You ever get that feeling that the US isn't just getting dumber? It's actually working on it. Like it's a group project.
And everyone's bringing Cheetos, but no one brought a damn pen. We're not just slipping into stupidity like it's a hot tub. We're cannonballing into it.
We're throwing parades for it. We're giving it TV deals, endorsement contracts, and a podcast where it talks about its healing journey. And it's not your imagination.
Our society really is getting dumber. And not the good kind of dumb or the fun kind of dumb, like laughing at videos of cats slapboxing. The bad kind.
The kind where we seem to be daring each other to trip over the same rock 5,000 times and then sue the rock for emotional damages. And just for the record, I think we're all guilty of this to some degree. And if you even hint that maybe thinking is good, you're immediately labeled an elitist.
like you just walked into a bowling alley wearing a monle quoting Kirkagard. All right, so Isaac Azimoff, the famous author and biochemist, who by the way was smart enough to predict this dumpster fire decades ago, nailed it when he said the following. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Let that sink in for a moment. Now, he wrote this like 40 years ago. America used to at least pretend to value intelligence.
Scientists were admired. Writers were respected because people actually read books. And the guy who invented sliced bread was a national hero.
And now if you use words with more than three syllables, somebody accuses you of word salad. You know, we used to aspire upward and now we aspire sideways toward whoever talks the loudest and fastest while knowing the least. And don't kid yourself.
This isn't some natural entropy of society. It's a conscious choice. We like stupid.
It's just easier. It doesn't make you feel bad about scrolling through 19 hours of YouTube videos titled, "Watch this dog say bro. " And look, I get it.
I waste time on some of this stuff, too, especially when it comes to cats and dogs. But I digress. And meanwhile, critical thinking, you know, the thing that separates us from barn animals, uh, no offense to barn animals, he gets treated like a personal [Applause] attack.
And God forbid you ask a question that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker and next thing you know you're called a hater or worse negative vibes because toxic positivity is also part of this problem. And now we're here in a world where believing something loudly is more important than being quiet correctly. where doing your own research means spending 2 hours on Reddit and suddenly knowing more than a viologist who spent 12 years studying infectious diseases.
Knowledge isn't just devalued here. It's actively mocked. It's considered suspicious.
Is someone saying you think you're better than me? When they're presented with irrefutable evidence on a particular topic, like if you know too much, you must be part of some secret cabal. So, welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If by brave you mean too stubborn to Google it. All right. So stupidity didn't just wander into America like a drunk at a wedding and start slow dancing with grandma.
No, we invited it in. We pulled out a chair, poured it a drink, and let it drive the bus. It started slow.
At some point, maybe right after World War II, the US of A decided that comfort was more important than curiosity. We wanted life to be easy and thinking is hard. We built the suburbs.
We filled them with TV dinners, plastic smiles, and educational systems designed to create compliant workers, not curious thinkers. questioning anything became unamerican. He didn't want kids to be philosophers.
He wanted them to grow up, punch a clock, and buy a Buick. And then came cable news where complex issues were considered well condensed into 30 second sound bites by men wearing obnoxious ties. And once reality TV hit, it was game over.
Stupidity wasn't just tolerated. It became America's favorite distraction. We laughed it off.
We told ourselves, "Ah, it's just entertainment. " While chugging diet soda and watching 6 hours of strangers throwing chairs at each other over baby daddies. I mean, I don't know about you, but Jerry Springer was pretty much inescapable in the '9s.
Anyways, being smart started to become seen as being elite and being educated meant you were somehow out of touch. And if you were too smart, then you were probably planning something nefarious. You were somehow dangerous.
Smart used to be attractive and then it got you labeled as distrustful. Okay. So then came the internet and everything changed where all information was instantly available and therefore instantly disposable because when everything is at your fingertips, nothing really matters anymore.
You can just Google the answers or better yet just decide your feelings are the answer regardless of the facts. And meanwhile, the foundations rotted out. We gutted public education and turned libraries into Instagram museums.
We stopped teaching kids how to think and started teaching them how to pass multiplechoice tests written by a guy who once stapled his tie to his desk. And then we industrialized it. We weaponized stupidity.
The media basically realized there's no faster way to grab eyeballs than to shove a camera in front of the loudest, wrongest, sweatiest idiot they could find and call it breaking news. I think social media was really the final bullet with all this. We didn't just lower the bar.
