 Weakness and stupidity are elements of narcissism. What's even worse, they very often lead to narcissism. And weakness and stupidity are not the outcomes of not thinking enough or being unable to implement critical thinking. They are the result of thinking too much, of using critical thinking in the wrong ways. If you overuse critical thinking, if you use critical thinking while you're weak, in a weak period of your life, when you're broken, when you're damaged, when you're hurt, when you're vulnerable. If you use critical thinking and you're not the brightest star in the galaxy, you're not a quick to do this. You end up believing in conspiracy theories or in the idiotic teachings of fake gurus who want to be public intellectuals, because you know no better. But even if you are of reasonable intelligence, even above average intelligence, overanalyzing and overthinking is risky. On the path to nothingness and healing, you need to get rid of overthinking. Overanalysis is one of the most pernicious legacies of Freud, Sigmund Freud. It is the counterfactual insistence that human action and human inaction have emotional, environmental and biographical antecedents that can be unerringly unearthed and reconstructed. Freud said, analyze everything, think about everything. He was a fan of archaeology. He collected artifacts from ancient Egypt and Greece and Babylon and so on and so forth. And so his psychoanalysis is a form of archaeology. Dig deep, go to the roots. It's counterfactual in the sense that it's not true. It's not a fact. If you take all the emotional, environmental, personal history, you put everything together, you still don't get an adequate explanation of most of human behaviors, moods, emotions, cognitions, affect, traits. It's human, human's a context dependent. They're social animals in the fullest sense of the word. They're integrated into social networks. They don't react only to internal events as Freud would have us believe. They react mostly, actually, to external stimuli. And the number of these external stimuli is so immense that there's no supercomputer in the universe who can calculate, which can calculate. So overanalyzing is not only bad, it's stupid. Freud firmly believed that he was charting a new physics of the mind. A bit narcissistic, wouldn't you say? A bit grandiose. He thought that he was inventing a science akin to the natural sciences, a science of the psyche, psychoanalysis, psycho-mechanics. Other branches of the social so-called sciences, they have developed similar grandiose pretensions. And there is the medicalization of psychiatry, which had rendered psychology an obsolete branch of medicine, where causes invariably lead to effects. We are machines. Behaviorism took it to the maximum at extremis. But we are all behaviorists nowadays. We all study the brain in order to understand the human phenomenon. Not realizing that maybe it is the human phenomenon that is molding and affecting the brain rather than the other way around. And not asking ourselves, is the brain the only seat, the only seat of mental processes. Because now we know, for example, that there is a substantial contribution of the gastrointestinal system. So there's hubris, hubris and grandiosity in all these alleged sciences, ostensible sciences, wannabe sciences, including neuroscience. And they want you to believe that they have deciphered the human enigma. They have deconstructed the human riddle. And they encourage you to overanalyze and overthink. There's a concept of trauma, childhood trauma. If you just find out your childhood trauma, you will heal. The truth is, of course, radically different. People are irrational, not rational. We are discovering this in economics, where there's a new branch called behavioral economics. People are not rational agents. They act irrationally, they often act without any rhyme, without any reason, against their own best interests. Ignoring the consequences of their action or inaction. And under a bewildering array of interacting internal and external stimuli, too numerous to list, too complex to calculate, to identify, or even just to enumerate. Overanalyzing, overthinking is counterproductive. Most people are suggestible. They aim to please their people-pleasers. They conform their social, sociable. They're prone to false memories. It behooves psychology to be way more humble, way more modest, and to focus on dispensing good and tried advice on various life issues. Evidence-based advice. Such as it is. It is as much a wannabe science psychology as it is a form of glorified literature. It should know its place. And the problem with psychology is that it had permeated. It permeated colloquial common discourse. Permeated the mass discourse. So today we are all immature, armchair psychologists. We all overanalyze and overthink. We all sleuths and detectives. And we try to decipher everything from geopolitical trends to your granny's cookies, using our amazing mind. You know, and we are told by con artists and psychopaths. We are told that if we only put our mind to it, things will manifest. We can affect reality. This is a pathology. It's magical thinking. When we apply critical thinking to reality, we do so from a position of partial