I had a couple of sobering experiences yesterdays that reminded me of the complications involved in keeping the human species from killing itself and every other major lifeform on the planet. As usual, if life wasn’t so funny it would be terrifying and depressing.
First, I had a doctor’s appointment to review the analysis of my failing right knee. I particularly like my physician because he has a very international view of medicine, life, and the world around him. As we went thorough my options regarding the beat-to-shit knee, we carried on our usual conversations about the world outside of my old, rotting body. Someone close to me once told me that all of the doctors in the world had conspired to treat Covid as if it were something much worse than the seasonal flu. He complained that he didn’t get “his check” for participating in that grand conspiracy to profit Big Pharma and whoever else supposedly benefitted from the pandemic. From there we had a laugh about the self-important goobers who imagined they were receiving Microsoft tracking chips with their vaccines. Again, no payment for that work to my doctor and I suggested he at least ask for a lifetime subscription for Microsoft Office and not that bullshit 365 crap, but the real thing on a DVD. And that was the funny part of the conversation.
The less funny part, from his perspective, is that when humans are confronted with evidence that their delusions are nothing more than bullshit they double-down on their bullshit. Cognitive dissonance seems to be exclusively a human mental defect, but it is a big one. When I asked if there was a way to get past that, in his experience, his response was, “No, we’re doomed.” I desperately wish I disagreed with him, but I don’t. Since I was a kid. in the 1950s, and first read C.M. Kornbluth’s novelette “The Marching Morons” I have had zero faith in the future of human beings as a species and my own best-case-scenario is that we find a clever way to kill ourselves off without taking every other form of life with us. Any reading of US history that isn’t pure conservative newspeak is full of the dullest, most violent, and the dumbest rolling over anything resembling logic and decency as easily as Trump cons his nitwits into sending him their spare change. “We’re doomed,” for sure. At best the 1% of humanity’s best and brightest will be doomed to babysitting the marching morons until the planet is uninhabitable.
Later that day, I limped to the local YMCA to try and reinstate my swimming routine after a couple of months of avoiding the pool until I knew if it was doing good or harm to my knee. When you are 75, a couple of months of low to moderate exercise does a lot of damage to your physical conditioning. My usual lame 1/4 mile routine too much for me and I was pretty discouraged when I gave up on the swim and headed to the sauna before braving this year’s mild December evening. There was one guy in the sauna and I picked the opposite end of the room to stew in my frustration. Within a few minutes, the sauna was almost full of middle-aged men showing off their flabby naked bodies and I should have passed on the experience. Their conversation was as depressing as my swimming failure and I sunk into a steaming funk as I listened to a pair of nitwits babbling about the “border crisis” and other equally obscure-to-Minnesota subjects they know nothing about.
The big takeaway I got from their conversation was that they are major breeders of stupid. I wasn’t interested enough to keep an accurate track of their family mobs, but I am fairly certain that everyone in the sauna had at least 5 offspring. All of whom were somewhat-to-seriously involved in mindless school sports. For sure, with all of the preening and bragging not one of those obvious-Trumpers had a kid who was competing in the USA Mathematical Olympiad, the Scripps National (or even the city or state) Spelling Bee, the National Speech and Debate Tournament, or any of the 30 national high school academic competitions. (I linked those competitions, just in case you don’t believe there is anything other than sports for your kid to excel in, you fuckin’ idiot shoulda-been-sterilized-at-birth goober.)
In this country, practically throughout the nation’s history, we have celebrated the luckiest 1%, not the smartest. The half-wits who stumbled into wealth through inheritance or good fortune or both end up being the idols of millions and those who work hard, take almost every step of accomplishment our species has managed, and make the rest of us look like the the extinct human species we came from are mostly ignored. As I have said more than once, “I’m not worried about AI, but LI is gonna kill us all.” The fourth of the “The 5 basic laws of human stupidity” is “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals” and the fifth is “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.” They are everywhere and their population is growing exponentially, even as world population growth slows. In fact, for the most part the only humans who are currently breeding are fools,. So, “we are doomed.”
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