Stupid people

The life sentence handed out by a US judge to a pair of vegans whose baby died six weeks after birth having been fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice, has led me to reflect on the wider political/cultural threat posed by stupid people.

Earlier this week veteran star-gazer Patrick Moore (pictured) complained that women were ruining the BBC, and by implication, western civilisation as a whole: “The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days.”

It strikes me that the cantankerous old astronomer is not alone in sensing the general rise of stupidity in our society, but has mistakenly blamed it on in-built gender impulses. Female stupidity is of course especially annoying to us men, just as male dumbness surely rankles with the opposite sex.

Perhaps there might indeed be cultural reasons why women have tended to be more emotionally engaged with matters that would strike the likes of Patrick Moore as trivial. Who can deny that British women are still more likely to be interested in astrology than astronomy?

But then Moore's probably not flicked onto Men and Motors recently. Personally I'd rather be locked in a room with someone wittering on about Paris Hilton and Peter Andre than a bloke desperate to share with me their love for Torquay United and everyday DIY projects.

Working in a marketing industry dominated by Hello and Heat readers (though not necessarily of the same sex or sexual orientation) I have often wondered whether capitalism has managed to keep itself going by appealing to the increasingly assertive demographic that just loves to be pampered. (Why else would we have the likes of organic avocado shampoo?)

Anyway, world stupidity is in many ways a bigger problem than say world poverty, and as with consciousness-grabbing crises like global warming, it may be becoming more dangerous with every passing day.

Many of the things that Europe's intellectual elites like to moan on about − media gossip, over-keen believers, teenage pregnancies, Yanks, street crime, soap operas, gameshows, poor people, rich people etc. are surely just white horses on the great wave of stupidity that threatens to submerge our way of life. (And Big Brother shows us that stupid people can actually provide worthwhile entertainment for non-dummies: a deeply worrying phenomenon as it gives the thick-pound some serious commercial clout.)

Remember, because they generally breed earlier and in greater numbers, over time the mass in things like mass media and mass hysteria inevitably includes a greater proportion of thickies. The chart that Al Gore uses to show the dramatic rise in human populations worldwide would be that much more terrifying if we could see within it the irresistible rise of the dumb-ass.

Is it already too late to reverse this worrying process of global dumbing down? Well, we probably won't be able to educate ourselves out of this particular tight corner. The trouble is that stupid people are immune to the didactive warfare waged against them, because they are of course inherently incapable of rationally assessing the consequences of their actions. Out in Guatemala you can get a real feel for how the "better education" delusion is applied (and thwarted) in practice, on issues like contraception and safe-sex in particular.

Yet just as trivial-mindedness is surely not limited to the fairer-sex, stupidity itself is not the sole preserve of the underprivileged. Indeed recent research has clearly shown that clever people are not disproportionately represented in the ranks of the affluent and powerful. And if Hillary Clinton is elected as the first female President of the US, she will take the helm of an institution steered by a couple of really notable dimwits in recent history. (She appears not to be the soap opera type herself.)

It is interesting to note that whilst essentially democrats at heart, many of the men that drafted the first American Constitution were presciently aware of the distorting effect that rising stupidity was likely to have over all "free" societies. And so they did their best to set up durable safeguards, but rather like the Thames Barrier, these will not hold back the tide forever!