Whose Mind Is It Anyway?

On the intellectual crutches that prevent us having to think.

In a sharply observed essay called “Dumb and Dumber”, published in the late nineties, Bill Bryson wrote about a mode of “dumbing down” that has only increased in the intervening twenty-five years:

“A few months ago a columnist in the Boston Globe wrote a piece about unwittingly ridiculous advertisements and announcements – things like a notice in an optometrist’s shop saying ‘Eyes Examined While You Wait’ – then carefully explained what was wrong with each one. (‘Of course, it would be difficult to have your eyes examined without being there.’) It was excruciating, but hardly unusual.”

This article is part of a long-established phenomenon of society pointing out to us the mind-numbingly obvious. Bryson points out in his essay the myriad ways in which society in the nineties was already well along its seemingly-terminal decline into baseline stupidity. He notes how so much of the culture is geared towards preventing people from having to think for themselves. When a meteorologist on the …