Everyone is So Goddamn Smart

On making a nation of saps.

We have the bad fortune to live in an era that is both jaded and naïve.

This might seem like mere grousing, but as you can probably see just by looking at, well, everything, the contradictions are heightening like a teenage basketball player, and the moment practically demands that we pay very close attention to things. Unfortunately, the culture demands that we constantly get distracted by the most frivolous shit imaginable, and because everyone is a nervous wreck all the time because the sheer means of staying alive have become so tenuous under capitalism, we all carry around an enormous amount of negative energy. Lacking any way of exercising against the actual people in power, who remain physically removed from our reach and psychologically immune to our good or bad opinions of them, we tend to aim this energy at one another; and lacking any ability to articulate the vastness of our problems, we tend to use it on petty personality clashes over abstractions rather than as a driver of ideological action.

It’s certainly oversimplistic to place all of the blame for this on the internet, but it’s also hard not to. With all of our cultural and economic decisions increasingly driven by algorithms that have zero interest or even ability to show you something outside of the contents of their databases, and with social media not just encouraging but necessitating the bold presentation of every passing thought and opinion, no matter how poorly reasoned or badly researched, as an immortal verity writ on a mountainside, there’s a strong temptation – practically a psychic drive – to draw lines in the sand over literally everything, until you’ve trapped yourself in a maze of your own construction, and nothing can get in or out but the opinions, beliefs, and ideas that you already know about.

The jadedness comes from easy access to information. Presented as the ultimate promise of intellectual achievement, as the possibility that everyone could access any information from any era for free within seconds, it fell victim to the usual suspects: monetization, insularity, amateurism, and the difficult balance between curation and gatekeeping, which, to be skillfully done, requires investments of time, money, and resources that most of the internet’s owners do not wish to invest. While the elimination of expertise and credentialism are generally wins for humanity, the substitution of awareness for familiarity is not, and we’ve reached a point where everybody thinks they know as much as anybody else, and personal experience and the ability to do a quick Google search has swapped in for knowledge of the unfamiliar and the ability to do actual research. We have raced straight from ignorance to third-hand understanding without an intervening period of actual learning. Why should you listen to someone who has spent thirty years reading about a subject when you can learn everything you need to know from Wikipedia?  Why should you respect the analysis of someone who directly participates in something when you can quote the contrary opinion of a stranger who agrees with you? The algorithm has already done everything for you; what’s the point of assigning yourself extra homework?

The naivety, of course, grows out of the jadedness. Because we are so unwilling to learn, because we are burdened down with work and family and money and the thousand other strains of life under capitalism, because we have so little time and there is so much to know, we skate knowing and doing just enough to get by. We have invented whole pathologies around the desire to cut corners: impostor syndrome, going along to get along, faking it until you make it. The world demands so much of us, and we have had it hammered into our brains that the greatest sin is to not have an instant opinion at the ready on any subject lest we be thought ill-informed or inadequate, that we construct entire political, cultural, and aesthetic identities without taking very much time to consider the nature of the material with which we are building. America is a country of deep cynicism and distrust; our weird admixture of extreme individualism and monocultural uniformity has created a nation of people who are terrified, above all else, of being taken for a ride. The fact that someone might know more than us, might possess information that is inaccessible to us, might have an opinion developed differently than ours, has led us to live in mortal terror that such people are trying to get one over on us, and that cannot be allowed. So we build walls of half-learned lessons, half-read books, and half-overheard ideas, cemented together with thick slabs of self-satisfaction, to keep those people out, even if they aren’t trying to harm us.

Trouble is, plenty of people are trying to harm us. In the hopes of not being taken advantage of, we have become the worst kind of chumps and gulls; and above all else, America is the land of con artists.  And a good con artist can spot a fake façade practically from lunar distances. There is nothing tastier to a shark of the type minted on the regular by this nation of hustlers and scammers than another obvious fraud; they thrive on tryhards and self-confident phonies. It’s their meat. America mints cults, religious lunatics, political cranks, artistic frauds, financial schemes, educational rip-offs, and every other form of parasocial shell games the way other countries do folk dances. If there’s a sucker born every second, there’s six to fleece him.

I’m not arguing here for credentialism – itself a scam of titanic proportions – or for the restoration of elitism or any other form of expertise. I’m just asking for people to forsake the idea that we know it all, to stop acting like a lack of certainty is a lack of commitment, that apology is weakness, that a willingness to learn is a flaw or a disgrace. Believing that we are not already the throbbing center of the universe would go a long way to erasing the pointlessly stubborn individualism that is poisoning us; ditching the assumption that our experiences and perspectives are the only valid ones would short-circuit the bullheadedness and cruelty that drives much of the fear of ‘cancel culture’; approaching art with humility and curiosity rather than prejudgment and impatience would do a lot to get us off the hook on which our aesthetic worldviews have been speared by marketing.

Everyone wants to pretend that they know everything already, because they think that means they can’t get played. But nobody wants to do anything that actually imparts familiarity or understanding, because it’s too hard. This is why we live in a golden age of grifters; new marks are cultivating their own suckerdom every day. The paralytic fear of being taken advantage of isolates us, marginalizes us, cuts off all channels of trust and respect and solidarity – virtually guaranteeing that we will be taken advantage of. We’re so busy being mad at an invisible enemy who lives only inside our own heads that we don’t see the endless line of actual bad actors, stretched out to the horizon, waiting to rook us for everything we have.  

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