Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Are Americans Stupid?

Recently several aged comedians agreed on TV that people are stupid. The context was a discussion of some truthful dude who helped invent the Affordable Care Act and then said that people were so stupid they had to be misled to give them health care. John Cleese, agreeing that people are stupid, said that what old age had taught him was that nearly everyone doesn't know what he is talking about.  (This is one of the great insights of philosophy, shared by the ancient daoists and Ludwig Wittgenstein.) 

I am now so old I might as well face reality, which is that nearly half of our population is of below-average intelligence. The upper half is mostly delusional by choice. They prefer to believe things like "Mary was a virgin" and "Woodie Allen is a great baby sitter." On a scale of one to ten, nearly all of us are dumb or deluded, especially our Supreme Court, and that is part of what is the matter with Kansas. (Did I mention that I am old?)


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