Why are americans dumbasses

Today many baby boomers are starry-eyed about the days of their youth. In that thought, one approaches the core of the mystery. My hypothesis: Stupidity dominates in our time because of the convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements that—mixed together at one moment, in one cultural beaker—have produced a fatal explosion of brainlessness.

What are those ingredients? You will have your own list, of course. My nominees will seem eccentric at first. The subversion of manners and authority two great casualties of the s prepared the way for the death of privacy, which would eventually be ensured by the stupendously intrusive capabilities of Big Tech in the 21st century.

Manners depend on reticence, even mystery. When those ingrained regulations, those protections of the individual mind, are gone, then you may open the floodgates to among many other things pornography, which is a massively lucrative assault on individual dignity and collective decorum—an assault on the manners of a society and, if you will forgive my saying so, on the divinity of the individual.

The death of manners and privacy, I argue, are profoundly political facts that, combined with other facts, lead, eventually, to an entire civilization of stupidity. Genitals became weirdly public issues; the sexes subdivide into genders. Ideologues extract sunbeams from cucumbers. They engage in what amounts to an Oedipal rebellion against reality itself. At the Tower of Babel, the Lord—whatever his reasons—confounded the languages of the peoples of the world. I suspect he has found he can achieve the same effect by making everyone stupid.

Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Before I go on, I should say that even I can see some holes in the above theory.

You only have to look at certain members of congress read Republicans who forced the government to shutdown last week , for instance, many of whom attended some of the finest universities and make bucket loads of money , to see that even an Ivy League education may be of little use to a person who is simply prone to stupidity. I should add also that many people believe that it's the large immigrant population of which I'm a member who are responsible for bringing down the nation's IQ, which further complicates the dumb American narrative.

Indeed one could argue all day about the reasons Americans are falling behind, Woody Allen blames fast food , but we should at least be able to agree on the remedies. Here's the thing, most economists agree that in this technology driven age, a highly skilled workforce is key to any real economic recovery. It doesn't bode well for the future then that so many American students, particularly low-income and minority students, are graduating high school without basic reading or math skills.

Nor does it inspire confidence that students who leave school without basic skills are not acquiring them as adults. So America's alleged dumbness has a lot to do with inadequate schooling for poor children and teenagers and a dearth of continuing education opportunities for low-income adults. The smart thing to do then surely would be to pour resources into early and continuing education opportunities so that American adults will be equipped with the necessary skills to compete in the global economy.

This is where the dumb argument really gets a boost, however, because the opposite is happening. Because federal education funding is doled out according to the number of low-income students in a given school, it is poor children, the ones who most need the help, who are being disproportionately impacted by the cuts.

So are Americans dumb? The answer appears to be yes, some are. So if someone hits you and they stop hitting you, you've already been hit in the face. And so you already have some damage. So you've already taken some damage. Your government is already weakened. He warns that a damaged government can stay weak for a very long time.

Like what they did was they destabilized and they caused all this chaos. And they said, Hey look at the chaos. Vote for us. So it's not like it just stops on Inauguration Day. What I try to tell readers is, look, in Sri Lanka this was a generational change. Our cycle of violence started when I was 0 years old and it went until I was about He's talking about the Sri Lankan civil war that bled across the nation's history from to I think maybe you guys kind of want the Amazon Prime subscription to history, where everything gets resolved tomorrow, you know, you want next day delivery on resolution.

And so it'll take a generational movement for this sort of thing to resolve. I think a lot of people might find that scary to hear. But hoping for generational change is also a form of denial in the present. It's Americans today, proffering a powerless shrug, and dumping a broken country onto the backs of its children.

We have already asked them to bear too much. So we asked Indi Samarajiva — How does a nation defeat, at least, the willful blindness that hurts a democracy? What can be done now to beat back the stupid part of the stupid coup? One is, you're in pain, like I think you need to feel that and you need to feel that things are bad.

I think a lot of people might be trying to tell you, Oh, it's not so bad, it's not so bad. And it's like sometimes things are just bad. I'm hurt, like don't do this anymore.

And I would tell you that Black people or say undocumented people, they've been saying, Hey, like, something's hurting us for a long time and you haven't listened. And now it's come close to you. And you need to feel that pain.

I don't know what you do with that information, but my only message to you is the denial is just getting you more hurt, it's just causing more damage, it's just causing more trauma. And you can sort of look to us and you can learn from the mistakes we made. Because God knows, we made a lot of mistakes. And I think this is actually a chance for Americans to leave the exceptional La La land they've lived in and to rejoin the rest of the world. But God knows, it's going to be a painful awakening.

Indi Samarajiva , a writer, living in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Find his Medium page here. And his piece on 'stupid coups' here. Skip to main content. Close close Donate.