Understandable given it's a comically elitist point of view.
Fun fact: Richard Feynman experimented with both LSD and Ketamine, among other things. Shame, imagine how much he could have achieved if he had this "genetic defect" you posit...
In elementary school - while my mother was on the field trips gathering data for her PhD thesis on methan gas distribution in coal mines of Donbass region I was living with my mathematician granddad. It was a small house shared by three families, no running water and amenities inside. My grandparents grew their own vegetables since you can’t buy vegetables on the market (since there were no market), and even bread was rationed - it was Khrushchev time. Elitist family, indeed.
Btw my ancestors were slaves, freed about the same time American slaves were freed. And then communists killed a brother of granddad, and a father of my stepfather, and then national-socialists killed the only brother of my mother, my uncle. My stepfather was never allowed to college, as a son of the “enemy of the people”.
If you want to see “elitist” - look at any American house.
I understand television may give a false impression of the American lifestyle, but there's a wide range of experience in a country approaching 400MM people.
Our company moved to San Francisco in late 90s to save money before IPO. The location was right near Tenderloin, the murder capital of the US. I walked through it from time to time. Nothing special, a city like a city. I remember thinking: how nice it is to walk through American streets - so less aggression in the air…
There was a huge homeless camp though near Civic Center. There was a homeless man sleeping near a back door to our office, he once saved a girl patronizing a local bar from rape. In Soviet Union these homeless would have been rounded up and moved to some rural location not near than 100 km to any big city. Some could have been criminally tried even, like “elitist” Soviet poet Brodsky who was tried and convicted for a lack of permanent job. “Elitist” who can be tried and convicted any time authorities do not like something he says? (I kinda worried that Americans do not feel that personal freedoms had much value, and are willing to trade them for some fashionable illusion).
But I can agree that there can be found some Americans who are materially worse than our family was. Still, calling us elitists - is a sign of laughable ignorance of the world at large.
Note that indulging in all these pleasant activities does not prevent you from being successful. A lot of my heavily drinking classmates became rather accomplished. We have a head of a regional KGB office (our region is about 2 mln people, a dozen counties or so), a head of regional sanitary office (a medic who checks business medical safety compliance), doctors, engineers…
And if I was born say a hundred years earlier there would be no such a crazy demand for computer specialists, and I would have probably landed a job of math teacher at high school, or if I was lucky - at community college like my granddad.
Math teacher at high school - only some brain defect can lead you to give up pleasures of booze to get such a job, no?
Do you find these condescending tactics work well when you're trying to change someone's view?
From: https://gizmodo.com/10-scientific-and-technological-visionar...
> Nevertheless, Feynman's curiosity got the best of him when he became acquainted with none other than John C. Lilly and his sensory deprivation tanks. Feynman experimented briefly with LSD, ketamine, and marijuana, which he used to bring on isolation-induced hallucinations more quickly than he could when sober.
As an aside, that page has a list of other notable scientists who also experimented with psychoactive drugs.