Are People Getting Even More Stupid or Have We Become Too Stupid to Notice?

I just finished listening to NPR News.

I learned that Herman Cain has actually risen in popularity among likely Republican voters, despite three documented claims of sexual harassment followed by a flurry of innuendo, extreme awkwardness, and outright lying by Cain responding to these claims.

Then I heard an interview with a person who runs a company that sends Care Packages to US soldiers abroad, where he was saying that our withdrawal from Iraq was just a political move and was coming way to soon. I guess he wasn’t aware that the Iraq War is not only among the longest in US history, but that we have been ordered out by the Iraqi government. Moreover, they can’t stand us being there.

Then I heard how Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper and that by self-proclamation he is as consistent as any human being on earth on the issues of the time. This was part of a story detailing how he would represent the voices of liberals and pro-choice advocates in Washington and then speaking to another , more recently, he was 100% against abortion, etc.

And then there was another story how Republicans first filibuster a jobs bill and then voted against it because it would raise the taxes on the income of those making move than one million dollars .7% (the net tax on income of more than one million dollars per taxpayer).

And then I heard another story how a study done by the US government showed that many, if not most, large US corporations pay little to no corporate income taxes.

If this weren’t enough there’s always “Yahoo Answers” and this profoundly dispiriting sign of human self-destruction. How can people be so stupid?

We are awash in information, as we are, simultaneously, devoid of wisdom. What can explain such rampant stupidity and ignorance? The proof is finally here.

I have read in Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth that ant neural systems differ in size and levels of activity in proportion to their level of the capacity of their species to create complex colonies. The leaf cutter ant is the ant species with the most complex colonies. And while most ant species have evolved to create colonies, there are still some ants that live, ostensibly, as hunter/gatherers.

The propensity of ants to live as colonies or as hunter/gatherers mirrors are own human organization. But here’s where it really gets interesting. The ants that live in colonies, which are the vast majority of ants, have much smaller brains and less neural activity than ants living as hunter/gatherers.

Exactly the same decline in brain power has been noted among animals that were once wild, but are now domesticated. The brains of sheep are about 30% smaller than their wild cousins. The same is true of dogs when compared with wolves.

This same book talks about brain studies that have shown that nearly all modern humans have considerably smaller brains than people raised in a hunting and gathering society. A study done in Australia has shown that the brains of aborigines are about 13% larger than non-aboriginal Australians. In other words, they are a lot smarter than their nattily attired neighbors in place like Sydney and Melbourne. An Australian aborigine can excel in advanced academic studies, but someone raised in urban Australia wouldn’t last two weeks on their own living in the back country bush.

Being a member in mediocre standing among the planet’s domesticated human beings, I’m really not at all confident that I am sufficiently intelligent to make the following statement, but these studies are showing me something that I’ve thought probable for quite some time: people are fucking stupid (or as Jerry Seinfeld noted, “People … they’re the worst“).

While I might not be smart enough to make that statement with confidence, I am quite sure that I am smart enough to realize that this statement won’t win me many friends in the blogosphere. But there you have it: people really are fucking stupid.

Is there any other better theory to explain why most Americans believe in a literal reading of the Bible, as well as rejecting the ‘theory’ of evolution? We also love to think of ourselves as #1, when we would have our collective heads waaaaaay up our collective asses to even claim we’re #20. See this fascinating chart published in the NY Times last Saturday.

Now if Americans were to shout out for all to hear “We’re #36″, then, and only then, might I begin to doubt those Austrailian studies.

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The Are People Getting Even More Stupid or Have We Become Too Stupid to Notice? by , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.