information in the best case, ignorance in most cases. And the vast majority of us are not equipped. You are not equipped to think critically. You don't know logic. You've not been trained in philosophy. You don't know analytic methods. You don't know anything. You are not qualified to think. So don't do only things you're good at. And don't overanalyze. And don't pretend to be psychologists, which you are not. Or medical doctors, which you're definitely not. Or political scientists, which you are very far from. And don't compensate for your manifest inferiority with conspiracy theories and other low bro dummy science and pseudoscience. You want to be experts too. You want to be respected for your knowledge and erudition and astuteness and acuteness of mind. So you study astrology or homeopathy. And you follow the teachings of equally ignorant and unbright people. So stop thinking now. Stop analyzing right now. Because if you are dumb, which the overwhelming vast majority of you are, and if you are weak, which a growing number of you are, life is tough and tougher than ever. Life breaks you apart. Life disintegrates you. Life hurts you. Traumatizes you. If you're weak, if you're stupid, let alone if you're both, not only are you not qualified to think, but the outcomes of your misapplied critical thinking and analysis are going to hurt other people, many other people. You first and foremost, suspend your grandiosity. Suspend your erroneous belief that you are capable of anything you put your mind to. Because your mind is puny in the majority of cases. Confine yourself to what you can do best, what you can excel in. And if it doesn't include thinking and analysis, then don't. Play football. Grow vegetables. Work in McDonald's, but do it well. Whatever you do, do well. Don't pretend to do well. Don't act as though you are capable and skilled and wise and strong. And in control. And with access to arcane knowledge and the secret of the universe and that the whole universe will obey your wishes. And that your mind is the ultimate construct in rule of totality. Godlike. Forget all these nonsense. Forget all these nonsense. These people who are selling you this crap, they want your money. They're laughing all the way to the nearest bank. You're brain dead. And they are the post-mortem morticians and autopsy medical doctors. They cut you apart and sell your organs. It's organ trafficking. The Japanese call this phenomena of grandiose, hubristic, inflated view of oneself as a great thinker or great analyst. They call it mononoavage. Go look it up. And weakness of character is indistinguishable from evil. Yes, if you are weak, you're evil. If you are weak, you're evil. If you inflict your weakness on other people. And the only way you can inflict your weakness on other people is via speech acts, via language. So don't. Don't talk. Shut up. Weakness of character is evil. Weak people cowardly sacrifice. Moral principles and values are often highly suggestible, are eager to please and conform at any cost. They unthinkingly follow the mighty and the rich, and they pretentious and the fake wherever they may lead them. Charlotteans and con artists flourish as do demagogues in such an environment as we have today where many people who should never have had access to mass communication platforms do. The main preoccupation of the week is how to abrogate responsibilities and obligations. How to surrender the freedom of action and free will to strong men, wise men and institutions. I have a surprise for you. No one is stronger or wiser than anyone else. They are simply better actors. Have a look at the meltdown of the strongest and wisest, orange men, Donald Trump. Weakness entails corruption, compromise, deception and dependence, as well as the ability to morph and shapeshift in order to fit in. Weak are amorphous and fuzzy. They cannot be trusted because they have no core, no identity. Weak people are easily swayed and end up committing the most appalling transgressions in a mob, against themselves, against others, against their nearest dearest and loved ones, against its institutions as cherished and venerable as they may be. They're weak are irreverent, not out of conviction and ideology. They are irreverent, out of reverence for the wrong people. I perceive stupidity as an intentional abandonment of others as a form of aggression. Stupidity is a threat when it's coupled with conspiracism, the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. It's a psychological trait. A rare one. Conspiracism. Stupidity is menace when it's coupled with narcissism. I cannot accept the reality that mankind is divided to two big groups, the dumb and the dumber. And both of them think they're geniuses. And both of them think they're godlike. And this inability is in itself, this inability of mine to accept reality is in itself profound stupidity. I'm one of you in this sense. The problem is we have let the stupid and the weak take over the world. The survival of the species depends on going back from these, I mean reversing these pernicious trends. The humanity is under imminent threat of being overrun by idiots, diluted by imbeciles and submerged by a tidal wave of retardation. Just have a look