
Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots - omnibrain
http://www.davidbrin.com/idiotplot.html
======
UrMomReadsHN
"Fahrenheit 451... served up chilling warnings that helped to stave off the
very scenarios [it] portrayed, by girding millions of... readers to think hard
about the depicted failure mode, and to devote at least some effort,
throughout their lives, to helping ensure that it never comes to pass."

Ray Bradbury said...

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world
that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in
Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I
stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a
small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang
tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear.
There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers
and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who
might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction." (From
Wikipedia)

~~~
tedks
Ray Bradbury is just a luddite, though. For all he knows she was listening to
a news broadcast or a play. If that happened now she might have been listening
to Farenheit-451 on audiobook.

In general, anyone who needs to bring up how their preferred medium of
information transmission smells is not going to give you useful information
about what technologies to favor over others. Nostalgia is fun but not
something you can reliably use to judge usefulness of technology.

~~~
UrMomReadsHN
Disagree. The whole point was not what she was listening to. The point is she
was ignoring the world around her. It isn't a mode of information transmission
issue - it is a human interaction issue.

~~~
tedks
I think it's pretty grossly incorrect to saying she was ignoring the world
around her if she was swapping out one sense (hearing) with what she wanted to
hear. People can do that, and sometimes choose to. I almost never walk
anywhere without headphones in, because I'd rather have the soundtrack of my
choice rather than whatever sounds the world happens to throw at me.

This is a fundamentally human concept, the control of one's environment. We
alone among animals have the ability to exert this control and to suggest that
it is somehow wrong to do so is absurd. Should we live in the wilderness and
forage for food to be more aware of the world around ourselves? Why is
"awareness of the world" a thing we choose to value?

Really, this is Ray Bradbury foisting his luddism and his value structure on
people that have moved on from books, moved on from the slow life he idolized
in Farenheit-451, and moved on from him. That woman _was_ interacting with a
human, in one of the many ways humans have invented for interacting with each
other, from radio to television to film to Facebook to Twitter to Yo. Each of
those are means of human interactions, and none of them are worth any less
than any other.

~~~
UrMomReadsHN
And I think people who wear headphones in public are being somewhat rude.
Guess that makes me a luddite.

And yes, some modes of human interaction are surely worth less than others.
Tweeting 140 characters can't compare with sitting down with someone having a
true heart to heart conversation. The former is replacing the latter.

[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744)

That isn't to say some forms of communication are entirely bad or shouldn't be
used - the obsession and taking over real life is the problem.

[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744)

I don't feel this form of communication-posting here-is even in the same relm
as having the same discussion with someone face to face. That's not to say
nobody should post on hacker news, just that it should have a healthy balance.

Either way it matters not if I share my opinion with Ray Bradbury or not. I
was pointing out the author missed a lot of the themes in the book and
probably didn't even read it - just heard it was a novel about book burning.

------
angersock
A well-written article, but I disagree with a few of the premises.

First, author mentions that a lot of directors and whoever will still call 911
when things go south. That in no way invalidates general suspicion of cops,
especially by citizens not pulling in over seven figures a year. Further, the
alternative is to call who, exactly--the article doesn't admit those people
any other options, so it's a void point to claim that they pick the only
available option and still go on to say that it's a high-quality one. That
phone call could still result in action maybe thirty minutes later if at all,
as many citizens in poor parts of a city may attest. So, yeah, it's completely
reasonable to portray police as overworked/corrupt/incompetent in many
situations.

Second, the bit about _Star Trek_ vs _Star Wars_ is cute, but should've also
included a comparison with _Babylon 5_ : government agencies (secret and
public) alike are shown all along the range of competence, and progress is
only made through working together across groups. Author completely neglects
to mention modern depictions of competent government agencies ( _X-Files_ ,
_Breaking Bad_ , _Stargate_ , _Battlestar Galactica_ , _The Crazies_ , _The
Siege_ , _Heat_ ) Author completely neglects to mention past depictions of
competent and robust government agencies ( _A Clockwork Orange_ , _2001_ ,
_Starship Troopers_ , _Brazil_ , _A Clear and Present Danger_ ).

Basically, there was a lot of cherry-picking to support the author's point.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Brazil? You'll need to elaborate because I don't think we watched the same
movie.

~~~
angersock
Well, consider--the system _worked_ , despite some glitches. Recall the
ending. Perhaps the only hero that actually helped was Tuttle, and on a scale
too small to matter.

