On the role of idiocy in American life

You can't beat it; you can't even hope to contain it...your best hope is to start drinking early and to keep drinking. Because guns don't kill; sex does.

It's an oldie but an all-time classic, no?

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.

• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I’ve been blessed (and cursed) with a higher-than-average IQ, and that can be a double-edged sword. I enjoy having the mental wherewithal to understand the world around me in ways many can’t. But I also don’t suffer fools lightly and, as I’ve learned through long, hard experience, there’s a shit-ton of fools in this world.

I never cease to be amazed at the number of astonishingly stupid people dragging themselves around this rock as if each day was a pop quiz. The popularity of Fox News Channel is Exhibit A as the answer to the question, “How can Americans be so thoroughly f*****g brain-dead?

The truth is that most Americans are pleased to have others do their thinking for them. They have neither the energy nor the bandwidth to engage in anything faintly redolent of critical thinking, so they don’t mind others telling them what to think and/or believe. That the folks doing their thinking for them may have a sinister agenda is of no concern to those waiting to have their brains filled with garbage. All the sheeple need is to be told what to think, and they’re good to go.

It’s why Roger Ailes may have been the worst (barely) human to leave a slime trail across the Earth. Not only did he conflate journalism with propaganda, but he also convinced low-information Americans that it was OK not to think critically. Fox News would do it for them and fill their brains with “fair and balanced” information. These unthinking Americans never considered the possibility that they were being propagandized into becoming inflexible, knee-jerk Right-wingers.

They were being taught to be reactionaries and to hate those not like them, and they learned their lessons well.

Before we get too far into this discussion, settling on a uniform definition of stupidity would be helpful. In this way, we’ll all sing from the same hymnal.

Stupidity is a kind of intellectual stubbornness. A stupid person has access to all the information necessary to make an appropriate judgment, to come up with a set of reasonable and justified beliefs and yet fails to do so. The evidence is staring them right in the face but it makes no difference whatsoever. They believe what they want to believe. Not only do they have no good reasons for thinking that what they believe is true — there are often good reasons for thinking that what they believe is false. They are not acting in a rational manner.

In other words, even when faced with information that would lead a person to draw the correct conclusion or make an appropriate judgment, a stupid person fails to do so. It makes no difference to them; they stick to their preconceived notions. They continue to believe what they wish to. Even when placed directly in front of them, the truth makes nary a dent.

When I read that definition, the first thing that comes to mind are supporters of Donald Trump. Despite his four indictments, 91 charges, two impeachments, and 25+ accusations of sexual assault, his supporters continue to believe that he’s the bestest, most excellentest President of all time. By and large, their support for him is unwavering and unshakeable.

You can do that when you’re impervious to truth and reality…and you care only that he hates the same people you do.

Of course, a reasonable person might ask themself how it’s even possible for some so morally and legally challenged to run for President. If we were discussing virtually anyone else, that person wouldn’t stand a chance, and rightly so. Yet, Donald Trump is hailed as a God-King and, if polls are to be believed, has a seemingly legitimate shot at winning the Presidency next November.

If that doesn’t scare the Hell out of you, talk to your doctor. You should probably have your Thorazine dose dialed back.

The problem is not that the people who don’t believe in climate change or who choose to not vaccinate their children or who deny evolution by natural selection are necessarily uninformed (although many of them are, and a good deal of what passes for “information” these days comes from highly suspect sources). Rather, it is that in the face of relevant information they have refused to adjust or abandon their beliefs accordingly. They are making a crucial decision not on the basis of what Descartes called “clear and distinct” evidence, but on prejudice, hearsay and, of course, those passions of hope and fear. An article in the New York Times recently said that “an aversion to scientific findings continues to shape American public policy.” What the writer failed to note is how much that aversion to scientific reasoning informs the decisions people make in their daily lives.

And that such scientific aversion has been carefully nurtured by Republicans in concert with Right-wing media outlets to keep people scared and stupid. It’s easier for the GOP to mask the complete absence of anything positive they have to offer Americans when they’re able to keep them too scared and stupid to question the Republican vacancy of ideas.

BUTBUTBUT…Joe Biden’s OLD!!!

Pay no attention to the Hitler-quoting fascist who’s threatening to “exterminate” the “vermin” infesting this country.

