2020 Was the Year We Found Out That Our Societies are Largely Made of Remorseless, Malicious Idiots
Dec 27, 2020
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When you think of 2020 in the rear-view mirror, you probably — after thanking your lucky stars this surreal dumpster fire of a year is coming to a close — think first of Covid. Me, though? I think ofidiots.
2020 was the year of the idiot.It was the year thata pandemic searched the ocean of human stupidity, and found, to its gleeful delight, that it appeared to be bottomless. 2020 was the year that idiotswrecked our societies. Many of them, anyways — you can judge for yourself if your society’s on the list.
If there’s one thing that I learned in 2020 — that I never really wanted to confront — it’s that the average person is amassive, gigantic, malicious, selfishidiot. A dangerous idiot. I say that because 2020 was the year that millions of such idiots — unbelievably — piled calamity atop disaster atop catastrophe.
What do I mean by all that?
I tookSnowyfor a walk today, as we do on winter days, through the great old park at the edge of my lively, famed neighborhood.We are in the most severe kind of lockdown in this city. But… nobody was wearing a mask. I live in the neighborhood, but the park was full of weekend warriors and tourists, out for a lark and a laugh. Nobody was enforcing the rules, of which there are barely any to begin with. What the?
What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they care? I have to walk my dog. I have to get a bit of exercise. Nobody who doesn’t live in this square mile has to go to this park. And yet thousands did, on a weekend where cases are spiking…a year into a pandemic…that’skilled more than 1 in 1000 people.
What on earth? You begin to see what I mean by “idiots.”The Greeks, who coined the term,meant it in a certain way: people who are only self-interested. Who have no conception of the public good or shared values or common wealth. The Greeks believed they were the most dangerous people of all, idiots, because enough of them in a society, and soon enough, any semblance of democracy would cease. People have to be more than idiots to make a functioning society: they have to care about, be considerate of, others, too, not just go for walks in the park without masks in the middle of a surging pandemic whose death toll is already astronomical. People that would have made the Greeks laugh, cry, and say: “Nowthat’swhat we mean by idiots.”
But we’re surrounded by such people, aren’t we?My wife — the doctor — goes to work on the subway every day. She comes home and tells me how it’s full of people not wearing masks, and nobody enforces the rules. A tiny train car cramped full of people, andnoneof them are wearing masks. What on earth? She spends her day saving idiots…or people infected by idiots…only to have to go to work and back by putting her life ateven more risk. What kind of twisted logic is that? Don’t these people have a clue? And yet you probably see them every day. You probably walk by them, hurriedly, and hope they don’t infect you, still.
Idiots. Everywhere. Reducing our societies to tatters. By piling calamity atop disaster atop catastrophe. That’s not my opinion, by the way, it’s basic math.Do you know how many people would have died in America if it had acted like South Korea?3,200. Singapore?1,600. Vietnam?120.
That is hundreds of thousands of lives saved. Why did all those people die? Because of acertain pattern of idiocy, that has come to absolutely wreck our societies at this point. It’s predictable, consistent, repeats itself, and there doesn’t appear to be any way of stopping it. Not even mass death can stop this pattern of idiocy. It goes like this. Greater idiots grin and lead lesser idiots, whole armies of them, marching in lockstep, to the edges of the cliffs of ruin, where they all hold hands, in a kind of insane suicide pact. The Greater Idiots call the bottom of the abyss the Promised Land — and all of them, the millions of Lesser Idiots, and the Greater Idiots who lead the way…jump.
And as they jump, they reach out, and grab atourlegs. The rest of us who aren’t idiots.We begin stumbling, pulled down by the sheer momentum of their suicidal lunacy. We find ourselves slipping down the cliff with them. We scrabble for a hand-hold — and that’s just where we are right now, the rest of us who aren’t idiots:holding on for dear life, as they pull us down into the abyss with them.
