Marching Morons: Dystopian Sci-Fi Classic That Inspired “Idiocracy” Puts the Trump Administration In A Grim New Genocidal Light
In C M Kornbluth’s bitter 1952 classic, a 1980s real estate swindler wakes up in the future, where he advises oligarchs on how to con millions to their deaths.
With the Trump administration, people have occasionally said that it is like the film “Idiocracy,” but for real.
This is supposed to be funny, but when you read the story that inspired the film - C M Kornbluth’s skincrawling 1952 tale, The Marching Morons, it raises terrifying questions about how many of the Trump administration’s actions are deliberately intended to lead to mass deaths.
Idiocracy involves an average man from the present who wakes up in the future, where everyone is stupid and no one knows how to do anything anymore. The President of the U.S. is a wrestler, and people threatened with starvation because the crops keep dying, because instead of using water, the farmers have been convinced by advertising to use an energy drink, Brawndo.
While some of the scenes are funny, I never got over the queasy feeling that I got, which was the explanation of how the world got dumb, which is essentially that dumb people are outbreeding smart ones, starting with a well off and educated white couple explaining why they’re not having kids.
While everyone’s stupidity is played for laughs, the basic principle of the film hinges completely on Social Darwinism, which is 19th century pseudoscience.
From the opening narration of the movie:
As the twenty-first century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction — a dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
Volumes could be written on its many failure, but really it’s as if Dunning-Kruger were a worldview. It treats a social order as the natural order, on the basis that the social order must be the consequence of innate, genetic qualities.
What’s skin-crawling is that is the explicit plot of the short story that Idiocracy is based on, The Marching Morons.
The Marching Morons: Mass Murder through Marketing
I was born in 1969, and before electronic information technology swallowed the world, the only place for really exciting adventure, sci-fi and fantasy stories was in short stories, novels, and comic books. There were huge best-sellers that just couldn’t be depicted realistically in any other medium at the time, like Lord of the Rings, Dune, Watership Down. There were also tons of reprints of popular stories - collections of “best ofs”.
The Marching Morons was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951, and I read it in a Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology. You can read the entire story here, at project Gutenberg, and it was highly influential, with other dystopian stories lifting or paying homage to it.
The Marching Morons is like an episode of the Twilight Zone amped up beyond belief, and like many episodes of the Twilight Zone, instead of a likable hero, the main character is a shady low-life. Fantasy is used to tell a plain truth that can’t be revealed in realistic fiction: the ordinary man’s shocking capacity for the evil. It’s not a snarling big-screen villain. It’s a person just like you or me, or someone you know, who you assume, despite their flaws, would never participate in an atrocity, because we have all underestimated the banality of evil.
Kornbluth, who was of Jewish descent and fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, is using science fiction the way Rod Serling used it in the Twilight Zone, to describe how a Holocaust happens, while referring directly to the actual Holocaust, which had occurred just six years before.
In the story, a man from the 1980s, John Barlow, is discovered after centuries of suspended animation. He is taken to meet some global oligarchs. They give him a VR helmet to put on, which feeds him an idiotic game show with a braying host leading a braying audience with a stupid meme - “Would you buy that for a quarter?” (In Paul Verhoeven’s 1980s dystopian satire, Robocop, an identical game show host shows up on TV pays homage with the line “I’d buy that for a dollar!”). Then a newscaster rattles off a string of horrendous accidents and deaths.
Barlow escapes into the city and comes across a movie theatre:
“…a glittering place whose sign said it was THE BIJOU.
The place seemed to be showing a quintuple feature, Babies Are Terrible, Don’t Have Children, and The Canali Kid.
It was irresistible; he paid a dollar and went in.
He caught the tail-end of The Canali Kid in three-dimensional, full-color, full-scent production. It appeared to be an interplanetary saga winding up with a chase scene and a reconciliation between estranged hero and heroine. Babies Are Terrible and Don’t Have Children were fantastic arguments against parenthood—the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of painfully graphic childbirth, vicious children, old parents beaten and starved by their sadistic offspring. The audience, Barlow astoundedly noted, was placidly champing sweets and showing no particular signs of revulsion.
The Coming Attractions drove him into the lobby. The fanfares were shattering, the blazing colors blinding, and the added scents stomach-heaving.
