Life In the Age of Idiocracy

If the pandemic has made one thing clear, it's that we live in the age of stupid. In the past couple of weeks, my news feed has had several stories about prominent anti-vaccination and COVID-19 deniers who have died of the disease. Then there's the Trump faithful who still think he's going to be reinstated as president and who attend crowded rallies in red states with low vaccination rates without wearing a mask. 

We have a phrase for that. Too stupid to live. Or the phrase coined by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, think of it as evolution in action. 

In the latest issue of Harper's, there's an interesting and profound essay by Garret Keizer titled "The Third Force". Here's one paragraph that really struck me.

Those who study stupidity as a psychological phenomenon have noted that conspicuously stupid acts often result from what Robert J. Sternberg calls “feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability.” No doubt traveling in a pack can supply the necessary lift, but some people manage it quite nicely on their own. The state in which I live is home to one of the more docile species of bears on the continent, yet in the past decade black bears have attacked at least two women who persisted, in spite of neighbors’ complaints and game wardens’ warnings, in feeding the bears from their porches. Then there was the fellow in Florida who was bitten while attempting to kiss a rattlesnake. Human and animal, tame and wild, crazy and sane—these people are above such trivial distinctions, no small thanks to the civilization they have also fancied transcending. A Paleolithic ancestor who attempted to feed a bear or kiss a venomous reptile would have cut short his contributions to the gene pool; a postmodern contemporary who does the same things can count on being medevaced to the nearest facility that will accept his heath-insurance card. Book deal to follow. As a rule, liberals love Darwin, but as a matter of social policy they generally caucus on the anti-evolution side. One of the ironies of stupidity in its conservative and libertarian forms is its dogged opposition to the very safety net that stands between an imbecile and the harsher effects of natural selection. “Without all this government interference, I’d be free!” My friend, what you’d be is food.

And this:

If we accept that stupidity comes from a loss of reality, and if we acknowledge that reality asserts itself most reliably through that creative interplay of mind and matter called work, then might one step toward our liberation from collective stupidity be a militant insistence on full, remunerative, and purposeful employment, the lack of which accounts for much of the simmering grievance that demagogues like Trump feed on? (If we could see the complete work histories of half the sad-sack insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol last Epiphany, we’d have a more illuminating epiphany than most of us deserve.) Marx located the origins of modern stupidity in a system of production that alienated workers from their tools and turned them into tools themselves. Is it possible to return the tools to their hands and to their rightful possession? The deniers of reality are always the first to call such a project “entirely unrealistic”—and perhaps it is, if only because their numb certainty makes it so.