Let’s begin with America.The biggest idiot in the country,the idiot-in-chief, responded to a brewing global pandemic by — you know this by now — denying it, minimizing, telling people to drink bleach, and thenplaying golf. As a result, the army of American Idiots that fervently believe every word Donald Trump says — that’s millions of people, by the way,more than half of white America—followed his lead. They didn’t wear masks. Their governors foughtagainstmandatingwearing masks. “Lockdowns” were “the bar closes at 11, not midnight.” Fast forward a few months, and…
In less than a year, more than 300,000 Americans aredead. That’s thegreatest death toll of any event in American history. More death than World War II. Vietnam. Any natural disaster. Anything. There’s a 9/11 every day. You’d think, given all that, that Americans would finally get it. Understand their basic responsibilities as human beings right about now. But they don’t. Go out, and there’s tons of people not wearing masks — probably the majority. Lockdowns aren’t real lockdowns. America still has no national Covid strategy — and Joe Biden doesn’t really have much of one, either.
Are you beginning to see what I mean by “Greater idiots led lesser idiots off the cliffs of ruin, and they all held hands, laughed, and jumped in unison”? This was the year of the idiot. In 9 months, 300,000 Americans are dead.
But it was hardly just America where the Idiot made a triumphant, gleeful return, and laid waste to their society.One of the world’s textbook examples of a successful society is Sweden — high levels of trust, happiness, income, wealth, all because Swedes appeared to be sane. It’s not one of the world’s examples of a textbook successful society anymore. Why?
Swedes believed a guy called Anders Tegnell. No, not all of them. But enough of them.He’s their state epidemiologist. And from the beginning of the pandemic, he espoused the crackpot,pseudoscientific theory of “herd immunity.Herd immunity is not something that emerges in the absence of a vaccine — ever. It is something that happens onlywhen wehavevaccines.That is exactly why, for example, Polio and Smallpox went on ravaging humankind until vaccines for them were created.
Never mind that. Sweden, which is supposed to be an educated nation, fell for Tegnell’s line of crackpot pseudoscience, hook, line, and sinker. Sure, some epidemiologists and politicians, understanding basic freshman biology, spoke up — but the average person didn’t listen. They believed that if Sweden just “stuck it out,” then sooner or later “everyone would become immune.” Never mind the fact that that has never happened without a vaccine in human history. Nobody much in Swedish society, it seems, was left even able to think basic thoughts educated people should know anymore.
They were seduced by a Greater Idiot. And what was the result? Exactly what science — real science — said it was going to be.No “herd immunity” emerged whatsoever. Sweden wasravaged by Covid. In a way that its nearest Nordic neighboursweren’t.Today, Sweden’s death toll iseight timesmorethan its neighbours.
The pattern was just the same in Sweden as in America — Greater Idiots led Lesser Idiots off the cliffs of ruin, they held hands, laughed in glee, and…jumped. Straight into the abyss. But there is a very big difference between America and Sweden. America is, well, America —one of the world’s most backwards societies, uneducated, violent, brutal, hateful. Sweden is none of those things. Orwasnone of things.
And that proves a point, too. If Sweden, which until the last year, was so successful, it’s massive, massive self-inflicted Covid failure tells us something: idiocy can strike anywhere, anytime.
We have avaccine now for Covid— but we still don’t have one for human stupidity.Until this last year, I would said: giving people educations, incomes, childcare, retirement, etc, is the best inoculation a society can have against idiocy taking over, by way of stupidity, rage, resentment, distrust. Just look at America. But Swedes have those things. Andstillthey jumped straight off the cliffs of ruin. What does that say about inoculating societies against idiocy? It says giving people the basics can provide some protection — but it’s not a totally effective vaccine against idiocy, as the grim, dismal, painfully stupid case of Sweden proves.
Right about now, there are going to be some Swedes who are mighty offended by what I’ve written. “How dare he?! We’re not…not…idiots! My GOD! We’re not like AMERICANS!!” And yet the evidence speaks for itself. And that teaches us something true about idiocy, too.
