To Be..or Pretend Not To Be?

Sipping on this brew..(the perfect set-off for creative thought), I was confronted with the most serious of questions:

 

Who was the first idiot to suggest that it was dumb to be smart? Cooler to big ignorant?

 

To be intelligent is to have a good understanding or a high mental capacity - To be of sound thought and good judgment. With that said, how could something this right be made into a bad idea.  Would it be just as dumb to have a good amount of cash and have a high financial capacity. Is it lame to be rich? Hell no. -- So what's the difference?

 

As a result of this attack on intellect, many people are forced into an unfortunate dilemma of either being openly smart or dumbing all the way down to avoid castigation. For example, look at the 3rd grader that knows the answers to her teacher's questions, but never raises your hand. Or the time you told your friends that you didn't read any of the books on the summer reading list, when the truth was you read every one of them. And now we have people in the workplace that possess the solutions to their employer's problem, but are hesitant to share, but swift to take the backseat to a cohort with lesser capabilities. 

 

Who shot J.R.?

 

The social value on being a flunky has historically superceded intellect, in the music, the movies, the marketplace. Rappers dumb down lyrics to sell albums.  TV makes its killing off of idiocy. Stupidity sells big and places us in a fog.

 

Dullness of Mind.

C'mon Son.

It's weird how conspiracy theories seem to make more sense the older I get, and my gut tells me there's some conspiring going on here (or maybe it's the brew talking); but either way something is up.

 

Noted. The U.S. education system was designed to produce workers and not an overwhelming amount of creators and innovators. Education as we know it was created to prepare Americans solely for work found in industrial settings. Reading, writing, arithmetic-Just delivering the basics. Additionally, the length of time spent in school was not dictated by children's learning needs, instead the traditional school schedule was formed around the farming calendar,  the school day is a mimick of an 8 hour work shift. -- no emphasis on excellence just get the basics.

 

Even closer to home, it was against the law for my ancestors to read (Still existing). Why? Because there's power in knowledge and reading is essential to enlightenment.  Laws have to be read and comprehended. Contracts have to be read and understood. So the establishment knew that a reading underclass would be in position to decode the BS.

What was my point again?  Oh yeah, Conspiracy. 

 

Based on the above examples, it appears that the goal is to keep the majority dumbed down to prevent any disruption of the system. The class system, that is. The gap between whites and blacks the upper class and all of the other classes must stay as wide as possible, so the perfect plan is to keep the "have nots" content in an ignorant bliss. Aspiration is highly frowned upon, so being all you can be is not the standard 'round here, instead just be what we programmed you to be. Dummy.

 

Conclusion: The person that made being smart a crime, was likely a dumbass who believed that making the intelligentsia feel guilty about their brilliance would be the only way he could get ahead in life. He would prevail if an intellectual's fear of being labeled an egg-head or nerd suffocated new ideas and prevented an opposition to wack shit. Call it psychological warfare in its various forms. Classmates, Co-workers, Big Brother.

 

Ignorance aint bliss though, it's a fog that keeps you fucked. --- BG