America as Idiotocracy

It is not a new thing. It is not of recent vintage. The war on merit has been ongoing for decades now. Fewer and fewer positions have been accorded on the basis of merit. From decline to death, we are seeing in the new woke revolution the death rattle of merit.

Idiotocracy reigns. We have been handing out credentials and awards on the basis of genetic makeup for decades now. The recipients of these awards, people who owe their careers to diversity quotas, are not going to go away anytime soon. In truth, they are doing everything in their power to cover up their own inadequacies, by lowering admissions criteria for universities, and by changing the nature of their professions.

Dumb down exceptional children, do not allow them to achieve at their best, and the non-exceptional will feel better about themselves. You see, it’s all about therapy.

You would think that the medical profession has more to do with science than with race or gender. You would be wrong. The American Medical Association has taken up the woke cause. It now considers curing the nation of racism and sexism to be part of its mission. Obviously, this will not improve the quality of medical care. Reducing the standards by which medical licenses are granted will not improve health care.

And yet, for all the talk about providing better healthcare for Americans, no one seems to understand that the provider’s intelligence is an essential aspect of the issue. You cannot have quality healthcare if medical schools dumb down the curricula and ease their standards in order to make the profession look like America.

But it will make those who are not very good doctors feel that they are not imposters. Which is the point. See this from the American Thinker, via Maggie’s Farm.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of idiotocracy lies in our demented president and our blatantly incompetent vice president. One day, I seriously suspect, we will fulfill Joe Biden’s prophetic utterance and be led by President Kamala Harris.

Nations around the world look at America and see a nation in decline. They see a nation governed by people like Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and they decide that the Western model of culture and governance no longer works. 

More precisely, the world sees that the West has abandoned what made it great and is currently in a period of senescent decline. 

Daniel Hannan learned in Pakistan that foreign nations no longer want to be like America. They want to be like China. No real surprise there.

Pakistan has its own reasons for cosying up to China, which it has long seen as a counterweight to India, and to which it is closely tied commercially. But something similar is playing out across swathes of Asia, Africa and, now, Latin America. Countries which, 20 years ago, looked to the West culturally and politically – countries which wanted to think of themselves as a law-based, propertied, multi-party democracies – have found an alternative model.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s clever and charming prime minister, recently put it this way:

“Up until now, we were told that the best way for societies to improve themselves is the Western system of democracy. What the CPC has done is that it has brought this alternative model. And they have actually beaten all Western democracies in the way they have brought up merit in their society.”

The rise of the West coincides and correlates with the replacement of genetics with merit. It involved standardized testing, with those who did best being recognized as such. In truth, the practice began in China a millennium ago, but the West perfected it.

Hannan continues:

Merit. That’s the key. Allocating positions through talent rather than by birth, caste or status was a big part of what originally elevated the Anglosphere and a handful of related European states over their rivals. Now, just as the West is letting go of the idea, the world’s greatest autocracy has taken it up.

In truth, America has long since let go of the idea. It did retain some vestiges of the old order, but consider the example of Silicon Valley. Tech jobs are largely held by people who were educated in Asia. As for the products of America’s great institutions of learning, they get hired to act like thought police. 

After all, if the nation is producing an army of dimwits, someone has to hire them. And someone has to find them jobs that they can actually do. Those jobs are not in high tech, and the default is mind control. It is better that the new band of idiots does not discover how mentally enfeebled it is.

Today’s young people have been dumbed down to the point where they can no longer assess different points of view. It takes more intelligence and more education to evaluate different points of view, to assess the importance of different facts and to sustain some level of doubt.

More and more of American young people are not up to this challenge. Their minds have been infested with dogmatic beliefs and they cannot think that they they might be wrong. They get jobs censoring reality and produce new versions of history that have nothing to do with facts but that make some people feel better about themselves.

It takes more intelligence to build than to tear something down. As the old saying goes, it takes a carpenter a year to build a barn. It takes a jackass an hour to bring one down.

Similarly, it takes more intelligence to evaluate different pieces of evidence and different assessments than it does to censor any piece of information that might challenge dogmatically held beliefs.

Thus do idiots prosper and does idiotocracy proliferate.