Barlow gets picked up again by his driver - “Tinny-Pete,” whom Barlow accuses of being a secret policeman working for oligarchs:
[Barlow] “I can put two and two together. You’re the secret police. You and the rest of the aristocrats live in luxury on the sweat of these oppressed slaves. You’re afraid of me because you have to keep them ignorant.”
There was a bellow of bright laughter from the psychist that got them blank looks from other patrons of the lobby. The laughter didn’t sound at all sinister.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Tinny-Peete, still chuckling. “You couldn’t possibly have it more wrong.” He engaged Barlow’s arm and led him to the street. “The actual truth is that the millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats.’
Tinny-Peete then lashes out at Barlow, telling him “This damned mess is all your fault and the fault of people like you!”
“Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children.”
“What of it?”
“This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted… while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”
“Wait a minute,” objected Barlow. “There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children.”
“The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.”
“But that’s far in the future—”
“So are you,” grunted the hawk-faced man sourly.
“But who are you people?”
“Just people—real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their descendants, about three million of us. There are five billion of the others, so we are their slaves.”
This is the entire premise of both The Marching Morons and Idiocracy: that people who are supposedly genetically inferior have outbred people who are genetically superior. Tinny-Pete’s title is “Psychist for Poprob.” which is the “Population Problem”.
In Idiocracy, this is played for laughs: a very average white man from the past is smarter than everyone, and his solution to save everyone is to stop putting energy drinks on crops, and use water instead.
In The Marching Morons, Barlow, the very average white man from the past - is a former real estate scammer who swindled investors with land in Siberia who figures dealing with a population of people with an IQ of 45 will be easy. “…these are morons, born suckers. You just figure out a con they’ll fall for; they won’t know enough to do any smart checking.”
Barlow hints that he might have a solution:
“If you really have a method, I don’t think any price would be too great,” the psychist offered.
“Money,” said Barlow.
“All you want.”
“More than you want,” the hawk-faced man corrected.
“Prestige,” added Barlow. “Plenty of publicity. My picture and my name in the papers and over TV every day, statues to me, parks and cities and streets and other things named after me. A whole chapter in the history books.”
The psychist made a facial sign to the hawk-faced man that meant, “Oh, brother!”
The hawk-faced man signaled back, “Steady, boy!”
“It’s not too much to ask,” the psychist agreed.
Barlow, sensing a seller’s market, said, “Power!”
“Power?” the hawk-faced man repeated puzzledly. “Your own hydro station or nuclear pile?”
“I mean a world dictatorship with me as dictator!”
“Well, now—” said the psychist, but the hawk-faced man interrupted, “It would take a special emergency act of Congress but the situation warrants it. I think that can be guaranteed.”
“Could you give us some indication of your plan?” the psychist asked.
“Ever hear of lemmings?”
“No.”
“They are—were, I guess, since you haven’t heard of them—little animals in Norway, and every few years they’d swarm to the coast and swim out to sea until they drowned. I figure on putting some lemming urge into the population.”
“How?”
“I’ll save that till I get the right signatures on the deal.”
Before I go any further about a racist real estate swindler who make deals with Russia demanding publicity and to be made a dictator through emergency acts of Congress, I want to mention lemmings, which have become a shorthand for animals that commit mass suicide in a kind of mania.
In fact, lemmings have no such impulse: this is a myth. One of the reasons it spread was that there was a 1958 Walt Disney educational film, “White Wilderness” that played in elementary schools (including mine) that shows these cute, hamster-like creatures flying off cliffs into the water below. It was nominated for, and won, an Academy Award.
It was, in fact, a fraud: Lemmings don’t behave this way. This is not the arctic ocean or Norway. As the Canadian investigative news program the Fifth Estate discovered, the lemmings were captured in Manitoba by Inuit Children who were paid a quarter apiece, then shipped to landlocked Alberta. They lemmings were dropped onto a large, spinning plywood turntable that flung them over a cliff, and the water they dropped into was the Bow River, which runs down from the Rockies through Banff and Calgary.
The voiceover says:
“Here’s an actual living legend, for it said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves… A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”
In fact,
The story came out in 1951. The film came out in 1958 - but both were steeped in this lie about nature.
Barlow demands to be made Dictator, and both Houses of Congress agree, with a show of hands. “The first thing I want is to see designs for a new palace for me—nothing unostentatious, either—and your best painters and sculptors to start working on my portraits and statues.”
