A Radical Reset
Our Republic has been converted into a democracy which is just another name for mob rule. The mob is getting what it wants, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, good and hard. One day soon, the entire edifice is going to collapse under its own weight and what takes its place historically will be tyranny. A Radical Reset is the alternative and the system is called Antipolitism. It calls for a new republic based upon merit and not ambition. No parties, no money in politics, no careers in politics, and only serving the public good.
A Radical Reset
Stupidity: Our Greatest Societal Threat
What makes intelligent people embrace utterly irrational ideas? The answer lies in understanding stupidity—not as a lack of intelligence, but as something far more dangerous: the unwillingness to question one's own beliefs.
Drawing from philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer's insights, this episode explores how stupidity functions as a greater societal threat than evil itself. While evil makes perpetrators uncomfortable and carries the seeds of its own destruction, stupidity remains impregnable because it always believes it's on the side of good. This explains how brilliant, educated people can simultaneously hold completely illogical positions—they've closed their minds to contrary evidence and refuse to engage with challenging perspectives.
We examine modern manifestations of mass stupidity across the political spectrum, from gender ideology to climate alarmism to drug prohibition policies. The common thread isn't intelligence level but rather the cultish inability to process opposing viewpoints. When confronted with contradictory evidence, the "stupid" person doesn't engage but retreats to slogans or becomes hostile. This pattern appears regardless of education level or political affiliation.
The solution begins with education reform focused on critical thinking skills and philosophical frameworks like Stoicism that promote courage, wisdom, justice, and moderation. Economic literacy must be prioritized to help citizens understand how systems actually function. Most importantly, we must cultivate the courage to question our own deeply-held beliefs, especially those shared by our social circles and identity groups.
If this resonates with you, check out my book "A Radical Reset," which proposes anti-politism—a merit-based lottery system designed to transform politics from a career path for the ambitious into genuine public service. Let me know your thoughts on whether we can overcome mass stupidity before it further damages our democratic institutions.
Good morning everyone. It's me, herbie, your host here today at the Spiritual Agnostic, here today, here and every day, since it's my podcast. Today we're going to talk about stupidity To. Stupidity is going to be at the top of our list, but it's not going to be your. I don't know, maybe it is, what do I know? But as far as I know, this is not the typical discussion of stupidity, because stupidity, to begin with, I want to define it, okay, and then I'm going to put it in the context of why I think it's so important for us to discuss it.
Speaker 1:Stupidity is not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of curiosity or even a willingness to listen, and in that respect, it's far more dangerous than evil. So, to my mind, see, evil is easy to spot once it gets underway, but stupidity is a whole different story. A lot of people, including myself and my own experience, back into being evil. I did evil things before I realized they were evil, okay, but once I was exposed to the reality of what I did, I immediately saw that what I did was evil and stopped and fell on my sword. Now, having said that, we live in a culture where there's so much stupidity, where the people who are stupid are also incredibly intelligent, and that is not a contradiction. Our culture is suffering from stupidity and people otherwise brilliant people can be stupid.
Speaker 1:I think it was at Yale they did a. It might have been. It was one of the Ivy League schools. I think it was Yale, might have been Stanford, which is, by when I say Ivy League schools, stanford is the equivalent of an Ivy just on the West Coast. Anyway, they're all kind of polluted now, but that's another story and I digress. Our major universities teach stupidity, but anyway, stupidity.
Speaker 1:They ran some experiments. Come to think of it. I think it was Stanford. Anyway, you can write me and tell me which it is. I'm not going to bother looking it up because it's not important where it came from, only that it happened and you'll recognize this. They did a series of experiments where they had students on one side of a wall hooked up to an electroshock machine and students on the other side of the wall with the buzzer to hit them, and I think, if memory serves, they weren't really electrocuting anybody, but the students with the shoot the shit out of the buzzer thought they were, and we're so the way. This. It was basically an experiment to see if people will follow directions given to them by authority, even when they know it's it's wrong.
Speaker 1:And it's a demonstration of how, for example, an entire population in Germany of otherwise intelligent people can elect someone as evil as Adolf Hitler. It's stupidity, it's mass stupidity. Hitler's a good example of how stupidity can really take hold of things, and I know it's an extreme example and I'm not citing that. Anybody in the United States is roughly Hitlerian. That's just lazy. When people start comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, that's an absurd comparison.
