Idiocracy comes at a price
It is axiomatic, people: elevate incompetent fools, and you will get incompetence and foolishness. It's time to let go of this fad.
In the 2006 film "Idiocracy," society in 500 years is dysfunctional because the best and the brightest do not much reproduce. Crops are irrigated with a sports drink. A clogged toilet leaves all the experts stumped. Most people speak at a grade-school level, the president is a former professional wrestler and critical thinking is extinct. In real life, the timeline has sped up—we no longer have 500 years to get our act together, and that can have dire consequences – as we saw in Israel this month,
The contours of idiocracy are coming into view as populist politicians all over the world are elevated by a fashion for disdaining experts, “elites,” and education. Possible explanations for this range from the seemingly endless complexity of every issue to mass migrations of jobs and populations. The educated have fewer children, and social media echo-chambers keep everyone in their lane, suppressing the intellectual mobility that society needs to thrive.
Those who see an emergency are treated as hysterics—or worse yet, elitists. The general sense is that we’ll muddle through somehow.
And so it comes to pass that a brutish conman like former President Donald Trump could be elevated to the White House, try to steal the 2020 election and now be leading in the polls again. So it is that we got Brexit, in which Brits voted to cut themselves off from their main market because of a campaign built on fake economics; to the economists, Brexiteer Michael Gove declared: “The people have had enough of experts!” He was right, and so were the experts, and the people have paid dearly for their mistake.
In South America, after neighboring Brazil endured several years of nonsense under climate-change denier former President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina now has its own rising populist: one Javier Milei, who wants to eliminate the ministries of Health, Education, Social Development and Science.
But Israel has set the gold standard.
The country of 10 million boasts stellar achievements. It hoovers in Nobel Prizes and ships out Netflix hits. In 2021 its innovative tech sector attracted venture capital at about half the level of all of Europe – with a population 40 times smaller. In 2022, it boasted a higher per capita GDP than Germany, Britain, or France. And yet that same year it succumbed to total idiocracy: Israelis handed power to a motley crew that lined up behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then and now facing trial for bribery.
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