~~~
dllthomas
I don't think that was _competence_ , though - the power of Brazil was that
systemic incompetence, apathy, and fear _won_.

------
protonfish
The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory
that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll.

I love movies and books where authority is the villain because it mirrors my
own (and most other people's) struggles in real life. Children strive for
freedom from overprotective parents and overworked and misunderstanding
teachers that don't have time to listen to them as individuals. Adults have to
deal with bosses, cops, politicians, preachers and other banana dictators who
hold the keys to their freedom and prosperity. Anyone who has read Parkinson,
The Peter Principle or Dilbert knows organizations have issues. This is not
fiction, but unfortunate reality and one that your audience can easily
identify with.

It doesn't help that he uses more talented and successful film makers as bad
examples. Star Wars had the rebel alliance - a well organized, powerful, and
benevolent organization. Even the Empire was competent (until Tarkin and the
other senior leadership were destroyed in the first Death Star.) And what does
teenagers splitting up in horror movies have to do with the struggle against
incompetent and uncaring authority? That example doesn't work but it does make
this sloppily-written rant gratuitously longer - an excellent technique to
keep readers that disagree with you from being able to finish it. A technique
that many commenters here also seem to be abusing.

Silence of the Lambs was a poor example as well. Dr. Chilton (the head of the
facility where Hannibal was kept) was as 2-dimensional a corrupt bureaucrat as
you can get.

In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and
the writing was needlessly verbose.

~~~
zo1
"The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory
that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. [...] In conclusion: the
thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was
needlessly verbose."

Likewise. I was thoroughly disappointed with the article. It started off as a
hopeful "hint" at social commentary about the underlying nature of how
movies/stories/epics affect us in subtle ways. And it turned out to be a
glorified, overly verbose rant against the "distrust of authority".

Maybe I should take a leap and suggest that perhaps this author is currently
having a bit of a political crisis in his life and is trying to reconcile
democracy with how he views what the article refers to as "idiots". Either he
accepts that the majority are "idiots", or he constructs a narrative around
how they're not really "idiots", and that it's just the "propaganda" that
tricks us into thinking so. Or it could be just me, projecting.

------
terranstyler
"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising
from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western
states.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

IOW, it's a fundamental problem of Western democracy and any other
"representational" system that is not based on voluntary agreement and/or
immediate feedback.

Unfortunately, people do not have a sufficient degree of control over
authorities, hence a frustration and its emergence in culture.

~~~
bildung
_" Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising
from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western
states._

In my experience "the society never works" feeling is by no means uniformly
distributed in Western societies, but mostly a phenomenon in the USA. When I
started reading American political discussions on the net 10 to 15 years ago,
I was really shocked how widespread this randian view on society is in the US.
OTOH that could be a self selection of a certain mieleu of people...

~~~
pluma
This. This attitude feels most alien to me as a European in discussions about
gun control ("the cops can't protect you"), freedom of speech, social welfare,
public health care, public education and so on. As an outsider it feels as if
individualism is valued over the common good to an almost impractical extent
sacrificing innumerable benefits to some ideal of personal freedom.

But of course this perception isn't unbiased. It just feels strange to observe
a culture that seems very similar but then and again shows facets that
couldn't feel less natural to me.

~~~
jerf
I'd submit that a better lens to understand what is going on is to understand
that the culture of the United States really is very diverse, whereas European
cultures often sit on centuries of history and cultural inertia (not
necessarily in a bad sense of inertia). What in a European culture can be
simply unspoken must be explicit in the discourse of the United States. What a
Frenchman may expect from his police may be quite uniform between both the
police and the policed (at least relative to the US), whereas in the US it
must be constantly spelled out in the culture. Some of the individualism is
probably also a reaction to the fact that we can't all just settle into a
pluralistic culture, because in the US, the first question would be "which
_one_?", followed by "why _that_ one?" for almost everybody who doesn't come
from that culture.

Remember, a "European country", which may still consider itself to have
several distinct subcultures within itself, is generally only the size of an
American state, and even within that division, a great deal more culturally
unified than any American state.

In a way, telling Americas about how they need to be less individualistic is
putting the cart before the horse... there's no way to make that happen
without massive, massive changes to the substrate of the entire country first.
No matter how desirable or undesirable it may be, it simply isn't an option
open to the United States. Nor, for that matter, would I really go around
wearing your cultural pluralism as some badge of pride as if it were some
deliberate choice.