Speaker 1:But how did Hitler? How did Nazism, itself an inherently evil? Okay, and really, if you read Mein Kampf, which I have managed to wade through, hitler wasn't exactly Shakespeare and he laid it all out and the whole thing was stupid and the racial connections were let me not use the word stupid, because we're talking about stupidity, isn't it? They were all crazy, just nuts. So how did an entire population do it?
Speaker 1:Stupidity takes hold because everybody around you starts to seem to believe it and since most people don't have courage, remember that the basis of this podcast is that, as God is dying and religion is dying, if we don't replace it with some other philosophy, some other underpinning of decency and how to live your lives and how to look at life. We're going to fall apart because we won't be able to keep up with the evolution of our own devices like AI. I know it feels like I'm jumping around, but I'm not. Anyway, so when the masses? There's so many examples today. I don't want to dwell on Hitler, but how did everybody start believing all that anti-Semitic crud? How did everybody start buying into the whole imperial goals of that lunatic? And the answer is really really simple Mass stupidity.
Speaker 1:Now, hitler himself was the furthest thing from stupid. He was brilliant, but he was stupid at the same time because I'm sure he wouldn't even entertain a discussion. I don't know, I never met him and I never will, thank God, but we've all met people. Let's now in a moment I'm going to round it around to our current experience, but just a little background. There was a German philosopher. Actually he was a pastor and he was alive at the time of the Nazis. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer very interesting guy. I think they made a movie about his life and I think it's either on Netflix or Prime. You should check it out anyway if you don't want to bother reading about him. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, the real deal, a true believer, the kind of guy that if we were all like Dietrich Bonhoeffer the world would be a better place. But we're not going to be all like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and it's not.
Speaker 1:And he was martyred for lack of a better term in I think it was 1942 or 43. He was an open and active opponent of Hitler, even when it was incredibly dangerous to do so, and he was executed. But before he did it, before he was executed, he had written a lot up to that point. He came from an intellectual family and intellectual background. A lot of people don't understand this, but Germany at the time of World War I, when we came in on the sides of the British, the German people and the German government, was far more liberal, far more forgiving, far more liberal in the classical sense and allowing people who had far more personal freedom could openly criticize the king, the Kaiser, and allowing people who had far more personal freedom could openly criticize the king, the Kaiser and all the rest, and it was a much more classically liberal society. So how did it turn into Hitler?
Speaker 1:Mass stupidity? How does it do that Cowardice? Cowardice when a mass believes idiocy and you're afraid to step up because of the consequences that it might bring down upon you, because you don't want to stand out in the crowd. And so what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said is that we are defenseless against stupidity. It is our greatest threat as a civilization, because neither force or reason have any power against stupidity. Power against stupidity when you speak of evil, like Nazism itself, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, because the people carrying it out always feel uneasy about it. In other words, once and I'll relate it to my own experience once I realized that I was doing an evil thing, committing the crime that I perpetrated on 35 people, knowingly or not, it doesn't matter. But when I became aware of it, I became immediately uneasy and looking for the way out, which, in the end, I determined was falling on my own sort. But having said that, there was no way out.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you do so many stupid things, and without Simon Braggie, I'm a really smart guy and I don't mean that to be a brag, it's just. The sheer luck of genetics is I had nothing to do withggie. I'm a really smart guy and I don't mean that to be a brag, it's just. You know, the sheer luck of genetics is I had nothing to do with it. But I'm smart, I pick up everything. So how can you be stupid and smart at the same time? Well, when you're committing evil, you're really not stupid because you get uneasy about it.
Speaker 1:Evil is less threatening, is what I'm saying. Evil is less dangerous because it's easier to recognize, because it makes everybody who's committing it uneasy, and so within it, within evil itself, lies the seeds of its own self-destruction. You know, hitler's own people tried to bump him off, time after time after time, because they understood that what was going on was evil. And they tried in their own ineffective ways, evidently, not more than evidently, obviously. But there was a lot of unease, the problem, and there were a lot of. During the war with the, you know an untold story, there were plenty of Germans who knew what was going on and plenty of Germans who knew that Nazism was evil and plenty of Germans that opposed.
Speaker 1:Because evil again carries within it the seeds of its own self-destruction, because it makes everybody feel gross, okay, but stupidity is impregnable, because and you'll recognize this right away, and again, I'm not the one who came up with this thought, I'm just crediting it to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who did Stupidity always, believes it's doing good, and stupidity always, always, serves existing power structures. Now just think about that. So here we are today, and we've transitioned to a different set of leadership in the last few months, but for the last period of years, and still half the population, for example, believes, at any given time, a lot of things that are absolutely stupid on the right or left, and yet they're otherwise brilliant people, and so why do they go along with this? So let's pick a couple of obvious, obvious stupidities. For example, that there's more than two genders. Okay, there's only two genders. You know what I know? It is an objective fact. Yet if you try to have that discussion with a person who is bought into the gender occult and all of these are cults.
