Why Are People So Stupid?

It is not natural for people to be this stupid.

It is not natural for people to be this stupid.

If we had always been this stupid, it is difficult to see how we could have ever advanced beyond our low-tech, high mortality beginnings. Everything, from the most basic technologies, to the social structures that allowed us to advance further was created by people who weren't only clever enough to figure out how to do something more efficiently, but smart enough to teach others how to replicate it.

And indeed, we are breathtakingly stupid compared to our ancestors, by and large, who could navigate vast distances, hunt megafauna, build cities with hand tools including vast cathedrals, and cross oceans without a single smartphone. While there are individuals who are quite clever, or at least cunning, the general run of humanity seem to have completely lost the plot of human progress – not just how to move us forward, but why.

If you speak to the average human, an unfortunate and dispiriting experience that you really can't avoid, and try to engage them on any matter of substance, you will discover two things about them:

1) They don't know important shit. Shit that is necessary to functioning as an adult. No, really. Vast numbers of them can't name the capitol of the state they live in, circle the continent they live in on a world map, or name their representative in Congress. Many of them are functionally illiterate, incapable of reading anything beyond a 6^th grader's expected ability. Many of them own cars, but they don't understand how they work. Many of them are incapable of changing a tire. Almost all of them own “smartphones,” but they know little about how they work. Ask one of them if they could do their normal, daily tasks without their phone. Watch how they hesitate.

Ask them about history, if you want a real downer. Educated people know that an understanding of history is important to comprehending human experience, and to understanding their role in governance and society. Go ahead and engage with the average person on history. They have a searchable encyclopedia in their pocket, but they know little, most of what they think they know is wrong and what they do know, they don't understand.

2) They lack mental agility to a degree that will startle you. They cannot figure things out for themselves. If they state an opinion about something, and you ask them why they believe that, they will often be incapable of describing their thought process to you. They will, likely, dive into the phone that is smarter than they are and give you the first search result, or start throwing smoke in a panic. Not only do they not know where their opinions come from, they don't have the intellectual tools to examine them.

They are shockingly innumerate, in a world that revolves around mathematics. Ask them to complete this sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8... Ask them to describe the Scientific Method, even after they tell you what sort of Science they don't believe in.

You would think that this would bother them. After all, living in a world that you don't understand, and holding beliefs from you know not where is a bit like playing in traffic wearing a blindfold and – of course, ear buds.

But it does not, for the most part, trouble them. Why? Because we have designed a system that is consciously designed to support stupidity.

The first way in which this is done is something that most people can't conceive of the world without. Capitalism makes people stupid.

The driving engine of Capitalism is the pursuit of profit, not, as is often wrongly stated, ownership. Ownership existed long before Capitalism, and it exists in places that are not capitalistic. Without the pursuit of profit, Capitalism has no motive force.

Of course, in the current, corporatist model of Capitalism, the pursuit of profit, expressed as shareholder value, the pressure to maximize profit is even more intense. If you are the CEO of a publicly held company, (72% of GDP) and you fail to maximize profits every three months, you will be punished, lose control of the company, or get fired outright.

So, let's consider a thought experiment. You are the CEO of a corporation that makes movies. You can spend any amount of money you care to, but your brief is to make the most profitable movie, in terms of box office gross ever made.

Now, which sort of movie are you going to make? Are you going to make a movie that is designed to inform people, or will you make a movie designed to entertain them?

You may be thinking, “both.” But understand that when you seek to inform people, you will alienate a percentage of your audience. Some will disagree with you. Some will not understand what you are trying to teach them. Every concession you make to informing your viewer, to broadening and deepening their understanding is one bit of effort, resources and funds that doesn't go to entertaining them.

You will be asked to defend every decision you made on the basis of shareholder value. Willing to risk your multi-million dollar job? Much of your compensation comes in the form of stock. Do you want to take a risk on not maximizing the value of that stock? Want to face shareholder lawsuits? Boardroom power plays?