(BTW, keep trying to grow the EU and you'll create the exact same dynamics
within it, if they don't already exist.)

~~~
disputin
I'm seeing this in London with the influx from Europe. I've come to the
conclusion that the sacred concept of diversity, handled ham-fistedly, is more
like the power of the atom, very useful, and very dangerous. Lose control of
the balance and you have a problem. A little random noise is beneficial, but
too much, too fast creates subculture conflict. There's a very slow
integration speed limit which is ignored.

------
jrapdx3
It's hard to disagree, fiction is made-up stuff having only so much in common
with actual reality. And sure there's good and not-so-good fiction and the
movies show it. When he brought up the possibility of a great story not based
on idiotic behavior I too immediately thought of _Apollo 13_ , truly
spellbinding in its entirety.

Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic
plots a priority, though if only limited to movies, there wouldn't be much to
write about. The bigger thing it points to is the way really important
discourse has increasingly become infested with the very same attribute.

After all, in recent years TV news has become more or less devoid of authentic
news reports. Calling TV news "sensationalistic" is hard new, not only failing
to qualify as factual, but even if intended as entertainment, it's lousy
fiction every bit as idiotic as a B-movie. People do watch it though, and that
what counts.

To the extent idiot plots are the standard in national and local politics,
it's far more damaging than the movies, but perhaps the point is the same
roots underlie a whole gamut of idiotic forms. But where are the rest of us
who are not idiots? What trouble do we go to express our non-idiotic ideas
where it does some good? (I suspect posting here is more or less like
preaching to the choir.)

Ultimately fiction is so much less compelling than real life. I love a good
story well told, but it pales next to the meaning of actual experience,
provided one is tuned in to experience as it is. The article hints at
something not quite said. We humans so often accept fiction and discard
reality, we don't or even refuse to see what we are seeing. Maybe that's the
definition of real-time "idiot plots" playing out all around us.

Easy enough with movies to know fiction when we hear it, the trick is to hear
our own inner voice, and make that distinction within.

~~~
icebraining
_Then again, if idiocy sells, it 's natural that producers will make idiotic
plots a priority_

But on the other hand, the phenomenon doesn't seem to have nearly the same
effect on a much more commercial platform that films: TV, which is filled to
the brim with shows showing teams of cops, medics, etc working hard and
unbelievably competently to "save the day" again and again.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That used to be the case. Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are
at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within
which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or
corruption) of their colleagues.

And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian
paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade
facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and
where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass
trying to kill you.

~~~
icebraining
_Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up
against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone
heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their
colleagues._

While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the
institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.

They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for
the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution
fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc).

I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law &
Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap.

 _And then there 's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian
paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade
facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and
where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass
trying to kill you._

Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The
Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the
opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the
breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.

~~~
TeMPOraL
TBH, I now realize that wasn't a very thoughtful comment on my part.

> _While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting
> the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me._

I was thinking more in line of House M.D., where from what I recall everyone
in the hospital except the protagonists were portrayed as mostly harmless
morons.

After going through your list of criminal movies and all the series I've been
watching recently and thinking on it for few minutes, I'm willing to partially
retract my claim about how every series portrays organizations where
protagonists work as broken.

> _but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it 's pretty
> much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much
> the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other._

But it also reinforces how small groups with lots of guns are the way to go;
every time they tried to stick in bigger groups, it all quickly and tragically
fell apart.. Maybe I'm reading a different message from this series than you
(but TBH, I gave up after season 3; unfortunately, my favourite plot arc ended
with the season 1, and after that, I just couldn't see the point of what they
were all doing).

I'll also admit that the "libertarian paradise" was a potshot; it just popped
to my mind that the kind of things my more "freedom-oriented" friends say wrt.
to policy and gun control would fit perfectly to a zombie apocalypse. The most
(self-labeled) libertarian friend of mine being a huge fan of Walking Dead
didn't help to avoid forming this association.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> I was thinking more in line of House M.D., where from what I recall everyone
> in the hospital except the protagonists were portrayed as mostly harmless
> morons.

That's just the POV of the protagonist (House), he doesn't discriminate
people, he thinks everyone's an idiot. Character trait, and an entertaining
one for that matter. House M.D.'s protagonists only deal with the most
difficult or vague cases, often coming into play when the general staff
doesn't have a clue anymore (and probably ruled out lupus themselves already).

