Few things are as simple as we try to put them across. But sometimes, a thing is pretty straightforward.

Sure, there's complexity underneath the thing. The whys, the how-comes, the what-fors, the how-did-we-get-heres. But on the face of it is the indisputable conclusion in plain, lowest-common-denominator English.

A lot of Americans are really fucking dumb.

Carl Sagan warned us in his final book The Demon-Haunted World published in 1995:

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science.

But there's another reason: science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning - not just of science, but of anything - are avoidable, even undesirable.

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

It's been 30 years.

It wasn't that hard to predict. Sagan did not need a crystal ball to see what the most likely outcome for the United States would be. He had been begging the Government to stop polluting, stop wasting money on Reagan's stupid fantastical Star Wars initiative, improve public education, and acknowledge that the Earth is heating up and oceans are rising for years. And he watched while they basically rolled their eyes at him and did nothing to acknowledge or address his concerns.

What evidence was there from where he sat that this country would be better off 30 years in the future?

Here we are

It's 2025. We have witnessed a consistent retardation of American progress. No, we're not in the stone age. We are more wealthy than ever. We have enjoyed a hegemony heretofore inconceivable by man. I can, at my whim, eat my fill of strawberries, while living in a place where fruit of almost any kind surely cannot grow, in exchange for a paltry sum of money.

But we have ground nearly to a halt in the last ten years our momentum of scientific, social, and diplomatic advancement. Our life expectancy, literacy, and democracy are all in a nosedive while infant mortality is rising. And a lot of Americans (somehow) believe it's more important to find a culprit for imaginary problems than it is to fix these things.

This is how I know we're doomed.

If you've ever been on a team, then you know that blame is suicide when you're in the middle of a situation. Whether it's a game, an emergency room, a firefight, or a power outage, the outcome is the same. When teammates start pointing at each other, they unequivocally give up on winning. Winners never blame. The blame game is a loser's expertise.

More Americans than ever this millennium think they're experts in everything. Sure, they're still prefacing their sloppy social media contributions with "I'm not a doctor, but," or "I'm not a lawyer, but," or "I'm not a [insert noun], but," every time they need validation from the gallery of their peers, but they don't actually believe there is anything they can't become experts on after a week or three of corporate web surfing. This is made apparent by the sharp rise in wholesale anti-vaccine efforts. Hell, look at who they put in office. And the fact they had the raw numbers advantage at the polls in 2024 is something to behold.

Few people read the current regime's manifesto in the run up to the 2024 election. Most of them unquestioningly hoovered up the statements from the candidate that the manifesto was a hoax or that it wasn't a part of their platform. If they didn't fall for that it's because they wanted it to happen. Like idiots.

A lot of these people who think vaccines cause autism or that mRNA-based medicine is a new world order ploy to depopulate the planet or that Vivek Ramaswamy is a man of merit with a backbone and any utilitarian skill are about to lose access to Medical Doctors. They already think they know more about medicine than anyone else on Earth so it may not bother them right now to know there won't be anyone available to help them except for a couple Nurse Practitioners that got fast-tracked to their certification in half a year. And when that noctor, with too little experience or education to be called Doctor, is overwhelmed, they'll be at the mercy of an LLM curated by their insurance provider for medical advice, diagnosis, and intervention.

You know what's great about having a language model write prescriptions? You don't have to funnel it kickbacks after it floods a community with your most profitable drug.

But the electorate is cheering. Because they're really fucking dumb.

Americans are myopic as fuck

Our popular cultures have fully succumb to the influence of the soundbite. The efforts of hyper-capitalist American tech companies shifted the overarching philosophy of business. Organizations primarily doing business on the internet generally stopped trying to sell things for money and started giving away intangible products (like "free expression", "connection", and "community") to anyone in exchange for an email address and a password. Now the consumers are the cattle; their attention and actions are the products used to generate a profit.

This has worked fantastically. The general population doesn't read. Sure, they can interpret these symbols as letters and realize they form words and sometimes conclude that multiple words have a meaning when strung together. But they're not REALLY able to read anymore. It takes way too long. Their instruction sets are delivered through memes, 90-second reels, multi-hour Youtube rants by charlatans, and ads they can't even tell are ads.

Instead, they pass the time recognizing patterns where there are none and believing just about anything warped and put through their favorite propaganda faucets. And even when experts dumb it down for their smooth-brains, they stick to their guns until Tucker Carlson's inane pseudo-Socratic bleats signal that it's okay to agree.

All this amounts to a voting majority of consumers willing to buy just about anything as long as the instructions include some statement about how it's all the other guy's fault. Consent manufacture has never been so streamlined and simple. You can pull it off in a matter of days or hours.

