Moronic Inferno

Once upon a recent time, humanity decided it had learned too much. There were too many facts cluttering up the place — too many equations, too many footnotes, too many inconvenient truths about who was getting rich and who was getting poisoned. So the people, in a rare moment of unity, declared war on knowledge.

And with their backs against the wall like the Dodgers in Game 6 (or those hapless cave dwellers in Plato’s Republic), they won.

The first victory came when a man on television shouted, “You don’t need experts to tell you what’s true!” and millions applauded. The next day, the bridges were built upside down, but nobody complained because complaining would have required understanding why they’d collapsed.

It’s a simple gospel, and simplicity is holy now. “Common sense,” they call it.

Common sense once told us that the sun circled the Earth, that leeches cured disease and that thunder was God bowling. We keep trusting it to run a nuclear world because, after all, what could go wrong? (And just in passing, I wonder how things would look if the Earth circled the sun.)

Politicians love the “common man.” They love him the way farmers love livestock — respectfully, from a strategic distance. They say the common man has deep instincts. He doesn’t need data or theory; he just knows. He can smell truth like a bloodhound — though mostly he smells what he wants to believe.

We don’t need no education.

We don’t need no thought control.

Opposing thought control as they do, cutthroat politicians said the people were wise, and the people, being wise, believed them.

Politicians said the common man had an instinct for truth, a sixth sense unsullied by nuance, unburdened by knowledge, honed by generations of not paying attention. The less he knew, the purer his insight. “He’s untouched by ideology,” they said, which was true, because he couldn’t pronounce it.

One candidate promised to make ignorance great again. Another promised to make it mandatory. The debates were glorious: a shouting contest held over a pit of facts no one wanted to look into. Every time a moderator mentioned reality, the crowd booed — because nothing kills a good feeling faster than a rigorous falsification. Or verification. Really, who needs to know? Ride the vibe.

Soon, universities were replaced by feelings centres. Students majored in Self-Expression with a minor in Outrage. Professors were replaced by holograms that said, “Trust your instincts” on loop. Tuition went up, of course. Ignorance is expensive. So then they stopped funding the universities altogether.

Philosophers tried to protest. “But truth matters!” they cried. No one listened, because no one knew what “matters” meant anymore. Let alone truth. Eventually, the brainiacs stopped crying and got jobs writing slogans for toothpaste and fast-acting suppositories.

Scientists didn’t fare much better. Their graphs and studies were replaced with testimonials. “I believe gravity is a hoax,” said one man on social media. “I fell off my roof once, and it felt staged.” Thousands liked and shared it. The algorithm smiled. Texas sued the makers of Tylenol.

Somewhere, the last librarian locked the doors for good. The lights flickered out over the stacks — history, philosophy, physics, poetry — all the things that made people uneasy. Outside, a crowd cheered. “Finally!” they shouted. “No more confusion. Teachers, leave them kids alone!”

They were right. Confusion requires thinking, and thinking requires doubt, and doubt requires curiosity — and curiosity is dangerous. It makes you look up at the stars and wonder how far away they really are, and whether the people telling you not to wonder are lying.

And that sort of thing ruins civilizations. Not to mention ridiculously lucrative con jobs.

So now we live in the age of perfect certainty where the public’s belief in evidence-supported facts has been completely undermined. Every fat-headed oaf is his own prophet, every woman steeped in asinine stupidity is her own oracle, and every child is born knowing the universe revolves around his or her opinion. No need for teachers, books or a scintlla of skepticism toward leaders who say, “Believe nothing except me, for I am the way and the truth and the big beautiful ballroom planner.”

So we’ve learned to praise ignorance as purity. “Don’t listen to experts,” they say. “Experts are biased.” Which is true. Everyone is biased. But the expert at least knows what he’s biased about. The rest of us are just guessing enthusiastically.

Following in the footsteps of that humble man of the people William F. Buckley, many of today’s political theorists on the far right — including some with four degrees and no calluses — write long papers explaining that the uneducated masses possess “organic insight.” That’s a polite way of saying they’ve never read Marx, Freud or the fine print on campaign promises.

It’s this very lack of reading that keeps their vision pure. A clean mind, unsoiled by thought. Like a baby’s bottom, but voting.

Real stinkers like Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo are drawn to Trump the same way Buckley was 70 years ago to an unscrupulous, alcoholic lout like Joseph McCarthy. As Mark Lilla remarks in his review of Sam Tanenhaus’s superb new biography titled Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, “the bow tie set does have a thing for the brass knuckles set.”)

“And why,” Lilla asks in his piece last month in The New York Review of Books, “would beneficiaries of the greatest university system in the world — perhaps in history — want to dismantle it (while still trying to get their kids into Harvard)? When did those self-styled conservatives, whose tradition used to teach respect for institutions and modesty, start cruising for rough trade?”

Good questions. But hell’s bells, Dr. Phil, I’ve been hornswoggled by thoughtful, informed, two-dollar words again!

In the contemporary world, it doesn’t matter what you believe — so long as you believe it strongly enough. The 1969 moon landing was fake. The government killed JFK. COVID-19 was a media hoax. The Earth is flat, the moon an illusory projection from Gotham City and we’re all living in the Matrix.

What, me worry?

The news upsets me so I don’t watch it. Worrying is for people who read.

And the people all said sit down,

sit down, you’re rocking the boat.

In short, the examined life is not worth living. Not sure who said that, but I’m going to go with Yogi Berra till the fat lady comes to a fork in the road and takes it. You could look it up, but don’t bother. Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.

Here in what Wyndham Lewis was wont to call a “moronic inferno” of insipidity and decay, it’s safer to idealize the thug, the barstool sage, the loudest voice in the room as he recklessly stokes the raging KKKampfire of his own racist, sexist, troglodytic perceptions.

Reading breeds hesitation. Hesitation breeds thought. Thought breeds doubt. Doubt ruins everything. A man who doubts stops cheering. A man who stops cheering might start asking questions.

And then who will clap for the speeches? Who will stand behind the president, breathing through his mouth, at the next soul-sucking moronic inferno rally?

“I trust the people!” the politician cries, and the people cheer — while his speechwriter, a PhD from Yale, quietly collects his paycheque.

As the great “decider” George W. Bush, now a left-wing outlier in America’s Grand Old Party, once reminded us: “A leadership is someone who brings people together.” You can’t “take the high horse and then claim the low road.”

It’s just common sense.