I love(d) House btw, it's often much broader than mystery-of-the-week as it
often seems superficially.

------
PaulHoule
An odd thing is that the institutions are incompetent meme serves the
interests of institutions.

Once people believe it they expect less from institutions and don't believe
they can change them.

Martin Buber wrote that the Israel/Palestine conflict supports the polticial
class; so long as there is a siege mentality, the Israeli government is not
held to account and hamas can buy legitimacy by firing missiles.

Similarly in the united States, the Democrats and Republicans buy legitimacy
by opposing the other party on a handful of issues (guns, abortion, etc.) They
never need to pass legislation because they blame the other guys.

~~~
spopejoy
Agree strongly with this.

It's a long-standing anti-socialist tactic to underfund and undermine solid,
working government programs, and then denigrate those same programs as more
proof that "big government doesn't work". US Postal system is a great example,
everyone finds plenty to criticize, and yet standard mail delivery is more
reliable than email (and getting more expensive by the second as neo-liberal
ideology dictates USPS should be "profitable". I've heard the same nonsense is
at play with Deutsches Bahn, leading to the demise of the S-Bahn in Berlin).

But also there's the cultural side, which is the emphasis in advertising from
the 1950s onward to portray an individual self-disambiguating from monolithic
society tastes and norms, by buying a Beetle, or smoking a Marlboro, or
chewing a different gum. This plus tie-ins to James Dean-style Hollywood
efforts, and it's a very unified message that is nonetheless somewhat
invisible.

The article is correct to note the attitude that "it's not propaganda if you
agree with it", it's been a huge win for advertising to promote and co-opt
this attitude with subtle directions toward consumerism, and its close
affinity with deeply conservative anti-socialist tactics is worth further
investigation.

------
DanielBMarkham
_"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary:
Everyone is stupid..."_

Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking at things.
Since most entertainment is actually written for teenagers, if you had to
paint with a super-broad brush this would be accurate.

More accurate, however is "Institutions are always sub-optimized, people who
are much smarter than you live and thrive in these institutions and do sub-
optimal things for good reason, and it's the distributed, self-optimizing
facile, and overly self-confident nature of the critical individual, which the
author seems to deplore, that gives us increases in efficiencies and the re-
factoring necessary to continue evolving."

100 guys think the system sucks, that they are smart and society is full of
idiots. 99 are wrong. The other guy is still no smarter than the rest of us,
but he just came up with the next thing we need to continue moving forward as
a species.

Western society has made a call on this: smart people in large groups do dumb
things. It's our job to continue to be suspicious and point them out. In fact,
the system depends on it.

------
TeMPOraL
A few thoughts:

 _" This kind of thought experiment — that Einstein called gedankenexperiment
— is the fruit of our prefrontal lobes, humanity's most unique and recent
organ, the font of our greatest gifts: curiosity, empathy, anticipation and
resilience. Indeed, forward-peering storytelling is one of the major ways that
we turn fear into something profoundly practical. Avoidance of failure. The
early detection and revelation of Big Mistakes, before we even get a chance to
make them. (...) an endeavor best performed by science fiction."_

This. I read a fair amount of books and there is this one distinct feature I
found in science fiction - they are humanity's concept simulator. It's all
about setting up series of _gedankenexperiments_ , and then simulating their
outcomes and interactions between the outcomes. Whether an author is writing
about effects of a new technology on society or testing new ways to structure
civilisation or elaborating on how physical limits are affecting day-to-day
life of a space-faring race, the art becomes a way to explore new ideas free
of constraints like political correctness, corporate interest, or social
taboos[0].

I wish people stop treating sci-fi genre as "stupid fiction tales that are
obviously inferior to thinks like Pride and Prejudice, etc." These people are
often the same that walk around saying "go read books, you'll be smarter", and
yet they dismiss the primary field of non-fiction that is pretty much
_designed to make you smarter_.

Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and
metaethics.

\----------------

It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi
hopeful about the future. I tend to agree with that, and I'd like to expand
that statement into: _somewhere in the early 2000s we have collectively lost
faith in humanity_.

I just finished re-watching Early Edition (a lightweight story about a guy who
gets tomorrow's newspaper today, complete with a cat) and I must say I'm
angry. People in the 80-s/90-s used to have _faith in the better future and in
other people_. That you don't have to shoot people to solve problems, but you
can ask them instead. _People used to help others._ How strange does that
sound today? This total reliance on individual performance, violence as a
means to achieve everything and assumption that everyone else is either stupid
or malicious (or both) is _fucking annoying_. We're raising a new generation
of people on such message, and I'm afraid this literally screws up our (and
their) future.

I so do want some positive, hopeful message in TV shows back.

\----------------

And since the author mentioned how Star Trek world is different from your
garden variety space opera - one thing I absolutely loved about Star Trek
series is that the crew of Enterprise/DS9/Voyager _were not the heroes_. They
were the protagonists, but you could see that they all acted on behalf of the
United Federation of Planets - a huge, competent, powerful sociopolitical
structure that they were _proud_ to be part of and that would always have
their backs. It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek. The whole
show made you believe that good people could come together and create
something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and that it would work out
ok.

I think that as a culture we've given up that belief. We're society of no
hope, no trust and no shared vision. And I'm afraid this is going to hurt us
massively in the next decades.

\----------------

Oh, and since I'm venting, I need to share my pet peeve of 2000+ film making -
the Batshit Insane Hollywood Morality. That it is a right thing to do for hero
to kill a couple thousand strangers to save one person, just because this
person is family. That it is ok for a hero to go and murder a few dozen poor
schmucks just to _get revenge_ on a guy that hurt you.

Or - and I'm not making this up, it's an actual plot of a known 2009 movie -
we're supposed to applaud the protagonist who shut down the global economy,
likely killing a few billion people withing minutes of movie credits rolling
down, _just because he wanted to have sex with his wife_.

I mean, Hollywood, what the fuck?

\----------------

Footnotes:

[0] - It even makes for a nice trick - you take a current taboo, frame it as
"aliens in space" and suddenly no one complains the way they would if you try
to endorse the same ideas in an essay. Early Star Trek is famous for running
that trick to criticize racial and gender prejudices which were more common in
the US back then.

[1] - [http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-
gene...](http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-generation-
future) \+
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363)

