I got a theory, but you’re not gonna like it.

I take a lot of guff for openly saying that I think most people are dumb. Whenever you say this, someone inevitably pops up and says “50% of people are below average by definition.”

While that’s not really how it works, it also dodges something I’m starting to think we need to admit:

In this modern world, totally average human intelligence is actually kinda goddamn stupid.

The more complex the civilization, the more intelligence is required to navigate it.

By “intelligence” I mean:

• capacity to absorb information
• process it
• contextualize it
• make connections
• do useful things with it

This was not always the case.

Up until relatively recently, you didn’t need to know much to be perfectly happy and functional. If you were born to a farmer’s family, you learned everything you needed from helping the old man and old lady around the farm. When they got too old or sick, you took the reins, prospered, had a family, and taught your kids the same way. You had a place in the order of things. Nobody asked you to answer hard questions or shape the destinies of strangers.

In the West, that changed in the eighteenth century when we invented modern democracy (not the ancient Greek version—don’t be tedious).

Suddenly people were expected to understand complex systems involving people nothing like them doing things they knew nothing about—but those things still mattered.

A Bavarian woodsman had no clue how the fishing industry worked, nor did he need to. That didn’t make him an ignoramus; it just wasn’t his world.

But now you were asked—allowed, even—to vote on what society did. Considered progress, sure. But it also placed a new burden on the proletariat: responsibility for anything beyond feeding their family and paying taxes to whatever inbred idiot made the decisions.

At the same time, we shifted from feudal agrarian → mercantile → industrial → post-industrial. All new, all fast-changing.

For millennia the amount of genuinely new information needed in a lifetime was near zero. Maybe one big idea per generation.

Suddenly entire industries were replaced every couple generations… then every couple decades… now every couple months.

Why? Because information became the currency, and information is defined by novelty (thanks, Claude Shannon).

Being skilled no longer meant apprentice → journeyman → master. It meant keeping up with relentless change and innovation. Civilization rewarded those who could—and left everyone else behind.

When you look at Americans who make the dumbest political decisions (aside from bigotry and religious fanaticism), the #1 reason is: they don’t want to learn things.

Every election, politicians pander to dying industries: coal, oil, old-school manufacturing. The workers are proud their parents did the same job… and apparently can’t grasp that the world has changed so much since their parents bought a house at 25 with overtime at the plant that they might as well have time-traveled here.

They complain about being left behind, but they ignored roughly everyone warning them to adapt. You can’t keep voting for people who only benefit capitalists and still expect solid ground under working-class boots. You can’t demand cheap goods while removing every limit on what capitalists can do.

Yes, it’s complex. It requires reading and critical thinking.

But for nearly twenty years everyone has had instant, free access to all the information all the time.

And here’s the counter: “People don’t know how to access it, process it, contextualize it, or think critically.”

Exactly. That’s my entire fucking point.

Our civilization has hit an inflection point where merely average intelligence is no longer enough to understand how almost anything works.

People still grasp what their great-grandparents did: their job, their hobbies, their local community, whatever mass media is trending. Not much else.

That’s simply not enough anymore to make informed decisions or even hold informed opinions.

Yet this is precisely when social media encourages everyone to not only have but share uninformed opinions—and expect to be heard, respected, taken seriously. Not because it’s wise, but because engagement makes rich people richer.

People are simultaneously told it’s their right and duty to participate in democracy regardless of preparation. That idea collapses the second you think about it—unless you see it as a well-meaning attempt to fix historic discrimination against minorities who were barred from education and voice.

But at some point: do we really want to encourage participation from people who don’t know how anything works—when one dumb vote in Nowheresville can rain bombs, starvation, or ecosystem collapse halfway around the planet?

I’m not saying ditch democracy. It’s still better than autocracy.

But maybe it’s time to revisit the idea that you should at least understand what kind of government you have before voting on what it does.

Literacy tests were white-supremacist garbage in the 19th century when Black people were deliberately kept uneducated. That’s not today’s world. We could design gatekeeping that doesn’t discriminate on race or class.

Or we can stay committed to absolute freedom with zero responsibility: that people too unintelligent to understand society should not only be heard but allowed to dictate taxes, policy, and killing done in our names.

Maybe that really is an inalienable right.

But look around.

If enough people are so easily confounded by modern life that they elect a mentally unsound psychopathic con-man game-show host as emperor—and the system is so broken it allows this, allows him to run amok, and singlehandedly torches America’s stability and global standing—

maybe we’ve spent way too much time talking about freedom and way too little about responsibility.

Can we really keep a functioning society on vibes only?