An economist named Jonathan Gruber got his name in the news because he called the American people “stupid.” Come on, Gruber, even if your fellow citizens are stupid, isn’t it stupid to say so in front of cameras and microphones?
A while back I had to call the police to my house. (Nothing major – just dumbassery committed by college-age kids who should know better.) The officer and I talked and he took notes and then our conversation took a tangent and we were discussing people in general. At one point the officer said this: “People are dumb, and they’re getting dumber every day.” Cops deal with people all day long, so if anyone knows whether people are getting dumber, a cop should know.
I turned on the TV and a quiz show was in progress. A contestant was asked to define an astronomical object named Miranda. It was multiple choice; he had to choose the correct answer from four possible answers. After a few seconds of indecision, the contestant stated: “I’m not a smarty astronomist, so I’ll use my lifeline.”
Smarty astronomist?
I have my own theory about intelligence. The amount of intelligence in the world is nearly a constant. That means, average IQ multiplied by the number of people is a number that doesn’t change or changes only a little. So as the population goes up, the average IQ goes down, because there is less intelligence to go around. Inversely, in earlier times when the population was smaller, the average IQ was higher.
Think about it. Modern humans don’t know how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. Oh, we’ve worked out methods of handling stone blocks that the ancients might have used. In theory, we could build a pyramid today. But do you really think modern Egyptians could build a duplicate of, say, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, using copper tools and without machinery made of anything besides wood?
There are countless other examples of ancient ingenuity, such as the cities of Machu Picchu in Peru and Tiwanaku in Bolivia. Their stonework is so incredible that some people have proposed that they were built, not by human hands, but by the advanced technology of visiting space aliens. I have no doubt those cities were built by humans – just smarter humans than are around today.
Why has every civilization on Earth collapsed at some point? It’s because a civilization is founded by smart people. Then the population grows and grows until eventually the people of that civilization simply grow themselves into stupidity. They become too stupid to keep their civilization going and it collapses. It’s probably what happened to Atlantis.
We don’t have to go back to ancient times for evidence. If you’re a senior citizen, think back to your childhood. Weren’t people smarter back then? Sure they were. Heck, we went to the Moon in 1969! The flippin’ Moon! And the engineers who designed the rockets back then made their calculations on slide rules – pieces of wood (or plastic or metal) with numbers and markings printed on them. The most powerful computer of that era had only a small fraction of the computing power that is in your mobile phone. And we went to the Moon! Now it’s almost 2015. Have we been to the Moon lately? No. Not since 1972. We have no way to get to the Moon. It’s almost as if … we forgot how.
Thousands of years from now, America will be a myth, a legend. And when humans finally return to the Moon and discover the pitted and bleached skeletons of their ancestors’ landers and rovers, they will marvel that humans made it to the Moon in such a primitive time as the twentieth century. Doubtless some people will insist that we present-day humans must have had help. Help from – what else – an advanced race of space aliens. But no, we didn’t have help. We used slide rules and our brains, and they were enough because we were smart.
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