When I was young (from about 12 to 30), most of my reading was science fiction for two reasons: 1) SF was heavily frowned on by 1950s and 60s western Kansas local book censors, parents, and other guardians of intelligence and too-much-knowledge and 2) the best of SF made more sense than the conservative version of magical Christianity surrounding me. One story, above all of the others, that has stuck with me for more than 60 years is The Marching Morons, by CM Kornbluth, published in the 1951 April edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine which you can read for free as a reasonably well reprinted eBook here. By today’s standards, it is a fairly politically incorrect story, but the basic concept is still accurate, as explained by one of the few intelligent people left in this dysfunctional future to a recently-cryonics-revived, childless, 20th Century real estate agent/con man:
"Very well. Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children.
"What of it?
This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damn-fool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!"
"As far as I can see," said Barlow, "you're running down the best features of time. Are you crazy?"
"The rockets aren't rockets. They're turbo-jets—good turbo-jets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilometer is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they're going two hundred and fifty. The cities are ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who'd be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside.
"We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"
Today’s post-2024-election political and social climate seems to be making Kornbluth seem like a farsighted genius. Other than the obvious 1950’s racial nonsense (“the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers” who he probably intends to mean non-white people), for the most part Kornbluth is talking about rural goobers. Rural parents tend to have more children, although some “analysists” like to call this a liberal vs conservative tendency. That, of course, avoids the blatant worldwide education level variances between urban and rural citizens where, for example, “15-year-olds studying in urban schools in 37 countries outperformed rural students by roughly the equivalent of one full year of schooling.” In the US Midwest, what passes for K-12 “education” is filtered through the racial and superstitious biases of parents and other uneducated small town power brokers. In the US Southeast, if something has to be explained with words that contain more than two syllables it’s considered to be too dangerous for young children to learn.
The fact that a low-brow,convicted felon/rapist, fraudster character like Donald Trump is a viable candidate for anything other than an asylum or prison is right out of The Marching Morons. In the 2024 US Presidential election, 76,917,041 marching moronic cult members (50% of the votes cast) voted for a convicted felon (34 felony convictions), who had been successfully sued for rape, who not only illegally retained top secret documents after he lost the 2020 election but carelessly passed many of those documents to the nation’s enemies, and has a lifelong history of criminal business practices and business incompetence. That should be impossible to believe, but in 2024 it is the state of the nation’s intellectual decay. In 2024, half of the nation’s voters are ethically, morally, intellectually, and politically corrupt and incompetent. Thanks to consistently stupid rural voters and the usual assortment of mentally lazy and racist urban voters, Trump and his merry band of fascists are in control of the United States of America. I think we’ve hit critical mass of stupid. It’s all downhill from here. 
The fact that rural military veterans have gone for the Russian-owned Trump disaster that shouldn’t be a surprise either. Only about 3% of enlisted military personnel become college graduates and officers. Almost none of the officer candidates from the past 50 years have come from rural areas. Even with all of the education and advancement opportunities, the overwhelming majority of enlisted military members only “reach the rank of E-4 (Specialist or Corporal depending on the branch) before leaving the military.” That is in spite of the fact that “almost all officers (99%) have at least a bachelor's degree, and 42% have advanced degrees” while “only about 17.2% of enlisted military personnel have an associate's degree or higher.”
It’s safe to say that after rural kids have managed to crawl out of the stagnant life they left, get a college degree, become an officer and experience that life, damn few of them are going back to the farm or small town America. After leaving any branch of the military, officers tend to live in or near urban areas where they can take advantage of their experience and education economically and socially. Which leaves most of the grunts to resentfully crawl back to rural America and the menial labor life they left; bringing their PTSD, entitled and uneducated dissatisfaction, their tendency toward violence, their meth, alcohol, and synthetic heroin addictions, and their racial prejudices with them.
The Marching Morons was about the outcome of hundreds of years of down-breeding and the resulting collapse of society as more and more people are unable to comprehend how anything in the culture works and fewer and fewer people are stuck with those critical tasks. Sooner or later, there will be a backlash from the people who can “pull the pin” most effectively.
In 2020, when I was surrounded by dumbasses who believed both that Covid 19 didn’t exist and that it was engineered by China, I often asked, “You don’t know any engineers, do you?”
After listening to the moronic drool that passed for their answer, I elaborated, “When engineers design a pandemic it won’t kill a pitiful 3%. Nature does that kind of sloppy work. Engineered diseases will not only kill 97% they will target their victims to specific genetic characteristics.” For example, there are several known genetic markers for a variety of undesirable human characteristics. A well-designed pandemic virus would aim right at that group, which would solve 99% of the world’s current problems (which are all human creations).
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