people to be smart? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 15, 2013, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352 "2013-12-15T03:27:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/1 "2013-12-15T03:27:39Z")
From Aldous Huxley’s [_Brave New World_](http://www.idph.com.br/conteudos/ebooks/BraveNewWorld.pdf): > [@](#): > > “I was wondering,” said the Savage, “why you had them [genetically-engineered Delta-caste and Epsilon-caste morons] at all – seeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don’t you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus [supergenius] while you’re about it?” > > Mustapha Mond laughed. “Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,” he answered. “We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas – that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!” he repeated. > > The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully. > > “It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work – go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized – but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself; he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle – an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,” the Controller meditatively continued, “goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It’s obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.” > > “What was that?” asked the Savage. > > Mustapha Mond smiled. “Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn’t properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.” > > The Savage sighed, profoundly. > > “The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg – eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/2 "2013-12-15T04:04:13Z")
Opinion: hell no! The smarter the population, the better. Educate everyone. Provide good pre-natal care and childhood nutrition. We want a populace able and willing to think clearly. Even if they come up with entirely wrong answers, they will be better wrong answers. You can’t be “too smart” the same way you can’t be too rich, too healthy, or too happy. Smart people are still able to do “sweat labor.” They can still dig ditches and mop floors, the kind of jobs that less-intelligent people can do. And these jobs need to be done. The smart workers will just be thinking higher thoughts while working. ---
**Author:** ![yellowjacketcoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/4bbf92/32.png) [@yellowjacketcoder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowjacketcoder)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/3 "2013-12-15T04:12:46Z")
I think the problem with Mond’s philosophy (or his Cyprus example) was in assuming that we needed Epsilons to do the crap work, rather than have the Alphas design automatons that would do the crap work so the Alphas could spend their time making whatever passed for art in the Brave New World. Cyprus shouldn’t have fallen into civil war, it should have blossomed as the Alphas automated all the scutwork. I don’t blame Huxley for this, as a lot of the robotic innovation we’re used to now was decades away when he wrote his novel, but it’s laughably silly today. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/4 "2013-12-15T05:12:28Z")
Huxley’s future society was technologically advanced by his standards (and even ours) but it was also specifically static. There’s another passage in the book, just a few paragraphs after the quote in the OP about labour-saving devices being invented but suppressed: > [@](#): > > “Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they > wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for > labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.” I don’t get why it doesn’t occur to them to just produce fewer Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, but again, Huxley did not (likely could not) anticipate the degree of automation we currently have, let alone what we anticipate just a few decades from now. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/5 "2013-12-15T05:58:32Z")
Huxley certainly didn’t since the book was intended, amongst other things, to be an attack on the tracking system in British schools. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/6 "2013-12-15T16:01:41Z")
If society is the same way it is now except that everyone is smarter, frankly I don’t see anything changing that much. It’s just that the baselines for “dumb” and “smart” will be shifted to the right. Someone who scores an IQ of 100 is average in our current framework. In an uber smart world, he or she would be mentally retarded and would be educated as such. They will likely not be represented in the 70th percentile of college entrance exam takers, which means they are more likely to become the next dishwasher at TGIFriday’s than a doctor or lawyer. Just like how people with IQs of 80 are now. There would be some differences, maybe. I don’t think everyone would be listening to classical music instead of pop music, but maybe there would be less religiosity and emotional thinking. But unless we changed our entire socioeconomic system, which hinges on guaranteed winners and losers, then those differences aren’t real important. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/7 "2013-12-15T17:18:45Z")
Two things come to mind for me reading this. 1. Due to the Flynn effect IQs are about 30 points higher than they were a century ago. I read (I believe Steven Berlin Johnson) say an IQ that would put you in the top 10% around 1920 now puts you at around the bottom 1/3. So the average person today is an alpha by 1900 standards. I think an average IQ today is equal to about 130 near 1900. 2. it reminds me of the story of the guy who wanted to become a cop, but the department wouldn’t let him because his IQ was too high (125). They said he would get bored and quit after they spent lots of time and money training him. Aside from that, I don’t know. We have no real working models of a truly high IQ society in the real world. I would assume in a truly high IQ society labor saving devices would proliferate and that would remove some of the stress of people being bored at work. Or in a society where everyone was bored at work maybe work would change to find forms of stress relief. Overall I don’t agree with Huxley, but again I don’t know of any societies that were truly high IQ (150+ for everyone). ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/8 "2013-12-15T19:38:46Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > 1. it reminds me of the story of the guy who wanted to become a cop, but the department wouldn’t let him because his IQ was too high (125). They said he would get bored and quit after they spent lots of time and money training him. [1996, New London, CT](http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836): > [@](#): > > Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/9 "2013-12-15T23:30:15Z")