Speaker 1:And, in my view, when people really get going and they're and they're massively stupid and they go into the, they're not evil. They're stupid Even though they're smart, which again sounds contradictory, but it's not. It's when they simply believe that they're on the side of good, that somehow that what they're doing is the right thing to do. Therefore they are justified in doing it, and they're not going to listen to anything you or me or anybody else has to say, because they view us as the evil ones and what they're doing as right, and they are so wrapped in their self-righteousness. Then, when they become part of a larger group, as somehow this poison I mean to me this is where the democratic party jumped the shark and destroyed its own future was on this particular issue, because it makes so many people obviously recognize it as evil, because it makes them feel gross it makes me feel gross even talking about it but the people within it think that they are on the side of God in their own mind, of whatever they perceive that to be, and that's what makes them so dangerous.
Speaker 1:Another good example is the climate cult. Okay, now is the world warming? Probably. Again, I've looked at a lot of data. I'm actually very into this subject myself. I've looked at all the hard data and all the evidence. I've actually read the IPCC report, which is the UN report on the climate and warming, and so on and so forth, and the graph is very long. When I say I, a more honest description would be I skimmed it because it was very deep and in certain areas where I had absolutely no expertise and wasn't sure what I was reading, but overall I got the idea, and the idea is that there is no certainty.
Speaker 1:You know this idea that 90 name the number, 95%, 98%, 99% of quote, unquote scientists a catch-all term. That's another thing that stupid people do. They cite scientists can be just as stupid as anybody else. You can have a PhD and be an idiot, okay. And because once you buy into a cult, for whatever the reason, and you have given up your right to call yourself smart, you are, in this respect at least, stupid Again. You won't listen to reason. So here, given up your right to call yourself smart, you are, in this respect at least, stupid Again. You won't listen to reason. So here you know the actual evidence on global climate change, just if you're interested, is that 65% of the measurements that have been taken to even support how far the climate has risen so far, those measurements are all wrong because 65% of them were taken in what are called urban islands.
Speaker 1:I live in an urban island. I can tell you what that is. I live in Phoenix, arizona, and Phoenix Arizona, as all of you know, is in the middle of a desert and it gets very, very hot. But as hot as it is, phoenix is always 10 degrees hotter than everything around it because of the pavement. I mean there's just so much concrete and, as we all know, concrete retains heat. That's why, if you lived in Phoenix a lot of times, you'll not a lot of times. I don't want you to those of you who are thinking about ever visiting Phoenix. I've lived here. I've lived in Arizona now for, let's see, since 19, roughly 1980, 81. So I've lived here 40, what? 45 years? In 45 years I've seen scorpions twice.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know it's not something that you regularly see, and the only time you'll see them is like around a construction site where they've dug up things and they kind of disturb them, rattlesnakes. You virtually I've seen them, and this is the point I'm coming to. Where you'll see them is if really early in the morning, you'll see them out on the pavement on the roads at certain times of year warming themselves Because the pavement retain heat. So not during the summer, when everything's really warm, but during the fall when they're just about to go into hibernation. You don't see them in the winter because they're cold blooded animals and they basically just become far less active in the wintertime. It's much safer in terms of just walking around the desert blindly in winter than summer. But anyway, what they do to warm themselves is. They'll come into an urban island like Phoenix or Tucson or Casa Grande or different places where there's a lot of concrete, like here in Arizona, and you'll see them out early in the morning on the pavement warming themselves up, getting themselves ready to go out.
Speaker 1:By the way, just as a side note, rattlesnakes and other snakes are your friend because they eat rodents. And, unless you'd like your house full of rats and mice, do not kill snakes, poisonous or otherwise. Leave them alone. They are our friends. They don't smell, they don't make noise and the last thing they want to do is see you. So if you see one and you happen to be out and about, you're visiting or you live in an area like this, don't automatically kill the snake, you know, call pest control If you're. If you're afraid of them and have them, just move them back out into the natural environment and if you're not afraid of them, get where was I going with that in touch? Oh, the urban islands. So it's much, much warmer, which disrupts all the measurements. So all of you who are panicked and think the earth has already gone up one and a half degrees, which is what it was supposed to do in the entire 21st century.
