2023-06-05: "People Are Such Morons"
Maybe it's just you, actually.
I feel like a lot of people overlook or underestimate the fact that the world we live in is deliberately designed to make us dumber.
It's unreasonably pessimistic to say that the average person is "stupid." Hell, I think humans are pretty clever! We're good at solving problems on our own and communicating complex, abstract ideas. We invent stuff all the time to make our lives easier. We make art! I could go on, but I'll just say that I think we're pretty great on average, if flawed in some ways.
This natural ingenuity is, generally speaking, bad for business. It's hard to maintain control over clever people, and force can only get you so far. People talk to each other, they realize that you're the common root of most of their problems, they cut you out of the equation. What's an aspiring petty tyrant to do?
You can't cut out the people, but you can try to cut out the clever. In the past, mere normies were forbidden from learning to read and write, education of any sort was highly exclusive, dissenting voices were muffled as quickly as possible to stop ideas from spreading, et cetera. This didn't always work, and it wasn't sustainable. Rules are breakable. No mode of enforcement is perfect. Harsh rules have historically proven to not be a terribly effective way of maintaining authority in the long run.
Trying to stop people from learning about the world around them with rules alone is a fool's errand. We're naturally curious animals. We like to learn. However, authoritarianism coupled with other strategies against intelligence has proven itself to be frighteningly effective. Neoliberal society has three tactics in particular that it uses in tandem to attack and destroy natural human intelligence and curiosity.
The first is to make learning a laborious and boring process. Despite the best efforts of most teachers, the modern education system is designed almost entirely antithetically to the goal of educating. Children are forced to adhere to rigorous schedules that typically give too little time to any one subject. They are given little to no choice in what they wish to learn or how they wish to learn it, and the act of learning itself is so often boiled down to the memorization of factoids and data with little context or analysis.
A student in Capitalist society is simultaneously worker and commodity, who's job is to refine themselves into a productive member of that society, and then sell themselves to it. Their bosses are the teachers and administration of the school, who are beholden to the state, which is ultimately beholden to Capital. Their labour takes the form of predetermined tests and projects on strict timelines to prove their continued viability as future workers. The student typically has little say in the nature or content of these tasks, just as a worker typically has little choice over the work assigned to them.
The second is to punish and frustrate curiosity. Deviation from the predetermined course, any serious questioning or protest, is at best politely rejected, and at worst severely reprimanded. Students are not particularly encouraged to learn outside of information spoon-fed to them, and certainly never taught to question anything. Critical thought is totally out of the picture. Classes are mostly predetermined, students have few chances to interact with their teachers as individuals, and libraries are often underfunded and full of dated and sub-par books. Very little education takes place in the Capitalist school system - what it is actually designed to do is produce obedient, diligent workers (and soldiers, should the occasion arise) who, for the most part, do as they're told and know better than to question superiors.
The third is to sate or smother any remaining want for knowledge with a deluge of Bullshit. We are, now more than ever, subject to constant floods of disinformation, trivia, and garish, mind-numbing swill like celebrity gossip and short-form video. In recent times, the internet, which briefly served as a rather powerful tool for self-education, has become filled with noise, misinformation, and propaganda. Search engines and social media are overrun by garbage. Finding useful information on any topic, updates on current events, or even worthwhile forums for discussion becomes an increasingly daunting task as the internet is filled with worthless, algorithm-gaming digital sludge at an exponential pace.
This isn't a new phenomenon, of course. Traditional media is little better in this regard, constantly pushing aside relevant stories in favour of irrelevant puff pieces, amplifying the voices of those in power, distorting and twisting the truth, even going so far as to lie outright when deemed necessary by those in control of these publications. No room is left for reality. You are left with no brain-space to learn the truth for yourself once you've spent it all absorbing Bullshit. If and when you become aware that you are constantly absorbing Bullshit - as, frankly, most of us have - it begins to erode away at your faith in yourself, and you begin to give up seeking the truth.
I feel sort of silly for writing all of this, because you already know. You, the reader, live on the same planet that I do. You went to school. You've been on the internet. You've been exposed to the news and television. Even if you've never articulated these thoughts before, you already know. It's plainly obvious. None of what I've written here is exactly high-level philosophy, or even novel at all. So why am I saying it?
It annoys me to no end when I hear people casually say things like "the problem is that we're so dumb," "oh, humans are so stupid," "people are such morons," and move on as if it's an irrefutable axiom. People are such idiots, so why bother trying to make anything better? Why try to change the world? Humans are so stupid, we'll just mess it up. Nothing to do but lean back in an armchair and sneer at everyone else as we all starve and choke on toxic smog. No use wasting any of your precious time trying to make things better. How convenient.
We live in a society that is very intentionally structured to dumb and dull us down. We produce garbage because we are fed garbage. We are the product of our environment, and if we want anything to get better, we need to do everything we can to make that environment better. If we begin to make the world a better place, the world will begin to make us better. The negative feedback loop of the Capitalist world has destroyed our collective psyche, but meaningful opposition to it has the potential to reverse it.
Aren't you at least a little curious to see humanity at it's best?