Dumb Celebrity Quotes

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison? Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret. But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written. You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary. And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge, And all knowledge is vain save when there is work, And all work is empty save when there is love; And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God. And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house. It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching. Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, "He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil. And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet." But I say, not in sleep but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving. Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

We should admire heroic actions, encourage them and celebrate them; we should aspire towards incorporating them into our lives. But we should leave those people to be people, and to act like people—that’s a great thing they are doing, I really admire it—and spare the person from your dumb expectations and assumptions regarding things you have no data about.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

I took all the criticism to heart, and I was really really sad for about two full years of my life. I felt like I sucked at the thing I most wanted to do in the world, and that is not a pleasant feeling. I also started feeling like I was a bad person because some people viscerally hated me so much, which is such a dumb, irrational mindset, but I couldn’t help it. I actually thought about quitting many times. I thought, “Shit, I’m trying my best, and people really don’t like me. Maybe I should just quit so that everyone on earth can celebrate.” Then I got angry and thought, “Fuck you, dickheads. You didn’t work all your life to achieve this, I did. And I’m gonna do it, and do it my way, until someone pulls me off this desk.

Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don’t want to hear it. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control. Coming at us like this — in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. . . . In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterises the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.

I was sorry he had not a cat, or a young dog, or better still, an old dog. But all he had to offer in the way of dumb companions was a pink and grey parrot. He used to try and teach it to say, Nihil in intellectu, etc. These first three words the bird managed well enough, but the celebrated restriction was too much for it, all you heard was a series of squawks.

What kind of civilization is this my friend, where people have to be reminded of their humanhood? Why the heck is it so damn hard for humans to act like humans? Why the heck do the man-made sects get preference over humans? How can a smart species like us be so dumb at the same time? Why can’t we join hands and celebrate our differences instead of turning them into cause of conflict! Why? Why can’t we my friend?

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

Britain is a country that, since World War II, has been on a managed decline. The men live vicariously through their favorite soccer team, celebrating its success with “a few pints” and commiserating over its failings with “a few pints.” And the women—walking muffin tops. Yet they stride around with a terribly misplaced sense of entitlement. Even their TV shows are emblematic of their mediocre mentality. EastEnders and Coronation Street are all about fat, dumb, ugly, poor people. And there begins the vicious cycle of complacent underachievers. Maybe I’m biased because, despite being born in England, I grew up in the US. At least our equivalent TV shows are full of good-looking rich people doing big business deals and dating glamorous women. I wouldn’t mind my kids growing up wanting to be J. R. Ewing, but who the fuck wants to be a pub landlord in Essex?

They will call you quiet because you’re perfectly happy in silence. They will call you weak because you avoid conflict and drama. They will call you obsessed for being passionate about the things you love. They will call you rude for not engaging in social pleasantries. They will call you arrogant for having self-respect. They will call you boring for not being extrovert. They will call you wrong for having different beliefs. They will call you shy when you choose not to interact in small talk. They will call you weird because you choose not to conform to societal trends. They will call you fake for trying your best to remain positive. They will call you a loner because you’re comfortable being on your own. They will call you lost for not following the same route as others. They will call you a geek for being a knowledge-seeker. They will call you ugly for not looking like celebrities. They will call you dumb for not being an academic. They will call you crazy for thinking differently from others. They will call you cheap for knowing value for money. They will call you disloyal for distancing yourself from negative people.

First we devise the notion that this spec of cosmic gas and elements is the universe’s Disneyland. Then we further display our arrogance by declaring that this particular country on this spec of dust is beloved by some imaginary creator. We’re so engorged on national pride that we stop baseball games in the 7th inning just to sing a self-aggrandizing dirge celebrating how much the man in the sky loves us. We well up at songs, waving flags, and jets flying overhead spewing out red, white and blue smoke in a proud demonstration of patriotic flatulence. We get aroused over symbols but are too lazy or stupid to ponder the concepts they represent. Don

He is my Savior. He is my friend. He was born in a manger. And died for my sins. He still lives in heaven above, Looking down on us. He loves us so much, Even if sometimes we’re dumb. And so, we celebrate Christmas every year, Loving God and bringing holiday cheer. But we often get so mixed up in the spirit, We don’t realize what makes Christmas. It’s not about the eggnog, presents, Reindeer, or even elves. It’s about God who sent His One and only Son, Jesus for us. So, whatever you do this year, Remember Christmas is about Jesus, Not Santa Claus and Reindeer. Merry Christmas, Dear!

Is it really possible to turn lead into gold? Well yes, as long as you consider fool’s gold to be the real thing. Being anointed with celebrity in America has turned many croaking singers, flat-line lyricists, witless writers, dumb-stupid comedians, one dimensional actors and noisy, bone- dead social commentators into soon-to- be forgotten, fool’s gold. Celebrity fool’s gold. Only in America.