~~~
Rapzid
The information age is airing a LOT of dirty laundry. I think faith in
society, government, and the "system" is suffering a bit. Hopefully we'll move
past this in a decade or so.

~~~
disputin
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I agree, but think that the
laundry is dirty, and that with all the vested interests these systems change
far too slowly for it to all be over in a decade or so. I'm hoping more
modestly that Europe's economy will be more stable in a decade.

------
AnimalMuppet
I think that there's a big force driving this: personality.

Society is impersonal. Institutions are impersonal. The purely scientific view
of human beings is impersonal (we're just matter obeying the laws of physics,
and we can't be anything more, because there's nothing more that exists).

As far back as Rousseau, there has been a current of thought that rejected
science and glorified the individual.

Far too often, technology is impersonal. ("For a list of the ways that
technology has failed to improve the quality of life, press one.") As
technology replaces persons with machines, we interact with machines in
situations where we used to interact with humans. (Getting a tweet from your
friend is nice, and there really is another human on the other end of that
tweet, but it isn't the same as a face-to-face conversation.)

But people still crave the personal touch, even if the structure of society
provides less of it. I think _this_ is what'd driving the trend that Brin
observes.

------
hliyan
A story, almost by definition, is an exception. If you went through your day
without incident and all institutions performed as expected, there would be
nothing mention-worthy. Stories are _anomalies_. If a serial depicts its
society as consisting of idiots, that would be open to criticism. But I'm not
sure if works that revolve around a single event (or a set of related events)
can be criticized the same way. I prefer to imagine that in the universe of
such stories, for each such event, hundreds of days go by without incident.

~~~
williamcotton
Stories are not exceptional by their nature. There are plenty of daily
routines and ceremonies carried out throughout the day that operate on an
intrinsic and perhaps unconscious level.

What you see as uncommon is an event that breaks the regularly scheduled
narrative but there is more to storytelling than entertaining novel
experiences.

Stories are not anomalies. They guide us through almost every action we take.
We are creatures of narrative and constantly hear, tell, act out and create
stories, calling them either fact or fiction depending on the circumstance.

------
jqm
I don't think there is much of an argument that many institutions in the West
appear broken and corrupt.