at YouTube comments. We often confuse technology with culture and civilization with progress. Nazi Germany is proof that such reflexive linkages, their sparrows, their own, is Nazi Germany was at the top of the game when it came to technology and considered itself a prime form of civilization. After all, they are the ones who gave the world Goethe and Kant and Schopenhauer. And so culture, technology, they are not guarantees against barbarism. Nazi Germany is the proof. In truth, we have become barbarians with iPhones. We use the latest innovations to play angry birds or whatever it is you're playing nowadays. We watch in main videos on YouTube. We exchange trivialities on Instagram and Facebook. We have sunk really, really low. I know because I have a historical perspective I spent 60 years or 50 years or 56 years to be precise reading history books. We are really at the low point of human history. Traits are not desirable or undesirable in themselves. They're advantageous, adaptive or detrimental depending on the context on the environment. And so today we have studies that show that women prefer men with low IQ than men with high IQ. There's a preference developing and an adaptive preference, evolutionary adaptive preference developing for stupid people. Women are the barometer, the seismograph, the seismograph of social trends. They follow the winners because they have to raise children, they have to take care of the family. So you want to see where society is going? Have a look at women first, how they act, not what they say. And women choose low-brow, stupid men in a series of studies, for example, with hundreds of thousands of women. Women said that they prefer men with an IQ lower than 120 to men with IQ higher than 145. These are the results of a study published two years ago. Why is that? Why women prefer stupider men for the first time in human history? Because our contemporary world is ruled by the feeble-minded. Dimwits are empowered by technology. Everything is dumbed down to foster mass consumption, to become easily digestible also. Sound bites. Women look around and they see that the stupid, the stupid become presidents of the United States, of the Philippines, of Brazil. And they say to themselves, well, whatever it takes, the stupid are taking over. If you can't beat them, join them, so they begin to develop a preference for the stupid. In such a world, lower intelligence is a positive adaptation and advantage. It confers evolutionary stupidity, confers evolutionary advantages on stupid people and on the spouses of stupid people. And this stupid offspring of stupid people. Women select for stupid men and for better males, by the way, because the current environment favors these traits. It is a paradigm shift of mind-blowing, mind-bending proportions for those in possession of a mind, of course. A study of 9 million young adults, over 40 years conducted by Jean Twenge and her colleagues and published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This study has starkly demonstrated the deterioration from one generation to another. Youngsters are now focused on money, image and fame, celebrity. They disparage, decry, deride and mock values such as community, volunteerism, environment and above all expertise and knowledge acquisition. Don't buy the self-interested slogans of millennials. You know, tolerance and activism and this is sheer nonsense. The studies are clear. There's a tiny vocal minority that give the wrong impression. Other surveys have documented a rising level of both narcissism and functional illiteracy. As if to illustrate the imminence of these dark ages, institutions such as the Encyclopedia Britannica announced that they seized the publication of the print edition after 244 years. The surviving digital editions are far cry from the print equivalent in terms of depth, length and irredition. So the stupid, the dumb, the trivial, the brain dead, the frivolous are everywhere. Among the working classes of course but increasingly you can find them displacing the erstwhile intellectual elites, political elites, business elites, scientific elites. They're spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons, narcissistic media personalities, gallible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate best-selling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop singers, less-than-mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers and even ignorant and semi-literate academics. And the cacophony of these people drowns the few voices, rare but there. Few voices of wisdom, expertise, experience, institutional memory, irredition, scholarship. These voices are drowned out. There's a problem of discoverability. We can discover them. In the mountains and tsunami waves of trash, it's difficult to find the two, three, four, five, six pearls. The sheer number of awareness, all systems of governance, all mechanisms of decision-making, all retail platforms. Rather than futilely fight back this tsunami, the well-educated, the erudite, the intelligent, the knowledgeable, they choose to withdraw. They're out of here. They seclude themselves in self-constructed schizoid ivory towers, drawing the bridges against the proletariat of