But, **yellowjacketcoder** , who would have \*assembled \*the automated devices? (This may bring up a chicken-or-egg question: would a population with Alpha intelligence \*\*\*but without the conditioning \*\*\*have been able to get over themselves?) > [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Huxley’s future society was technologically advanced by his standards (and even ours) but it was also specifically static. There’s another passage in the book, just a few paragraphs after the quote in the OP about labour-saving devices being invented but suppressed: > > I don’t get why it doesn’t occur to them to just produce fewer Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, but again, Huxley did not (likely could not) anticipate the degree of automation we currently have, let alone what we anticipate just a few decades from now. Even that sort of adaptation would counter the notion that you have arrived at optimum social stability with the extant stratification distribution(\*) and you don’t want ideas that there may be a better, different way to spread. (\*And if the 1/9 ratio is to be sustained, you may have to proportionally cull _at the top_ as well) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/10 "2013-12-15T23:53:15Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > If society is the same way it is now except that everyone is smarter, frankly I don’t see anything changing that much. [You don’t?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave) ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/11 "2013-12-16T00:46:16Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Due to the Flynn effect IQs are about 30 points higher than they were a century ago. I read (I believe Steven Berlin Johnson) say an IQ that would put you in the top 10% around 1920 now puts you at around the bottom 1/3. So the average person today is an alpha by 1900 standards. I think an average IQ today is equal to about 130 near 1900. This doesn’t necessarily have much to do with people today actually being _smarter_ than they were a century ago. Some of the proposed explanations for the Flynn effect are simply greater familiarity with testing, or even greater familiarity with mazes and puzzles similar to those used in IQ tests. While it seems plausible to me that improved medical care and nutrition have made a difference in intelligence, I don’t think any of the experts believe that the average person a century ago was really borderline mentally retarded. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/12 "2013-12-16T01:01:53Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > [You don’t?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave) What in the world is the point of a post like this? Your counter to her statement is to link to another science fiction book? To answer the question: I think someone’s capacity for boredom is completely divorced from their intelligence. Some people find routine work soothing, some find it aggravating. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/13 "2013-12-16T01:08:13Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > What in the world is the point of a post like this? Your counter to her statement is to link to another science fiction book? Both amount to sociological thought experiments. A thought experiment is the only kind that can be run here. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/14 "2013-12-16T01:25:55Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Both amount to sociological thought experiments. A thought experiment is the only kind that can be run here. You countered someone’s statement of opinion with a link to a book of fiction, with a dismissive query tacked on. I’m not going to speak for her, but I didn’t read the link once I saw that it was a book of fiction with you making no attempt at argument or persuasion. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/15 "2013-12-16T02:53:00Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Both amount to sociological thought experiments. A thought experiment is the only kind that can be run here. Translation, you made an extremely stupid post and are now trying to pass it off as clever. Perhaps you could articulate your own feelings on the subject rather than throwing up links to what others have said. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/16 "2013-12-16T02:56:41Z")
Maybe **BrainGlutton** is an Epsilon. The caste is known for their non sequiturs. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/17 "2013-12-16T03:05:30Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > Maybe **BrainGlutton** is an Epsilon. The caste is known for their non sequiturs. What nonsequitur? An SF novel about the possible social disturbances caused by everyone becoming really smart is directly relevant to the OP. You’d know that if you’d read both books. ---
**Author:** ![Farin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e79b87/32.png) [@Farin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Farin)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/18 "2013-12-16T03:20:11Z")
It depends on what the smart people are doing. Smart people and dumb people, alike, working for themselves in a greedy fashion will destabilize the society in which they live. Smart people and dumb people, alike, working for societies betterment will stabilize the society in which they live. It has very little to do with “danger” to society and very much to do with the speed at which society updated and/or advances in terms of how many smart people you have in it. The smarter you are, the faster you can come up with effective solutions for, as an example, integrating and updating to a new technology. We have had a decided turn towards self-interest and down-right greed as a society over the last 100-200 years. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/19 "2013-12-16T03:30:17Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > What nonsequitur? An SF novel about the possible social disturbances caused by everyone becoming really smart is directly relevant to the OP. You’d know that if you’d read both books. Well, that’s a compelling argument. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352/20 "2013-12-16T03:30:55Z")
Automation was envisioned, but primarily as physical automation- having one backhoe instead of twenty ditch diggers. At least until the idea of robots or androids arose, no one seems to have anticipated mental automation- replacing a human controller with an electronic mechanism. Case in point: in B.N.W. rather than simply having a push-button panel that automatically sends the elevator to the floor you want, Epsilons work as _elevator operators_, because they don’t find it boring to go up and down all day. A lot of older science fiction is like that- presuming that it will always take (at least a minimal) human intelligence to do things we now have electronics do. H. G. Wells’s novel _The Time Machine_presumes that the class structure would endure for so long that the elite and the workers would become separate species. Heck, for all I know Asimov presumed that it would require a robot elevator operator to automate elevators. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-mustapha-mond-right-is-it-socially-dangerous-for-too-many-people-to-be-smart/676352.md?page=2)