It's not Idiocracy
By Christopher Hays 03-10-2025
As we navigate through life we all inevitably come face to face with the dreaded specter of stupidity. Sadly, as it turns out, this encounter is an extremely powerful trap. By no means is this an ordinary trap. Far from it. In fact its been said that this trap was laid by our ancestors at the very dawn of humanity. Unfathomable eons in origin with Stygian intent. Some folk swear it moves like a living entity infecting the minds of those who come too close. Should its tendrils touch you even slightly, its effects can very wildly, but thankfully temporarily. However, those who find themselves unable to break free from its grasp....Family members report the experience is like watching their loved ones rot away before their eyes.
The trap is triggered by one of two events. Both events can be either small, innocuous and quickly forgotten while others can culminate into epically catastrophic situations. The first event is "Accusation". This is the moment either you, or the people around you accuse you of being, doing, or saying something stupid. The second is "Witness of Action". As it sounds, you witness an act of stupidity. That's it. That's all it takes. Just the witnessing of stupidity is enough to set it off. Unfortunately, once ensnared there is very little hope of escape. The traps most powerful effect is what I call Stupid Goggles. The effect is a excessively heightened awareness of the stupidity in everything around you. And I mean literally everything. Living, dead, animate, inanimate, nothing is safe from the skewed vision through the lenses of our stupid spotting goggles. From the most minor mistakes of grammar usage to some of the most horrific historical events of our age. But the one thing our stupid spotting googles cant spot is how stupid our stupid spotting goggles actually are.
In 2008, with my stupid spotting goggles firmly planted to my face, I watched the movie Idiocracy. A comedy sci-fi staring Luke Wilson, as a accidental time traveler trapped in a future America populated with nothing but stupid people, making him the smartest man alive. Its really funny I think because I normally find this type of humor entertaining. However I wasn't laughing. In fact I found myself becoming agitated. I turned it off. Yet, over the years, Ive seen more of it. Still, I'm not laughing. To this day I've not seen the film in it's entirety. Don't get me wrong this is not a knock on the film. I actually wanted to find it funny but I just couldn't. I wasn't aware of it yet but It turned out my stupid spotting goggles were beginning to fail.
Soon after, I became fascinated with the subject of stupidity. I delved into stupid documentaries, stupid data, stupid historical events, stupid famous quotes. The amount of proof that stupidity was so pervasive in society that it could utterly and thoroughly replace the intelligentsia within the highest ranks of our leadership became, not only a very real possibility, but that we were already too late. Yet, even with all the signs pointing to stupidity as the secret hand that drives humanity, It just some how felt wrong.
Several filters, and the tertiary processors of my stupid spotting goggles began to short out. The Stupid system attempts reboot. Fails. Main system processor switches to back up power. Immanent failure in....4...3...2...1. Powering down.
I have held many jobs throughout my life and Ive worked with some of the smartest people I've ever met. I've cleaned the operating rooms of hospitals and worked around doctors and nurses. In my younger days I worked security for music venues and met some of the most amazing musical progeny. I served in the military and trained with tactical war-fighter masterminds. For 20 years I worked in film and I was surrounded by the most brilliant minds I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Through all of it, the one take away that was true throughout all these pools of intelligence, talent and skill; Smart people do some of the dumbest shit I have ever seen! I'm talking about epic fuck ups so bad that one is left to wonder how truly pervasive stupidity is even among the most intelligent among us. Don't even get me started on what politicians are capable of committing, that's well documented fact.
From a distance all of these idiotic behaviors appear with such great frequency that I began to loose hope in humanity. In my despair I started to question pretty much everything. I had to ask, If stupidity is this pervasive what hope do any of us plebs have? But this question rang a bit too hard with hopelessness. There had to be another source.
Not to brag but I take pride in my ability to read peoples intentions with relative ease and a solid amount of accuracy. That's when I had a realization. I needed to change my perspective. I asked myself what events in my life caused my episodes of stupidity? I began to notice that my bouts with my own stupidity coincided with traumatic events in my life at the time or even the remembrance of past traumas. My heart sank at this realization. We've been running around reinforcing everyone's traumatic experiences by hurling insults and accusations. We've been misreading so many cries for help as merely the misfortune of their or our own stupidity. Every time we do it we ingrain this social behavior on our collective psyche with the thoughtless wave of a stupid hand. It turns out true stupidity comes from our inability to see past the stupidity to fix what is really broken.
I would like to offer a suggestion, I will use the lyrics from the song Language of Violence by the Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy.
"Dehumanizing the victim makes things simpler
It's like breathing with a respirator
It eases the conscience of even the most conscious
And calculating violator
The power of words, don't take it for granted
When you hear a man ranting
Don't just read the lips, be more sublime than this
Put everything in context
Is this a tale of rough justice
In a land where there's no justice at all?
Who is really the victim
Or are we all the cause and victim of it all?
In conclusion; You can call out stupidity, but you do so at your own peril. If we keep feeding the narrative that we are living in the real life version of Idiocracy instead of seeing it for what it truly is; a "Trauma Olympics", than we will truly have succumbed our own stupidity. Lets not do that, OK?
Endeavor to persevere! Cheers!