I wrote recently about how attention spans are shrinking and that this result is an intentional plan designed to make of the mass man an unthinking, dot-pecking, robotic consensus cog – someone who is given his opinions by memes and short videos and accepts them uncritically because they already fit into the bubble-thinking his programming requires.
That’s a long sentence. This will be fun.
Your IQs are shrinking too. It’s a fact. A study published nearly two decades ago showed that IQs had dropped 1.16 points per decade since around 1890, and the rate of drop has only increased since 2004. But there are now multiple proofs that this is true. You don’t need a study, just look around. People are dumber and they are getting dumber by the day.
It is natural for every generation to think that we are smarter than the one that came before. The compilation and storage of specialized knowledge in digital form has only multiplied this mirage. That is to say, we have access to more information, pre-digested, categorized, and framed for us, even when it is wrong, and we can access it faster with less pause for reflection. Specialization has increased this insular way of thinking and acting in the world. We don’t have to know how a car or a microwave or a robot vacuum works. Neither do we really need to know the physics of driving, cooking, or sweeping. Machines do more and more, but all of this comes with a cost. And the radicalized bifurcation of the political scene has resulted in making control even easier. We are a mobocracy moved predictably by cherry-picked news.
According to the study, real intelligence exploded during the Victorian era, and my opinion is that the primary mover of this marked increase in intelligence was the ready-access to books and reading materials made available inexpensively to a wider class of people, coupled with the increasing freedom to form and test opinions based on a wider range of knowledge rather than the necessity of agreeing to whatever opinion was given to you by the powers that be. That is to say, more people were reading books and testing ideas by studying materials challenging the opinions they’d already been given.
Fast forward to today, where people cannot be bothered with reading more than a snippet provided it is already vetted to fit into the worldview of opinions they already have received. Specialization means that we have more and more outlets to search out non-challenging sound bites fed to us by memes and short videos we scroll through to satiate our boredom. As the attention span dwindles, intelligence does too.
Soon enough, with the technological advance and corresponding efficiency of small providers capable of producing high-quality entertainment (kids with laptops will be able to make movies that look like Hollywood blockbusters,) our micro-think bubbles will shrink even more. Meanwhile, the publishing houses are dead and people have stopped reading. The mass-man is fit for nothing more than to be led by autocrats and manipulators who master the art of spoon-fed propaganda.
Man, Bunker, this is a downer!
Not really. There is an antidote to what is being done to you. Read hard things. Read about things you don’t know or don’t already agree with. Decide to learn something new. Challenge your own thinking. Realize that you are being used, and that methods are being taken to keep you dumb and happy and numbed and outraged and demoralized, and that all these things make you predictable and predictably less human.
You say you are busy, and that the world has you down and you don’t want to read because it’s too hard? Then accept your fate and know that the world you see around you is the inevitable result of that kind of thinking. You hate what has become of the world, the division and hostility? Does it seem to you like people who hate you are running things, and you feel powerless and demoralized? That’s the plan, and it is the result of what is being done to you. Provably. There is an antidote, but it takes work.
I know, I know. I’m preaching to the choir, right? I mean, you read this far. Read something else long-form today and make it something that isn’t just some encapsulation of what you already know. Stop scrolling for a prescribed period and pick up a book. You are not smarter than your ancestors no matter what you think, and just because you have ready access to all the knowledge of the world at your disposal on a device that fits into your pocket, doesn’t mean that you are smarter than the people who built civilization.
But other than that, have a great day!
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
