DAWN OF THE DUMB

Aldous Huxley predicted this in Brave New World Revisited in 1958. Advancements in healthcare, technology, and the ability to prevent disease have allowed the weakest members of the gene pool to survive, rather than die off. As they reproduce, the average intelligence of the world declines.

Look around you. Do you really think the average person is more intelligent today than they were 30 years ago?

And then remember what the patron saint of TBP had to say:

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

George Carlin

We are surrounded by stupid people and they are getting stupider by the minute.

 

Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing – and some experts argue it’s because humans have reached their intellectual peak

 

  • IQs have largely increased since the 1930s thanks to better living conditions and education – a trend known as the Flynn effect
  • But IQ test results suggest people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have become less intelligent in the past decade
  • Opinion is divided as to whether the downwards trend is long-term
  • Some studies have shown the average IQ of Westerners has plunged 10 points or more since Victorian times and others claim it will keep decreasing
  • But other experts argue that even if we are becoming more stupid, better healthcare and technology means the ‘problem’ will regulate itself

 

By Sarah Griffiths for MailOnline

 

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.

Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

Dumb and dumber? Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade. Opinion is divided as to whether human intelligence will decrease over time. A study by the University of Hartford claims that the larger the global population becomes, the less intelligent we will be, dropping by around eight IQ points by the year 2110 - and other estimates are even more pesimistic

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998.

And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak.

Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named. 

An image of the future? Some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries ¿ and that IQ scores are leveling out and even declining. Pessimistic scientists think  that our descendants may struggle to understand subjects we can grasp (illustrated with a stock image)

Westerns have lost 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian age, according to a study published by the University of Amsterdam last year.

Jan te Nijenhuis thinks this could be because intelligent women tend to have less children than women who are not as clever, The Huffington Post reported.

The perceived link between IQ and fertility is a very contentious one.

Dr Nijenhuis studied the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 and 2004 to come to his conclusion.

Each study measured peoples’ reaction times – how long they took to press a button after being prompted.

It is claimed that reaction time mirrors mental processing speed – so it reflects intelligence.

They found that visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds in the late 19th Century, but in 2004, they had increased to 275 milliseconds.

This would suggest that people have become less intelligent, they said.

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just leveling out, but declining. 

Scientists including Dr Flynn think better education can reverse the trend and point out  the perceived decline could just be a blip. However, other scientists are not so optimistic.

Some believe the Flynn effect has masked a decline in the genetic basis for intelligence, so that while more people have been reaching their full potential, that potential itself has been declining.

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people.

Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.

He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.

Michael Woodley, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, claims people’s reactions are slower than in Victorian times, and has linked it to a decline in our genetic potential.

Must try harder: Psychologist Richard Lynn calculated the decline in humans¿ genetic potential. He used data on average IQ test scores (illustrated) from around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

It has previously been claimed that quick-witted people have fast reactions and Dr Woodley’s study showed people’s reaction times have slowed over the century – the equivalent to one IQ point per decade.

Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era.

He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever,The Huffington Post reported.

Dr Woodley and others think humans will gradually become less and less intelligent.

But Dr Flynn says if the decline in IQ scores is the end of the Flynn effect, scores should stabilise.

He thinks that even if humans do become more stupid, better healthcare and technology will mean that all people will have fewer children and the ‘problem’ will regulate itself.

ARE BRITISH TEENAGERS BECOMING LESS INTELLIGENT?

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009.

Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported.

Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

Professor Fynn said the results could be the result of less intelligent youth culture.

He used data gathered in IQ tests on UK children and found that children aged between five and 10 saw their IQs increase by half a point per year over three decades.

‘Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents’ influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age,’ he said.

‘…What we know is that youth culture is now more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations.’

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Chicago999444
Chicago999444

“ldous Huxley predicted this in Brave New World Revisited in 1958. Advancements in healthcare, technology, and the ability to prevent disease have allowed the weakest members of the gene pool to survive, rather than die off. As they reproduce, the average intelligence of the world declines.”

You mean people like Stephen Hawkins, or Hellen Keller, or any other number of geniuses or extremely gifted people who would have died at birth or shortly after, or “exposed” due to their physical defects and handicaps?

