Friday, 26 July 2013

Scenario #12: Stupidity

(Apocalypse How? #12, 2010)

We’ve all been there: you’ve just seen a particularly brain-dead report on the evening news or read a poorly-spelled diatribe on why Obama is a socialist Muslim Nazi and you sit back and wonder: “Is it just me, or is the world getting stupider?” Well, you’re not alone my friend, and even experts have noticed a steadily increasing global trend in the amount of incredibly stupid shit that goes down. Just a quick glance at the internet, television or even the people around you reveals a terrifying abyss of incoherence, aggressive ignorance and jokes about being kicked in the balls. Why, it even seems that most people are having ability to not writing the full sentences properly.

As we all know, this deluge of stupidity can lead to a lot of exasperated sighing and foreheads rubbed raw from constant facepalming. However, it could lead to something even worse: if the human intellect continues to descend at this rate, it could easily bring on the downfall of society itself. At first the changes will be subtle, as we start to see less innovation and development of technology as the number of people with the required skills begins to drop. Then things will break and no one will be able to fix them; buildings will crumble due to lack of maintenance; raw sewage will run in the streets as people forget how to flush toilets. Within the next hundred years we could be reduced to a society of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging simpletons living in piles of rubble mixed with our own filth, before finally succumbing to scurvy and disappearing for good.

So how did we get to this point, facing imminent extinction at the hands of mass stupidity? Sure, I could just sit here and blame all the old scapegoats: the proliferation of reality TV; puerile YouTube clips designed to hold our attention for no more than a few seconds at a time; pandering, hacky ‘current affairs’ shows that assume all their viewers are slobbering imbeciles; bland, clichéd pop hits shat out by slick-haired, dead-eyed record executives; various other forms of entertainment that are constantly vomiting up bite-sized chunks of mindless crap designed to assault your senses, drain your intelligence and incinerate your soul. But that would be too easy.

Perhaps people aren’t actually getting stupider, and it’s just that the internet and other forms of media are spreading stupidity in a way that was never thought possible. Complete cretins can now broadcast their mind-bogglingly stupid thoughts to the entire world, whereas in the past they were just made to sit in the corner in silence with the dunce cap on. Anyway, it’s not as if people were exactly that clever back in the old days, what with all their feudal systems and castles and stuff. That was some dumb shit. I mean, they didn’t even have electricity. So perhaps we’re as stupid as we’ve ever been and there’s no need to panic just yet. Still, we should probably bomb all the people responsible for producing Rock of Love, just in case.

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