Death By Stupidity

“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee…”       Matthew 5:30

Billions (yes, with a “B”) of us are going to die within the next decade from war, famine, and pestilence.  How do you like them apples?  Millions of people all over the world know this, and some of them are actually in a position to alleviate some of the suffering, perhaps even to help us all avoid the great die-off all together.  But they are not going to do a thing, and that includes any kind of warning or wisdom.  Isn’t that a scream?  Wait, it gets even better.  For many of them, the die-off and collapse of industrial civilization will be somewhere between a deuced inconvenience and a jolly adventure!  And here’s the kicker: for some, the die-off is a great opportunity!  Call them optimists.

Call them what you like: Capitalists, the ruling elite, the superclass or the rich fatties.  They rule. Your Congressperp or Senateboob or whatever “representatives” you think you have in “government” work for them, not you.  But you knew that, right?  They have private estates all over the world and the boats, aircraft, armored vehicles or thoroughbred horses to take them there.

There is no “government.” There is no “political process.” There is no “country.”

There is a network of corporate fiefdoms owned by rich fatties turning imaginary paper into guns, grains and grunts as fast as they possibly can… for a real feudalism of fortresses, food and firearms.

To hell with them. If you survive the die-off you will either have to avoid their serfs and mercenaries or become one (just like now, really).  Furthermore, at this point trying to convince anybody the great die-off is real and approaching like a speeding train is similar to arguing for the existence of the sun.  You can veer off into the William Cooper school of Esoteric Agendas and say a secret ancient cabal of select rich shitpokes planned it all along.  You can subscribe to the more pedestrian explanation of peak oil and planetary carrying capacity .  Either way, it will be perilous enough with cascading factors of environment and energy creating famine and disease.  Most USAns will die of stupidity.

Stupidity is already pandemic in the USA,  and lethal in many cases.  That’s with the lights working and fast-food joints and strip malls burping beige lard from see to Chinese sea.  Turn out the lights, and it will be Zombie Time.  With millions who still believe in mythical medieval sky-Santas and define their ethos in terms of their pee-pee things, ZT isn’t hard to imagine.  But gaze with abject horror at the stuffed, buffed and minted suits and haircuts who will be driving as we steer into this apocalypse.  They’re still nattering about “terrorism” as the “global economy” falls like a failed soufflé.  They say they didn’t see that coming either.  Are they that stupid… or are they that evil?

We know evil is dangerous. Stupidity catches us off guard, especially if we ourselves are the practitioners.  If we think about the last time we did something really stupid, there’s a good chance it was the result of believing what we wanted to believe.  Maybe we really didn’t know any better.  Maybe we did not want to know any better.  Or- the Mother of all stupid: we knew better and did it anyway.  This is the kind of stupidity that is not far from evil.  Its banality is everywhere, from sporting-event wars to super-size prisons, while we chatter about celebrity-cult politics and the outrage du jour.  Nobody wants to believe the die-off is coming and that our puppet show politic is worse than useless.

Evil is selective stupidity. Evil people are operating on brain-stem only, and all those higher-level brain functions are just there to help them do it.  For example, many high-ranking Nazis were smart people with advanced degrees: brain stems with PhDs.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand the Golden Rule, but it does take a part of the brain that lives above food, fear and fucking.  Likewise, the stupid-evil conundrum is not all that difficult.  If it doesn’t work, it’s stupid… and if it’s not right, it’s evil.  What if it doesn’t work and it’s not right?  Guess where we are now, and if history is any guide we will all want the trains to run on time—whether to grandma’s house or the gas chamber.

Three steps of stupidity toward evil: clueless, wannabe-clueless, and do-it-anyway.  To practice any evil; genocide, ecocide, or omnicide is the other side of what makes us human in the first place.  How ironic… the selective disconnect is often a freak of what awakened our “higher” consciousness: a mutation of some kind of “ideology.”  Religion, for example, has worked like magic for people who want to switch to stem-only mode.  In the cases of saints, martyrs and Holy persons, it enables them to face certain death because “it’s the right thing to do.  That’s the flip-side of “do-it-anyway,” the greater brain overriding the stem instead of serving it; rare as bird lips in the USA.

The USA is a culture that hoards firearms so people can shoot themselves when they run out of toilet paper, that is, if they survive the toilet paper wars after the lights go out.  It is a gaggle of a hundred million “rugged individualists” who hate non-conformists to the point of murder, a land-mass packed with people who think Jesus and Fred Flintstone were neighbors.  The USA is a culture where the cunningly evil have made billions of fraudulent dollars for generations by preying on the brutally stupid.  Ponder how those same millions who got brain-stem stupid after three buildings fell down will react to collapse of global infrastructure.  No toilets.  No water.  No Friday night football.

None of the superclass or their sock puppets are going to talk about the die-off, even as it happens.  Even if they did so with the best of intentions, the usual snake-oil side-show would emerge, saying it was all a scam by elitist egg-suckers to get “your money.”  There would be the usual sophists and sops saying that nothing can be accomplished with such “negativity,” and just thinking about it will make it happen.  Just keep clapping, and Tink’s light will stay on along with the rest of the energy grid.  The messengers have no microphone, the Holy ones no megachurch.  The sophists, sops and stem-heads are going to get you long before the super organic does.

You can build a fire to keep away the cold, but no stove will stave off the stupid, so watch the Inauguration root for your favorite Stupid bowl tuber and stop thinking about it.  There’s nothing you can do about it anyway, so pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.  Ignore the scientists and all those other nattering nabobs of negativism and jerk furiously on that lever that is not connected to anything.  At least you’re “doing” something.  Grease the sky-skillet, and saltpeter will take us all to Never-Never Land.  But woe to you if you have eyes that see and ears that hear.  Then you know that the global warning is just as real as global warming.  You are in real danger.

And it’s not the heat… it’s the stupidity.