The huge strides in medicine and technology allowed many physically weak people to live, but are these physically weak people also more likely to be mentally defective? I don’t think so. I believe, conversely, that the technological strides made in the 19th and early 20th century permitted intelligent and gifted, but physically deficient, people to flower, who would have died or been very marginalized in primitive, agrarian societies in which most people only survived by being very brawny, and physically resilient.

As you note, intelligence as measured by I.Q. tests rose in the period between 1880 and 1930, the period that saw the greatest technological advances, and improvements in living standards in the western world. This is because many people survived who would be quickly weeded out by the sheer physical privation and hardship of primitive, agrarian societies.

You could say the same for primitive societies in Africa and the Amazonian jungle, which is that they weed out the physically weak, irrespective of intelligence, and favor those who are able to withstand the rigors of the jungle, but who would not make it in a society favoring high intellectual development.

If I.Q. has decreased in the past 30 years, it would seem to owe almost entirely to mis-education- methods of education that produce irrationality and destroy the student’s ability to conceptualize and cogitate.

However, where we are really going wrong is by paying the stupid and incompetent to reproduce, while punishing the conscientious, the prudent, and the fairly decent, and making reproduction and parenthood an ordeal for them with intrusive Nanny State meddling.

IndenturedServant

I, like many of you monkeys, KNEW hoomans were regressing! We didn’t even need any fancy charts to illustrate it.

Olga
Olga

Huxley did believe in eugenics.

Dutchman
Dutchman

I’m convinced it’s about immigration. Too many dumb niggers / Mexicans / Puerto Ricans / Somalis / Hmong.

I’m not joking. A large percentage of these people are inferior IQ wise. We import them, and they breed with the general population. If they weren’t inferior then their countries would have their shit together – but they don’t.

spinolator
spinolator

All we have to do is look at the nutrition of the avg kid. It is complete shit masquerading as food. That has been proven to decrease IQ. Also, inactivity shrinks the brain, as does stress. Vaccinations more than ever before without any evidence of long term effects in the brain or immune system (how dare you question it). Add to that the toxic mainstream media culture and you have a very noxious mix. It is no wonder we have an epidemic of autism. Is it pure genetic? Depends on who you ask.

We’re in a time in which the “next boom” is in genetics, genomics, molecular biology, etc., etc., blah, blah, research. So we are now hearing how they found the gene that causes this or that and how they are trying to “change it, turn it off or on”. And if we do that we will all shit rainbows. They forget, however, that the cell is an extremely complex living system that responds to EVERYTHING in it’s internal and external environment. With thousands of chemical reactions occurring all… the…time. But that is the last place they look. Because the real aim of this research, at least for the corporations, is to make a buck, not cure diseases, which leads me to the next thing.

Prepare to have the shit vaccinated out of you. Or at least they will try. Many vaccines on the pipeline for adults so you can be vaccinated from cradle to grave. Of course, all perfectly safe. Brain inflammation as a side effect? Of course not!! Totally safe. Long term studies of the health of vaccinated vs. non vaccinated populations. No need. I told you it’s S-A-F-E.

We could go on about the effects pesticides, insecticides, damaged intestinal flora, smog, etc, etc on the brain and IQ. But then it sounds like a rant.

Anywho, I’m sure the “experts” above considered this when they claimed we have hit a peak in our intellectual capacity. Maybe they are correct. They themselves are evidence that we are getting stupider. Or perhaps they are just mainstream “experts’, which explains a lot. Maybe some of them are also economists.

Llpoh
Llpoh

I believe -as I have said here many times – the reason IQs are dropping is that the stupid used to die off, via natural selection, while today the stupid breed like rabbits. This will lead to catastrophic decline in IQs over time.

Chicago – humans by and large are not de-selected from the gene pool for being weak. They are deselected for being stupid. You try to make your case that it was the weak being deselected, but it was moreso the stupid. Weak and smart survive, strong and stupid die. Otherwise chimps and gorillas would rule the world and not man.

But the fact that deformed and diseased humans now successfully breed is not good for the gene pool either.