idiocy. Imbeciles are a menace to the continued existence not only of our civilization, but also of our species. We may end up being all homo, no sapiens. The percentage of stupid people in the general populace may not have changed and not implying that people are becoming more stupid. Maybe the percentage of stupid people has had actually decreased. There are studies that tend to show this. But in terms of absolute numbers, there are many more stupid heads now than the entire human population only a century ago. Our numbers are bigger. Modern medicine makes sure that even the retarded and the plain demuted live on to a ripe old age. And these people vote. These people have a say. They don't know where the toothpaste is, but they elect the president. That we are faced with the daunting prospect of idiocracy is the fault of the malignant transformation of the democratic ideal and the recent onslaught of the media, both mainstream traditional media and the new media. Start with democracy. The stupid people's pernicious answer to meritocracy in the not too distant past, not so long ago. There are people with living memory of this. Stupid dim-witted people in Basils, feeble-minded. They have the right maybe to vote once in a while and express their completely inconsequential opinion, where it mattered least in the ballot box. But alas, the inane counterproductive idea of one person one vote, never mind how pinheaded, unqualified or ignorant that person is, has invaded and permeated. Here the two. Environments which used to be hierarchical. Environments such as government, the workplace, the military. Encyclopedias for crisis. With technology at their disposal, the stupid repeatedly interfere with and disrupt the proper functioning of virtually every system, including systems that crucially depend on mind power, on intellect, on intelligence, on cumulative knowledge and on analysis of raw material, raw data, big data. Stupid everywhere. And they don't let anyone work. They don't let anyone function properly. They have a saying. They have an opinion. And their opinion matters as much as yours. Never mind that you are, you know, 200,000 times more educated than they are on the topic. You have your truth. They have their truth. And being stupid, they truly believe that they're equal to you. And they act as though they're equal to you, thereby sabotaging and undermining and destroying everything. Look around you. It's all falling to pieces. And this is a direct outcome of access that we had granted unwisely to people who should have never had access. Never had access to speech platforms and to power. Even the generation and transfer of knowledge have been democratized as crowdsourcing yielded enterprises such as Wikipedia, the so-called encyclopedia, that any idiot and teenager can edit, can add to, can delete from, result, vandalism. Internet search engines rank results not according to the merits, authority and quality of the content. No. But by the number of votes and who cast these votes, you guessed it, dense people, thick-headed people with skull and nothing in it, who now congregate on social networks. This widespread and much-loaded vandalism, because there's no other word for it, it's a destruction of civilization, stone by stone. This reflects the utter collapse, utter disintegration of the education system. Because our education system turns out illiterate, self-entitled, magical thinking, nascient and irrational graduates having annihilated its standards in order to lucratively embrace them as students in the first place. Money. Money talks. Education walks. The stupid, dimly aware of their innate inferiority, because the stupid know they're stupid. They've been told so many times on multiple occasions, so they're dimly aware they're stupid. There is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The stupid don't know they're stupid. They think they're geniuses. But still, there's something nagging, knowing in the background, telling you, you know, you're not really a genius. So they are aware of their inferiority, and so they become anti-expertise, anti-education, anti-knowledge, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, anti-excellence. They seek with destructive envy, with ressentiment, to destroy everything that is superior to them, everything elevated and aesthetic and beautiful and clever and wise. They seek to reduce everything to their swampish level, to the level of the protoplasm and meba-like existences that they lead. But while in the past, these people remained sequestered, isolated. They were granted no access to any lever of power, to any instrument, and their sentiments remained mere sentiments. Today these people have become the majority. They have an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values and ideals which reflects their inherent limitations and what limitations these are beyond your wildest imagination. It is politically incorrect today. It's impolite to claim any advantage and any superiority on any grounds, by the way. So it's not okay to say retard, even if the person is the reification of retardation. And it's not okay to say that you know something better than other people, because they too have a smartphone