Is the world run by idiots?

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It.s okay for idiots to run the world as long as they have good social skills.

-- William S Burroughs.

It seems like NT's are split three ways - one third a lot like us, one third completely in their own bubbles, and maybe 1/3 somewhere inbetween.

I worry a lot about the kinds of things the OP is bringing up. On one level looking at the last 2000 years this kind of churlishness is nothing new. At the same time we've had a culture that's shielded people from consequences like never before, distracted them into utterly idle pursuits (like playing Candy Crush all day or living for American Idol), and we're watching national debts balloon in extraordinary fashion all across the west. On one hand it's simple physics of a living system following the path of least resistance but at the same time it looks like that chute leads right down into a furnace (I really hope it's not WW3, mass atrocities, etc. but the degree of deferred consequences these days makes it easy to imagine).

The isolated incidents of corruption past that look to me at least more like nihilism playing itself out. Humanity can't really function when most people can't tell which end is up or can't find answers to why they shouldn't just let it all burn anyway, and too many people are more than happy to take up the notion that they can do whatever they want. I'd be the last person to suggest any sort of theocracy and really it's a culmination of so many other factors - not just broad ontological but also the shifting situations in the work world and capital (ie. humans needed less and less), traditional social roles and priorities evaporating with no replacement, etc.. Pretty much everything we've relied on to make a culture work even like a dysfunctional or unoiled machine, seems to be going out the window.

1) No, but the UK has had a brain drain problem for a century if not longer, and all the smart ones fled long ago. Keep in mind that once upon a time, the sun never set on the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes subjugated Africa via sheer force, India was kept from rebelling by overwhelming force, etc. England is where the Industrial Revolution started! England ruled the oceans, and defeated Napoleon. Today, all that is left is a crumbling London, full of statues to England's long ago glory but full of people from Pakistan, the Caribbean, and Africa who at best see the royal family and parliament as fodder for tabloids. London is one vast, expensive slum, and the rest of the country is following.

2) So you have a country where the descendants of the empire builders are now in America, and only the ones too dumb to flee and third world peoples from the former empire now reside there. Nobody cares simply because they don't know any better.

3) Generally, no. NT's are shallow, in general. Over on this side of The Pond, Kim Kardashian is virtually worshipped, she is an idiot who blows through a quarter-million dollars A MONTH, money neither she nor her family actually have. But young women worship the ground she walks on. By the way, women dominate the office jobs that are the only thing America has left, and they all hire only each other. In many families the woman is the breadwinner. Americans actually elected Obama, twice, and he may yet prove to be like the dumb, populist politician from Stephen King's novel The Dead Zone, the guy who causes a nuclear holocaust because he's an idiot, and it's up to one Cassandra to kill the guy and save humanity. Not that I'm suggesting something so extreme for Obama, but he should have been impeached a month ago because he's worse than Nixon. The Congress won't do it because if they did the blacks would riot.

4) Ever heard of the way to keep crabs in a trap without a lid? Put several in at once, they won't let each other climb out, in fact if one crab tries it they will go so far as to kill him, but a trap with one crab, the crab escapes. Humans are the same way, we go along to get along.