In the previous article, I wrote about how Biden is fighting a war on two fronts, one against Covid, the other against fascism. There are many fronts in this war, though, and many battles he has to win. Another important and rather general one is the battle against stupidity, which is related to the other two.
One thing the Founding Fathers got wrong is that bit about “all men are created equal.” That’s not even true biologically. (For this article, let’s forget about the important fact that the Founding Fathers were misogynist pricks.) Some people are blessed with more smarts and skills than other people are. Statistically, that’s just those old bell curves at work in the human population across human characteristics, just as they do for other animal populations. Most people are educated and decent enough to realize that the Founding Fathers, if they wrote anything logical and reasonable about human populations, must have meant that everyone should have equal opportunity, i.e. the freedom to realize their innate potentials.
And thus we have another front in Biden’s war: Fighting the stupid people who are so egotistical and self-centered to think they’re smarter than everyone else, often going so far as to want to exterminate them—anti-vaxxers, religious nuts, anti-abortionists, gun fanatics, climate-change deniers—the list of these idiots is long, but they can all sadly be described as complete fools trying to impose their wills on everyone else and keep them from realizing their potentials.
These are the “marching morons” (I stole that from C. M. Kornbluth’s prescient novella). Whether they follow that infamous “f&^%ing moron” or not (that’s a SecState Tillerson quote) doesn’t matter, because the fascist plutocracy uses all these idiots to ensure their hold on power in the US and around the world. The plutocrats are the true Nazis sending the marching morons into battle, and those battles have been going on at least since the days of the Roman Empire.
It’s a bloody war too, and it will continue to be one. Biden faces a daunting task. As Einstein stated, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” As it turns out, the Universe is finite, so Einstein’s fallback was the correct one.
Is Biden, or any sane politician (they’re an endangered species), for that matter, up to the task? The world could soon become a very dark place even without climate change.