The two dumbest last resort arguments often desperately flung forth by the losers of emotional debates are (1) that everything is a matter of opinion, which it too too obviously isn't (when you're right, you're right), and (2) that the s.o.b. guilty of winning the argument is not the smartest man in the world (or doesn't know everything), which is irrelevant if that (or that) wasn't the subject being argued and inept if it (or it) was.
    Now, don't put words in my mouth just because I often win arguments. You HAVE my words on dumb argument (1), which I won't expand because those words (when you're right, you're right) are immediately self evidently true, and any reader who doesn't see that is hopeless. On dumb argument (2), contrary to the foolishly quick assumption of the loser cited above, you DO NOT HAVE my words yet, but you're about to read them.

.     I hold (correctly) that an intelligence ranking system finely tuned enough to determine who is THE "smartest person in the world" is near certainly IMPOSSIBLE,  so I've never claimed the championship and never will. That's my actual very logical position on the concept. Now pay attention to my explanation of that point - i.e. to my actual words, which may not be quite so self evidently conclusive to you (though they are), maybe because they're new to you.

    First, a pair of useful digressions:
    First digression: I don't think I've ever heard anyone actually say, "I'm the smartest man in the world," or "I know everything," certainly not myself. So, the number (2) dumbest last resort argument IS as flagrant an example as possible of putting words in someone's mouth - mine for instance, and is therefore not really worth responding to, but I'll continue only because that's the point of this essay.
    Second digression (to actually introduce the promised explanation of the response to dumb argument (2), which really isn't worth responding to): I'm an ardent women's tennis fan, and because I consider illogical the WTA's use of a contrived point system that ranks tournaments instead of players, I once devised a better system of my own and ended up with three number 1 players, one number 4, two number 5's, three number 7's (which made a top 8 impossible); and too many tied for 27th to fit into 32 ranking spots (the end of four logical flights of 8), and I still hadn't counted some players beyond that point who I knew could beat anyone in the top 16 any time they played their best games or even tried to factor in my certainty that several 5'3" to 5'7" players are obviously far better players than the highest ranked 5'11' to 6'2' players.

    But that's a minor problem of ambiguity (being related to only a couple of hundred easily comparable people) compared to what I'd wind up with trying to pick the smartest human in a world of almost eight BILLION people logistically PROBABLY impossible to compare. My method of sorting geniuses and non-geniuses into only two slots wouldn't help, and the IQ testers' method of dividing the brain-stuffing progress for their age of almost 8 billion humans into a row of less than 200 numbered slots wouldn't, either.
    Of course, accumulation of testable knowledge (though not capability) might be infinitely subdivisible within any ranking slot, except that different geniuses accumulate different kinds of knowledge, which may all be comparable but which are never parallel enough to compare precisely, and the concept of age-related general knowledge is too vague to be precise.
    Even my guess that something like only one person in a thousand is likely to correctly answer a dozen or so litmus test questions that I think should separate realistic clear thinkers from the masses isn't discriminating enough, since, even if I could pose my questions to the whole human race and even if the responses DID accurately highlight the one-in-a-thousand clearest thinkers among them, I'd still wind up with about 8 million thinkers tied for number 1. So, to pick a single "SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WORLD," I'd need another test fine enough to cut the (very theoretical) intellectual top one tenth of one percent into 8 million sub-slices.
    So, even if any good tavern debater with his wits sharpened by wine and with the help of cunning equivocations (like relatively, virtually, essentially, in the last analysis, etc.) might surprisingly find it just AS possible to actually single out the smartest person in the world as to determine which grain of sand is at the top of a dune, I still hold that it's too close to impossible to worry about.

    I've told people whom I THOUGHT were smart enough to handle it as a teasing joke which actually IS true, and only because they brought it up (I didn't), that if there were a single smartest person, for all they or I knew, it MIGHT be me. But, I'm in most perfect accord with the protagonist of my only completed novel, who, accused of thinking he was the smartest man in the world, said, "The possibility worries me more than it does you."

-Glen Roberts

What's wrong with humanity? How do they stay so dumb?
(I really should say stupid, because it's appropriately stronger)

  14 July 2010:  I'm not asking what's wrong with the media, because, even if they are both ethically and intellectually wrong, I don't think they're making a mistake. I don't think they necessarily know what they're doing, either. But whether instinctively or cunningly, by keeping the public confused, they're assisting and obscuring the crimes of the system they're part of. Better to ask what's wrong with me. Why do I go on hopelessly explaining and re-explaining to a stubbornly deaf race the lies they're being told, the tricks being played on them?

     But the best question is "WHAT - IS - WRONG - WITH - HUMANITY!?!?"

     Why do humans never get any smarter? Why, after thousands of years of scientific progress, do they keep believing in ghosts? Why do they never stop letting themselves be sent out to fight and kill each other for the benefit and at the bidding of a few rich insiders and religious maniacs? How can they be so easily taught to demonize the poor and idolize the rich? Why, no matter how much they suffer for it, do they keep falling for every scam their rich oppressors and their oppressors' media pull on them - including the obviously unfair, unequal, dysfunctional capitalist system that never has and never will work for most of them? Why do they never learn their language well enough to figure things out? And why do they keep reproducing and inflicting all their stupidity and its consequences on more and more victims while stupidly denying the limitations of space? What's wrong with them?
    Well, for one thing, they're not philosophically very sharp, are they? Even though they HAVE separate brains, functional to a point, as philosophizing mechanisms, their brains either don't work or aren't under their own control. There's no use calling that unbelievable, by the way. It's a fact.