Brian
Brian
Bostonbob

Admin,
I believe it was his brother Julian,
Bob.

Bostonbob

Sorry Admin I hit send too quickly, I believe it was Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian who believed in eugenics.
Bob.

Bostonbob

Very interesting family:

“Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and his half-brother a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, Andrew Huxley; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, his great-uncle was poet Matthew Arnold and his great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.”

Wikipedia for what it’s worth.

Bob.

hardscrabble farmer
hardscrabble farmer

“They found that visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds in the late 19th Century, but in 2004, they had increased to 275 milliseconds…”

I would like to see the late 19th century study that was able to accurately measure reaction time to the millisecond.

And just out of curiosity, are the demographics of these so called intelligence studies duplicated or have we taken globalism into account?

Bostonbob

Admin,
This has peaked my interest in the Huxley clan, I will have to do more reading on them this weekend. About Olga, well you know how quick some are to apologize when they are wrong. My youngest goes off to UMass next weekend to major in Biology so the Huxley clan will make for some interesting reading.
Bob.

efarmer

Llpoh nails it.

When the government subsidizes something, you get more of it. The trillions thrown at the welfare class have bred an enormous number of, well, there is no other way to put it, stupid fucking people.

EF

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

Don’t have kids.

Olga
Olga

My first thought is that anyone reading those quotes must certainly see it. : )

My second thought was that I doubt seriously individuals who advocated for eugenics carried membership cards – but I was wrong.

Brother Julian is listed both as a VP and as a President – go figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Eugenics_Society

It is my understanding that damn near the whole clan were eugenicists – this is a long listen but IMO Richard Grove’s entire series is well worth a listen – perhaps during those long commutes.

https://www.tragedyandhope.com/peace-revolution-episode-064/

DaveL
DaveL

For my mostly worthless two cents, I think of a couple of things on the subject.
1. How do you believe in evolution and survival of the fittest and then abort 50 milion of your species without having a fucking clue as to whether they were more fit or not?
2. I think of the movie Johny Mnemonic. The brain being used to transport downloaded information so it couldnt be stolen.The problem was you had to give up part of you normal memory and persona to hold this downloaded information. This is today’s human problem. There is so much new shit to learn out there that you don’t have room for your own human history anymore. I think that’s why old people (me) think that young people are stupid. and young people think we are dinosaurs.

Billy
Billy

Every time I make the argument that modern medicine has made the human race weaker and stupider, I get called a Nazi or some shit…

Now an article gets posted here pretty much saying the same thing…

Can’t catch a break, ya know?

You guys remember Band Aid? Same thing.

30 million starving, low IQ Africans. Band Aid comes along. Container ships of aid flow to Africa. Fast forward a generation and now there’s 50+ million starving, low IQ Africans.

Do-gooder assholes interfering with the natural order of things…

Fuck em.

BOOSH!
BOOSH!

Admin,
You beat me to the punch………when I first watched Idiocracy on DVD some time in the late 2000’s I didn’t laugh once, because it was more real than fiction to me. I can now laugh about the scenes, but it really is where we are going. The opening says it all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8

Marc
Marc

The descent of man takes on a whole new meaning. Cro-Magnon was probably taller and more intelligent than present day man but lacked the knowledge base that has been accumulating since the dawn of civilization (written language and agriculture) starting around 5000 B.C. Modern political-economic redistribution programs may be responsible for accelerating the trend toward lower IQs as pointed out in Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.

Gubmint Cheese
Gubmint Cheese

+100 Idiocracy.

Think about all the healthiest and most fit go off to war. War helps facilitate flooding the gene pool with physically unfit and mentally weak.

The unfit and weak minded may live and continue their genetic line,since they are not selected, yet the fittest and possibly smartest get culled.

Rise Up
Rise Up

take a test…don’t know if it shows anything definitive for IQ. I scored 116, the wife got 120.

http://memorado.com/iqtest?r=122#.U-KXl318kaA.facebook

Olga
Olga

Crickets:

You are correct – we are not our brothers.

