Making the World Smarter, Faster, Stronger

It's time Americans embrace the Placebo Effect. As the other nations of the world pull farther ahead of us in the quest for world dominance (i.e. elementary school Asians score higher on standardized tests than do Americans, Europeans know anywhere from three to six languages, Australians can drink twice the amount of alcohol) America can't simply rely on integrity, government, and public schools to provide us with the necessary tools we need to succeed. It's time we tried something different.

For years we've been scared off by said effect and used it to discredit any and all panaceas when the true panacea is, by its very essence, the Placebo Effect.

Recent studies have shown that the Placebo Effect works approximately 30% of the time, regardless of what the intended outcome of the study was. As far as I'm concerned, 30% of the time is a great efficacy score. Think how many times in your life you've taken aspirin. Most of the time it doesn't work. Your headache persists. You're left cursing the pharmaceutical industry. If the drugs the pill mongers say should work don't work half the time, let's just switch everything to a placebo. It's cheaper, doesn't need to be tested on protohumans and primates, doesn't need to be developed in an expensive laboratory where people wear goggles and sterile lab coats, and the side effects are zero.

If the American government told everybody that they had developed a drug - which in fact was nothing at all (enter Placebo Effect) that effectively made the populace smarter, faster, stronger, better lovers, taller, better looking, more responsible, and genuinely happier, 30% of the American public would actually believe that their natural capacities for thinking, running, lifting, and so on were augmented and amplified due to this new wonder drug. If placebos really do affect 30% of participants, and these participants believe they have been improved, is this an entirely unethical social experiment. Deceptive? Absolutely. But through this deception millions of people will feel that their lives have been irreversibly improved. I say put an imaginary substance in our water supply. I could use the boost. Glub glub glub. I feel smarter already.