Changing people’s cognitive behavior will not be easy; it may even be a fool’s errand. By young adulthood, we naturally become stuck in our ways of forming and abandoning beliefs. I like to think that the key lies in more philosophy, and more of the humanities overall. Most people, if they study philosophy at all, do so only in college — typically to fulfill some distribution requirement. But what if we start exposing young people to philosophy well before they become undergraduates? There is no reason why high school students, even children in elementary school, cannot absorb the basic lessons of rationality and critical thinking that come from studying the great thinkers of the past and of today, and the problems in ethics, politics, epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics that they address. If there is a cure for stupidity, I am convinced that this is it. I hope I’m proven right.

Changing people’s cognitive behavior will prove a fool’s errand; most Americans neither recognize, understand, nor care that they’re intellectually bereft. They’re under the spell of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which, not to put too fine a point on it, holds that stupid people are too dumb to know that they are, in fact, intellectually vacant.

The results of the 2016 election are proof positive that too many Americans are too dense to be trusted to think critically. A democracy functions best when informed citizens take an interest in what happens around them, pay attention, and become informed voters. In 2016, sadly, millions of Americans were propagandized into voting for a man who shouldn’t be allowed to manage a Dairy Queen in rural North Dakota, much less have access to the nuclear launch codes.

Unfortunately, Americans have no plans to conquer their idiocy. They would first have to recognize it.

The COVID-19 pandemic reaffirmed the worst fears many of us had about American stupidity, as millions of Americans refused to get vaccinated. Science became politicized because Trump manufactured and manipulated the resulting distrust for his political advantage.

Because of the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccines, Donald Trump can and should be held responsible for, by one estimate, 70% of COVID-19-related deaths. You can, of course, argue the numbers and/or how they may have been arrived at, but the broad theme is accurate.

If this had happened in wartime, Trump would have been tried as a war criminal, convicted, handed a cigarette and a blindfold, and asked if he had any last words. The firing squad would’ve been instructed to open fire as soon as he opened his mouth.

As it is, the people who died because they refused to get vaccinated or took Ivermectin or some other quack remedy have only themselves to blame. They made their (blindingly stupid) decision and paid the price for it. Ultimately, their vanity and callowness cost them their lives, and, as sad as that is, there’s no sympathy I can find for them.

The fools were given every opportunity and all the information they needed to make a sound, informed decision. Instead, they let their arrogance and ignorance get the best of them and decided they knew more than doctors and scientists. Why? Who knows, perhaps a few Google and YouTube searches made them feel as if they had developed sufficient expertise in epidemiology.

Hey, I graduated summa cum loudly from YouTube University!!

Their stupidity killed them, and if you want to call that natural selection, I’m OK with it.

Even when Americans aren’t killing themselves with stupidity, they’re on the verge of a Handmaid’s Tale-like political farce. In a rational world, the Republican ridiculousness pushed by new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would be laughed off Capitol Hill.

These days, it’s just another day at the office.

The new Speaker, Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson, praises “18th-century values” and told the audience of a conservative event that Americans should live by them when it came to morality and religion. Values, one supposes, like executing women as witches. Just like Supreme Court Justice Alito, self-imposed guardian of public morality, who fancies himself in the mold of Puritan jurist Matthew Hale.

As an attorney for the Dobson-linked conservative Christian advocacy group the Alliance Defense Fund (known today as Alliance Defending Freedom) through the early 2000s, Johnson was an especially zealous advocate on the issues of changing sexual attitudes that dominated the religious right’s first generation.

Johnson not only opposed same-sex marriage, but also supported the criminalizing of gay and lesbian sexual relationships, writing at one point that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” as CNN’s KFile recently reported. Even by the standards of that era, Johnson was especially vitriolic in his denunciations, calling same-sex relations “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle,” and describing gay people as “a deviant group,” as KFile found.

He’s a real American Taliban freak show, eh? But he would’ve been harmless enough had he remained an anonymous backbencher in the Congressional Republican Caucus. But then he became Speaker, and suddenly it was…WTF????

Among other things, the new Speaker belongs to a Christian group that believes mpox (previously known as monkeypox) to be “the inevitable and appropriate penalty” for homosexuality.

Holy heart failure, Batman….