His contemporaries were eugenicists, his brother an avowed eugenicists – and his dystopian novels had heavy eugenicist overtones – but at no time are these associations adequate to label Aldus in his thinking and beliefs.

=========================

Listen to “The Ultimate Revolution”, a lecture by Aldous Huxley recorded March 20, 1962 at UC Berkeley: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#huxley (Real Audio)

He talks about using terrorism to create willing slaves out of the population and the use of drugs to control behavior and the emotionally reactions of humanity. The ultimate Illuminati/Elite goal is to love our servitude. Who would protest about being a slave when they don’t think they are one? Much like the Matrix we live in today.

====================

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/tph.2007.29.3.105?uid=3739776&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104079711681

Abstract: Aldus Huxley composed Brave New World in the context of the Depression and the eugenics movement in Britain.

=====================

New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship

Huxley explained that, “The future dictator’s subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers,” and he quotes one “advocate of this new science” as saying that, “The challenge of social engineering in our time is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of social engineers.” Thus, proclaims Huxley, “The twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.”[2]

New Eugenics
Many sciences and large social movements are directed by the same foundations and money that financed the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. The Rockefeller foundations, Ford, Carnegie, Mellon, Harriman, and Morgan money that flowed into eugenics led directly to ‘scientific racism,’ and ultimately the Holocaust in World War II.[13] Following the Holocaust, Hitler had discredited the eugenics movement he admired so much in America. So the movement branched off into forming several other social engineering projects: population control, genetics, and environmentalism. The same foundations that laid the foundations for eugenic ideology – the belief in a biological superiority and right to rule (justifying their power) – then laid the foundations for these and other new social and scientific movements.

==================

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1994/eirv21n41-19941014/eirv21n41-19941014_044-aldous_huxley_in_the_1930s_the_f.pdf

The Aldous Huxley on display is not the full-blown socio¬path of the post-World War II period. Through his later writ¬ings and activities, Aldous Huxley’s name has become a household word. His Brave New World has become a meta¬phor for a civilization
in which an entire population is con¬trolled by drugs and an all-powerful oligarchical state appara¬tus. He is also notorious for having promoted hallucinogenic drugs, in The Doors of Perception and Between Heaven and Hell. He is justifiably regarded as the
single most important conceptual architect of the rock-sex-drugs counterculture launched in the mid-1960s.

bb

I’m smart . You know how I know ?I read the TBP everyday. So that makes me very intelligent .Plus I took an IQ test in high school. I’m as intellectual as I S and ECONMAN.Of course some would say their stupid.Anyway happy to be here.

Billy
Billy

bb,

You sound like a Pakled…

Olga
Olga

“Hatcheries” are nothing but an attempt at breeding a species in a controlled environment for a controlled outcome – i.e., eugenics.

So I am curious – what part of his writings – his thoughts – leads you to believe he was not a eugenicist?

Anonymous
Anonymous
JIMSKI
JIMSKI

I blame Ralph Nader and his ilk. Everytime i get into a vehicle and it beeps or tweets or will not fuckistart till the seatbelt is on a say the following words.

Fuck you Ralph Nader.

You see a while ago stupid people DIED often and sometimes messily. They put hands in threshing machine or poked a bull in the sack and damn well paid the price. Now we have safety guards and warnings such as do not eat light bulbs or do not shove light bulbs up your ass or do not use ladder on roof and the guy who was gunna die cause he was fuckin dumb lives until he finds a dumb bitch who will let him drop a load so she can join the fsa as a breeder.

Cause and effect. Cause we let this dumbfuck live the effect is that Merica gets more stupid.

Stucky

I hope I’m not stating the obvious here; but, humans are getting both smarter AND dumber.

Recently I watched a one hour show on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland —– “a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets … which accelerates wo high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide.”.

I look at this machine, and think of the minds that produced it and I think to myself —- “Holy shit, Stucky. You’re nothing but a retarded Chimp compared to,these people!”

comment image

So, it seems a case could be made that humans are evolving (or, is it devolving) into two classes of people …. the super smart (the 1%ers), and the rest ….. just like in economics/finance.

Mr Chen
Mr Chen

take a test…don’t know if it shows anything definitive for IQ. I scored 116, the wife got 120.

