Were you a Higher Being, too?

Yesterday's events made me wonder: how prevalent is yesterday's loser's mindset? Do all teenagers go through a stage when they consider themselves a higher being and almost everyone else a moron? Do most?

I know I did. There was a time in my teenage years when I considered myself a Higher Being, much more intelligent than anyone else (the later IQ tests showed 2 standard deviations upwards from the mean, which is quite bright but unexceptional), the society around me a festering shithole that needed to be destroyed (which I still think it was), most of my classmates total idiots who don't understand anything about the finer things in life (some of them were, the rest were just into different things). Everything was stupid and everyone else was unworthy.

In combination with my high level of aggressiveness, near-total lack of empathy at the time and easy access to automatic weapons this sounds like an extremely explosive mix. Except that it wasn't. I did not feel any temptation to take those weapons that I handled a couple of times a week and shoot all, or indeed any of my classmates. Why would I? They were some stupid masses whose lives had no meaning one way or another, and a Higher Being had better things to do: go see a Higher Movie, hang out and eat some ice cream with the Higher Friends (regular ice cream; this was Russia, after all, and the chances of Higher Ice Cream were rather slim), and in the evening curl up in the Higher Bed (which became a much lower bed after losing its legs in an unfortunate sex act) with a Higher Book.

Some of those Higher Books were actually pretty good.

So, how many of my readers used to be Higher Beings? Fess up.