Hopefully my reading audience here remembers reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Brave New World was a novel, published in 1932, depicting an imaginary future in which everyone was a designer idiot. The idiots were arranged by designer intelligence into a caste system, and the castes were labeled with letters -- thus the Brave New World had Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, in declining order of intelligence. The Brave New World was run by "Controllers" who viewed the global society's primary social problem as one of restraining the human race's intelligence. Thus the Alphas were the group seen as most dangerous, the ones who (it is thought) must be corralled into idiotic pursuits for the sake of social stability.

There was a puzzling moment in this framework in which Mustapha Mond, a Controller, explains his view of intelligence. This is in Chapter 16 of the book, Mond described a social experiment within the Brave New World, of a society in which all of the inhabitants were Alphas. The outcome was not a good one. Here is Mond's description:

It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen. (from page 201)

What's puzzling is that, from the evidence of the novel, it's impossible to figure out if Huxley, the author, believed that a society of idiots was necessary to preserve social stability. Huxley appeared to be hinting that such a society might achieve its primary aim of social stability if there were a small cadre of intelligent people (one would be enough) directing the whole society. I think we can say, however, that the experiment of a society of idiots -- as it is being tried today -- is a failure. It produces neither a universal idiot-hood, nor social stability. We should elaborate upon this experiment, however, to examine what results it actually produces.

Much of the United States, for instance, is a society of idiots with guns, such that there are two mass shootings every day in the US. If you look through the catalog of mass shootings, however, you can see that typically these mass shootings produce injuries, and that most of them produce few or no fatalities. The phenomenon of a Stephen Paddock, who killed sixty people before turning his gun on himself, appears to be rare. Thus the society of idiots with guns appears to have produced -- merely -- a frightened society, and not a society capable of exercising population control by killing off its own members.

Idiocy in journalism:

Now, I suppose that journalists are idiots because they are in perpetual training to be "stenographers to power," pseudo-reporters who spend entire careers repeating the wishes of those in business and in government who control their organizations. They come out of the universities, and, from experience, I can tell you that American universities are good places for the production of idiot savants, people who are good at their specialties (at what Ben Agger calls "academic writing as real estate") but who are not good at anything else. But sometimes these people produce some particularly SMH moments. So here, for instance, is Robby Soave:

Must we review the history of Palestine for Robby's benefit? Does he know nothing of how the two mega-groups currently inhabiting Palestine got to where they are now? Oh, that's right, "Israel" was created mostly of land STOLEN from Palestinians. Say, Robby, if your neighbors had stolen nearly all of your wealth from you, would you just want to get along with them?

Of course, by the same premise the US was built upon land stolen from indigenous peoples. This is the challenge of peace in our time: how to "resolve" not just colonialism but also capitalism, another fun form of theft. Our societies would benefit from journalists who were taught, and who discussed, how the world got to be what it is. What we have are designer idiots.

And then, to go on about this topic a bit, there is the matter of religion, the motivator behind Israeli theft. The first few minutes of this video are about Alastair Crooke, describing the present-day mission of Israel:

So, yeah, once upon a time it was obvious to everyone in the core nations that settler societies were totally kewl and bitchen. Now it's not.

At any rate, the topic of idiocy in journalism brings us, dear readers, to idiocy in politics. Here's a too-typical example:

Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s announcement to run as an Independent is a dangerous and cynical move by wealthy Republicans to put Trump back in the WH. I talked with Bobby and told him that what he is doing could destroy American Democracy. He didn’t care.

— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) October 9, 2023

I am not bringing up this "xing" or tweet to denigrate Rob Reiner -- I'm sure he's good at movie-making. I do, however, wish to point out the commonality of the political appeal he makes -- that the primary appeal of Biden supporters is that running against Joe Biden means, for them, that you want to destroy democracy. So, in the name of democracy, the Biden supporters want to eliminate all opposition to Joe Biden by, well, removing from the ballot anyone who would challenge him.

Little does it occur to said supporters that, if this is Joe Biden's primary appeal, he's definitely not saving democracy, and he's probably not going to win re-election anyway.

At any rate, in each case, idiocy loses. Perhaps -- in writing Brave New World -- Huxley missed the point of creating a society of idiots. If we are elites, we do not create societies of idiots for social stability. We do not bombard populations with advertising, dominate their landscapes with convenience stores, highways, and restaurants, or pretend to occupy their minds with inane garbage masquerading as "news" or addictive cellphone chatter because we want social stability. Perhaps the Controllers of the Brave New World created a world of idiots for good reasons -- in his novel Huxley hinted at some disastrous war which leveled the ground for the society he imagined. But if we are elites living in our society, we are primarily interested in preparing the ground for domination.

One key thing to notice here about our world, in this regard, is that our oligopoly is a lot bigger than the inner circle of "Controllers" described in Huxley's novel. To use an overworked metaphor here: a large society of sheep can support a smaller, yet still large, society of wolves.