You're all fucking stupid

The United States has been completely overrun with idiots and I'm the minority exception. I'm not going to sugar coat it– if you're reading this, odds are if I ever meet you I'm going to think you're dumber than me, and I'll probably be right. The only reason I don't include the whole world in my appraisal is that I don't know enough people in the rest of the world. I'm not saying I'm a genius, I'm saying that I'm of expected median intelligence but the rest of the United States is really that dumb.

Normally when someone makes a blanket statement like this, it's because they've got that one thing on their minds, something they're bitter about—their nemesis got the promotion they wanted, their girlfriend cheated on them, Bush got re-elected to office—but as I mentioned before, those people are fucking idiots and I'm not. I'm referring to a broad generalization I have deduced from expecting people to have a minimal level of intellect and 28 continuous years of perpetually being proven wrong.

Let's start with work, shall we? I am the second-highest non-management tier of the top branch of a huge financial management company (excluding specialist branches that require masters degrees or doctorates. At first I was excited by the promotion, thinking that it would be an exciting challenge and I would finally be able to work with peers. Nope. Every one of my coworkers are fucking idiots. Some of them are really nice folks, and I even occasionally have drinks with them, but that doesn't make them any less stupid. I find myself constantly having to explain rudimentary things to people that should have learned this shit years ago. I immediately grasp concepts that took them seven months to learn. Hell, I spent all morning drafting this essay in my head while I was working, because I needed something to think about while I was busy doing the work that requires concentration for them to pull off.

I will actually admit that the management is a bit smarter than the worker bees, in that they openly express their ignorance, in effect saying "I don't know this basic shit any better than you do, but I know that since we're all idiots I have nothing to hide, so I'll express my ignorance and let you fix my shit." You know those monster.com commercials that show people working all day with monkeys, then a tag line saying "Find something better"? That works because all jobs have that monkey element. The difference is, whoever's job hunting has the intellect of a monkey as well, that's why they fall for 30-second TV ads.

Hell, our entire economy is supported by the fact that people fall for 30-second TV ads.

But I'm not bitter about work. Hey, I got paid $80 this morning alone to do mundane data entry. If I looked for new work, I'd be a fucking idiot. And I'm not. Here's another example why:

People who shop at Forever 21 are idiots. Nobody's contesting that. People who spend $5 for milk and coffee are idiots. People who buy name brand shit that's manufactured in the same factory as the generic shit are idiots. (Disclosure: I am a name-brand buyer, but that's because I prefer quality goods. I wear Doc Martens or Rockports, customized contact lenses, and Eddie Bauer. My computers are all Apples and I buy all my produce from a collective farm.)

Then there's the demographic of people who spend 500 calories a day expressing their disgust for people who shop at Forever 21, Starbucks, and American Eagle. Is that really the most important thing in your life? Are you really offended by the presence of a corporation with good marketing skills? Do you really think that a company who pays fair wages to their baristas and Nicaraguan coffee growers, donate massive amounts of money to charities and the arts, and actually provide subsidies to their competition must be boycotted? Or are you making the same naked, superficial, shallow fucking attempt for approval as the people who shop there to be seen? I will agree with you on this: when clothing designers like Banana Republic, Hollister, and A&F actually write their names on the front of their clothes because their shoppers are buying the clothes in such an obvious attempt to buy approval from their peers, and their peers are SO FUCKING DUMB that they have to have this brand marking literally written out for them and pasted on the tits of their codependent admirers, you're dealing with a truly useless demographic of people whose only value to society is that they'll take it in any orifice you name if you suggest that it might lead to their father loving them again.

