From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:
Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade. In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in. Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us. We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach. Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television. 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet. It may be hard to believe, but there are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet today, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.
What in the world has happened to us? How is it possible that we have become so stupid? According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know.
Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal.
It can be tempting to laugh at numbers like these until you realize that survey after survey has come up with similar results.
Just consider what Newsweek found a few years ago…
When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Even worse were the extremely depressing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core…
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Of course survey results can be skewed, and much hinges on how the questions are asked.
To continue reading: Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become
It’s government schools that are skewed. Un/mis- informed is not the same as stupid. My 7 yr old grandson can tell you the date and summary of every important occurrence in Western Civ up to the crusades, and he’s just getting started. :o)
* I take no credit. His dad is schooling him. Though I might contribute a thing or two, now and then..
Idiocracy was based on the dysgenic trend of stupid people having way more kids than smart people. This is real, it is true and it is unavoidable.
Humanity appears to have peaked far more than 100 years ago. We have ever more trinkets and cosmetic doodads, but very little of substance is being discovered any more.
As robotics increasingly replace humans in work, a shrinking number of people will be involved in producing actual “stuff.” Ever more people are being employed doing things that for all practical purposes amount to “friction.” I estimate 80% of medical services (and the legions of people in the related insurance, drug and device industries) are either wasteful or outright harmful, and this is but the tip of the iceberg.
My guess is that soon over half of all people will be simply not smart enough to “do work.” A very small (<1%) cadre of people will be engineers whose activities will be vastly amplified by robotics and technology and a relative few people will be employed doing the few things resistant to automation. This will create an untenable political dynamic where the creators will be demonized (even more than now) and the relatively useless will sit around, watch TV, produce children by the truckload and vote to continuously raise the "guaranteed minimum 'wage'" pundits like Charles Murray see as the inevitable "fix" for this coming debacle.
Add the fact that either Affirmative Action doubles down on adding window-dressing to the producers' firms or else the cadre of productive, the "tax payers," will end up being 99% Caucasian (with a few East Asians sprinkled in) and you have the makings of class warfare that will fracture right along racial lines.
If left on this track, what might be expected is for increasingly assortive mating to occur. Those who are bright will associate (and have children) with those like themselves, while the rest wallow ever farther down the IQ food chain.
H.G. Wells' Time Machine looks to have gotten it all wrong. The Morlocks will be the beautiful people who make the machines and run everything. The Eloi will be the ugly, the stupid, the brutish, the crime-ridden who do everything possible to enslave and expropriate the Morlocks.
My guess: Today's socialist democracy (where income is taxed) will turn into cannibal democracy (where wealth itself is expropriated) and when that inevitably collapses, in its place will arise zombie democracy (where the "brains" of society are directly eaten by the zombies, a la Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.)
The future promises some very rough sledding.