Men marry up, women marry down; it’s their way of controlling us, see Michelle Obama.

Mr Chen
Mr Chen

I reached my intellectual peak at 15 when I had an epiphany and discovered how the world works, I meant to write it down but I was “overcome by events” and it was all downhill from there as life destroyed my illusions one by one.

Leobeer
Leobeer

I know someone that was an English police detective that never got promoted in his 20 years on the force. IMHO he is not very bright. He moved to Thailand, married an uneducated hilltribe girl and was unable to knock her up. They went to a fertility clinic for a couple years and voila — a boy was produced. A year later, another one.

What do you think the chances are for these kids ?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Diversity is our nose ring…

http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-cost-of-equality.html
The terrible cost of equality

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Was Lincoln correct about the prospects for social and political equality? 156 years later, consider the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and think about the gerrymandered political districts carved out on racial lines. Then tell us how many more years will be required to reach that nominal ideal.

Anonymous
Anonymous

‘Salter’s realization that ethnicity is extended kinship at the genetic level led to his conclusion that individuals have a large genetic stake in their ethnic groups, which could help explain the ubiquitousness of ethnic identity, solidarity and conflict from tribal times to the present. From the late 1990s Salter began studying the strategies used in group competition, with a particular interest in win-win strategies, those that would be adaptive to all groups. The outcome of this analysis was Salter’s theory of “Universal Nationalism,” described in his book On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration.[8]Salter has argued that “multi-ethnic societies are often confronted with the problem of discrimination and group conflict. He has written’:

“More ethnically homogeneous nations are better able to build public goods, are more democratic, less corrupt, have higher productivity and less inequality, are more trusting and care more for the disadvantaged, develop social and economic capital faster, have lower crime rates, are more resistant to external shocks, and are better global citizens, for example by giving more foreign aid. Moreover, they are less prone to civil war or ‘Fratricides’, the greatest source of violent death in the twentieth century.”

– Frank Salter

culture , just like water seeks it’s own level.bet on it.

http://heartbloodspirit.tumblr.com/post/95427283518

‘Salter has also argued that it is often the original majority group who suffer the most as a result of immigration-induced ethnic diversity’ :

“They are pushed out of areas of employment and business; they suffer from the higher rates of crime often shown by immigrant communities; they become the minority in poorer suburbs; and they sense a threat to their continuity as a people belonging to a particular place. They observe that the newcomers have a different group identity, one that excludes them, and that where there were few, now there are many. They sense, sometimes with justification, that they are losing their country.”

– Frank Salter

flash
flash

Barbarians at the gate.

White Genocide in South Africa

comment image

I would kindly like to inform you about the ongoing white genocide in the Republic of South-Africa. Since 1994, the end of the so-called Apartheid, whites people, especially white farmers, have been subject to extremely brutal and racist murders. About 50 people on average are murdered in South-Africa per day, of which at least 20 of them are whites(95+ % black on white murder rate). Please take into consideration that white people make up only 9% (4 500 000) of the demographics in South-Africa and therefore the white murder rate in South-Africa is quite significant. (read more – warning: contains pictures of violently murdered children and grown-ups)

http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html

Olga
Olga

In my world when someone writes like a duck, comes from a duck-centric family and prefers the company of other ducks then chances are good they are a duck.

IMO his fiction was heavily influenced by what was being discussed in his private circles as potential futures for the riffraff – Edward Berney’s wet dream of societal control – and as time went on he came to realize how much faster his “future” was manifesting.

Maybe he was ambivalent, maybe at some level appalled – but he came from a societal rung that believed in and accepted social Darwinism – they were at the top because they were inherently better – not because of any accident of birth – and it was their responsibility to deal with the “white man’s burden” which BTW included all the whites that were not of their social class.

The Fabian socialists [good friends of the eugenicists] “kill them with kindness” strategy has worked wonders – we have a nation where 50% are dependent on government bread and too many of the remainder numbed out on the ubiquitous 24/7 media circus.