That said, what statement do you make when you stand in front of American Eagle, proclaiming as loudly as you can how much you disapprove of its patrons? You're not making an attempt to change the hearts and minds of America, are you? No, you're making a shallow, superficial attempt to earn the approval of the people standing next to you. I actually don't fault either side for this, by the way, though it does prove my point that they're just plain morons. The reason I don't fault them is because their peers are actually so fucking stupid that you have to SPELL OUT TO THEM the fact that yes, you agree with them, and you want their acceptance because of it. If you spent your time trying to impress them with your intelligence and wit, you would just be proving my next point, which is:

The American public is so staggeringly devoid of anything resembling brains that it has become a cultural virtue to be fucking stupid. Look at our President. Hell, look at the people who criticize our president. I've actually had conversations with these people on the street. Here's my all time favorite back-and-forth:

DIPSHIT ON THE STREET: "We have to get the Republicans out of the government and restore our country to the great values we used to have, with leaders like Lincoln."
ME: "Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party..."
DIPSHIT ON THE STREET: "Uh, well, I don't know that much about Lincoln, but we have to get rid of the Republicans."

What's amazing about that discourse is that her original point was actually valid. There are countless ways she could have continued the conversation in her favor, if she has any clue whatsoever what she was talking about. Mind you, we're talking about a political canvasser. This wasn't some yahoo on the street corner. Well, it was, but not some random yahoo. Anyway.

Occasionally I'll be hanging out with someone and they'll ask some question that actually demands an intelligent answer. Last month, for example, my dad asked some of our relatives, "I wonder how aboriginal people in Oceania got there. I mean, it's not like they could have crossed the Bering Strait." An intelligent question. One that, as it happens, I know the answer to. You know, because I studied Linguistic Anthropology, where that's actually a prevalent question. I explained that when they just had long-canoes to travel, the inhabitants of Southeast Asia made an effort to... you know what, you don't care what the answer is. You probably didn't even know where Oceania was until I said "southeast Asia." The point is, my relatives, afraid of being outdone by their nephew, who they're too fucking stupid to realize has actually grown and matured since that time they saw him eat the side of a chair (I didn't really do that but you get my point), start immediately countering my claim, talking down to me and scolding me for trying to make things up.

Now does that sound like something someone would just randomly make up? Don't you think in this day and age I could just bust out an Encyclopedia and make them look like a bunch of jackasses? That fact is, though, that people have a very primal act-and-react instinct that causes them to say stupid shit like that.

The other thing that happens is that I'll actually know the answer to something, and I'll be accused of being a know-it-all. I'm not contesting it, actually. But it goes back to stupidity being considered a virtue. It shows that the culturally accepted response to an intelligent question is to not know the answer. Then why the fuck did you ask? Because, of course, you're smart enough to ask questions that nobody has ever asked before. "Do you ever wonder if, like, the color I see as 'blue,' you might see as 'red' or 'purple'?" OOOOOOOH you are SO fucking deep!!!! It couldn't possibly be that this question hasn't occurred to every other person on the entire fucking planet since the discovery of marijuana!? You know what, I thought of that too. When I was 15. Guess what I did: the fucking research. Turns out, there's a whole field of study that we've been perfecting for 1400 fucking years called "ophthalmology," that directly deals with how the brain perceives shit that comes in through your eyes, and you know what? Since the science has been around too long for our stupid fucking country to ban it in the interest of perpetuating this ridiculous fucking myth that we were created on day 6 of existence by a relatively arbitrary and simplistic system of a God that was created by a bunch of Mesopotamian aristocrats from 2600 years ago because the population of the time couldn't figure out why there was any problems with killing their neighbors so they could stick their dick in his wife without retribution so a shallow creation mythology was thrown together as a stopgap measure to hold them off for long enough to allow the Hebrews time to establish themselves as a nation-state, they actually figured out that in fact, there is significant evidence that the blue you see is purple in someone else's eyes. So, in summary, you're no smarter for asking that question. In fact, you're dumber, for actually thinking that vocalizing that thought will enable you to "trick" your peers into thinking you're some kind of genius. The funny thing is, it will probably work. But again, that doesn't mean you're smarter, it means you're all fucking stupid.

This is where the social norms require me to make a light-hearted, ironically self-deprecating remark about how all this ranting also applies to me, so don't think I'm arrogant, because I'm just talking out of hurt; I don't really think I'm smarter than you, I just want to get things off my chest, because I've got that one thing on my mind, something I'm bitter about. Nope. My fellow Americans really are that dumb. I'll offer more reasons later, but I've got some "work" to do.