Comfortably Dumb

“Is there anybody out there?” - Pink Floyd

In a statistics course I taught, to introduce the concept of boxplots and ANOVAs (Analysis of Variance tests), I would show my class a boxplot image of the IQ scores for three countries (A, B, and C) and ask them, do any of these look different to you?

Of course, I already knew the answer, because I collected the data. You see, Country B had an average IQ score nearly ten points lower than the other two. Countries A and C (China and Japan) had an average IQ score of around 105. Country B, the United States, had an average IQ of about 94.

I never told my students that we were “Country B” because that did not matter to what I was trying to teach them. However, I think it certainly matters now.

I won’t get into a discussion of what it means for China to have so many more people and a much higher average IQ. Suffice it to say that any random Chinese person is almost always going to have a higher IQ than any random American.

But the problem is not intelligence, or lack thereof, but instead our inability to properly use what intelligence we have.

Complacency, convenience, and comfort are our sins and many of us in this country refuse to do more to try to do better. We have all become comfortable with what we know and often do not try to open our minds to something new.

Personally, I have a mantra of “learn something new every day” because I am curious or because I crave information.

Most in this country, especially Trump and his MAGA cult, are instead comfortable in their stupidity. They argue for things that are not real with evidence that does not exist purely because they refuse to learn anything new. Their ignorance has lulled us into a “waking dream” whereby we are just waiting for the rest of the country to “wake up”.

A friend here mentioned that everyone was walking around as if all this terrible stuff were not happening. This our “sleepwalking” state, as we are going through the motions while being broken down slowly.

We fall into their habits of reacting on the internet and then forgetting what happened the next day. We allow a madman to drive our thoughts and actions each day because we cannot separate ourselves from his madness.

Meanwhile, our “leaders” might be the dumbest and most incompetent people in existence. That, or they might be incredibly corrupt and self-serving, but either way the result is the same. The policymakers make the stupidest policy imaginable and nothing worthwhile ever gets done.

Have the Democrats in Congress done one thing that was not a reaction to something Trump has done? Have they tried to set their own agenda at all?

They are comfortable with just pushing back and not pushing forward.

Hegseth has as much war experience as I do. The man is quoting Pulp Fiction and promising nothing but death and destruction. He is an incompetent fool, and yet he is allowed to continue his idiocy because no one has any idea how to stop them.

Kash Patel behaves like a college kid. Drunk in locker rooms, worrying about his looks, and running off to watch his girlfriend do something he can’t.

Because of his clearly mismanaged lifestyle, he is not only costing us money, but he is failing at the actual job of running the FBI. Where is Nancy Guthrie? The poor woman’s mother went missing and Patel is too busy getting wasted to try to help her. If he cannot be bothered when it is someone with a high profile, what makes you think he will do anything to protect anyone else.

But, he still has a job.

They want us comfortable. They want us reacting to their memes and constantly sitting online arguing with them.

Because that means we are never actually getting in their face and they know nothing has to change. They can just manufacture another outrage for us to complain about and they will drag us even further.

They want us to feel comfortable so that each new ignorant thing will feel like the last one and they never have to admit what they are doing wrong. If we are not asleep like the cult, they want us sleepwalking through everything so the consequences of their actions never splash back on them.

The sooner we realize that we have power through our actions, the sooner we will see some actual changes. We have to make them react to us and take the agenda away from them.

Clearly they have nothing but ignorance, hate, and anger. None of their ideas are good and they do not help anyone. We know so many of the solutions, yet no one is given the chance to actually solve problems.

We know universal healthcare would help everyone and would be cheaper than the current system we have.

We know immigration requires a workable system for people to become citizens.

We know people need to be paid fair wages.

We know billionaires and corporations need to pay more in taxes while the average person pays less.

We know education needs to be funded and costs of education need to be minimized.

We can do all of this stuff and more, just as soon as we make it happen.

There will always be more of us than there are of them. Bigots and racists are in no way a majority. Likewise, we have facts, reality, and science and they only have the “gospel of Trump”.

Maybe it is time we stop letting the dumbasses determine the discourse and we start playing our own games.

There is no benefit to being comfortably dumb.

• Dr. C