The critical thinking skills necessary to comprehend the illusions presented as reality are becoming rare – and requires an understanding of history’s players – and their absolute appreciation for covert mind-control as the preferred method of herding the cattle.

But short of finding a YouTube of Aldus singing the praises of eugenics I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree.

It’s been fun Boo-boo!

flash
flash

a commercialized culture of nothing inevitably leads to moral and intellectual bankruptcy

Identity Defies the Global Marketplace

Identity Defies the Global Marketplace

Jack Donovan, American Renaissance, May 23, 2014

What is called “multiculturalism” is not so much an acknowledgement of separateness, uniqueness, or independence, as it is an invitation to put aside old loyalties and rivalries while maintaining some superficial elements of your old identity to help ease your transition into the new global commercial culture.

I was having dinner at an Italian restaurant a couple of weeks ago at a table next to a family of second- and third-generation Mexicans. All of the men at the table were talking about the same thing. Do you know what they were talking about? Multi-level marketing. Amway. Avocare. They were all passionately debating marketing strategies and business plans, arguing about the best way to sell more products to friends and neighbors. One guy said to his brother or cousin:

You have to set goals for yourself and figure out how much revenue you have to generate to get there. That big house. That nice car. That big vacation.

And I thought to myself, “You sure are Americans now.”

Their grandparents might have been different. They might have had a different culture. But these guys weren’t different. They were just like everyone else in the restaurant. As American as Tony Robbins, Joel Osteen, the Olsen Twins, and P.T. Barnum.

As I said earlier, I’m not much for using conspiracy theories to explain what human nature already explains well enough. There are elites and corporations with investments and customers all over the world, who stand to benefit immediately from increased fluidity in the global marketplace. Many similar decisions are also made by small-business owners, job seekers, low-level bureaucrats, entertainers, and middle managers.

More than a conspiracy, what I see on the horizon reminds me of “The Nothing.” Some of you may be too old and some of you may be too young, but anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember the movie The Neverending Story. In The Neverending Story, a young boy acquires a book that he was told is “not safe.”

As he reads it, he becomes involved in the story of a dying world. The world is not being conquered by some foreign invader. The world is simply disappearing, succumbing to a force known as “The Nothing.” All of the creatures, the peoples, the rocks, the lakes, the mountains and trees are all disappearing.

The hero learns that the fantasy world of the book–the world that is disappearing–is the product of human dreams, and that “The Nothing” is evidence that people are forgetting their dreams. And that the power behind “The Nothing”–the mysterious force that moves it–is happy that people are losing their dreams because hopeless people without dreams are easy to control. That’s what is happening to human culture, to human difference, to “diversity.”

Identity Defies the Global Marketplace

Olga
Olga

I have read the book.

IMO it was inspired by the milieu and the mindset of the author. He was an insider privy to the attitudes of his class and I found the novel to be an accurate and creative thought experiment concerning what sorts of futures our rulers contemplate for the rest of us.

Artists find inspiration all around them – his writings reflect that – I see no contradiction in his novel BNW and his background with eugenics.

I see a concept creatively taken to the nth degree but I suspect – as the years went by – that even Aldus was taken aback by the success our masters have achieved.

Jesse starts his blog today with a quote from Mark Twain:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-four-challeges-in-reforming.html

Gayle

I agree with Stucky

There will always be the cream de la creme of high intelligence but a growing mass of inferior IQs seems to be evident. In our particular culture, I think part of it is because of the ease of living a passive life requiring little creativity or critical thinking for problem-solving. Children spend much less time doing chores or playing outdoors doing things like building forts and catching polywogs. They can’t walk 2 blocks to the store because they will be kidnapped. Their sports teams are mostly formalized, adult -run organizations. Like the rest of us, they are seriously seduced by all things technological and thus sit on their butts playing games on various devices.

When I teach in inner-city high schools, I find hordes of teenagers possessing values dictated to them by popular culture. Besides the educational system’s weak attempt to offer an alternative view of things, they have no one to present other perspectives. Most of them intensely dislike reading. Their thinking and language are vapid. Adjectives have completely disappeared in favor of the ubiquitous “fuckin'” and the pretty girls loudly banter with “fuck you bitch!” which is either good-natured or hostile, depending on the context. I know they are the modern version of the lower classes present in all societies. It’s their numbers that worry me. As I work with these kids, I always wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think and say . Do you think he would be hopeful about America’s future?

