http://Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay

But what can you say? At this point, you’ve been there and I’ve been there. Through years of a pandemic, where people refused to wear masks. Where basic precautions were politicized, used as footballs for fanatics aspiring to power to score points with. Where science was ignored and attacked and mocked. You’ve been there and like me, you’re weary with the goddamned endless stupidity of it all. You know it’s just going to keep happening again and again, like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, only for human stupidity. So what can you say, knowing all that, that we’re in an age where stupidity wins, over, and over, and over again, in an endless doom loop?

Ehhhhhhhhhh.

Can you tell me the last time that intelligence or wisdom or grace or truth won? Anything at all, really? It didn’t win against Covid. It didn’t win against climate change. It didn’t win when it came to saving democracy’s skin. This isn’t a rant, by the way — it’s just a set of observations. Am I angry?

Ehhhhhhhhhhh.

We are in an age now where stupid wins. Worse, we all know that stupid wins. Stupid wins in a predictable cycle. The cycle goes like this. Stupid is proposed as clever, counterintuitive, daringly thoughtful, challengingly brilliant. Smart is mocked as alarming and scaremongering and doomerism. Pundits draw false equivalences between smart and stupid. Hey, guys, having a boiling, dying planet is the same thing as having a healthy one! Having a Greater Depression while the crops fail and the rivers run dry is the same as another century of shining industrial-age growth! These things are equivalent, in risk, probability, chance, occurrence, meaning, significance. It’s just a game, for views, likes, clicks, attention. Cue up the spectators! And so the average person comes to believe that their “opinion” is the sole determinant of reality, the greatest force in the universe, possible of reshaping all of reality, greater than climate change, depression, extinction, anything, everything.

This is why and how stupid wins, over and over and over again.

The result of this isn’t the class war that “meh” pointed to. In that way of thinking, the enemy was the super rich and billionaires and tycoons and so on — and it was the noble working classes of the world against them. Marx redux. But reality turned out to be subtler, with a sting in its tail. The working classes, amazingly, are the ones who back billionaires and tycoons and the super rich in whatever insanely psychotic move they propose next to wreck whatever’s left of a future.

Hence, the dumbest people in our societies now call the shots. There is something incredibly sad, strange, disturbing, enraging, and funny about all that. I don’t just mean “the working class.” I mean every idiot with an “opinion” who thinks that “opinion” supercedes science, empiricism, reason, logic, facts, analysis, thinking, truth. If you think I’m kidding, let me give me a few examples. In America, a handful of fanatics on the Supreme Court have made common cause with 20–30% of the population who believes everyone else is going to hell…and they’re going to Eternal Disneyland in The Sky…to take away women’s rights, and they’re coming for everyone else next, from gay people to just regular people who want to teach their kids it’s OK not to be a fanatical theocrat.

The dumbest people in the country run America, and America is what happens when you let the dumbest people in a country run it. They make a suicide pact, and drag everyone else into the abyss with them. In America, the fascists and theocrats and lunatics of every stripe have made common cause with a handful of ultra wealthy and powerful people, and the result is total social collapse, from the average person not being able to make ends meet, to coups, to plot against democracy, to the church taking over the state. Meanwhile, pundits and media treat all this as a game…something to spectate over and gawk at…not something to change, stop, prevent, alter. The doom loop of stupidity is exemplified nowhere better in the world than America.

Except maybe Britain. In America, the dumbest people in society run it now like it was a mega-church with a gun store in the pews. In Britain, though, it’s arguably worse. There, the top contenders for PM have laughably delusional ideas for their economy — ones that are literally plucked out of the tracts of internet fanatics. They want to create “Freeports” where, basically, laws don’t exist. The idea is that that, somehow, is going to be what creates a prosperous modern democracy. What? How, exactly? Britain is going to be Shenzhen-on-Thames? Hong Kong…in 1852? What kind of synthetic opiates are these people smoking? The mind boggles. The jaw drops. Delusional doesn’t come close. And yet, the country believes these fairy tales — eagerly, desperately, the way a teenager believes in their First True Love.

What can you even say about all that?

Not a lot, really. Except ehhhhhhhhhhh. They’ve chosen their destiny, and it’s chaos and ruin. Can you help people who don’t want to be helped? What, are we supposed to be therapists and interventionists for entire social classes and groups who want to commit suicide en masse by way of climate change and fascism and depression?

We’re supposed to hold the hands of these lunatics and idiots and coo at them hoping they change their minds…while they’re dragging us right along, kicking and screaming, down the abyss with them?

