“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Idiocracy
Apple® has embraced the future: they’ve already priced in 20 years of inflation.
One constant theme of this blog is change.
We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors.
Blue is a flavor, right?
The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year.
Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.
Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.
Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.
There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.
Maybe they have a point?
Why can’t Elvis drive a Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.
Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.
How has that changed humanity?
In the beginning was the Word. And, the word.
If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.
Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future.
In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.
Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?
Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.
Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.
The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”
His mom’s advice was, “Just because you Genghis Khan, doesn’t mean you Genghis Should.”
At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.
Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.
Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.
Well, 24 and Me© now has a new customer.
Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information.
The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today?
Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?
Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off.
That’s the media that we’re trained with today.
We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.
The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.
I always make it a point to respect the modesty of women wearing bikinis by staring at the parts of their body that are covered up.
The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film Idiocracy) selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.
This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.
It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.”
Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.
Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history.
The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak.
Hell’s bells, we are all on the short bus.
Obedience to self destruction…sure that’ll work.
Find your mirror and reverse the process.
Paradoxical polarities promote psychic satisfaction.
Good post JW. It’s a point I have been aware of for 60 years. The trend is not controllable, and is contributing to the coming collapse.
It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot harder than making them better.
Are you sure? I admit, maybe I have not understood the matter.
Thank you!
Elmer Pendell speculated about civilizations rising and crashing on a 200-300 year cycle: advancing tech makes it possible for more and more marching morons to multiply, until the society becomes so top heavy with lightweights that the whole thing tips over. Then the stupid get eaten by the smart, and the whole thing starts again.
Not too long ago, Charles Hugh Smith posted an article on the increasing crisis of incompetency. In the past year we’ve had a lost F-35 in SC, Kamala presented as a viable Prez candidate, OMG Biden was a veggie – who knew, etc., ad nauseam.
What is abnormal is now normal. Dumb cashiers at your supermarket? Do the self-checkout, which often goes haywire. Females with 1″ long fingernails that have to tap keyboards with a pencil eraser, speaking in what is supposed to be English?
I always thought that technology was society’s savior. It’s increasingly becoming a curse, as the general populace is getting dumber by the day and can’t operate without it. What happens when the plug gets pulled for 2-3 days in Chicago?
Well, that was a stoopid question, I’ll admit.
” Kamala presented as a viable Prez candidate”
When I read that, I thought it said “Pez” candidate. Trying to picture Kamala’s likeness on a PEZ dispenser and it just doesn’t work. Kamala is only known for things going into her mouth, not coming out.
J-Bird
“What happens when the plug gets pulled for 2-3 days in Chicago?”
This, but with afros instead of mohawks, and the people will be much swarthier. Shittier music too.
In all this talk of unproductive, low impulse control people, we know to whom you refer, and it is becoming somewhat less taboo to call them out for their antisocial behavior (see: Fatigue, black). Yet whereas they never really were a good fit for a civilized, technologically advanced society, they are rapidly losing what little inroads they managed to make, and are now more problematic than ever. This makes for a surly, parasitic, volatile segment of the populace with easily wounded pride, for even they realize on some level just how utterly incompatible they are with the modern world.
Man has tamed Nature to the point where Nature is no longer able to effectively select for traits such as intelligence, willingness to cooperate and resourcefulness. What, then, is to be done about the growing obsolete, underperforming population which is nought but an anchor, weighing the rest down?
I’ll bet that coldly dispassionate reasoners could come up with a solution.
I was thinking about this earlier today after a trip yesterday to Costco and Sam’s Club.
For most of human history, the overriding driver of human activity was getting sufficient calories to keep you alive until the next day. In much of the world that is still true and it was true for the West until maybe 1/3 of the way through the last century. Now my problem is having so much dang food in my house that I don’t really have enough space for it all.
Being relieved of the need to hunt for calories was a enormous boon to humanity, again at least in the West, and allowed for amazing innovation but we seemed to have hit peak efficiency and are now heading the other direction.
When the ability to secure calories is lost so is that individual.
