I’d
bet, these days, shortly after reading the headlines, you’ve thought,
shaking your head and muttering, something like: “OMG. We live in an
age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”
You’re
not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial
crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the
world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere
deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one
boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human
folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite,
dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.
And
so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion
thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness
shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here
are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first
job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being
turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too.
Economic
stupid is nationalism, populism, or austerity, three words that
craftily mean the same thing. It’s the idea that “we don’t have the
money to pay for it!!”, whether “it” is school lunches, healthcare,
education, parks, libraries, media, or trains. Sure we have the money.
What do you think an era of zero interest rates mean? It means that
there is so much money sloshing around in the treasure chests of the
global economy, so much loot piled up by Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses,
that there is nowhere left to put it. Not a single place: all the
yachts, super mansions, and trophy castles have been bought.
Nada left
to buy equals zilch interest to lend at. Zero interest doesn’t just
means “societies can borrow for better than free and give everyone
healthcare, education, an income, and savings” — it means that if they
don’t, the economy will go right on cruising into oblivion, because that
money will go on piling at the top, instead of doing anything remotely
useful, beneficial, or necessary.
Now,
who’s the prime exemplar of austerity? America, of course. There,
thanks to four decades of people imbecilically destroying their very own
government, those very people live in rank indignity — they have no
healthcare, retirement, pensions, safety nets, and therefore, they have
no mobility, opportunity, stability, security, and therefore, quite
reasonably, they have no hope or optimism left, which is why they’re
turning to harder and harder drugs to numb the pain of it all. But see
the point: the nationalist says: “us first!!!”, but ironically, he only
means “them last!!” He is too stupid to invest in his very own society.
He wants, instead, to kick out the scapegoats, exclude the minority,
scorn the weak. But he doesn’t see that “us first” and “them last” are
not opposites — they quite often go hand in hand in a race to the bottom
of the abyss. Ah, only a true imbecile would confuse up for down...
Denial. Self-chosen ignorance. Socially constructed mass delusions.
Overweening folly. About the world, humanity, life, and each other.
Things will be OK, go back to normal. We stick our fingers and cry “LA
LA LA LA!!” at the merest mention of even the tiniest inconvenient
truth — quick, change the channel, unlike that person, unfollow. So here
are a few of those truths, now that I’ve got you in a position where
you can’t squirm away so easily.....
READ ENTIRE ESSAY AND APPLY THE EXAMPLES TO THE PEOPLE & CIRCUMSTANCES AROUND YOU:
1 comment:
You know what the real stupidity is? Writing an essay in which "Living within one's means" is considered stupid.
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