My grandpa had an eighth grade education but an inquiring mind. He was always reading, reading, reading. Fun for him was reading the encyclopedia and his annual trip to San Francisco for the sole purpose of prowling the used bookstores. I’m pretty sure he had good genes. He represents to me the diminishing role of traditional Eurocentric Judeo-Christian values and their dominance in the world now. Advances in medicine, food production, and technology (products of some really high IQs) combined with social programs that reward irresponsible breeding assure that low IQs will far outnumber average and high ones. What a conundrum. It is hard to be hopeful.

bob
bob

I believe Stucky and Gayle are correct. A large percentage of the smartest people who ever lived are walking around today, surrounded by many of the most stupid and useless ever. The knowledge explosion of the past 50-60 years explains why IQ scores are drifting lower. There is exponentially more knowledge in the world now than when many of us were children –the odds that any single person will know any single fact decreases when the number of facts has increased exponentially. Last and not least, our diets are making each successive generation physically bigger — eventually, a larger average brain pan may increase average brain size and enable enhanced intellectual capacity. Too bad we’re probably still not smart enough to avoid a large die-off of some kind before that happens!

TeresaE
TeresaE

We are simultaneously getting smarter – in individual subjects – while the average and masses grow sicker in both mind and body.

I don’t really think our smart are “smarter,” they are the current culmination of thousands of years of human knowledge. An astronomer today does not start at “the earth is flat and the universe revolves around us,” they start with scads of data and research that is already known and in the bag. This makes the next discovery seem impressive, but without the previous generations’ knowledge, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

We currently sit on the largest amount of knowledge EVER accessible by almost all men. How people can ignore this, squander this, is beyond me. Exercise makes my body strong, but knowledge truly is power.

Anyway, for the remainder, we have three things simultaneously occurring. The first is ease. The knowledge base of mankind is at the fingertips of even the most dense. The problem has arrived because they do not have to rely on their own cunning to put food on their shelves, or in their bellies. Many don’t even have to work on their health, they have 100% capitulated all their own personal capabilities to others. This is creating generations that literally cannot survive without other people doing everything for them. This makes them lazy, and under-learned, and sick, but the stupid is the result of the ease.

The second is chemical, and body-weight, lobotomies. Brain scans and other science has proven that obesity has a direct effect on your IQ. IQs rise as body returns to its “normal” state. Fluoride and chlorine are both known to displace nutrients in your body that our brain needs. Our current medical propaganda has us avoiding natural fats, the sun, and clean water in favor of brain starvation in the name of “health.” Not to mention the numerous medications, cosmetic additives and the like that have toxic “side-effects,” many of which directly attack our brains and nervous systems. We are being told that these deadly things are “good for us.” Sadly, most of us, even the smartest amongst us, prefer to continue to accede our health, and power, to the very status quo that is destroying the rest of our world.

And finally, the third reason, medical “advancements” which has poured billions, if not trillions, into “fixing” the sick, weak and damaged, enabling them to reproduce, or live. This is the hardest part, how do you tell people that their child is too damaged to save? We, as a country, people, have been playing god – or attempting to – with everything from snails to humans. Whom knows what exactly the outcome of this will be? When we save those/that which nature, god if you prefer, has deemed finished, how can we believe this will come without consequence? Instead of a relative few dying from the flu, or measles, we are now facing a 1 in 3 chance of getting cancer, and probably dying from the cure. Not sure this is the right trade, but it is definitely the one we are making.

Decades ago my mother worked at Michigan State U. for three PhDs, I forget which department. She kept some of their notes, and her notebooks full of shorthand from her job. I ran across them when I was a kid, and I questioned my mom on the spelling, grammar, incomplete thoughts and out and out stupidity I read in those notes. Mom’s answer was that while all three men were “brilliant” in their fields of knowledge, that didn’t mean they could make toast, change a tire, or understand how to balance their checking account. That really stuck with me.

What a world.

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