I can’t take credit for “herd stupidity” but, man, am I going to make good use of it.
I like to point out—whenever I can—that despite spending an inordinate amount of time watching Dobie Gillis, Green Acres, Hogan’s Heroes and Mister Ed (and that, of course, is merely scratching the surface) I like to think I turned out to be a productive citizen, likable person and all-around, okay human contributor to the world around me.
As far as I can tell, television failed to rot my mind.
Granted, if I bundled all of the time I spent watching Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity, I could have learned to play the bagpipes, solved a Rubik’s Cube or written a treatise to help ameliorate the conflicts in the Middle East. How cool would any of those things have been? But I also would have missed one of my favorite quotes of all time from Xander in Buffy, “I’m a teen age male. Looking at an old linoleum floor gets me horny!” Even so, my mind did not become mush.
I was advised to kill my television, but I didn’t. Very few of us did.
I was warned—early on, mind you—that the medium was the message. I’ve never really understood what Marshall McLuhan meant by this but it is clear to me, as a society, we’ve moved inexorably down a path toward the ability to hornswoggle more people in a shorter amount of time than ever before through all of the various mediums available to us.
From oral, to print, to television, to the Internet.
We are living in the great Era of Hornswoggling. Where there was once a “sucker born every minute”, there are now so many people being hornswoggled in real time every few seconds we are not able to measure it. The hornswoggling is coming from every facet of the latest and greatest medium and, the worst of it is, all the other mediums are still viable and the hucksters are also working overtime in those mediums.
Anyone remember when your cell phone was inviolate as far as sales calls went? Remember the quaint, bipartisan(!) idea there would be an iron clad Do Not Call registry? Someone failed to inform all of the hucksters doing the hornswoggling that Congress had put their foot down on the hornswoggling tomfoolery. I know Maine Senator Susan Collins was deeply concerned.
We may be at peak hornswogglery.
You have an asinine Republican representative tweeting out that her constituents should raise a toast to Social Security and Medicare and, in the same breath and on the same tweet, she castigates government socialism.
You have the person on the street still utterly confused that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are one and the same entity. These “citizens” heartily dislike Obamacare, but stand behind the Affordable Care Act. Of course, these are only the fortunate mouth breathers who live in states that embraced the ACA.
How did we get to be so stupid?
I am not qualified to answer that question since my Bachelor’s degree was in Leisure Studies but that is not going to stop me from using the remainder of my column to wildly speculate.
I think people are willfully, blissfully ignorant. I think they like it. I think they prefer it. I think there’s a large swath of our citizens who’d prefer not to think all that much. Not thinking suits them just fine.
Their thinking is, “It worked for the Neanderthals!”
They don’t want to spend much effort in thinking about things that don’t directly impact their everyday life. They’d rather be spoon fed information and therein lies the biggest issue. The Internet is not kind to those who turn off their brains. The Nigerian princes who show up in your emails are not kind to those who turn off their brains. The Indian cold callers sitting in a Mumbai warehouse pretending to be IRS agents are not kind to those who turn off their brains.
Fox News is certainly not kind to non-thinkers. All of the internet forums and chat rooms and social media sites are La Brea tar pits for non-thinkers. All you need do to be “red-pilled” is launch yourself down one of the myriad conspiracy rabbit holes. The next thing you know, you’re paying $3,000 to attend a QAnon convention in Dallas, Texas, where a bunch of traitorous weasels like George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell are honing their gaslighting skills by pretending they know nothing about QAnon while hawking or wearing QAnon merchandise.
Oh, yeah. And you’re also paying a $1,000 a night for a room.
Worth the 20 minutes. All Gas No Brakes - Channel 5 - Go, Andrew Callaghan! News article here.
The willfully, blissfully ignorant are ripe for the taking. And they’re being taken. They’re being taken for a ride by the GOP, whoever the hell Q is, all of the grifters in and around the international crime syndicate that masqueraded as a government over the last four years, the talking heads at Fox News, OANN and the other fake news channel of which I can’t recall the name but was given credibility by the twice-impeached former guy’s former White House staff, and all of the other hornswoggling hucksters they’ve allowed access to their pea-sized brains.
Because we achieved herd stupidity first, we aren’t ever going to reach herd immunity.
Good thing I bought stock in popcorn futures.
Could hydrogen power save the day? Who knows?! What have we got to lose? From David Byrne’s website, Reasons to Be Cheerful, here’s a glimpse of a possible energy future without burning carbon. On an island community in the seas north of Scotland, the last frontier in green energy is being realized.
Also, herd stupidity in action. From 7/27/21
Under the “For no apparent reason” category. . . look at all of those trophies! And—no—they were not for a pie-eating contest. Four of us DID consume 64 steaks in one sitting at an All-You-Can-Eat steakhouse once (which went out of business not long after that. . . #:).
Thanks Tracey Toole Marchbanks for the memories!
Thanks for reading, sharing and responding. Didn’t solve the world’s issues this time around. Maybe next time. - JLM