You have absolutely no respect for my privacy. Now that I know you absolutely are very much capable, you lost all credibility with me. I don't know why I have any respect for yours, after your absolute disdain for mine since day 0. I guess I am not an asshole. I haven't had liquor in a long time, and I'm not an angry drunk. I begged you to clear the air, many a time. Begged, and begged some more. Made sure you knew it was fucking me up mentally, that it was tearing me apart, 'till it made me sick! I backed off early this year to cut you some slack. Hoped you'd extend something I could actually grasp, but nope, there was something better to do. Name one thing you've done for me that wasn't destructive. What you say and do to others can absolutely have a dramatic effect on them. It is written in books and autobiographies. Many celebrated people have died as a result of the evil or harmful acts of others. Let's not forget that you haven't said one nice thing to me all this time. Try doing what you did to me to someone else, how would they react? That's right, fucking run. For years I held the benefit of the doubt, but I know now that you are a fraud. Your own actions and willful lack thereof prove it. You destroyed my mind, my heart, my body, turned everything against me, even fucked with my financials. Yes I let you in for that to happen. But that's still no excuse for YOU to willfully do it. Each step I take forward gets smashed to pieces, every time. Because I don’t know things. That was on you to fix. It's not because you were incapable. You could have changed the trajectory anytime. You chose to do something else instead, every time. Even a sliver of what you give to others would've made a world of difference. You most certainly could have. You chose not to. You chose to let me suffer. There was something better to do. Yes, that is a fact, if that were not true, I would not be here writing this. And you did me this way why? because I desperately sought some sense of community, of which I was in dire need of. Don't ever pretend that you cared for me, ever. It's an insult. A direct contradiction to your own actions. The only thing you care about is the pleasure you get knowing people who suffer and die. That's exactly what this is, and always been. After your handywork, my own life means nothing anymore. I have nothing left because I let you mangle it all to gore. Yeah, I'm a dumb shit for letting you delve deep inside me only to leave behind a grenade. I do not believe I will be alive much longer. No doubt this pleases you. Murderer. I curse you.

Taking my hand, she walked out of the room where we found Vaughn and Judd playing pool in the dining room. The guys were deep in silent competition, so we admired their hot bodies quietly. Our giggling finally drew their attention. “Where are we eating?” Vaughn asked, hitting a ball. “We should eat somewhere that preggos can’t enjoy,” I suggested and Tawny grinned. “I think they can’t eat deli meat, but I don’t want that crap.” Tawny searched info on her phone then smiled. “Sushi is supposed to be iffy.” “Barf,” Vaughn said and Judd grimaced. “We should go to a fish place and share a little sushi to celebrate our powerful birth control.” Judd smiled at this comment. “Poor Aaron.” “Screw Aaron,” I grunted. “Lark’s the one carrying two babies.” Vaughn and Judd looked at each other then burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?” “He hooks up with a chick whose birth control is defective and ends up with twins,” Vaughn said, walking to me. “Dumb fuck probably didn’t know what hit him.” “He gets to spend his life with an amazing person. Fuck you for laughing at his good luck.” “Don’t go big sis on me, daffodil. One day, I’m knocking you up with twins too. No harm in making double the hot kids.” “I’m still mad.” “Wanna make a baby right now?” he whispered in my ear. “Sushi first.” “Barf.” “We’ll see.” Thirty minutes later, Vaughn proved me wrong. He hated sushi and nearly threw up after trying a bite. Watching him freak-out nearly killed me. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Tawny was also in hysterics. Like any good friend would, Judd took a picture of a gagging Vaughn with his phone. “Sent it to the crew. You’re welcome.” “Jackass,” Vaughn said, wiping his tongue with a napkin. Calming my laughter, I stroked his ponytail. “Poor baby. I’ll make it up to you later.” Vaughn’s horrified expression immediately shifted into a smirk. “Yeah, you will.

Now that you understand the key players in ecosystems, here are the key principles of building an ecosystem. They are similar to the principles of creating a community discussed in chapter 8, “The Art of Evangelizing.” CREATE SOMETHING WORTHY OF AN ECOSYSTEM. Once again, the key to evangelism, sales, presentations, and now ecosystems is a great product. In fact, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop an ecosystem from forming. By contrast, it’s hard to build an ecosystem around crap. DESIGNATE A CHAMPION. Many employees would like to help build an ecosystem, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if an ecosystem doesn’t happen?” Ecosystems need a champion—an identifiable hero—within the company to carry the flag for the community. DON’T COMPETE WITH THE ECOSYSTEM. If you want people or organizations to take part in your ecosystem, then you shouldn’t compete with them. For example, if you want people to create apps for your product, then don’t sell (or give away) apps that do the same thing. It was hard to convince companies to create a Macintosh word processor when Apple was giving away MacWrite. CREATE AN OPEN SYSTEM. An “open system” means that there are minimal requirements to participating and minimal controls on what you can do. A “closed system” means that you control who participates and what they can do. Either can work, but I recommend an open system because it appeals to my trusting, anarchic personality. This means that members of your ecosystem will be able to write apps, access data, and interact with your product. I’m using software terminology here, but the point is to enable people to customize and tweak your product. PUBLISH INFORMATION. The natural complement of an open system is publishing books and articles about the product. This spreads information to people on the periphery of a product. Publishing also communicates to the world that your startup is open and willing to help external parties. FOSTER DISCOURSE. The definition of “discourse” is “verbal exchange.” The key word is “exchange.” Any company that wants an ecosystem should foster the exchange of ideas and opinions. This means your website should provide a forum where people can engage with other members as well as your employees. This doesn’t mean that you let the ecosystem run your company, but you should hear what members have to say. WELCOME CRITICISM. Most organizations feel warm and fuzzy toward their ecosystem as long as the ecosystem says nice things, buys their products, and never complains. The minute that the ecosystem says anything negative, however, many organizations freak out and get defensive. This is dumb. A healthy ecosystem is a long-term relationship, so an organization shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of discord. Indeed, the more an organization welcomes—or even celebrates—criticism, the stronger its bonds to its ecosystem become. CREATE A NONMONETARY REWARD SYSTEM. You already know how I feel about paying people off to help you, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reward people in other ways. Things as simple as public recognition, badges, points, and credits have more impact than a few bucks. Many people don’t participate in an ecosystem for the money, so don’t insult them by rewarding them with it.

