Although this was written in 2009 and the author is referring to the 1990s in the following excerpt, it is exactly how I felt in the 1070's and 80's (after reading all of Ayn Rand's novels during my teenage years in the 60's): "I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it."