I’ve become very worried of late that as a society we may be on the verge of winning a collective Darwin Award. You know, the circumstance by which we make ourselves extinct due to an act of extreme stupidity. The guy who strapped himself into a lawn chair tethered to a jillion helium balloons comes to mind. They found his body washed up in the surf a few weeks later. I know this is an extreme example, but it illustrates what could happen to all of us if something isn’t done soon.
Climate change, swine flu, al-qaeda, Dancing With the Stars, to name a few, are threats to mankind that pale in comparison to the epidemic of stupid that is sweeping across the nation. What makes this disease all the more dangerous is the fact that the higher the degree of stupid, the less awareness people have of it. There is even a name for this condition. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Stupid people go around making bad decisions and stupid choices, all the while thinking they know better than anyone else.
To paraphrase the line from The Sixth Sense, “I see dumb people, but they don’t know they’re dumb”.
Conversely, the other half of the DK effect says that most smart people don’t think they’re necessarily any smarter than anyone else. That’s why they leave important decisions to dumb people, like congress for example.
Now don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that I myself am immune to this malady. I’ve certainly made my share of confident wrong decisions. Like buying a Renault, getting a sub-prime re-fi, or letting an unlicensed contractor with a lowball bid re-roof my house. I could go on, but I’m not that stupid…
The good news is, I think I know what’s causing all this and possibly how to stop it and maybe even reverse the effects.
I call it “The Maggie May Conspiracy.”
In the late 1960’s the United States government developed a plan to control the citizenry of the country and eventually the whole world by reducing the collective IQ to that of a junior high school student. They did it by secretly implanting a chip that was reverse engineered from UFO technology (captured at Roswell) into each American under the guise of vaccinations. The chip was designed to lie dormant until a trigger activated it and began to reduce the IQ of each unknowing victim. In order to not raise suspicion, it had to react incrementally, lowering the IQ only 5 to 10 points at a time.
Then, in 1971 the trigger was created, the hit song Maggie May by Rod Stewart.
A team of government scientists worked tirelessly around the clock to come up with just the right balance of mind-numbing lyrics and annoyingly repetitive music so subtle yet so catchy that everyone who heard the first strains would be compelled to listen to the whole song, all the while being slowly and unwittingly stupefied. Like a viral pandemic the trigger became ubiquitous through mutation, such as Muzak, and TV and film soundtracks. Somehow, some way, every minute of every day, there is a version of Maggie May playing in someone’s ear.
We are at this very moment de-evolving into heavy-browed, knuckle-dragging, tree dwellers with an annoying song we can’t get out of our heads.
As brilliantly complicated as this diabolical plot is, there is a remedy that is equally brilliant in its simplicity. In order to counter the intelligence reduction, one must merely
recite the song title backwards three times in a row very loudly.
So, the next time you’re tempted to believe someone talking about death panels or WMD’s, or you’re about pick up a copy of the Enquirer, Globe, or Washington Times, or you’re about to watch an episode of The Hills, scream at the top of your lungs:
“Yam Eiggam, Yam Eiggam, Yam Eiggam!!!”
You will feel your intellect begin to expand almost immediately, and as you’re being carted off you will know for a fact how much smarter you are than those fools manhandling you.