To date, some 108 billion people have lived and died on Earth. Yet, we still think our individual lives are so fabulous that we celebrate them daily on social media. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Not anymore. It’s the un-promoted life that’s not worth living. Know thyself has morphed into flaunt thyself. Once upon a time, fame was tangentially related to talent, hard work, and accomplishment. Now the metric for evaluating a life is who’s got more Facebook friends, Twitter, or Instagram followers. We

The success of professional wrestling, like most of the entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling us that these stories are real,” he writes. “Rather, it succeeds because we ask to be fooled. We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality. The wrestlers, like all celebrities, become our vicarious selves. They do what we cannot.

He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people’s existence. He didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the Bankman-Frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. “We did a few trips,” he said. “I basically hated it.” To his unrelenting alienation there was one exception: games. In sixth grade Sam heard about a game called Magic: The Gathering. For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it.

If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive it without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.

The economy is slowing; reports are negative. Corporate earnings are flat or declining, and falling short of projections. Media report only bad news. Securities markets weaken. Investors become worried and depressed. Risk is seen as being everywhere. Investors see risk-bearing as nothing but a way to lose money. Fear dominates investor psychology. Demand for securities falls short of supply. Asset prices fall below intrinsic value. Capital markets slam shut, making it hard to issue securities or refinance debt. Defaults soar. Skepticism is high and faith is low, meaning only safe deals can be done, or maybe none at all. No one considers improvement possible. No outcome seems too negative to happen. Everyone assumes things will get worse forever. Investors ignore the possibility of missing opportunity and worry only about losing money. No one can think of a reason to buy. Sellers outnumber buyers. “Don’t try to catch a falling knife” takes the place of “buy the dips.” Prices reach new lows. The media fixate on this depressing trend. Investors become depressed and panicked. Security holders feel dumb and disillusioned. They realize they didn’t really understand the reasons behind the investments they made. Those who abstained from buying (or who sold) feel validated and are celebrated for their brilliance. Those who held give up and sell at depressed prices, adding further to the downward spiral. Implied prospective returns are sky-high. Risk is low. Investors should forget about the risk of losing money and worry only about missing opportunity. This is the time to be aggressive!

We will appeal to the highest aspirations of people, not their basest instincts. We seek to make all people into Gods, no matter how retarded, deluded and dumb they may be at the moment. We will transform their consciousness. When we are finished, it won’t be Hegel and Nietzsche who are unknown amongst the masses, but the vacuous celebrities.

The modern world represents in some respects an enormous improvement over the world in which our ancestors lived; but in other respects it exhibits a lamentable decline. The improvement appears in the physical conditions of life, but in the spiritual realm there is a corresponding loss. The loss is clearest, perhaps, in the realm of art. Despite the mighty revolution which has been produced in the external conditions of life, no great poet is now living to celebrate the change; humanity has suddenly become dumb. Gone, too, are the great painters and the great musicians and the great sculptors. The art that still subsists is largely imitative, and where it is not imitative it is usually bizarre. Even the appreciation of the glories of the past is gradually being lost, under the influence of a utilitarian education that concerns itself only with the production of physical well-being.

If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes pro-active, a political statement. Our collective norm.

These are the celebrities of my school, and I’m seeing them in their natural habitat. I know it sounds dumb, but I feel sort of cool for joining them. Who knew being popular could be so easy? All it took was some lying, manipulation and moderate dance skills.

I thought if players talked loud and celebrated, they'd have to back it up. Their energy would run like an electric current through the team if you had similar-minded players, too. But my players were also coached that there's a line out there, even as they played freely, and that line stopped at taunting the opponent, or committing dumb penalties.

I thought if players talked loud and celebrated, they'd have to back it up. Their energy would run like an electric current through the team if you had similar-minded players, too. But my players were also coached that there's a line out there, even as they played freely, and that line stopped at taunting the opponent, or committing dumb penalties.