I think there is a thing as too much intelligence, which obviously the government is hiding away from us or at least doing the best they can to keep us ignorant about. Too much intelligence can obviously lead to danger. I don't think American [citizens] are getting too smart for their own good. Like I said, there are a lot of things the government knows that we don't know. Secret agendas, secret information, etc that they keep locked up and away from their people. You can't always tell everyone everything. Kind of how Odysseus didn't tell his men about Scylla and Charybdis, because he didn't want them to go into panic, just apply that to us. If we knew everything people would go into panic. Ever heard the saying "the truth hurts"? Some people would rather not know, and it's in the government's best interest that they don't know.
I'm not too sure about the overly confident part. We know a lot but not that much that we should be overly confident, there are still things we have yet to discover.
As for American citizens, too much intelligence is probably nonexistent to them. Like Mega said, America is now filled with lazy sloth like people that would die if they had to live in a post apocalyptic world or you know, something like that. We've evolved to be nothing like the nomads of our past and we're not capable of fending for ourselves in the wild now that we've become adapted to modern technology and such.
