The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot

There’s a thought I keep on having, and maybe you’ve had it too. The main question they’ll ask about our age is: how did everything get so stupid, so fast? You can look at our economies and see inflation ripping through them. But there’s another kind of inflation at work too. In human folly, and all its flavors, from ignorance to malice to bad faith and beyond. It’s pulsating through our societies, and the lunatics, it seems, are seizing control of them, faster and faster.

I know you know that. But I also think it’s instructive to really think about it for a moment.

Think back to a decade ago. Just a decade ago. 2013. It seems like a…practically a…Golden Age…by comparison. We’d go online, and Twitter and Facebook weren’t…great. But they weren’t the smoking wrecks of disinformation, hate, and moronitude they are today, either — not even close. Our politics was fragmented and a little bit fractured — but nation after nation hadn’t been seduced by fanatics who’d go on to wreck its institutions and norms, like Brexit did to Britain, or Trumpism did to America. Our economies weren’t exactly in stellar shape — stagnation was beginning to bite.

But we weren’t exactly in the insane — to me as an economist, anyways — position of a recession hammered home by central banks raising rates to astronomical levels just as the mega-scale impacts of climate change hit. Which themselves were largely ignored, in favor of an endless parade of celebrities and billionaires.

Does it feel a little bit like…what’s the phrase I’m looking for…The Bonfire of Vanities at the end of a civilization…out there today? Welcome to the Acceleration of the Age of Stupid.

Think back, again, just a decade, and remember how you felt. How do you feel now, in comparison? If indicators are any bet, you feel not just worse, but astonishingly worse. People are so pessimistic that it’s hard to even do it justice in words — 80% of people, and this finding holds true across societies, basically think there’s not going to be a future, for them or their kids. A decade ago? Societies might not all have been shining examples of happiness — but they weren’t exactly biting their nails to keep from screaming in despair, either. And all that’s taken a knock-on effect on social cohesion, meaning trust and ties, which are collapsing at light speed.

When I or you say “stupid,” as in, “Jesus, how can people even be this stupid?” — and we mean everything from climate denial to regressive who want to take rights away to fanatics who want to ban books to lunatics who think storming Congress is wonderful and peaceful — part of what we mean, even if we don’t know it, is all that: pessimism, the loss of social cohesion, trust and ties collapsing — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

by Umair Haque, Eudimonia and Co. |  Read more:

Image: Peter Dynes

"So a weird and startling megatrend is emerging: human consciousness is shrinking — that’s what all these flavors of stupidity really are — at precisely the time it needs to expand. Expand most, given our civilization crossing the threshold into the Age of Extinction.

The growth of conscisouness is the expansion of empathy, grace, truth, beauty, justice, goodness, wisdom, courage, humility. See any of that happening? Or just the explosive growth of every flavor of folly, every crazed admixture of stupidity, history’s ever seen, at light speed?"