Our academia-heavy culture rewards intelligence and conformity. Those who come out on top are the smartest who color within the lines. If you’re not smart enough, you won’t make the grades. If you’re too free-thinking, you won’t pass the tests. The system ejects nonconformists. This explains the bell curve meme. The left-curver is sufficiently disagreeable to reject the dogma. The right-curver is intelligent enough to see past it. But we both look crazy to middle-core normies.