Reflections On The State of Stupidity In Today’s World

This is increasingly clear as a direct result of the number of ways we can actually see stupidity in action. i.e. More media=more stupidity.

Back in the day, this stupidity never really bothered me all that much. Mainly because I was able to sidestep and or ignore a lot of it.

But now, with all the cruising around I do both on and off line, I’m starting to see more and more of it, and it’s really hard to avoid the feeling that it’s kind of taking over in a way.

The Causes Of Today’s Stupidity

I don’t think people in this era were always this stupid. I think it is something that they have been indoctrinated into and conditioned to accept fairly recently.

The first root cause of modern day stupidity is television. I watch a lot of TV, because I find it relaxing and I follow a number of different sports. But being reasonably intelligent, I find there’s relatively little to actually choose from in this billion channel universe.

A lot of TV is designed for stupid people. It doesn’t just make them stupid but it also keeps them there, because it's addicting. There is a whole culture of stupidity that has been successfully cultivated out there by people like Jerry Springer and Maury Pauvich, who invite stupid people to fight it out over stupid stuff in front of audiences composed of screaming and cheering people just like them.

There is a lot of comedy programming out there that is also designed to attract and nurture stupidity in people. These are shows that are basically about losers or completely dysfunctional groups. The stupid people who watch these shows imprint on them, as opposed to seeing them for what they are, and so they do a pretty good job of keeping them stupid as well.

Reality TV shows are designed, in great part, to be voyeuristic. Because there is nothing that stupid people like more than seeing other stupid people getting to be a star for 15 minutes. It gives them hope that maybe one day they can achieve that level of notoriety. The reasons don’t matter, because these people are stupid and don’t really need all that much motivation.

Two more root causes of stupidity are movies and video games which are steadily conditioning people, mostly younger people, to the acceptance of murder and war. This reshaping of their values wears down their sense of right and wrong and makes them more supportive of right wing war mongering.

Yet another key root cause of stupidity is social media. Here, stupid people are allowed to vent as much racial hatred, sexism, misogyny and ignorance as they like. They can rant and argue and spew all kinds of hatred with the protection of anonymity. This, of course, has the advantage of giving them a bully pulpit for their stupidity, which in turn, incentivizes them to keep on going.

Social media also has the added feature of being addictive. People will do the stupidest shit after they have become one of the ‘attention junkies’. Just the other day, some idiot girl and her stupid friends made a video of her throwing metal deck furniture off the balcony of a high rise apartment building and onto one of Toronto’s busiest expressways. This is the kind of insanity stupid people will engage in just for the chance to have their video go viral.

But the right wing news media are really the worst offenders. The people who run these organizations are not stupid, but understand that a great many of their viewers are. So instead of objectively reporting the news, over the past few years especially, they have started injecting opinion into it.

Networks like Fox News & Breitbart which are run by ultra conservatives realize that shaping opinion is a piece of cake when most of their viewers are stupid, desperate and malleable.

The New World Order

There is a lot of speculation about this concept, and the more I read about it and the more I think about it, the more I believe that a lot of what is happening in the media these days is designed to subtly brainwash stupid people into believing pretty much whatever the powers that be want them to believe.

If you include the cold war, the United States has pretty much been at war or in the business of influencing outcomes of other wars since World War 2.

In order to keep the masses from becoming fed up with how little of their tax money is being spent on improving life for its citizens as opposed to financing the huge military industrial complex, it’s critically important that every idea possible be deployed in the effort to keep people stupid.

Stupid people are satisfied with less. And these days they are being given more and more of less and less.

Stupid people can be easily conned into supporting extremist views. A good example, of course, is Donald Trump. To an intelligent person, he is spewing vile, hateful innuendo and lies all the time. But because his audience is composed in good part of the stupid, they scream and cheer for him like he is the new Messiah.

Donald Trump is the poster boy for the New World Order. Rich, shallow, egocentric, sociopathic, sexist, racist and extremely popular with the stupid.

A lot of people will tell you that Trump is only saying what they are really thinking. But I think that’s bullshit. I think Trump is telling them what to think and because they are stupid, they imprint that.

It’s a win win for Trump and the New World Order.

Terrorists groups, as we hear every day, are very effective at recruiting and radicalizing, because most of the people they target are either stupid or psychotic. I mean you really have to be either or both in order to let someone take you to the point where you are willing to actually strap on a vest and blow yourself and a lot of other people out of existence.

Don’t Get Me Wrong

Although it may sound like I hate stupid people, I really don’t. I don’t have any feelings toward them at all. They are simply sheep being led to the slaughter. And of course, I wish to hell they weren’t stupid. But what can you do?

In fact, this whole article is not an indictment of stupid people. It is a statement about power. Anybody who is exploiting stupid people, and there are a lot of them from TV preachers to politicians to assholes from Nigeria with 8 million dollars in a bank account with your name on it, it’s all just the exploitation of stupidity for power or personal gain or both.

But it’s a slippery slope. Because even stupid people have their limits and if you keep taking from them without giving anything in return, sooner or later you will end up pissing them off. And they will turn on you like angry mongooses.

Then the real prisoners in society will be the well-to-do. And won’t that make for an interesting paradox? And if you don’t think this will happen, perhaps you should read this, written by an American billionaire, who was one of the first Amazon investors. https://tinyurl.com/y2hq6ydx

I know that some of you will think I am being elitist and others will think I’m oversimplifying something that is a lot more complex than I make it out to be here.

I can’t really do anything about that except to say that I’m not an elitist. I’m just a regular guy. And this is what I am seeing these days.

And I don’t think I am oversimplifying anything. There’s nothing really complex about brainwashing. And that’s what’s been happening to people all throughout history.

It's all pretty much just one big con job. But it only works when there is an overabundance of rubes who are easy to con.

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