Instead - a week later, what he embarks on is a propaganda campaign, working with the countries of the world to push for vacations to, and the colonization of, Venus.
TV shows, ads, politicians, op-eds and magazine features. Everyone starts talking about trips to Venus. An American Senator demands that “Venus must be American!” as construction on fleets of rocket ships began, and as a global marketing campaign to get as many people to move to Venus as possible, when their actual destination is that they will be flown over the ocean and dumped to their deaths - in the millions.
The question was how to keep it from being discovered, but Barlow remembers a ruse from the Holocaust.
“There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards…
“Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed.
The plan works, with billions making the trip on hundreds of rockets a day. “Poprob got a dividend in every nation after the emigration had passed the halfway mark.”
The U.S. President and Government get aboard a more luxurious craft and fly to their deaths as well - which makes Barlow fly into a rage.
“Barlow snapped, “What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven’t authorized?”
“Didn’t want to bother you, Chief,” said Rogge-Smith. “It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?”
Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor.
“You still shouldn’t have gone ahead without my okay,” he grumbled. “Where the hell would you people have been without me?”
“That’s right, Chief. We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler—it wouldn’t have occurred to us.”
The last thing they’ve been working on is what to do with Barlow himself: they usher him onto his own, personal ship, lock him in, and blast him into space with such acceleration that his body is shattered as he is crushed to the floor.
“Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily.
The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.”
Jack Ketch was the name of an executioner under the reign of King Charles II who was so legendarily inept and barbarous that his name came to stand in for all executioners, or even as the embodiment of Death or Satan.
The Marching Morons now reads less like satire and more like prophecy. The con-man dictator who wants adulation, the oligarchs who believe they are victims, and the hapless cannon fodder, and the relentless scams, lies and tsunami of misinformation that accompany the deliberate dismantling of the US government and its capacity to enforce the law by criminal oligarchs.
As I was writing this piece, I got an e-mail with an article about the Trump administration’s latest use of hunger as a political tool: “Brooke Rollins of the USDA, announcing that any state refusing to hand over their SNAP data, including immigration status, will have their food aid frozen… Translation:
Give us your immigrant information or your residents—children, seniors, working families—don’t eat… Millions of American citizens—citizens—stand to lose access to food so Trump can pressure states to help him fake progress on an impossible deportation quota.”
This is the second time in a month that the Trump administration has decided to use hunger as a political weapon as they target their social inferiors for death.
The Trump administration is the outright criminal takeover of the richest country on earth, with the help and support of preening of the Crpto-fascist tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and others, whose intellectual and emotional development stopped when they were about 15. While they’re all fans of pop culture like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, comic books and sci-fi, or the least realistic of them all, Ayn Rand.
Despite the ease of reading comprehension and the clearest possible moral lessons, none of the (sometimes profound) and crystal clear moral lessons at the heart of these stories have penetrated their consciousness. Instead, they their military companies and technologies after them. Musk’s AI, “Grok” is from the best-selling sci-fi classic (and bore), Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein - a Martian term that meant “understanding.” Thiel has Palantir - a military and drone surveillance company, named after the “seeing stones” from the Lord of the Rings that the villain, Sauron, uses to poison the minds of others and bend them to his well. “Anduril” is the name of another company founded by Palmer Luckey, another Silicon Valley military contractor, based on the name of the sword that cut the Ring of Power from the hand of Sauron.
What they all have in common, aside from their wealth and toxic nerdiness and supposed superiority, is that they’ve made a lot of money from other people’s work, as well as from R & D and technology that was developed entirely at public expense, much of it in support of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. Many are anti-intellectual and anti-university, which has led them to adopt views of politics, finance and the economy that are unconstrained by facts, evidence, or reason.
That is because they are not Captains of Industry, or distinguished researchers, or talented innovators. Many are con artists and worse. They buy or crush competitors, and it is hard to imagine an industry that has benefited more than U.S. tech companies from decades of investments in R & D, as well as protectionist policies and now threats from the U.S. government against countries or blocs have the temerity to enforce their own laws.
The U.S. government has stripped away and cancelled USAID programs that have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as vaccination and anti-HIV programs were shuttered, and hundreds of thousands of tons of food was left rotting in warehouses.