We buried it. We dug a hole, threw the bar in, pissed on it, and handed out trophies to whoever could trip over it the most dramatically. Stupidity is like fast food for the brain.
It tastes good. It goes down easy, but eventually it's going to kill you. So today, stupidity isn't something you're embarrassed about.
It's something you shout about on social media in all caps. It's marketed. It's branded.
I mean, you can walk into a Target right now and buy a mug that says, "I'm not arguing. I'm just explaining why I'm right. " And the person buying it can't even spell the word argument.
Being proud of being uninformed is like being proud that you failed to put on pants this morning. Except here we throw your parade and let you give a TED talk about your journey. You know, in in today's America, ignorance isn't just tolerated, it's glorified.
It's wrapped in a flag, handed a Bud Light, and shoved onto a Tik Tok feed. So somewhere along the line, America confused freedom with freedom from consequences, accountability. I mean, you're free to believe you can stare at the sun if you really believe hard enough, but the sun doesn't give a about your freedom.
You know, it'll fry your retinas just the same. Reality doesn't negotiate. You know, we live in a world where refusing to read the manual somehow makes you more trustworthy.
Where a guy in a basement high on Monster energy drinks thinks he knows more about epidemiology than people who've been studying viruses since you were still eating crayons. Imagine trying to explain modern America to the founding fathers. Yeah.
We built a constitutional republic based on reason and enlightenment ideals. And then 250 years later, half the country thinks the moon landing was faked by gay Satanists. And here's the thing, it's bipartisan.
Both sides of the aisle have their own brands of boneheadedness. One side thinks we can shoot hurricanes and the other thinks banning plastic straws will save the wells even though they just flew into the rally in a private jet. It's a golden age of ignorance and folks seem to be damn proud to be polishing brass on the Titanic.
Okay. So, remember that movie Idiocracy? Yeah, we're going to go there for a minute.
When it came out, it was freaking hilarious. Like looking at a funhouse mirror version of the US. A stupid president, electrolytes instead of water, everybody punching each other for entertainment.
And now fast forward 20 years and I'm pretty sure half the population thinks Gatorade is a fruit or vegetable and the other half is trying to live stream their own colonoscopy for Tik Tok followers. I mean we're we're we're here. We made it.
Somewhere Mike Judge, the guy who made Idiocracy, is chain smoking on a balcony, muttering, "I was just kidding you maniacs. " And the terrifying thing, it seems we're still doubling down. Instead of course correcting, instead of collectively going, "Oh maybe we should read a book or two," we're speedr runninging it like a video game.
Going for the high score in the dumbass Olympics. And corporations, they love this. Stupid people are the best customers.
I mean, you can't sell critical thinkers $90 essential oils or convince them to buy a $1,500 smartphone that bends itself in half if you look at it wrong. But you can sell the willfully stupid just about anything. A subscription box for dirt.
Done. A $600 candle that smells like Gwennneth Paltro's bathroom. Sign him up.
All right. So, maybe you're thinking, "Yikes, this sounds bleak. And is there any hope?
" Honestly, yeah, a little, but you got to squint to see it. There's still people out there reading real books, asking real questions, educating themselves authentically or experientially. quietly holding on to that flickering flame of curiosity while the rest of the world tries to smother it over the top with insane gender reveal parties and edible glitter.
I think being smart and not being afraid to show it means living with discomfort. It's difficult. It means being willing and able to admit when you're wrong.
And it means being okay with complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty. So the good news, I think smart survives. It's stubborn.
It's not loud. It's not flashy, but it's resilient like a cockroach with a PhD. And the thing about stupidity is that eventually it bumps into the hard wall of reality.
When the bridges collapse and the crops fail, when the Amazon package doesn't show up because the supply chain finally imploded, suddenly people start looking around and going, "Hey, does anybody know how to fix things, build things? " And the guy who spent the last 20 years reading books and educating himself instead of screaming at his phone. Yeah, he's the one holding the duct tape.
It won't be sexy and it won't be immediate, but intelligence isn't dead. It's just hung over. And sooner or later, we're going to need it to crawl out of bed, drink some black coffee, and start fixing the mess.
So, at the end of the day, stupidity will always be popular, at least in the US. But intelligence, real patient, compassionate intelligence is what keeps the lights on. And by the way, that goes for emotional intelligence, too, which is every bit as important.
So, if you're still here, still critically thinking, still refusing to go quietly into that great dumb night, you're already part of the resistance. Keep going. Thanks for watching.
