Shit’s crazy lately. The stupidity leads to weirdness. Weirdness leads to instability. Standing around wondering how completely fucked we’re going to be before stability returns… if it ever will… is making us all tense.
It’s the weekend. I invite y’all to let off a little pressure. Let’s all sit back and enjoy some sci-fi reading from back before sci-fi was colonized by whiny woke asshats.
First, a 1951 short story by Arthur C. Clarke. Click the link to see it reproduced in its entirety (I assume it’s not a copywrite infringement). I present to you Superiority:
“The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleet’s. We were defeated by one thing only – by the inferior science of our enemies. I repeat – by the inferior science of our enemies.”
Second, another 1951 short story by C. M. Kornbluth. This is one of my absolute favorites. (It’s reproduced in its entirety by Project Gutenberg.) I present to you The Marching Morons:
“The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.”
Every word is linked for free just above this line. (You can’t stop the signal Mal!)
If you want to buy a copy I sure as hell won’t stop you. Please use the links below. Since they originate on my page. I’ll get a tuppence from the Bezo-collective no matter what you buy. (Amazon requires an “I get money from this” disclaimer in case there’s still a living human in 2021 hasn’t figured out how sponsored links work. If that 90 year old cloistered monk still exists, I want to meet him. I assume he’s busy cutting checks to mail order stuff from late night TV ads repeated off VHS tapes.)
You’ll find Superiority nestled in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.*
You can also buy The Marching Morons.*
Also, anyone who loves The Marching Morons will love the excellent documentary Idiocracy. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen Idiocracy, do it now. Its got what plants crave!)
Happy reading.
A.C.
*Note: I bought my version’s of those texts under different titles. That’s the thing with old sci-fi from periodicals, they’re available in various anthologies. If the products at one of these links is low quality, please tell me asap.
I’m sure Arthur C Clarke may have had Germany in mind when writing that. Also have to wonder if it applies to us in more recent times: We have a superlative ability to see what people are sending our way, but every time we try to procure a system of our own to field it turns into an over-complicated, gerrymandered, unwieldy hangar-queen like the F-35. Any system that needs PHDs to study how to manage the pilots’ attention because too many instruments are blinking and beeping in his face all the time has jumped the shark. Then there’s the F-22, which can reach out and destroy any six things in the sky almost uncontested, but then it has to go back and re-arm. We’ve been blessed so far with no one else being able to afford to play these games.
I remember reading the marching morons: At the time I thought it was a bit mean-spirited for my tastes. However, there was one thing that stuck out at me: I think psychologists call it excitability, but my memory is swiss cheese. Basically, how much stimulus is needed for something to register.
I remember watching this 1980s documentary on steel-ships on the Great Lakes. One of the things that interested me was how *quiet* all the commercials were, and how understated and calm the working environment was, even aboard a rough industrial ship. (The equipment may be loud during certain operations, but nothing about the human environment was this blinking neon circus of interruption.) I don’t have a TV at home – have difficulty explaining to the cable company that I don’t even want it. When at my parents, I notice how eye-bleedingly ear-stabbingly *loud* the commercials are. (And obnoxious: Obnoxiousness as a technique to SWAT-raid your brain for your cowering attention.) Hell, the commercials almost never have *anything to do* with the product being advertised: there is still a relationship in the 80s era commercials.
The style of presentation of the documentary vs reality TV today and its ginned up tension and gratuitous drama totally overshadowing the ostensible subject which might actually interest me (in certain cases) if it were just *presented straight*.
That dichotomy rhymes nicely with the gratuitous loudness depicted in “the Marching Morons” dystopian future. We are pretty much there.
There was this other book by Paul Fusell (who, IMO, is a bit of a supercilious asshole) on social class that made the same sort of observation about how various social classes structure their world, things being quieter and less chaotic on the upper ends of the scale. Loudness and attention-grabbing on the lower.
Harrison Bergeron in Welcome to the Monkey House, by Vonnegut is another insightful bit. What would be the result of full on guberment forced equality ?
Good idea. I’ll look for that online and if it’s somewhere I’ll link to it.
Kornbluth also wrote “The Little Black Bag”, published in 1950, predating “The Marching Morons”, but more or less in the same world. It doesn’t have the scope of TMM, it’s a closer examination of one particular issue of a world full of idiots, i.e. How do you train and equip doctors, when there aren’t enough people with the intelligence to do the job? I believe there is mention of the idea that “something” will have to be done about the overall situation, but those with sense haven’t reached that point yet.
Gutenberg Canada has “Little Black Bag”, where it is clear that it is public domain. In other countries, YMMV.
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/kornbluth-littleblack/kornbluth-littleblack-00-h.html
This is the setup Kornbluth establishes in said story, that carries over to The Marching Morons, which I think sums up an awful lot about the state of steadily improving tools, and steadily degrading intelligence/education.
“There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other exponential function, the accumulation of technological devices. A moron trained to punch an adding machine seems to be a more skillful computer than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron trained to operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype seems to be a better typographer than a Renaissance printer limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.
It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supernormals “improved the product” at greater speed than the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was practiced on a custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had some weird avatars by the twentieth generation: “colleges” where not a member of the student body could read words of three syllables; “universities” where such degrees as “Bachelor of Typewriting,” “Master of Shorthand” and “Doctor of Philosophy (Card Filing)” were conferred with the traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such devices in order that the vast majority might keep some semblance of a social order going.”
For your “free” of Idiocracy, see here.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/BJpV4iCdy6xD/