Speaker 1:And now the climate cult and a lot of stupidity forms itself as a cult and the only difference between a cult and mass stupidity is there's no central leader, but they behave as if there's. You know, there are Moonies, like the group from South Korea, anyway, another group. If you don't understand that, I'm not going to go into it. But anyway, the bottom line is they're beyond reason. You know that fact alone. If I said to a climate cultist, if Greta Thunberg, why we, by the way, were worried about what a high school dropout, autistic teenager thought, is beyond me. I mean, that's a case of mass stupidity. But anyway, they, she wouldn't listen. She would just stick her fingers in her ears and go la, la, la, la la, either metaphorically or literally, because she's a cultist, she's just, she believes what she believes, she thinks she's right, she thinks she's smart. She probably is smart.
Speaker 1:A lot of the people in the climate cult are brilliant. There are plenty of PhDs and scientists who buy into it. But they buy into it for reasons that you don't know, which is basically self-interest, and they're funded by government grants and the government grants. Up until the time, at least, that Trump took office, you had to pretend you were in the cult, otherwise. Pretend you were in the cult, otherwise you wouldn't get the money. So I mean, believe me, it's a self-perpetuating cycle of stupidity. But the fact of the matter is you can't argue with them, so they won't listen to that.
Speaker 1:In fact, the temperature has not gone up one and a half degrees because all the measurements are wrong. How far has it gone up? No one knows, because all the measurements are wrong. Even the ones that are outside of the urban islands are misplaced. There are rules on where to place temperature measuring stations, but over the years, you know, cities grow and things happen and concrete is poured near them. There's supposed to be a certain number of feet I forget how many but away from all concrete. And yet even the ones that are not in urban islands are a lot of times located around, you know, truck stops and things that disrupt the accurate reading of temperature.
Speaker 1:So, number one, we have no idea if the planet, how how much the planet, is warm. We think it's warm and a lot of the things you see are out of context, like, for example, you'll see the picture of the dying polar bear, when in fact the objective reality is we've never had more polar bears. They just showed you the picture of an old, dying polar bear, and polar bears die like human beings die, and that's what they look like when they died. It had nothing to do. There are now more polar bears than there have ever been and they're breeding like crazy because they're protected by law and their habitat is not shrinking. You see the pictures of the Greenland ice sheet and it looks like it's all dropping into the ocean, but they're showing it to you in the summertime and in the winter it freezes right back up again. And they show you the Great Barrier Reef and you say to them that coral bleaching is a natural phenomenon that happens all the time, that in fact, the Great Barrier Reef today is bigger than it's ever been. It came back from the so-called global warming bleaching in spades. It's a normal thing. It's the cycle of life within a little animal called a zooxanthellae, which is the animal that creates the exoskeleton that we see as coral.
Speaker 1:And anyway, long story short, I only know that, by the way, I was just that there. Right, there was me being arrogant. We're not arrogant showing off, because when I went to Miami Beach High School, we actually had a course in marine biology and I learned how a coral reef is built. So I was just showing off my little trivial knowledge of the animal. Anyway, pardon me, see, I'm a human being. Sometimes I can't help myself. I'm smart and stupid like everybody else. So, anyway, stupidity is tough. So you can't reason with them is the point I'm making.
Speaker 1:I was talking about transgender. You can't reason with them. There's no evidence that can be presented. And within the cult, there are a lot of people, like, for example, in Hollywood today, who will not admit that a lot of the things that these actors are espousing are just insane. A lot of them have bought into the climate cult and a lot of them have bought into the gender dysphoria cult and you know all of these things. None of them understand economics, they never stop to think if it makes sense and a lot of them are perfectly intelligent people. The problem is they are stupid at the same time because they have bought into a mass psychology and if they were to speak up, they would be shunned. And if you don't think that's true and take it from me Now, I briefly, when I got out of prison and after about a year or so, I decided I'd like to start dating again.
Speaker 1:So I stuck my toe in the water of e-dating until I realized that it's the hiding place of every sexual deviant in society, male and female, and decided it wasn't worth it. But in the meantime, as I went into it, many, many, many of the profiles on, for example, matchcom start with the sentence if you're a Trump supporter, don't contact me. Now let's just stop and think how stupid that is for a moment. It's it's defining another human being entirely by one one set of beliefs within a complicated spectrum of beliefs that every human being holds. Yet people judge their friendships and their relationships based upon, in this case, politics, and it's politics based upon issues for which they are stupid, because they have never stopped for a moment to think about why they believe what they believe, and even when they have doubts, they fight them down because they're too cowardly to stand out in the crowd Even to question.
