There was a short story I read many years ago, and can't remember the author. But the basic story was about a future society that was run by the stupid and uneducated, who had enslaved the small group of people left who had enough intelligence to keep the ignorant population fed and comfortable.
In some ways, I wonder if we aren't on a fast track to something similar to the world imagined by that short story writer. For evidence of cultural stupidity, all one needs is to look around and listen.
When I'm out in the community, I observe and listen to an overwhelming majority of people advertising their ignorance like a billboard. It can be seen in the way they dress, the bumper stickers on their cars, the way they treat their children, and their inability to produce an intelligible sentence.
When I turn on the television, it seems that 90 percent of the programs are targeted toward idiots. Aside from the slide in sitcoms into the gutter because of the loss of talented writers, there are the news shows so obviously managing stories to manage viewer attitudes. There are talk shows that exploit stupid people with faux psychology, and those are the ones that haven't reached the gratuitous Jerry Springer genre.
Even in the newspaper it is easy on any given day to find errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It's funny sometimes to see a word provided by the writer's spell-checker that is a real word but has nothing to do with the context of the sentence.
We live in a world of blissful ignorance. Most people I meet have no clue of what's going on in the world, but have strong opinions all the same. If not for the internet, I fear the real truth of current events would no longer be accessible even to those of us who want to know. We've almost reached the point where the country will be effectively stolen by those politicians who have recognized and exploited the stupidity of its citizens.
And that's why I now believe the freedom and democracy that made America unique in history will be destroyed in my lifetime.
2 comments:
i think i've read that story.
i agree, except on one point - tv is not trashier because of ignorance. some of the shows on tv that i would consider "worst" from an objective moral standpoint are really pretty intelligent. reality tv puts tv in general in a bad light, because it puts stupid people on tv without a script to make them sound not-stupid.
i think intelligence is really reaching a sort of zenith. unfortunately, while a portion of the population grows smarter, the others who aren't think that they are. if you read slashdot comments or bloghop you'll see a staggering number of people with vast knowledge.
the problem, as i see it, is not that there are more stupid people. it's that the stupid people think that they are smart. blame the schools, blame the media, whoever, but i really think it's true. stupid people have always been everywhere, always will, but it's how they think of themselves that determines the extent to which they are exposed as stupid.
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