Dangerous Imbeciles

Mundabor explains why he believes that the stupid people of today are so much more dangerous than were the stupid people of past ages.

From Mundabor's Blog

No wonder they treat us like imbeciles. Many of us are. Kate R.

Thus writes reader Kate R. in a recent comment, and I think that she is right. I would like to also expand a bit and explain what I think is the real problem.

Dumb people have always existed. Mediocrity in everything has always been the guiding star of most people. Thinking has always been a business for which only a minority was ready. If you read books written in past ages, mocking the so-called “wisdom” of the time, you can have a good idea of what I am talking about. If you love Italian literature, Leopardi’s Zibaldone and Manzoni’s immortal I Promessi Sposi deal with the issue with brutal, but amusing, frankness.

However, there are two elements that differentiate this age from all ages that preceded it. They are the fact that 1) Modern Cretin has a university degree, and 2) Modern Cretin had no religious upbringing.

Once upon a time, a peasant knew he was a peasant. He could have thought that he possessed his own degree of smart thinking, with which he tried to impress the other peasants; but deep down, he knew that he did not know jack of pretty much anything beyond, perhaps, a modicum of technical/professional knowledge.

Also, yesteryear’s peasant lived in an environment that gave him, without even having to carry out the complex task of thinking, a whole set of predetermined, inescapable rules, pretty much all of them inscribed within a rigid Christian framework.

Therefore, a mediocre brain born in 1693 had two great advantages when compared with the mediocre brain born in 1993: he knew he was dumb, and he knew how to get to heaven.

This is not really happening anymore, and it is certainly not happening among the urban heathen populations of the XXI Century. They have acquired (like their peasant, or fishmonger, or blacksmith ancestor), a technical knowledge allowing them to work in their professional environment. But their brain doesn’t really know how to work properly. They feel educated and smart, though, which was not the case for their ancestors. You only need to tell them what “science” says, and they will swallow it hook, line and sinker, because doing otherwise would make them feel, well, exactly like their uneducated ancestors. They will believe in global warming, but will not believe in a Creator, and will be too dumb to simply grasp how infinitely illogical and, in a word, plain dumb both positions are.

Nor will they have the safeguard of a religion telling them to shut up, pray, and get on with the program of working towards Salvation. They will make their own rules, they will make of their own little, arrogant, dumb selves their own personal gods, and they will feel good and very sophisticated in the process.

This is the situation we are living in today; but today’s peasants are far easier to manipulate than yesteryear’s ones because they can be easily allured with “science”. The woman who wants to be free to kill her baby in the womb will not stop for a moment – because she is *dumb*, and because she is *faithless* – and think that an abortion is killing her own baby in the womb. She will, very simply, await some stupid slogan like someone telling her that some evil man wants to threaten her “body”, or wait – if particularly dumb – for someone telling her that it is “science” that a baby in the womb isn’t really a human being…. et voila’, you have another dumb woman supporting abortion as she sips her $4.25 latte with her “sexually curious” female friend, possibly talking about marijuana, favourite bed practices, and vibrators. The same applies, of course, to their male friend, very stupidly hoping to get a piece of the action by wearing some senseless t-shirt with “the future is female”, or something like it, and not even understanding that women find such a behaviour pretty much as sexy as a drunken beggar vomiting on his pants.

This, my friends, is the reality of the Imbeciles of the XXI Century.

They are many, as they always were.

But this time, they are far more dangerous.