Speaker 1:When you're within a cult of stupidity, like climate change, like gender dysphoria you become afraid of saying anything else. You wouldn't dare speak up. That's why, occasionally, you'll see an interview done with a Hollywood star and they will evade a lot of politicians. But politicians are professional liars and they stop even knowing what they believe so. Otherwise intelligent people are made stupid by politics and they have to buy into it. Why do people continually support things that otherwise intelligent people who are not stupid on that particular subject? Because we all have our blind stupidities. They're beyond reason and that's what makes them so dangerous. Because we live in a democracy and democracy is evil, and we are so collectively stupid on so many subjects. And since all of us are allowed to vote, who can basically draw breath? You know, over the age of 18, then consequently, we get a lot of stupid people voting on issues that they're afraid. Even when they have doubts, they don't bother to even reason them because they into more stupidity than ever as human beings, and this is a fatal flaw that has to be corrected, which is why I say democracy is evil. Democracy is evil because democracy is stupid. Democracy is mass stupidity.
Speaker 1:There's a reason why the founders set up a republic. They set up a republic because they knew people were stupid. Now, dietrich Bonhoeffer wasn't alive in the 1700s. You know. He died. It was either 1942 or 43, I think it was that they literally chopped his head off in Nazi Germany. And anyway, the point of the matter is, stupidity has been coming around in many forms for since the dawn of mankind. And the founders went to prevent it by setting us up as a republic with certain safeguards, like property ownership, like having senators selected by state legislatures and therefore could be removed before the end of their term much more easily if they went off the reservation into crazy land, or stupid land as we might call it in this podcast. But those are all gone now created a stupid democracy. Not only are we a democracy, but we're a stupid democracy and we're becoming increasingly more stupid.
Speaker 1:And it's not like people on the right can't be stupid. If you think I'm just picking on people on the left, think again. People on the right can be just as stupid about lots and lots of subjects. I'll give you a great example of a right-wing issue where people are stupid the drug war. There is no rational case to be made to continue drug enforcement. The rational case is we've spent the trillion dollars since 1971 and stopped nothing. And, like all prohibitions, historically the drug war hasn't worked. It can't work because what we know from history is if the people want it, they're going to get it, legal or not. And what will happen is you create a black market, and that's what the drug war is. We're trying to combat a black market.
Speaker 1:Well, as Thomas Sowell says, my favorite living economist and intellectual and God bless him and I hope he lives to be 190. He's in his 90s now. I dread the day to be 190. He's in his 90s now. I dread the day that he leaves. It'll be a tragedy for the world. But Thomas Sowell has said that. You know, whenever someone comes up with an idea, like a government program or an idea that changed the world, the first question you have to ask yourself is as compared to what? Okay, when has this ever been done before that it actually worked? You know, and the answer is there are no successful examples of democracies that don't end in tyranny, and there are no examples of, for example, social programs that don't end in tyranny. And there's no examples of prohibitions that don't end in failure. 100% of the time in the history of the world, every government that has ever tried to prohibit anything that the public wanted has failed. So we're just failing Now.
Speaker 1:That argument is objective and ironclad, and I have lots of data to support that, because this is a subject I'm passionate about and we'll talk about the drug war in detail another day. But having said that, the people on the right are stupid about it. They stop at. Drugs are bad. Drugs are bad. Therefore they won't listen to anything else. Yeah, but look at how many people are dying. Well, maybe we could do better if we treated it, for example.
Speaker 1:I'll give you an example of an argument I might make to somebody Drugs are bad, we have to be illegal, we have to crack down, we have to go get them, yada, yada, yada. And I would say what I just told you, so I'm not going to repeat it and I would also say I'm not arguing the drugs are good. I'm just saying that we shouldn't criminalize people who are self-loathing. You know, addiction is really the self-medication of self-loathing and depression, and these people are trying to get through the day, and by making their drug of choice illegal, we're making it expensive. And by making it expensive, we're making it so they have to commit crime in order to support their habits unless they're lucky enough to be Hunter Biden and consequently, because they have to steal, they end up in prisons and we end up imprisoning people who are otherwise simply sad, and you can't compare to perfection. There will always be addictive people. There will always be sad people. The question is do we want to continually not just waste money but destroy our society? And a large contributor to the breakdown of the urban environment, and particularly the black inner city urban environment, is the drug war. The drug war itself is causing an awful lot of problems. Again, this is not about the drug war.