and access to Wikipedia, so that makes them instant psychologists and medical doctors and professors of physics and everything, because they can scroll and surf and they don't understand a bloody word they are reading, but still they can show you the screen as proof of access to knowledge. Egalitarianism had become malignant to egalitarianism. It's running amok. Everyone is equal. Are you kidding me? No one is equal to anyone else in any sense. I am far superior to you intellectually, but for the life of me, for the life of me, I can't do carpentry or electrical work or draw or compose. So there are some of you who are superior to me in these capacities. Everyone is superior in some way and it's very bad to misallocate skills and tasks they have to fit. So today everyone is equal. The patient is equal to the medical doctor. They negotiate. They discuss from a position of equality, medical issues, professors and their students. Students come to me and they are my equals. They have read somewhere something on some website. So they are my equals now. Experts are just laymen with degrees and laymen are experts without degrees. It's very simple. It's a path to hell and to our extinction. It's an extinction event. And continuing technology in an act of self-preservation, past civilizations, all civilizations in the past had confined the stupid to certain physical settlements, certain neighborhoods, certain parts of the city, replete with their drinking establishments, stupid entertainments and stupid sports. Let the stupid associate with the stupid and do stupid things was the very, very wise thinking. There the intellectually challenged could safely torment each other with their vulgarities and rampant uninformed idiocy in those neighborhoods, in those ghettos. But the advent of radio, television and most egregiously the Internet, this media, mass media have changed everything. Now stupid people have unmitigated access to the kind of technology that allows them to pollute the airwaves to contaminate everyone's life with their non-thoughts, non-thinking and dysfunctional inoperative brain. So they have access to technology. They can broadcast on the airwaves. They have broadband and with their inferior analytic capacity, low-brow output, trivial observations, monosyllabic exclamations, hairbrained questions. They're all over the place. There's no escape anymore. We are drowning. We are drowning in sludge, nonsensical sludge. Hairbrained. It's stupid. You know, mud. It's quicksand, the quicksand of idiocy. So the new media, including and above all social media, they have transformed stupidity from a mental endemic or mental epidemic to a viral pandemic. The wise and knowledgeable may broadcast while the stupid merely narrow cast, but the stupid have the upper hand because via Google and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Amazon and YouTube, they've decimated the print and electronic media and the mainstream media. They're not newspapers anymore. They're not books anymore. There's nothing anymore. And every and the stupider you are, the more followers you have because people can identify with you. They understand what the hell you're saying. If you are one IQ point above the average, you have lost 95% of our population. No one can understand the word you're saying. The technological empowerment is the crux of the problem. There are no barriers to entry, no institutional filters, no erudite and experience intermediaries and gatekeepers to hold back, to hold back the tidal wave, the other lunch of doltish, bolder dash, the tsunami of nonsense, the flood of misinformation, factoids and conspiracies that corrupt our intellectual space. Discovery or discoverability separating the wit from the shaft has become mission impossible. You can't find good things anymore. You have to go through a million cats jumping off roofs and girls peeling bananas to get to Slavojizhe and by that time you are so exhausted that you don't even understand what he's saying. You've been depleted by the idiots on the way. Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with brainless, stupid masses, dumb with the dumb because of their superior aggregate purchasing power. There are so many more stupid than clever that if you're a commercial enterprise you want to sell to the stupid, not to the clever. And you want to tell the stupid that they are clever. You want to cater to their grandiosity, to massage their ego, to flatter them. They are stupid enough to believe it either. Commercial interests inevitably and invariably side with these people. The privatization of education is one manifestation of this creeping, creeping, decaying and decadence. The mindless nature of television programming is another example. The empty one liners that comprise most conversations on social networks. This is the culmination. This is how the stupid sound if you didn't know. They can put five words together. Apropos the late, not lamented president of the United States. We are surrounded with clods harassed by the lame brain, criticized, censored and ordered by simpletons. Welcome to the new dark ages. Welcome to our end. The virus will not, does not threaten us as a species existentially. The stupid do.