In the aftermath of the Maine massacre, Johnson blamed mass shootings on 20th-century American reforms. Listing “no fault divorce laws”, “the sexual revolution”, “radical feminism” and “government-sanctioned killing of the unborn”, he said that liberals had created “a completely amoral society” in which young Americans were “taught there is no right and wrong”.

Because, you know, guns don’t kill, sex does.

Johnson’s predictions of American decline have been widely noted in rightwing bizarro world. He has called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic”. His crusade to stamp out LGBTQ+ and abortion rights is a point of particular pride.

As one example of his profound unsuitability, he brags that he doesn’t believe that human beings cause the climate crisis, though his home state has been ravaged by it.

Perhaps most notable is Johnson’s leading role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Because the man who’s now second in line to the Presidency

“violated his oath to the constitution and tried to disenfranchise four states,” as the writer Marcy Wheeler put it.

Johnson certainly has his Trumpian bona fides in order: he was the leader of the legal effort to reverse the results of the election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and he hawked — and continues to do so — Trump’s lies that the election had been rigged.

When asked to present evidence proving their contention, no one associated with the Trump campaign has ever been able to do so. They can’t give evidence because there is none. There’s only empty, meaningless bleating…which might sound like evidence to some if framed in a certain way.

This isn’t a problem to the millions of Americans who, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, continue to believe that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen by Joe Biden.

She seems nice.

Yes, many low-information Americans have swallowed the red pill and remain convinced that Joe Biden is an illegitimate President. They can’t cite evidence, but they believe beyond the shadow of a doubt. They can’t prove it, but they KNOW Joe Biden stole the election and that The Former Guy is the genuine and legitimate President.

They’re still waiting for the Italian satellites to rain their laser beams upon the Usurper-in-Chief.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues fueling the stupidity in America and using it to support and fuel his ambitions.

Liz Cheney has described some House Republican Trump loyalists as not only glad to break the government but “frankly, some of whom are white supremacists, some of whom are Anti-Semitic.” 

“I think Donald Trump is the single most dangerous threat we face,” Cheney concluded.

I’m a lifelong Democrat — since the Vietnam War, in fact, and frankly I never thought I’d be in full agreement with anyone named Cheney. But folks, on this she is 100% correct.

Trump is enabling and empowering the looniest loose screws in America — and the entire Republican party/rightwing propaganda apparatus is helping him get away with it.

Yeah, as a lifelong Democrat myself, the thought of agreeing with anyone whose surname is Cheney is hella creepy, but Liz Cheney has nailed it in this case.

Donald Trump is stupid but yet not stupid, which is somehow even worse than being merely plain-ol’-garden-variety-stupid. By that seeming contradiction, I mean he’s as dumb as a post-turtle. Still, he possesses sufficient fascist cunning to manipulate other similarly stupid people to do his bidding. He has a certain…um, blunt-force charm…that appeals to those even more intellectually and morally bereft than he is. Somehow, he’s charismatic enough to appeal to their vanity and make them feel intelligent.

Like these chodes….

These incels believe (for reasons I can’t begin to imagine) that they are the future of this country. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t hire ANY of them to work the counter at a McDonald’s in Rugby, ND. And if I had daughters, I’d send them off to a convent before any of these numbnuts could get within 10 miles of them.

If I were King of the World, I’d order each of them to be forcibly neutered before being allowed into the general population. The LAST thing we need is for them to be allowed to breed.

And yet they believe the world owes them the best of everything- education, women, cars, houses, jobs- and perhaps some come from families whose surnames will carry them far in life. Whatever, it likely won’t be due to their qualifications or their willingness to work hard. Almost certainly born with silver feet in their mouths, they’ve probably had everything handed to them from the day they popped out of Mommy’s womb.

And they probably believe they’ve earned everything they’ve “achieved.”

A year from now, we may well be facing an election in which the future of America is decided by millions of people with double-digit IQs and the morality of a back alley abortionist. And that future might just end up in the hands of chodes like those pictured above.

Be afwaid. Be vewy, very afwaid.

If American democracy is meant to die, I’d hoped it would go out on a more glorious note. Instead, it may be undone by millions too stupid to understand the damage they’re about to do.

Welcome to our new idiocracy, y’all. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho sends his warmest regards.

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