We are getting closer to tipping point daily. AI will eliminate enough jobs to create chaos, and starvation.
If you can’t hunt, trap, and fish that could be critical.
If you can’t fix things you are screwed beyond saying.
What does it look like when the full-blown self-limitation impulse really kicks in? And when might that occur? Just curious.
Being part of society for almost 70 years taught me that 70 years is a long time to deal with society. Some people should be thankful I’m not a Neanderthal, nor extremely vindictive.
Still not sure how language would be selected for, as it requires a couple physical and a mental change to be possible. Being the first person to develop language would be worthless, as no one else would understand you. You’d be like the Asian guy in the movie “Caveman” who always knew the modern word for things.
They thought the midgit had fallen into dino shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYqovHffGE8
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I don’t think any of this is inevitable. In the early 20th century society began moving towards eugenics, with even SCOTUS ruling 8:1 that the government has the right to sterilize institutionalized people purely for eugenic reasons. Then WW2 happened and making a strong people and a strong society became LITERALLY HITLER for some reason. Why? Who nose.
Our government has intentionally pushed things in the opposite direction, apparently to make a more controllable population both through ethnic strife and idiocy.
OTOH I think that the past few decades have set the stage for the possibility of better genetics. There used to be much more mixed breeding, while now it is very assortive. A good-looking poor girl would likely marry a guy with a good job who didn’t care about her intelligence, an ugly girl born into good money would likely have to marry a man of less means, etc.
Nowadays smart people tend to marry smart people, and stupid people tend to breed with other stupid people. With the stupid/stupid cross often being pushed even further down the selection pole due to the negative effects of bastardy/ lack of a father. So we have an increasingly genetically stratified society, with smart people tending to have smart kids and dumb people having even dumber kids. A bottleneck event could massively change the genetic average of society, as they often do, but it could be to an even greater degree than normal.
Assuming the vax will have a large effect on reproduction, this could be a bottleneck event. Although the effects go in both directions. On one hand, poor people, coloreds, and the less educated were less likely to get vaxxed. But on the other hand, perhaps this will reverse a few centuries of selecting for conformists and those who mindlessly obey the government.
Many variables and unknowns exist making it difficult to see what is coming, even more so than usual.
You need to look at what ethnic group started controlling key government positions during and following WWII to understand why “making a strong people and a strong society became LITERALLY HITLER”.
It’s why the muslims are bitch slapping the master race and doing their women.
It does not get better from here. And the less one knows to do the more likely their demise. And that’s not counting video games or rapping.
Z99-
Carbon copy post describing the first few minutes of “Idiocracy”, with the exception of smart couples are having at least 1 child, sometimes 2.
JW,
I commend to your reading The Axemaker’s Gift by emeritus genius of the history of science and technology James Burke (of The Day The Universe Changed and multiple editions of Connections on PBS).
He condensed the subject of this post down to only 342 fascinating pages.
It’s an excellent read, by one of the most original and brilliant historians on the topic of science and technology since…ever.
https://www.amazon.com/Axemakers-Gift-Technologys-Capture-Control/dp/0874778565/ref=sr_1_1
TL;DR:
Technological change in society is a constant.
The rate of technological change is exponential.
For but one illustrative example:
cuneiform on clay tablets > printing press > telegraph/telephone/television > computers > personal computers
3500 B.C. 1440 A.D. 1838/ 1876/1927 1945 1975
Each step contributed directly to a worldwide explosion of knowledge and dissemination far beyond the speed of Thag grunting to Og.
The expansion and dominance of technological innovation follows, like ripples from dropping a stone into a pond.
This also illustrates why AI is inevitably a dead end, as machines now are where man was with cunieform tablets, and improvements in AI make for stupider people, at precisely the time machines need smarter people to advance the capabilities of AI improvements.
The closest equivalent to this is riding a jet-powered car into a brick wall at top speed.
It ain’t gonna be pretty, and AI is riding that car.
We have now reached a singularity with your earlier post, and this one.
You’re welcome. 😉