Why Are So Many Americans So Freaking Stupid?

I answer the most-pressing political and cultural conundrum of our times

Anyone with a brain that’s stable and working has in recent years been scratching the cranium that surrounds our gray matter, wondering about the ignorance, inanity and, too often, outright insanity that plagues our conflict-ridden and possibly-crumbling republic. The election to the presidency of Dullard Junk tRump – he who deals in demeaning nicknames deserves same – is the most prominent and appalling example of mass dumbfuckery within our lifetimes, strong contender, I reckon, for worst ever. Then there’s the staggering Technicolor tapestry of fallacious notions, bogus beliefs, lies, delusions, wackadoodle fantasies, crackpot theories and raw, unmitigated rancid bullshit that the former guy, his dupes, followers, suck-ups and fellow travelers swallow and spew.

Let’s get real: Stupidity is a fact of life, hard-wired into the human biocomputer. We all must contend with day-to-day stupidities in some form or another, including our own – those Homer Simpson-ish “D’oh!” moments we all suffer from…. Stupidity, like death and taxes, is inevitable. And the current bumper crop of dolts, dimwits, morons, loons and pig-headed fools, homegrown right here in the ol’ US of A, is all but unavoidable these days.

Those of you who have enough snap to manage to sort the wheat of truth from the chaff of fables, delusions, maniacal myths and alternative facts have probably, like me, encountered or speculated about all sorts of theories and suppositions explaining how this plague of idiocy suffusing the state of our nation came to pass. We could get all analytical and deep dive into the cluster of factors that feed into it. But ultimately, there’s a simple Unified Theory of Modern American Dumbfuckery that nails its origins square on the head. And many (maybe even most) of us were witness to the Dumbo Disease infecting our peers as we came of age.

Remember back when we all graduated from elementary school to junior high or middle school? And we now had the freedom of choice to select where we would sit in class? Some of us chose the front of the classroom; others chose the back. And a boundary was drawn between the two halves that is as significant and near-immutable as the Mason-Dixon Line

Those of us who seated ourselves towards the front were there to largely not just learn but retain what we learned so we could at least live our lives with some measure of success (however we might define that) and personal and maybe also cerebral fulfillment; we were at least smart enough to know we needed to know more.

Then there was the back of the class crowd. They tended to tune out the teachers and enjoy all sorts of tomfoolery like shooting spitballs, passing notes, doodling, flirting, muttering snide commentary and giggling at the teachers and those of us seated in front of them and, most of all, at their own remarks and lame jokes. They thought they were smart because they were getting away with something. But they were too stupid to realize they were also dumbing themselves down.

This largely self-selected process of willful dumbfuckery even carried on into college, including top-tier schools like my alma mater, Colgate University. (Presidential aspirant Ron DeSatan holds degrees from Harvard and Yale; I rest my case.) In my junior year I took a history class on Civil War & Reconstruction. My professor, Dr. Carol Bleser. a wise woman who hailed from South Carolina, was eminently clear about how the war was ultimately about slavery. This was obvious… at least before rising dumbfuckery sought to revise and repaint the causes into something that wouldn’t later raise the horror of CRT.

The course was known as a gut, hence the gaggle of frat boy jocks at the back of the classroom. The prof didn’t ask much to pass; a substantial part of our grade was based on reading one of Bruce Caton’s books about Civil War battles and writing a short report. Easy peasy, right?

When it came time to hand the papers back, she first mentioned how surprised she was at how well-written one of them was… until she came across an identical report, and then a third. A trip to the library quickly revealed the source of the A-grade-level reports: The New York Times Book Review.

She noted how the three who turned in the same plagiarized review belonged to the same fraternity. They thought they were being clever and getting away with something. But as the prof noted, they weren’t smart enough to check in with their frat bros to make sure they didn’t duplicate their choice of cheat. It would not at all surprise me if those Delta Upsilon football and hockey jocks who maybe took too many hits to the head later became Fox News viewers and Trump voters. Stupid is as stupid does… when stupid isn’t smart enough to know its own stupidity.

As I was writing this, I came across an article from Raw Story on Alternet titled “Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America,” that puts the Great American Stupidity in context. People who don’t know how stupid they are suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect: “[A] well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance,” notes its author, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian (who can be found here on Substack as the writer of “Road to Omega”).

He proposes a “new theory of stupidity... that [it] is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but a lack of awareness of the limits of one’s intelligence or knowledge… more important right now than ever before.” Or as Dirty Harry Callahan once noted, a man’s gotta know his limitations.

Some might blame the ill effects caused by the classroom divide on a failure of the educational system. I believe it’s a larger systemic failure within our modern, now hyper-media-filled capitalist American democracy and culture – ironically, the promise of a digitally-interconnected nation and world hasn’t made us smarter and more informed but has instead only fostered even greater stupidity and ignorance

Our Founding Fathers that the dumbo right-wingers love to invoke while knowing little about them could never have anticipated the current state of our nation. The founders were largely men of the Enlightenment (hence they knew there was always more to learn and know).

We are now in the Unenlightenment, an era where stupidity and ignorance are screaming for attention, desperate to pull off a masquerade of credibility. Smart as I believe I may be, I’ll readily admit I haven’t any idea how this dangerous quandary might be fixed (but will say Mao was onto something with reeducation camps. There. I said it. A great fear of the right wing from the left. But if the workboot fits…).

There is one small but still impactful way to push back against the tide of ignorance I’d like to suggest. Sometime not too long after reading this, go pick up a book on something you wish to know more about, and start reading….