Dystopian literature warning of our increasing stupidity has produced some genuine classics in the past fifty years. I’d like to mention three of them, all with different central themes, all still highly relevant.
In his 1961 novella, “The Marching Morons”, C.M. Kornbluth has a 20th century con artist wake up from suspended animation centuries hence to discover that overpopulation has created a world where five billion morons with an IQ below 50 are kept going by an educated elite of three million. This is a consequence of the tendency for the educated classes to breed less, while the uneducated continue to let rip. There are too many morons to sterilize and, no matter what the elite does to persuade them not to procreate, they’re at it like jack rabbits.
The conman from our era (well, mine, at least) comes up with the ultimate con: the elite persuade huge numbers of morons to emigrate in spaceships to Venus, which they have marketed as an alluringly delightful place.
The travelers will, of course, all die. The conman’s reward is… well, I recommend reading the story to find out.
The British government has boldly addressed the problem of overpopulation on our own island by pretty much abolishing all immigration controls. As the immigrants are mainly from poorer countries, they will tend to maintain their custom of producing lots of children. But, of course, as they start to integrate and learn our ways, and discover that there’s nothing to be gained by excess breeding, they’ll stop at two or three kids, just like the rest of us. Unless, of course, we ensure that they never have to integrate. And we reward them for producing more children.
I suggest our political masters be forced to read “The Marching Morons” pronto.
Kurt Vonnegut ended up as a testy old-style Yankee democrat geezer, crustily chuntering on about the evils of the Bush administration like some dizzy Hollywood airhead. Pity, because this man had oodles of talent. 1961 (must have been a hell of a year) saw the publication of his sublimely funny and intelligent short story, “Harrison Bergeron”. The eponymous hero is extravagantly gifted, physically and mentally, but because he lives in a society where equality is all that matters – no one must be allowed to feel bad because anyone else is better at something - he has to carry various “corrective” burdens, such as weights to counteract his athleticism, deliberately blackened teeth to offset his beauty, and glasses that give him headaches to neutralize his intelligence.
Equality is policed by the United States Handicapper General. It’s a she. Britain’s equivalent would, I presume, be Harriet Harperson, one of the great levelers of our age. Or Ed Balls: having failed, despite vast expenditure, to bring state education up to the level of the private system, he has now resorted to ever more deranged edicts to force universities to favour applicants with poor results from “disadvantaged” backgrounds (i.e. state educated) over pupils with good results from “advantaged” backgrounds (i.e. their parents paid a fortune for their education, while also paying for someone else to be educated by the state).
In “Harrison Bergeron”, bright people are made to wear headphones that emit noises that destroy the wearer’s ability to concentrate. No doubt, private school pupils will eventually be made to wear them during examinations.
Finally, Mockingbird, a 1980 novel by that superb writer, Walter Tevis (The Hustler, Queen’s Gambit, The Man Who Fell To Earth). It’s the 25th Century, the world is administered by androids, and people have lost the ability to read. They’ve been taught that fulfilling their own needs is all that matters. Sex is for pleasure and means nothing more than the immediate experience: “Quick sex is best” is a popular slogan. Violent porn movies are the main source of entertainment. Children are raised en masse: there are no families. People are encouraged not to question anyything: “Don’t ask: relax!”.
The loss of the ability to read (Tevis had noticed a fall in literacy amongst his Ohio University students) means that there’s no sense of the past, and therefore no shared cultural identity. The world has been reduced to getting what you want now!
Sound familiar? Our ruling left-wing elite hates the past, because the lessons to be drawn from it so often contradict its own modish view of what human beings should be like. It is one of the ”forces of conservatism” so memorably attacked by Tony Blair. Deliberate manipulation of the curriculum and the general emphasis on non-judgmental multiculturalism means we are losing shared cultural knowledge: the store of common reference points, whether historical events, or works of art and literature, is dwindling alarmingly.
A shared cultural past, especially when the past is as glorious as Britain’s, is an endless source of pride, knowledge, strength, and a sense of identity. Forging a new, better breed of human being is best accomplished with subjects who are ignorant, resentful of their current lot, and lacking any sense of an inherited cultural identity. A shared culture fosters and celebrates national character, and the very existence of a specifically national character threatens our Masters’ project to build a society where what you know, where you came from and whatever natural gifts you possess are all potential sources of INEQUALITY. And we can’t have inequality. It’s, like, you know, wrong?
If you don’t know enough about the past, you become stupid. If you can’t take pride in the past you share with the others around you, you become rootless and unhappy. Stupid, unhappy people are just great subjects for social engineering. If you actually make it illegalto question the direction society is taking, and then bar anyone who doesn’t slavishly agree with you from any positions of influence, hell, you have a perfectly manipulable population.
It’s sad that science fiction has mainly migrated from the printed word to the much dumber world of the movies: it used to consist mainly of smart people writing for smart people: its place on bookshelves has been taken by works of fantasy, so now it’s a question of “Don’t ask: relax!”
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