Speaker 1:I'm just telling you people on the right can be just as stupid as people on the left and be absolutely brilliant at the same time. You know President Trump is dead set against legalizing drugs, but he's the furthest thing from unintelligent. He is stupid on this subject. You know, people get stupid on subjects and then they can't be reasoned with. That's how you know you're dealing with stupidity instead of an honest discussion.
Speaker 1:If you get into a cultist, a person who has bought into a mass stupidity will become hostile right away and they'll resort to slogans as opposed to if I say, for example, there's been no historic prohibition. They won't go and try to find one that's worked. They won't try to like even make the connection to one that may be a half-ass work. Instead, they go right to drugs are bad. Well, that's just stupid. Everyone gets the point Right and left. They're not immune to stupidity. So I have a few suggestions. I don't want to just complain and bitch and moan on this podcast. I have a few suggestions of ways that we could reduce we'll never eliminate, but hopefully reduce stupidity.
Speaker 1:One of the problems I think that we face, if not the central issue, is is that people are not taught to be critical thinkers in school. Okay, I don't expect their parents to teach them, because their parents were raised by their parents, who went to the same schools and have for the last century and a half. Public education has always been a form of indoctrination, originally for workers into the industrial revolution, and now it's. I don't know what it is. It's a disaster, but we are going through a massive natural reorder, a reordering of public education chart. We're replacing school districts with charters which, by the way, are publicly funded private schools essentially. I mean, I don't want to get into again, that's another discussion for another day but I have some suggestions.
Speaker 1:We have to start teaching the people not what to believe, but how to think. Okay, we have to spend less time. We have to spend no time, ideally although we'll never reach an ideal, because subjects are taught by human beings and human beings have their biases and their stupidities. But if we have to have a curriculum, a curriculum is a track to run on. If you're a teacher, tell me if I'm wrong, write me if you think I'm wrong, but the curriculum is simply the track you run on and then you use your own talents and personality as a teacher to teach that curriculum and, hopefully, make a connection with enough students that you don't turn out a class full of morons. Having said that, I have some suggestions for a new curriculum. So I think what we need to do as part of this and think what we need to do as part of this and, again, not being stupid. I'm opening it up for discussion with you.
Speaker 1:These are some ideas that I've had in addition to anti-politism, which I'll round about on as I close today, but some ideas that I have of what we could do to prevent as much as possible stupidity. And that starts with. My first suggestion is we should teach critical thinking and study philosophy in high schools, starting with freshmen. In high school Freshmans. I almost pluralized the plural word. What a retard I am. See, smart people can be stupid, although that was not stupid, that was dumb, which the difference is. I know better and I'm willing to admit it right away. Anyway, we need to teach critical thinking, how to think critically, and I think we need to teach Stoicism in school as a governing and guiding central philosophy that is compatible with Christianity and Judaism and Islam in its core principles.
Speaker 1:But for those increasing amounts of people a large minority now, but ultimately inevitably will become a majority of people that don't believe in God and don't practice religion, this is critical. They have to have a way to think things through and not just fall back on beliefs that are now discredited. We know that God doesn't make the sun rise and set. We know that God didn't create the moon and the stars and the heaven for us to look at as lights and all this kind of stuff. I can go through it. It was a nice mythology and it served it incredibly and still serves. I wish everybody could somehow resummon faith, but faith was a lot easier when you didn't know how science worked.
Speaker 1:But now that we all know how everything works as a result of scientific inquiry, increasingly God is dying and we have to replace that with something, and what I say is let's replace it with critical thinking and stoicism, which should be a course. Kids should be taught this throughout high school. Okay. Whether or not they go to college should be immaterial. This should not be a college-level course for only the elite to understand philosophy, because by that time they're all too stupid stupid to understand it anyway because of the biases that have been downloaded in them during their most formative years and they're just going to be lost. So, number one teach critical thinking and stoicism in high school. Number two we also need to introduce into the high school curriculum, beginning with the freshman year, what is essentially econ 101. We need to teach economics so that people understand how money works. People have a much greater understanding of stupid versus smart in a broader sense and in the sense that most impacts their families and their future marriages and children and everything else, if they understand economics.