Maybe institutions have always been this way... I don't know. It seems to
happen like this: a person or group comes along with a new idea or a vision.
It catches on. It becomes institutionalized and then come the parasitic
bureaucrats taking control of the organization.

If the original vision was good, it sustains the parasites for a time but
eventually the organization succumbs. Rinse and repeat.

------
squozzer
Brin makes his points but neglects counter-evidence, both fictional and non-
fictional, so I will supply a few examples:

1) Support The Troops / First Responders 2) Religion 3) Law & Order TV series
4) Nearly everything on The History Channel

Nearly all of the above glorify institutions, or more accurately, indivividual
working within institutions.

------
rayiner
Love this article, especially given how common it is for people in the tech
community to succumb to these ideas.

------
Htsthbjig
I believe that probably the assumptions that everybody is stupid is totally
right.

This does not mean that every individual person is stupid. They could be very
very smart, but when they join a macro organism they could behave very very
stupid following emotions like nationalism, pride, being part of the group,
fear and hatred, power or sex.

The advertisement industry operate under the assumption that human beings
operate under irrational forces that are stronger than anything else and they
are right because people buy things that they advertise.

It probably does not make rational sense that because people see a tennis
player like Federer using a specific razor, people are going to buy this
razor, but it just happens.

There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are
stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated
country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so
on), and kill millions of Germans in the process.

It was Freud who wrote the "Mass Psychology" because it became obvious for him
that intelligent individuals could become totally irrational when they take
part on masses after the experience of Nazism that made this highly
intelligent individual to lose his job because he was jew.

Not so hard to understand, we know that very smart individuals could become
totally irrational in their personal lives. For example a beautiful women or
man could seduce them and they knowing rationally that they are being
manipulated not being able to escape.

Look at the economy today: we are following a path of printing money and
increasing our debt that won't make sense for any person with half a brain.

The same happens with Ukraine, Europe(their leaders) are following US in
trying to make war with Russia, what makes zero economic interest for Europe.
Less sense makes a military confrontation with Russia or China, but we are
following this path.

~~~
elorant
_There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are
stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated
country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so
on), and kill millions of Germans in the process._

That's the most naive oversimplification of what happened in Hitler's Germany
I've ever read.

------
tempodox
I find this a worthy read. I think it's inspiring and thought provoking about
more than just movies and novels. It sheds a light on how many of our
narratives are built.

------
crusso
Institutions are boring.

Audiences typically want to identify with characters, so it's only natural
that strong character-based stories will favor individuals over faceless
institutions.

------
rpenm
To what extent is this driven by the rise of youth culture and and the rising
market value of adolescent consumers?

------
anigbrowl
_And yet, directors like Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and their peers clearly don
't think they are lying, or doing harm, or insulting the public or
civilization or the dedicated professionals they depend upon. I doubt the
thought even crosses their minds._

It's like they're...idiots!

Really, I don't think this criticism is well-founded. I'll give him Cameron,
but most of Nolan's characters are self-consciously transgressive of society
that seek some sort of re-integration with it, while Spielberg has numerous
positive depictions of institutions or their representatives, from the benign
scientists if _Close Encounters_ to Sheriff Brody in _Jaws_ (I picked two
older movies but think they are good collective and individual examples).

Certainly the idiot plot is widespread, and I am as sick as Brin of people who
have just discovered the imperfection of the world running around yelling
'wake up sheeple!' but he rather undermines his argument with shallow jabs
such as this.

 _Did I allude to exceptions? In literature, you could look to the novels of
Iain Banks, which depict our descendants having rollicking, dangerous
adventures despite living in a near-utopia thanks to the hard work and genius
of their ancestors. (You 're welcome, kids.) Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End,
portrays near-future citizenship becoming tech-empowered art in a society
that's getting better all the time... yet, drama is not killed._

Er...in most of Banks' Culture novels (which made up only about half his
output, but which are obviously what Brin has in mind here), the mass of
people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete, with the
protagonists usually being cynics of some sort who have found themselves
blackmailed by one or other of the Culture's hyper-utilitarian espionage
outfits, who (of course) never do things by the Kantian book that the general
public subscribes to, insofar as they ever think about ethics when they
briefly lurch out of a hedonistic haze. It's been a while since I read
_Rainbow 's End_ (although I have read it a couple of times) but I seem to
remember major plot elements including Bad Guy Administrators whose approach
to library preservation is to feed all the books into a giant combination
shredder/scanner/captcha processor, who are inadvertently thwarted by
competing MMORPG players who are engaged in a virtual battle on the same
university campus as the bibliocidal authorities while a 1337 hax0r5 save the
world in the background. I'm having real trouble seeing how these examples are
supposed to support his point; to my mind they _epitomize_ the trope of
'burdensome knowledge borne by a few.'

There are some great ideas in this piece and as an occasional screenwriter I
think these are quite Important Ideas, but it needs to back into the oven for
a while.