In the U.S., the Republican willingness to starve the 40-million Americans on SNAP benefits, while taking away their health care, and cancelling farm subsidies to reduce food supplies.
Notably, Elon Musk, a race-obsessed lunatic, and DOGE were responsible for many of these terrible decisions. Even in an administration filled with criminals, liars & psychopaths, Musk stands out, but he’s far from the only one.
RFK Jr’s celebrity, lunacy means that he plays the role of pornographic clown. It’s a role that once seemed more rare in public life. Now, he’s one of many in a crowded field. That means his dismantling of global public health, destruction of the CDC, and open encouragement and alignment with health fads and conspiracy theories that will certainly kill people and spread diseases, deadly and otherwise.
As a result, we’re seeing the return of entirely preventable diseases, based on absolute and blatant lies where people in political leadership are openly encouraging policies that known to be false, dangerous and deadly. Drinking unpasteurized raw milk, refusing vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella. Aside from death, some of the permanent possible harms from these diseases range from, disability, sterility (mumps), birth defects if pregnant women are infected (rubella), and measles can strip the body of acquired immunity from previous exposures.
These are propaganda campaigns and policy decisions that have already lead to many people dying from diseases that are preventable.
Many of these billionaires are also involved in some extent to another in the mostly criminal world of cryptocurrencies, which have no use as actual currencies, and are dominated by scams, extortion, and worse.
Not only do they participate in ripping off investors and paying the President to shut down investigations, this gang of crypto-fascists is perfectly fine with the collapse of the U.S. dollar and economy, believing that if that happens, they can make crypto - which they own - the global reserve currency. This all, quite frankly, sounds like all the stuff Vladimir Putin would do to the U.S. if you gave him the keys to the White House: bankrupt the U.S. and end democracy, in exchange, the First Family will be set up as the Only Family.
The good news for those who care about such matters, is that none of them actually understand finance or the economy. They’re really just crooked businessmen who now just openly act like gangsters. They made a lot of money, and they’ve used it to buy politicians, lie, cheat, bribe, get cases and charges dropped against the unethical and illegal practices of their companies. In the last few months, Trump and his family have become billionaires through crypto. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Ellison skewing the bias of their media outlets and platforms, and in return, the regulators and oversight has been dismantled, under a Supreme Court that is breathtaking in is absolute and total corruption.
These are all companies that sided with Trump because the previous Biden administration was willing to enforce the law against their corrupt, anti-competitive, monopoly- and rent-seeking practices on the part of all of their companies, as well as in crypto.
Finally, what is so insane about the fact that these monumentally wealthy people are supporting full-scale assaults on the constitution, violating due process on a national scale, open corruption, pardoning dangerous criminals and working to end democracy in America is that they are pulling the temple down on top of themselves.
They’re so brainwashed by their own propaganda about politics and economics that they don’t realize that the monetarist American economic propaganda they’ve been fed equivalent of Soviet-era communist propaganda. It’s a convincing story, but it’s not accurate.
For many of these billionaires, the reason they have that wealth is directly due to U.S. government contracts.
Contrary to the idea that government depends on billionaires, no one is more dependent on government for their income and wealth security than billionaires.
Back to the Real World: Look, Don’t Think
Part of the true madness and horror of our current moment is that our existing systems aren’t adequate to deal with it.
Here’s the thing. There is no question that we are living in a period of terrible crisis, where the willingness of people to repeat bald-faced untruths so outrageous that the horror of it never fades to noise. It is an age of constant roaring deception, and in this there is self-deception and self-delusion as well. It is not just that people are saying terrible, harmful things that they don’t genuinely believe: they have come to believe them.
People are being deceived, and some are deceiving themselves as well. The easiest person to fool is yourself, and we need to guard against it.
I say that as a reassurance, and also to point out these oligarchs have no actual clue how the world works - or they are lying, for self-interest.
On the Vital Importance of Nurture and Culture, Not Just Nature
The fundamental mistake that all these maniacs make can be explained fairly simply. Of course every living being has some fixed inherited traits.
However, when you consider all living things, the ones where genetics are very deterministic are the simpler ones. If everything that an creature does is a matter of pure instinct, then heredity alone is going to be more important.
The things that separates human beings from all other living creatures are purely cultural. You might have some inclination, but the language you speak and the ideas you believe almost always come from someone else. We’re all born with senses that are ready to hear, see, taste, touch, perceive, but all of human technology was something that at some point never invented before in history.