Speaker 1:Not to say that there still won't be. There are a lot of stupid people, for example, who blindly and I'm going to point to my own group, boomers in particular who blindly will go apeshit if you threaten to discuss the reforming of Social Security, which has to be reformed. I'm not going to go into a long discussion again today, but it has to be, and the bottom line is people, otherwise brilliant people, turn stupid when this subject comes up. Well, I'll pay it into it, god damn it. And I need, I deserve my money, and don't you mess with it. And blah, blah, blah, and they have the money. And whenever you get to the point where we just don't have the money for it, they always go oh yeah, they have the money, they'll find the money. No, that's stupidity. Okay, if you believe that you're stupid, Now you might be brilliant Again. I know I'm harping on this over and over, but you're beyond, you're not going to listen. You know I can give you all the reasons why, but it won't make any difference, because on this one subject that this is what you believe you're stupid. Okay.
Speaker 1:And the way to fight a lot of that kind of stupidity is to introduce economics in the high school curriculum. You know, we teach all kinds of crap. Get rid of social studies and bring in economics. Okay, it's much more important Social studies, which I don't even like that word. You know. There should be history and there should be economics, there shouldn't be social studies. What the hell does that mean? So, anyway, and number three, the government. And I, you know, as a libertarian, naturally I'd like this to be privately funded, but there needs to be a national video campaign of videos both on the internet and on broadcast television and everywhere.
Speaker 1:It is of little, 30 second spots, maybe 60 second spots entitled. Does it Make Sense when somebody rational, who is on the subject, smart and not stupid, goes on and explains individual subjects? Are there more than two genders? Okay, could be one of these spots. Does that make any sense? And the answer is no, it does not. And for 30 seconds, points out why and goes on.
Speaker 1:Now, again, the stupid will reject it. But there are the people on the line who could be affected by the stupid and when they're away from the stupid they say to each other that seemed pretty stupid, but when they're with the stupid they'll go. Yeah, of course, of course that you know your child has blah, blah, blah and they'll go along with it because of a lack of courage. That's why, again, we go to stoicism. The four pillars of stoicism courage is always the first one mentioned, then justice, wisdom, moderation. But you can't have any of the other three without courage. It doesn't matter if you have the other three without courage. So, people, you know, most of us really don't want to get into a fight, we don't want to confront anybody, so we sit there and we go yeah, okay, that's whatever you say, that makes perfect sense, blah, blah, blah. But the truth is just sense, blah, blah, blah. But the truth is just like we did the national campaign with the Indian, with the cry and to stop littering those of you old enough to remember it literally cleaned up littering in this country, seemingly overnight, by bringing shame upon the American people, which was a good thing in that case. Well, I got news for you. We can do the same thing with stupidity, we can go on, and it would also help calm people down.
Speaker 1:You know, is there climate change? Yes, there is, but there's. We don't even know what we don't know. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, and maybe millions of factors bombarding the Earth with various kinds of radiation from the Sun, the orbit of the Earth, the axis of the Earth, how the Moon affects the Earth, how other planets. Jupiter's gravity affects us a great deal. A lot of people don't understand that, but it does. Jupiter is essentially a star that never formed but has enormous, enormous gravitational pull. All of these things affect our climate, and the intelligent discussion on the climate subject, by the way, would be to say the human race does three. Here's how an intelligent person I'll use the climate cult as a good example of how otherwise rational people are stupid but could possibly, maybe, if it's repeated enough who knows, especially that group you know in that gray area in the middle that aren't completely committed to their stupidity might come around to rationality and intelligence by simply repeating look the human race historically does.
Speaker 1:There are three things we could do about climate change, and two of them we do really really well, and one of them we do we've never done, which is prevention. The human race doesn't prevent. We don't do it To expect that the global economy is going to somehow convert to these renewables that none of these people in the climate called understand in the first place. Not really Ask the people in Spain and Portugal who lost all their power a week ago or so. Anyway, rather, we don't prevent. It's a pipe dream. We've spent now globally about $5 trillion to do nothing. We've had no effect on the planet's climate and yet still the stupids of the climate cult insist we need to do more, more, more, more, more. It'll fail. It will fail 100% of the time, because human beings don't prevent. What we do exceptionally well is mitigate and invent. Okay, and that's where so an intelligent.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to run the 30 second spot on climate change, it would go something like this Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to speak to you today about climate change. Climate change is real. What we don't know is how much is caused by mankind, if at all, and how much will be coming in the future. But what we do know is we want to be prepared for it, but at the same time, since there is no example of any civilization in the history of the world ever preventing anything they saw coming, we are not going to be the first ones, let alone, even if the United States did participate in this, it would destroy our economy and, at the very same time, the rest of the world would be unaffected and we would only destroy ourselves to no effect whatsoever. So, rather than spend time trying to prevent something that we're not going to prevent, it is coming.
