“The Marching Morons” is a science fiction story by Cyril M. Kornbluth that was published in 1951. It involves a man who is accidentally put into suspended animation and awakens hundreds of years later to a society in which the average IQ is around 45. I’m not sure whether the writers for the 2006 film “Idiocracy” had this in mind when they penned their screenplay, but the two themes are quite similar, save that the film was a comedy, and the 1951 novella definitely was not.
I imagine it was the “marching” part of the title that led to my making a mental connection between the shambling idiot masses in the story and the shambling idiot masses who continue to engage in violent demonstrations across the country. Like many deluded and dangerous individuals and groups throughout history, however, they really do believe they’re in the right.
It’s actually quite sad when you’re aware of the history: The Western republics that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment wrested power from Old World oligarchs and installed it with the governed. Inasmuch as these agencies had held power for many centuries (through monarchies, though not exclusively so), the notion of self-governance was truly novel and unique for that time. Over the next 300 years, nations in the West enjoyed an unprecedented level of intellectual, technological and cultural growth, as well as unprecedented prosperity.
A little over two centuries later, however, and the governed are apparently prepared to hand that power back – willingly – to the oligarchs.
Obviously, this isn’t something that came about as the result of careful deliberation. Populations in the West have become willing to surrender their power because they’ve been systematically deceived through socialist propaganda and social engineering.
I’ve said for many years that if we want to know where America is going in terms of where leftists would like to take us, we need just look to Europe, because socialists gained a foothold there many decades before the same occurred here. As early as the late 1800s, when America was still rebuilding after the Civil War and reestablishing a national identity, socialists and communists had already been recognized as legitimate political interests in places like the United Kingdom.
Thus, from the end of World War II on, socialists have had almost unfettered influence on public policy in Europe, and we can readily see how this has led to the speedy decline on that continent by every conceivable metric.
Unfortunately, American school children aren’t taught much if anything about the Enlightenment era any longer. Nor are they taught about the Magna Carta, the 1215 charter of rights that was the forerunner of later guarantors of civil liberties, such as our Constitution.
Over the last several decades, of course, teaching this history has been deemed too Eurocentric, and thus racist. How convenient. Socialists – and here, I mean those who self-identify as socialist, communist, liberal or progressive – have had a great deal of success crying racism in order to intimidate us into acceding to their demands. Now, Americans are essentially being told that they’re racists if they don’t support the emergent communist revolution being orchestrated by the Deep State interests that mobilized Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters.
Those familiar with how leftists operate are aware that there’s always an imperative for identifying some enemy upon which they can hang the pain of the downtrodden “masses.” In the Old World monarchies and oligarchies of Europe, it was often fairly easy to find such an enemy, since the self-serving autocracy of these governments typically left huge swaths of citizens completely disenfranchised.
In the modern, Western republics however, this was a more difficult proposition due to the significantly higher level of prosperity in these nations. Enemies had to be invented, economies sabotaged, and factions of various persuasions had to be set against each other. Gaining control of educational systems was paramount in this sense, as it facilitated the indoctrination of future generations into socialist orthodoxy.
Which pretty much brings us to where we are today. These days, it’s a foregone conclusion that the younger a person is, the more likely it is that they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated by the left. The young fools engaging in rioting and mayhem in our cities are indeed morons, but they’re not morons because they were born with bad brains. They’re morons because their intellectual processes have been effectively hobbled by a poisonous doctrine, absolutism and a proclivity for engaging their emotions rather than reason. At this point, many are no more able to engage critical thinking than I am able to safely land a fighter jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier in choppy seas.
Bereft of an objective, foundational basis for history – even recent history – these young revolutionaries are also blissfully unaware of what socialist leaders typically do once they’ve coalesced their power and neutralized all internal opposition. Those who’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy a real education (or who’ve read George Orwell’s “1984”) will be well-aware of this machination.
When socialist leaders have coalesced their power and neutralized all internal opposition, they turn their attention toward external enemies, real or (more frequently) imagined. This is the only way they’re able to distract the citizenry’s attention away from socialism’s failure and keep from getting strung up like Mussolini. We saw this in spades while the Soviet Union was in existence: The squalor and poverty in which most Russians and the citizens of Soviet bloc nations existed was never the fault of communism – it was the fault of Western capitalists. This still goes on in nations like Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and to a somewhat lesser extent, China.
Also quite often, the revolutionaries who were so instrumental in bringing about the revolution are purged – and by this I mean killed en masse – because they’re considered too dangerous to have hanging around.
President Donald Trump recently announced the formation of his 1776 Commission on Patriotic Education. To some extent, this in response to The New York Times’ racialist 1619 Project and colleges that have institutionalized radical thought and the demonization of everything traditionally American.
Such a measure is definitely long overdue, but it’s going to take a great deal more than that to repair the 60 years of damage that’s been done. If the last four years have taught us anything, it’s that leftist rot has permeated our society to such a degree that it may take truly unpleasant measures to excise same. And despite the gravity of our situation, I still harbor great concern that we do not possess the collective will to take the requisite action.
