More Stupider Than You Are

I wish I could credit myself
for identifying the most stupid
people in the world today,
but hey, it's a sport identifying
them. It's just that,
everyone gets it wrong,
because everyone has an agenda
except me.

I swear! When Fast Food Nation
pins stupidity on the systematic
gridding of the world into
golden arches, what it's really
saying is, hey, I really don't
like the whole fast food thing.
It can be a whole book and
still miss the point. Dude,
it's just culture. Whatever
you think you gleam from it,
you've gleamed wrongly. Stupid
is as stupid does. You can
have the most simple instructions
possible, and still have them
less useful than they think they are.


It's not, in the end, about whether
someone is capable or willing to do
something, or apathy or conflicting
interests, but rather the fact that
for some people, it's simply easier
to ignore good sense. Yeah, that's
it. Pretty dumb, right? They might
not even realize what they're doing;
they might be listening to what they
were told to do, and the people who
told them what to do might not have
realized what they were doing, or

they did and just didn't care, because
it seemed like a good idea at the time.
What we lack is a basic ability to think
for ourselves. The book touches on that,
but doesn't seem to think it's as important
as the greater thesis, that homogeny is
somehow a bad thing. Hey, culture is
as culture does, and it's not really
about being stupid, but rather about
an apathy about stupidity, a feeling that
you're either smart or you're not.

Well, fuckheads, everyone's smart
about something, and everyone basically
knows what everyone else does, it's just
that we don't want to trust in that,
we'd rather believe that we can or everyone
probably should be able to do everything,
or that no one else can do anything,
and even when that's true, we don't
allow them the benefit, or they don't
allow themselves the benefit, and so we
listen to idiots spouting idiotic things
because it's easier than trying to see
how the person everyone says is an idiot
isn't so stupid after all.

It boggles me, it really does. We spend
all this time talking about the importance
of school, of learning, of reading,
of growing up, yet we never for
one moment think it's important that
people learn to reason for themselves.
To hell with research papers! To hell
with essays! To hell with grades!
Give me a classroom and I will give you
students who will be asked what they think,
simply as a matter of course. If they're
not thinking, they're not there. It's
as simple as that. Every day is already a
challenge, in some way, anyway. Embrace that!
Teach that! But don't tell someone
they're worthless if they challenge the world!

I mean, my god, education is all about that!

Ah, for the world to realize that,
for the world to see what the world is,
to accept that the philosophers are not alone,
that we are not alone, those of us
who are alone, those of us who are never
alone, that the world is what the world is
because it is how we see it. We don't
have to suffer fools, because it
does not take a fool to know a fool,
but it takes fools to love fools,
and to love fools is to hate mankind,
but to see past their foolishness
is a challenge we must all embrace.

It's the real struggle that we call life,
our chance to make up history as we go along,
learn from it or not, but always to see
what's possible, even when everything seems

impossible.

But don't tell me change is when we say
the right thing for the wrong reasons
and with the wrong words.
Yes, it's possible to have progress like that,
but haven't we done enough of that?

Ah, I guess not...