And that majority basically has no ability or desire to consider the long term ramifications of what they're doing. Not to mention the historical facts around anything. Hell, plenty of them think Winston Churchill is chiefly responsible for the high death toll of World War 2 just because some guy with a lot of Twitter views said so on their favorite propaganda outlet. It hasn't even been a hundred years and the whole 20th Century War in Europe thing is pretty much completely on record in every way. But still, a significant number of Americans have some alternate theory. Probably because they don't (or can't?) fucking read. They're addicted to the soundbite. They know it too. But they're fully down with that sickness.

A lot of voters are mostly just flitting from one little bubble of bullshit to the next with no real awareness of a true continuity. Everything is plausible or what-if'd to hell and back. So naturally, they probably don't give a fuck about how the end of tax-funded domestic programs will come back around on them several years from now. Or how that's going to undercut our ability as a society [see: team] to progress a decade from now.

Americans are unable (or unwilling) to grasp a real timeline of any appreciable length

The American government is beginning work on the next great tax-dollar grift in 2025. 30 years ago, Lockheed-Martin, General Motors, Boeing, and others got fat off the Reagan administration steadily through both terms. What came of that "investment" of American tax dollars?

Fuckin' nothing.

And what will Lockheed-Martin and whatever other Wendigos bribe the President deliver in exchange for our tax dollars?

Fuckin' nothing.

This administration is fleecing the population and more than half voted for that. As long as gas prices are a penny or two lower than they were when the last guy was in office (Fun fact: they went up the last time this guy took over), they don't seem to give a fuck about anything else. Nevermind the increasing price of survival.

But Americans pretty much have no ability to imagine what the outcome of this sort of idiocy will look like 10, 20, or 40 years in the future. They're mostly trapped in a series of nested simulacra staring slack-jawed at a projection regaling them with fairy tales of market magic and blue-haired kids using liberal government-funded litter boxes in public schools.

The last time we decided to eliminate taxes on the ultra wealthy, squander billions of tax dollars on imaginary satellite missile defense systems (that aren't capable of existing because of the laws of physics and won't be built anyway), target minority communities with illegal drugs in order to generate funds for international terrorism, it had a pretty clear outcome. You know, the reality we live in now.

"But surely this time it will be different," says the anti-establishment voter who is confidently ahead of the mainstream media mind control apparatus because s/he gets information from the truth-telling and independent billionaires.

I would say this is ironic, but it really isn't. It was planned. Irony is usually unintentional, I think. But more than half of the American voting population is pretty certain this is going to work.

And they're proud that they voted out the war-mongering, satanic, liberals that were definitely the reason for Palestinian genocide. So they could get an even faster Palestinian genocide but with luxury hotels built on top of the mass graves.

Americans are selfish as fuck

The western philosophy of individualism and personal freedom has fully spiraled in on itself at this point. You'll find a lot of American voters using $10 words. The pseudo-intellectualism makes them all feel like they're smarter than everyone else. Which makes them feel right.

As J.K. Galbraith put it, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Voters believed the government was calling for foreign gangsters to come and murder Americans (it wasn't) and that Joe Biden and company wanted to end democracy so they voted to hand it over to a bunch of fail-upward corporate rejects. You know, the kinds of people who were birthed into a 7-figure trust fund.

They didn't care how it would turn out for anyone else because they believed it would personally benefit them. And they leverage every little shred of neural tissue floating inside the tepid toilet bowls they call craniums to forge some philosophical and moral reason for why they had no other choice.

Americans are really fucking dumb.

There is no great and esoteric conclusion here. A spade is a fuckin' spade, mate. The United States has reached the critical mass of idiocy from which there is no return. No, not every single person in North America is a fuckin' idiot. But at least half of the folks who showed up to vote in 2024 are. That's tens of millions of people. And America has statistically 1.5 guns for every living, breathing human.

How do you think this unfolds over the next 30 years for a bunch of armed, selfish, and stupid people willing to cook up any quasi-honest moral justification for why they ought to have what they want at the expense of anyone else?

These people still believe Elon Musk when he says one of his companies will deliver the product they've all been waiting for next year for the twelfth year in a row.

They believe Trump's Golden Dome is akin to Kennedy's declaration of putting a man on the moon.

Nevermind the fact that literally no one is shooting missiles of any kind at the United States. Let's have a brand new nuclear arms race but with A.I. this time. Let's pre-allocate $175 Billion for it. Let's pretend to lower drug prices and actually make everything else more expensive while doubling down on the blunders of 2017.

That'll surely make us great.