"May you live in interesting times" is usually offered as a traditional Chinese curse, but it’s English and was supposedly first used by the British diplomatic service in China around 1936. Bobby Kennedy (the smart one, not his worm-damaged offspring) repeated the misplaced origin of the saying in an address to the University of Capetown, South Africa in 1966, “For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged - will ultimately judge himself - on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort."
We are definitely living in “interesting times” today and too many people are foolish enough to think that is a good thing. The Trump/MAGA/Party of Stupid era is full of “danger and uncertainty” without much upside if it continues. Anyone with a glancing understanding of statistics and normal distribution curves knows that “half of every population is of below-average intelligence.” Likewise, half of every population will have a below-average education. Half of every population will have below-average judgement. And so on. The Republican Party, since Nixon, has catered to the below-average voter, promoted the least qualified candidates in US history, and created The Party of Stupid that we are suffering today. The Republican politicians cater to below-average-everywhere devotees and Republican rapidly-reproducing, Dunning-Kruger overconfident, rural, uneducated, and unintelligent “Mob of Malcontent” voters are driving the averages to a right-skewed distribution, nationally.
This right-skewed distribution is a terrible thing, nationally. In a totally math-disabled world, the end result would be “Idiocracy”: a world of “anti-intellectualism, commercialism, consumerism, dysgenics, voluntary childlessness, and overpopulation.” “Idiocracy” is some kind of evidence that we’re already well on our way to a Nation of Stupid. No part of the movie, other than the heavily pirated opening scenes, make any sense at all.
That “everyone is stupid” scenario is impossible. There will always be outliers on the “high” side of the right-skewed distribution, but the story “Idiocracy” was stolen from, C.M Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons, described fewer and fewer people will be doing all of the critical work while the average idiot becomes nothing more than a brainless consumer. In Kornbluth’s future, “the 1%” are the people who provide every necessary function for society, thanklessly, while the 99% breed, consume, and complain. Using the numbers from the last election, there were 77M Trump voters in 2024 and 93M too-lazy-to-bother nonvoters. The USA is rapidly approaching 70% stupid and growing. Kornbluth is going to be looking better every year from here until humans go extinct. The sooner that happens, the better off every other species will be.
Remember, a few months ago, when the Biden Administration’s worst quality was being “boring?” Work, in general, is boring to watch and it isn’t all that exciting to do. We don’t have to worry about the Trump clown show being boring and they haven’t done a single useful thing in more than 100 days. Long ago and far away, the intent of our public education system was produce a left-skewed distribution, dragging the average up with the best and brightest in an effort to create “a more perfect union” and promote happiness, productivity, and democracy. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but we’d be better off if we’d have stuck with that. I miss boring.
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