After President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNOW summarized it as “profoundly stupid,” the conclusion was inevitable: The president gave a “profoundly stupid” State of the Union speech to a “profoundly stupid” nation only because, obviously, we, as Americans, have become profoundly stupid and deserved it. How else could any third-grader explain the speech so lightly given yet so heavily received?
Let’s backtrack and try to see what all that means.
America began as a “utopia” in “pursuit of happiness.” In this free nation, what would have made them all happy? The freedom to do anything they wanted to (conversely, not doing anything they didn’t want to). Davy Crockett described the American Republic as such a nation: “People can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober.”
For a century after the Revolution, widely available land and equal security with guns kept frontier America as a “perfect union” where such freedom did exist. Then capitalism intervened and destroyed this dream nation by introducing a completely different system where people had to think and work hard to survive or to get rich, in a way that could hardly be imagined by Davy Crockett’s America.
After nearly a century and half of hard-thinking capitalism, with Trumpism coming in at the tail-end of the capitalist era, we are back to the utopian nation of perfect dreams in which we are free from having to think hard, or not having to think at all: Just now, all of our thinking in America is being done by the three new kings: artificial intelligence does all the thinking for us; capitalist entertainment fill up all of our free minds; and the Trumpian big brothers make all our moral decisions. What’s left there for us to think about now?
These three pillars of America — interrelated and mutually dependent — will make our lives so easy and predictable that nobody will have to think at all. When AI replaces your work and relationships, when the entertainment industry occupies all your free time and mind, and when Trumpsters, largely motivated by primeval anger and hatefulness, make all political-moral decisions for you, why would you need to overtax your brains for anything? Independently and together, these three forces of America make thinking simply unnecessary. Like our forefathers’ dreams in America, all we have left to do is pursue our individual happiness: eat, drink and be merry! Whatever else that might strain our brains is now all handled by AI, entertainment and Trumpian dog whistles.
All we need is a remote control in our hand, eat the food they provide, laugh our heads off with always-on entertainment, and obey the orders from the great white father’s government. Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves (whether in delight or in grief we don’t know) to the background chorus of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The triumvirate of our new utopia — AI, entertainment and Trumpian politics — has now been developed to near perfection, poised to become the comforting companions of every lonely soul in America (that’s the majority), while it takes over our labor in thinking. Virtually all of our free-from-work time is now occupied by mind-nullifying entertainment and amusement, which is ever becoming more perfect in replacing our loving and hating each other (which is where much of our daily reality is for normal people): Then, there is Trumpism which has now monopolized America’s political power by replacing the liberal tradition of debate and persuasion with something threateningly monolithic and fascist. Now, all we have to do is trust the sitting president whose favorite saying is “Don’t worry about it.” (He could just as easily recommend, “Don’t think about it.”)
In American history, the busiest thinking people were the Southern slaves who thought about “freedom” or “liberty” from their bondage virtually every moment of their consciousness. For free Americans, gifted with spaciousness of land that allowed unprecedented individualism and isolation, each person minding his own business, it was always a challenge to think about anything else or anybody else.
The vast majority of humanity always disliked the mental labor of thinking as much as physical labor. Even in the best of times, such as during the Renaissance or the revolutionary 19th century in which everybody seemed to be actively thinking and arguing about something, the thinking was done only by the few.
As their new national creed, our Founders wanted freedom for every American — to be left alone. But frontier America, facing its new destiny, still had to do some serious thinking. Soon, between slavery and freedom, America was a boiling cauldron of hard thinkers that eventually brought the Civil War, which was uniquely a war of ideas. Today, mental activity is relegated mostly to America’s oppressed minorities, seeking freedom and equality. For the comfortable majority, freedom is found in consumer selections and equality in shared stupidity.
When our “thinking” is made unnecessary, we tend to get busy with “feelings” that are expertly exploited by the capitalists and Trumpists (with AI serving both), who are unrivalled in selling “feel-good” emotions. Overfed with such artificial feelings and unable to handle reality, the unthinking masses became “crazy” Americans, whose national insanity thrives in the thinking vacuum so exploited. (In Old World societies, their feelings are moderated by their communal-collective solidarity). Wholly unprecedented even for America, it is predicted that in the next few decades, half of all sick Americans seeking health care will be “mental illness” patients.
When citizens stop thinking, only evil flourishes.
Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.