Idiocy hardens. It mummifies around the mind, seals it in tight, and renders it incapable of thinking.That is because nobody wants to admit they have been an idiot. Nobody much wants to admit they live in asocietyof idiots. And so many Swedes will object to my little case study, and deny their own idiocy vehemently. But I’m not the one who believed in crackpot pseudo-science —they did. It killed thousands of them, totally disproportionately — and Sweden as a societystill can’t admit it.
But in that respect, Sweden is little different than the West.The whole of the West followedAmerica and Sweden’s pattern, to varying degrees. Nobody in the West very much looked at successful societies, and said: “Hey, do you know what every society who beat Covid has in common?They tried to eliminate it. We should do that, too.” And so the West, all of it, is in a stupid and vicious cycle. Lockdowns that aren’t lockdowns keep the virus in check, but just barely, until they’re lifted, and it explodes all over again. Rinse and repeat. Life never goes back to normal, like it has inmuch of the East. The economy falls into a depression every month this bizarre, self-defeating pattern goes on. And yet nobody is about to stop it.
That’s probably because the West has pinned its hopes on a vaccine. I hate to burst your bubble, but avaccine isn’t going to magically make Covid go away. Resistant strains are already multiplying, and societies which don’t try to eliminate Covid will just go on breeding them. Sooner or later, one of those strains will defeat the vaccine, or maybe that will happen every year. Right about now, Covid is on track to become a seasonal illness in the West, probably requiring a new vaccine every year or two or three. Life never goes back to normal that way —ever.
I could go on with so many more examples of idiocy being the defining theme of this painful, terrible year. How this was the year that proved human stupidity really is bottomless and literally unfathomable. But why should I? This was the year that idiots made hundreds of thousands people diefor no good reason.
And they could still care less.They show no remorse. They don’t think of themselves as responsible. For what? For manslaughter, if we put it accurately and kindly, or maybenegligent homicide. They will say they are just living their lives. They have no regret for the deadly, mindless, things they have become. So who is the virus at this point?
We live in societies — it’s now painfully obvious— where most people are idiots, anddon’t care if the rest live or die. They don’t care how many people they kill with negligence and malice. They will shoulder no basic responsibilities, because they think they have none. They believe themselves to be above any moral law or civic duty, and yet when you point their irresponsibility out to them, they become instantly aggrieved, snowflakes melting in narcissistic fury. Our societies have been overwhelmed by idiots who let loose a tidal wave of death — the greatest onesince the last World War— and haveabsolutely no remorse whatsoeverabout it.
How do you live in a society like that? I don’t know. What I do know is this.If the rest of us, the 49% of us, or 40%, 45%, 30%, want to go on living in anything remotely resembling functioning societies, we are going to have take civilisation back from the idiots. You can’t have a civilization, and a massive wave of idiots jumping off the cliffs of ruin in gleeful despair — grabbing at the rest of our legs on the way down into the abyss. You can either have idiots, or you can have civilization. Ask the ghosts of the Greeks. Ask the ruins of the Romans.Ask America.
Or take a hard look around at your own society, unless you’re lucky to enough to be in New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan.
2020 was the year of the idiot.The year we found out how suicidally dangerous, how relentlessly insane, how totally backwards, how absolutely, incomrehensibly indifferent, evil, stupid, and remorseless idiots can really be. The idiots among us literally killed millions of us who didn’t need to die, and they still don’t care — they will literally laugh about it, while the rest of us cry, or shake in rage, or shudder in contempt.
But do the rest of us, who are supposed to be the good ones, know that? Are we ready to hold them accountable for their grotesque, obscene negligence?Are we ready tobuild better societies, on more humane and wise and thoughtful norms, values, and responsibilities? Covid isonly the first challenge of the 21st century.The next pandemic will be worse — and so will climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse.
How many more of us are the idiots going to kill, then?
Let’s hope that 2021 is the year we begin taking civilisationbackfrom the idiots, now that we know something as true as it is terrible: all of the rest of uscould literally, actuallydie, and they’d laugh, shrug, grab a beer, and pat each other on the back.
UmairDecember 2020