Nobody’s got that much…milk of human kindness…in them. When lunatics have chained your feet to their wrists, and then marched straight off the nearest cliff, the one which ends in the rocks of ruin, and they’re cheering and applauding while they plunge downwards…what are you going to say? Stop? No? Wrong? There’s not much you can say. I guess you pull as hard as you can, hoping against hope the goddamned chain snaps.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is where we are at this juncture in human history. Stupid wins. You see, that’s different from all the comic book stories and even a lot of the erudite predictions and interpretations of history. They said: evil wins. Greed, vanity, avarice, cunning, pick your form of evil. And then, hinging on that interpretation, they offered all kinds of remedies. Be better people. Form nicer communities. Make laws that prevent evil. Form social norms and other mechanisms of control that can prevent evil. Punish evil, deter it, educate against it.

But evil didn’t turn out to be the problem, such as it is. Stupid did. And we don’t have any good answers for what to do about stupid.

Let me give you final example. “Climate change,” aka extinction. Sure, evil’s one part of the problem. There’s plenty of evidence that fossil fuel companies have tried to hide what they’ve done to the planet, our civilization, our future. But you know what? We’ve all known that for a very long time, anyways. The problem isn’t just that they were evil. It’s that a whole lot more were — and are — stupid. Still, even at this juncture, we’re sitting around “debating” what to do, as if there are two “sides” here. Meanwhile? Our crops are dying, our rivers are running dry, and our planet is on fire.

And it’s only 2022. Go ahead and tell me what happens by 2025.

The central problem at this juncture of human history is that stupid wins. Not just “is winning” or “won a lot” but wins. Over and over again, predictably. From the Monkeypox guy to climate change to our economies cratering to…on and on and on. Stupid wins, by making a mockery of democracy, from the average person who thinks their “opinion” trumps centuries of science and millennia of knowledge, to the way that person is turned into a suicide bomb of idiocy by the wealthy and powerful, who themselves are so painfully stupid they haven’t even asked the question: what’s all this money and power worth on a dead planet, anyways? Anything at all? Oh, cool, my dynasty gets to rule over a gigantic never-ending trash megafire.

These days? We’re making Nero and Caligula and Commodus look smart. At least under them only Rome burned. Stupidity at this juncture in human history is so triumphant, so towering, so singularly powerful…the planet is….our economies are…our democracies are…and the idiots, lunatics, and fanatics cheering it all on, for the sake of salvation, death, purification, or just pure dumb pleasure, are each a little Nero, Caligula, and Commodus.

But what can you say to them that doesn’t make them angrier, dumber, and even more self-destructive?

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The next civilization is going to have to start from a very different place. It’s not just going to have to prevent evil — which in the end, isn’t that hard — but prevent stupid. That’s a tall order. We’ve failed at it completely. So completely that stupid is the only force really operating in the world at all anymore. Why else are things going to hell, faster than the devil can count his winnings?

Umir Haque - https://eand.co/the-age-of-stupid-or-why-it-feels-like-the-world-is-ending-a-little-more-every-day-b3809ba521fd

*****

I think everybody in the world has lost their mind
I believe they lost something they cannot find
Cause everybody is going crazy
And everybody is out their goddamn mind.

I don't wanna watch the news to see no bad news,
Don't wanna be glued to the Youtube,
I ain't paying no attention to no sick dude,
Eat them people up like his child needs food.
Killer mommas storing babies in the dumpsters,
Ain't no education for our little youngsters
Politicians operate with no structure,
You're working dirty, that's why we don't trust you.
Everybody just wanna be famous,
Whiling on the internet, acting all shameless,
Yesterday the motherfucker was nameless,
Now they're on the talkshow, ain't really same shit.

Everybody just following a blind man,
Buying water for the motherfucker sandman,
Hoping in the ocean, looking for Bin Laden's body.
The world's going crazy.

I think everybody in the world has lost their mind
I believe they lost something they cannot find
Cause everybody is going crazy
And everybody is out their goddamn mind.

I asked my momma what the hell is really going on,
She said the world's too cold, keep your coat on.
I heard a priest tell a lie at the podium,
The whole world in a state of pandemonium.
Don't wait for an answer, it ain't coming soon,
They pick cause is killing like it's hot new
AK47 in the classroom, kids killing each other like it's cartoon.
Everybody unemployed, no education for the kids got me so annoyed,
They put the money in the prison like they're paranoid,
They put the Bible down to pick up the tabloid.

We're all following a blind man,
Buying water for the motherfucker sandman,
Hoping in the ocean, looking for Bin Laden's body.
The world's going crazy.

I think everybody in the world has lost their mind
I believe they lost something they cannot find
Cause everybody is going crazy
And everybody is out their goddamn mind.

Writer(s): Will Adams, Caleb Speir, George Pajon Jr.  - https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/william/theworldiscrazy.html