“Fitness” for survival is not about the flexed arm hang or being able to outrun someone. It is fitness, as in how well two things fit together: the living creature and their environment.
For human beings, everything we do is cultural. We are living in a world that we ourselves have shaped. A technological advantage is often temporary. But it’s not just positive qualities that can put people in political power. Criminal syndicates, warlords, oligarchs and corrupt organizations make and follow through on threats of murder, torture, kidnapping, rape, theft, and persecution, bribery and corruption.
I say all of those things because we are living in an age of horrific dehumanization that is already leading to catastrophe, torment and death, with more escalation in sight.
If any of these billionaires had a clue about what they were talking about, and had any knowledge of economic history, they might know that the current period of political polarization - which is global in nature - is because that is what happens after a financial crisis like the one we had in 2008. It leads to political polarization, including nationalism, and socialism with a loss of moderate centrism. These divisions make it harder to reach consensus on solutions and delays recovery.
I have made it clear that I believe we are in a financial crash, right now, especially due to crushing private debt burdens that are part of a global bubble in asset prices. These bubbles have were inflated by ultra-low central bank interest rates over a period of decades, but were made acute with emergency monetary responses during the 2008 crisis, the Euro Crisis, and especially during the pandemic.
As I have also made clear, while economists may have their fanciful theories, civics shows that the Government of the United States cannot go bankrupt in U.S. dollars, because the money creation process that central banks and commercial banks use is different than described in most textbooks, and applied by most economists. There are ways out of this crisis without further escalation.
In fact, we’ve gone through exactly such mass panics before in times of similar economic crisis. You have a bubble where stocks are high but everyone else is going broke until the big crash. After that deflation makes it incredibly hard to pay off whatever debt was taken on prior to the crash. People close ranks, splinter, tribalize. But it’s not due to lack of energy, or resources, or people: it’s because the money system has broken down, or is about to, and government has the capacity address that, because that is how the law has always worked.
So today’s Meta Marching Morons, the Broligarchs, don’t actually know how money works. They are part of a different mania, which is the financial mania of the AI bubble which has zero chance of ever being able to pay off the absolutely ludicrous costs.
The other is that they don’t know anything about biology or evolution, either. It’s all just 19th century race science, none of which has a shred of validity. As with all pseudo-ideologies, it’s only purpose is to justify and rationalize a political or social arrangement, especially the establishment of governments that are crafted to be tyrannical and unjust.
In the 1930s, Dietrich was a Lutheran Pastor in Germany who opposed Hitler, and was executed for his role in an assassination plot. What he described was chilling:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his co-conspirators on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. “One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” When provoked, “the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Fighting stupidity, to Bonhoeffer’s mind, first necessitates understanding it. “In essence not an intellectual defect but a human one,” stupidity can descend upon practically anyone: “under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.” And it happens most noticeably when a particular figure or movement seizes the attention of the public. “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity,” he writes. Since such phenomena could hardly arise without blindly obedient masses, it seems that “the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
The talk of “infecting” people with stupidity is part of a long human history of manias and panics. In Charles Mackay’s introduction to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, he details them, “We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity… Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Elon Musk has said the weakness of Western Civilization is empathy, when his own view of the world is dominated by fear, ignorance and insecurity. What is being lost is not just empathy: it is any and all moral conciousness.
What the modern day propagandists learned is that quality messaging doesn’t matter: quantity alone - repeating a blatant, even impossible lie over and over again - does the trick. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”
There’s no doubt that our social bonds have been shattered by crises, especially the Covid pandemic, which like the Spanish Influenze a century before split societies, destabilized economies and led to widespread mass hysteria.
“So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that.
Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.
A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.”
In this maelstrom of deception and corruption, it is absolutely vital that people cling to reason and our moral consciences with everything we have in order to keep ourselves and others from hurtling headlong into the abyss.
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Whatever you do, just pull the blanket of stupidity back over your head and DON'T READ THIS!
No, seriously, thank you Dougald for this important outlook on this sad state of affairs!
It's not "survival of the fittest", it's "survival of the most fitted".
In times of scarcity being the "fittest" (large & strong) can be a significant disadvantage in evolutionary terms.
Peter Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid" was dismissed at the time but modern evolutionary biologists find much to agree with.