Speaker 1:We also need to understand it's coming very, very slowly. For example, the sea is rising at less than an inch a month, as it has for the last 120 years or so of taking measurements, which means it's coming very, very slow. It's not coming in like a tidal wave. It's slowly creeping up. Plenty of time to mitigate. We know how to hold back the sea. We do it really well. Ask the Dutch. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. Ask the Bangladeshis, who were with, by the way, the help of the Netherlands are building enormous dikes and protections against having their below sea level land flooded. We know how to prevent flooding. We're not going to just stand there as the water comes up to our knees. Florida is not going to go underwater. New York City is not going to go underwater. We are going to mitigate it because we do it really really well.
Speaker 1:The technology to do that exists and that's what we'll do. I know this is way too long a commercial spot. I'm trying to demonstrate, but of course I'm expanding in the podcast and the other thing that we can do is invent. We will invent ways out of it by the time the 22nd century comes and we're supposedly going to be too far to go by that time we'll have nuclear fusion powering everything clean without any cost at all, or something similar, or we'll find better batteries, better cells. That's the thing about invention. Us non-inventors have no idea what's coming. But literally, as I speak to you, one of the great strains of the United States is as a free economy. There are a million people out there thinking they can get rich with this next invention, which is why greed is good, but that's another subject for another day, and I almost went to a digression on greed, but I'm not going to go there. I felt myself being pulled, but I'm going to stop. The point of the matter is, we're very good at inventing. We are going to invent our way out of it. There will be plenty of other alternatives of things to do. Look how far we've come. It is now 2025.
Speaker 1:In 1925, we were flying biplanes, and now Elon Musk is about to launch Starship Nine and we are probably less than a decade away from people on Mars. Okay, or at least certainly Optimus robots or something like it. So look how far the technology has come. In 1925, there were biplanes. There was no artificial intelligence, there were no computers. We were in industrial age, but there was no technology to speak of. Antibiotics had not been invented yet, women were still dying, childbirth, the average lifespan was in the low 60s. I can go on and on and on. We have come a very long way in a very short time.
Speaker 1:So by 2125, I assure you that the world will look different and it is sheer stupidity to believe that we, even now, in the present, need to worry about that. That is something that will all be dead. Every single person listening to me now, in 21, 25, will be dead. So let's be smart and concentrate on today what we do well, okay, which is mitigation and invention, and just not worry about prevention, because it's never happened and it never will. Okay, let's wrap up this podcast and sum it up by saying let's not be stupid. Mass stupidity is a greater threat than anything else facing us. Mass stupidity. Don't be a stupid. Listen to the other person, listen to the facts. I know I'm probably talking to myself, because that would take courage to go against. You know, if everyone in your family thinks one way and you're the one person going. But what if I understand how tough that is, but also understand that you're being stupid. Okay, that was kind of a low way to end the podcast, but it is Okay.
Speaker 1:Now, to prevent the stupidity ruining our country, I've invented a political system. It is a republic by lottery, a merit-based lottery. I know how strange that sounds. Read the book. It's called A Radical Reset. A Radical Reset. It's available to you on Amazon by me, herbie K. Pick it up. It lays out anti-politism that takes the ambition and the money out of politics. Politics is converted from a career to a service and a duty, and that changes everything. Read about it. It's interesting, it's different, and I don't like to talk about myself as the inventor of antipolitism.
Speaker 1:I am the discoverer of antipolitism, like the New World. When Christopher Columbus came, it was always there. He discovered it, but he didn't invent it. I discovered antipolitism. I don't think I invented it. He discovered it, but he didn't invent it. I discovered anti-politism. I don't think I invented it. I think it's just so obvious. And once you read the book, I think you'll go oh my God, why haven't we been doing this from the start? We need to get rid of the megalomaniacs and the sociopaths and the psychopaths that currently populate our public life and replace it with people who are there because they've done something with their lives and they have a strong sense of duty and they're not stupid. Okay, my friends, don't forget to share this podcast with your friends. Talk amongst yourselves and I'll be back with you this coming Friday. We'll see what goes on in the world. I'm hoping all good things and, most importantly, I'm hoping all good things for you, take care. God bless you and God bless America.