Cool Cherry Cream

People aren’t getting any stupider, but we will still be remembered as being much stupider than our predecessors.

We’ve always been stupid. We’ve always hypothesized about things we know nothing about, and when we look back on people years ago saying things like “the earth is flat”, “television won’t last”, and “640K ought to be enough for anybody”, we think they are stupid.

Maybe stupid isn’t the right word. How could anyone possibly know what’s going to happen in the future? Fact is, they can’t. And that’s not being stupid. That’s being confident, and that’s a good thing.

It’s like when you’re writing an essay; your thesis can be “Shakespeare was probably influenced by the tale of Oedipus” or your thesis could be “Shakespeare was influenced by the tale of Oedipus”. If tomorrow we uncover Shakespeare’s secret diary sitting in someone’s attic and it says “I’m writing a new story called ‘Hamlet’. It was inspired by my friend Jim who is in love with his mother”, you’ll be wrong whether you said “probably” or not, so why not be wrong and confident than just plain wrong?

But the reason that we, and future generations, will always appear to be the dumbest of the dumb is the simple fact that there are more outlets for being dumb nowadays. People five hundred years ago couldn’t read the ramblings of any given random person on their personal blog. People five hundred years ago couldn’t see that picture of Janie taken at the party last night on her MySpace. People five hundred years ago weren’t watching “stupid drunk guy chops off his arm with butcher knife” on YouTube.

But that’s not to say we should stop making outlandish claims and predictions about things we could never truly predict to simply appear smarter than we really are.

If someone had never told Elvis, “stick to truck driving, because you’ll never make it as a singer”, would we even know who he was today?

If no one had ever said, “this ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication”, would Alexander Graham Bell have ever pushed himself to improve his product?

Okay, okay, so maybe not. But I say let’s keep making crazy predictions. If that economics professor had never said, “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” in 1929, and if Decca had never rejected The Beatles because “we don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out”, history certainly wouldn’t be as funny as it is.