Of the five largest grossing movies of all time, two are science fiction spectacles, and two are superhero movies. The other is a Chinese animated children's fantasy. If you are “smart,” in the sense of playing by the rules as they exist, you will greenlight “Mister Muscles and Captain Cape vs. the Alien Horde.” You will spend money on big name actors and special effects, and you will instruct your screenwriters to produce a simple, easy to understand plot with clear heroes and villains, and dialog easily comprehended by a third grader.

If you want to maximize your profit, you need to sell people things that they enjoy, rather than things they can use. Even utilitarian items are marketed as being “lifestyle choices,” even as they are intentionally engineered to be less useful, to become useless in a short time, and to be impossible to repair.

The idea is that you don't repair your phone, or hire someone to fix your appliance – due to design decisions made by the manufacturer that's often impossible – you have to buy a new one. Your money doesn't go the repairman, it goes to the manufacturer, and of course, their executives and stockholders.

It takes training and talent to repair things. It only takes money to buy a new one. Every time a repair shop closes, it takes years of knowledge and skill down with it.

Education in the United States, at every level is designed around “school to work.” Since most jobs require specific skills, rather than general knowledge and mental agility, American education makes you stupid.

It has long been true that most education in the United States is designed around teaching students to meet their teachers' expectations, and to comply with orders immediately. For many students, especially those in disadvantaged districts, this often leads to what is called the “school to prison pipeline.”

The destruction of the American educational system, and the criminal underpaying of skilled teachers and the intentional wrecking of any sense of career security and working conditions is seeing teachers leaving the profession in droves.

Why is the American system blighting the futures of both their students and teachers? Because certain “visionaries” who are positively drooling at the thought of privatizing the system and making profits from parents and the state alike are doing everything they can, including spending billions of dollars in lobbying money to destroy the public school system.

American religion, at least the most politically active faction of it, is determinedly anti-intellectual, and culturally repressive. This is in keeping with a significant current in American culture in general in which “eggheads” are distrusted in favor of a mythic “common sense,” which seems to consist of the prejudices and presumptions acquired before one's seventh birthday.

American culture makes you stupid.

The anti-science, anti-education faction that is currently running the country rode to power behind the most ignorant, bigoted, uninformed President in the history of the nation. People vote for people that they trust, and most of them trust people that they perceive as similar to themselves. Trump, as I have said, is not a lighthouse, he is a mirror.

All of this isn't helped of course by the fact that decisions about what news to expose consumers to, when they're not overt propaganda are made by corporate executives who value viewership far above accuracy. Cheap “balance,” giving the same exposure and weight to obvious liars and “spokesmen” as to subject matter experts is designed to sell controversy, and to make sure they can't be accused of “bias.”

They're accused of bias anyway, since Fascists don't believe in any sort of Truth other than what they want to believe, but they soldier on, presenting the anti-science “point of view” as if it had any legitimacy outside of a conspiracist's worm-eaten brain.

Donald Trump is right in calling corporatist media “fake news.” He's just wrong about how and why it's fake.

The decadence of American culture, it's unwillingness to come to terms with its moral and social duty is put into stark relief by the nation's attitude toward health care. We tolerate a system that leaves many millions of people with the choice between bankruptcy and death, all to enrich a class of middle-men insurance executives who contribute nothing to health care but billion dollar overhead. Sure, these soulless vampires are loathsome, but the fact that any attempt to change the system is met by inarticulate moaning about “Soshulism!” from the very people most endangered is most telling.

The whole picture is one of a culture that discourages intellectual pursuits, undervalues education, overvalues entertainment and “lifestyle,” has no positive political or social ethos, and no moral baseline aside from “consume, compete, conform.”

People don't have to be very smart to work most jobs, and when it comes to being a consumer, be it of goods, services or politics, the more easily manipulated they are the better.

“I love the uneducated,” he said, and they cheered.