~~~
arethuza
"the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete"

In a few of the Culture novels Banks makes a point of the fact that the
Culture annoys a lot of other civilizations (or more accurately, the leaders
of other civilizations) by being the nice guys who appear to always finish
first - which as we all know, is not supposed to be how the real world works.

The idea of a society that goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of it's
citizens are happy and lead long and fulfilling lives, doing pretty much
whatever they want to do (extreme sports, building stuff, designing worlds,
playing games, helping other civilizations...) seems to annoy a lot of people
- for reasons I've never quite understood.

Of course, outside of Special Circumstances, an individual human isn't going
to contribute much to a society that includes billions of hyper-intelligent
AIs and trillions of lesser AIs - but the Culture has accepted that the humans
role in their society (also shared by a lot of the drone AIs) is basically to
have fun. Personally, I could live with that.

~~~
jerf
"seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood."

Because it's a cheat. In novels, you can build up whatever society you like,
no matter how implausible, but it doesn't mean anything in the real world.
Sure, the Culture world is among my #1 fictional places I'd like to live, but
it probably can't exist because there's no path from here to there that looks
anything like the books. It's a fun place to put stories, but as an argument,
it's disingenuous, which is what bothers people.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek TNG run was another example of a cheat... the
idea that humans would grow, get to space, build a star-system-spanning
Federation, and that the crew of its flagship starship wouldn't so much as
slightly disagree about anything, ever, let alone squabble, is just an absurd
cheat of an argument, as arguments go. Things got more realistic, if not
necessarily "better", when at least small amounts of internal conflict were
let in.

To which my solution is to simply stop allowing works of fiction to make
normative arguments in my head. It's too easy to cheat. Arguably it's
impossible _not_ to cheat.

~~~
arethuza
Even Banks thought that humans weren't really nice enough to form something
like the Culture. On the other hand, he also makes it clear the organic
inhabitants are as engineered as the drones and Minds - everything from the
way their bodies work through the language they speak has been had thousands
of years of engineering.

Of course, all SF "cheats" in some respects - and clearly a lot of aspects of
the Culture technology are effectively unexplained magic - but that doesn't
bother me. Having always been fascinated by strong artificial intelligence
(real artificial minds) and I think the Culture novels do a very entertaining
and optimistic job of raising questions about what a society made up of
artificial intelligences and organic inhabitants might be like.

As he said to an interview about the Minds:

 _Is this what gods would actually be like?” Banks answered, “If we’re
lucky.”_

------
michaelochurch
The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e.
a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public
life. Not "stupid person".

We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to
hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of
trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word
(unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not
unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to
holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much
harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are,
but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than
whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them
formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from
Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on
becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers.
(Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he
admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the
utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.)

All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out
that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth
and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the
right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"\-- they're
plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-
interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal
superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have
higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital
is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've
built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the
physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper
belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've
mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important
question: what should we _do_ with the value thus created? Hence, instead of
curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative,
we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.

------
dschiptsov
It is not a cliche, it is another notion of the famous general 20/80 rule.
Like, in any field of knowledge (or just any human activity, including sports)
20% of participants are worthy, while 80% are, well, idiots.

And in some special cases, like Java...)

------
tedks
I used to think David Brin made good points when I first read him. Now I just
think he cherry-picks to support his own political views, which I find fairly
distasteful. He makes a large amount of totally far-off claims and doesn't
cite them at all. There are only a handful of links in this entire thing and
that speaks to how supported it is. If you rely on priming and the
availability heuristic to make your point about cultural trends you've already
lost.

I get that David Brin wants to live in a world full of competent people; I get
that he wants to be able to trust every human with literally everything; but
we aren't there yet and no amount of complaining about culture will make that
happen.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"People are angels" may be as false as "people are idiots". The idea that we
can build a perfect society out of humans is a profoundly false reading of
human nature.