     Thousands of years after the development of writing catalyzed a leap forward in the accumulation and supposed sharing of knowledge, hundreds of years after the invention of printing jump-started the worldwide spread of available knowledge, and in the midst of a computer revolution, which is expanding access to every facet of knowledge, while people have evolved technologically, and to varying degrees economically and even socially, and in some quarters politically, it IS an indisputable fact that over 99% of humanity have STILL not even slightly evolved philosophically. Philosophy itself has evolved. To write the documents on iammyownreporter.com, I've got to have come a long way past Epicurus. But not only have not even 1% of humans come with me, almost 100% of the human race remain philosophically between cave men and the ancient Egyptians.

     People who wear clothes, drive cars, take high tech pills, do complex math problems, and can put on a show of moving printed words off a page, through their eyes, presumably through their brains, and out their mouths as real words - STILL - seldom speak their own languages coherently and, confronted by realistic discourse about any of the to-them most important ancient human delusions, apparently either can not or will not understand either what they read or what is said to them.
     Their entire pseudo understanding of the world they've lived in for a million years without ever paying any sustained coherent philosophical attention to it is faked by aping endlessly rehearsed expressions and reciting memorized slogans. But, you may say (if there IS a you out there who can read these sentences), they certainly act as if they had honest convictions. Sure they do, but it's an act, and even the act of acting is merely copied.
     Here and there there's an inventor, one human in a thousand (you, my reader, I hope), whose brain always functions on its own and who can articulate his own ideas or analyze and corroborate the ideas of others - and, maybe, now and then, there's a minute at a time when maybe even one out of three humans can manage a spontaneous series of coherent thoughts about something besides simple business, cars, sports, sex, cosmetics and celebrities - but, for the most part, humanity's too numerous heads are, like the Scarecrow's, stuffed with shredded newspapers and TV scripts. No wonder they're easily brain washed. If it wasn't for brain washing, they'd have no political, social, economic, ecological, or philosophical thoughts at all.
     In America, the insidious media teach the suckers that brainwashing is something weird done by "the enemy" to their foreign subjects, while simultaneously teaching them that nothing is so piously moral as "believing in" their own country's most blatant lies. Brainwashing isn't foreign or exceptional; it's the rule everywhere. Human thought, including all appearances of serious conviction, is NORMALLY the product of brainwashing. What looks and sounds or reads like honest and even honestly conceived conviction is all around, as blatant as commercial packaging. But it only looks and sounds or reads like honest conviction. In fact, it's not. The woman on the screen who tells you the best thing to buy for your family is acting. The party hack who tells you YOUR candidate will END the scams and CHANGE the system is acting. The Secretary of State who tells you Cuba must "get its act together" is herself really ignorantly acting. They're almost all parroting each other - reading their assigned lines.
     Logically, conviction should result from hard brain work - energetic fact gathering, analysis and synthesis that prove a particular conclusion is certainly or very close to certainly true. So, finding myself surrounded by apparently honest conviction, I ought to be able to assume that - wow! - there's a whole lot of thinking going on.
     But there's not. In fact, in the world of human thought trading (the well-named market-place of ideas), even conviction is sold and bought in the ready-to-wear department. And like any other commercially packaged product, it is sold by repetitive sloganeering, not by compelling argument.
     The NORM is brainwashing. Brainwashing is the NORM. I said that twice so you'd get it, the same way normal humans get almost all their convictions. Apparently honest and earnest convictions NORMALLY get from the shelf into human heads by being routinely, relentlessly and conspicuously repeated - by the media, of course.
     So when I tell you that every time a normal human "decides" to vote for X because Y isn't "experienced" or "tough," he's parroting the media, I'm not talking about an aberration. I'm talking about something normal, and, since it's normal, examples abound.
     If you think it's outrageous that I should claim to be right about this and everybody else wrong, by the way, you're wrong. Why is it outrageous? The everybody else referred to believes in gods, patriotism, democracy, freedom, family values, evil, the magical effect of gold dug out of the ground and re-buried in a bank vault on the value of money, the impossibility of stopping what's idiotically called progress, etc. etc. It's not a stunt; it's EASY to be right and everybody else wrong if your brain works. After all, I DID my real brain work. I DID think out my conclusions. And almost any logically right conclusion arising from actual thought almost always contradicts majority opinion, because majority opinions NORMALLY result not from careful thought but from brainwashing. And examples are so numerous and obvious, I don't NEED to name them.
     If I were pointing out something UNUSUAL - if I were claiming a THINKING people known for THINKING things over had somehow been fooled about ONE THING, for instance how and why they're going to vote on this or that, it might be outrageous, but I'm not.
     I'm pointing out that a people whose every apparently earnest conviction is actually a religious belief (and religion itself is the first elephant-sized example) are OF COURSE parroting their high priests, mass media and each other when they blabber phrases like "sustainable development," "property rights," "our brave men and women in uniform," "the American way," "choice of physicians," "our precious freedom," "hardworking Americans," "political experience,""global warming" (until their thought masters get a hundred letters pointing out that the globe has been cooling ever since it was formed of molten matter and the thought masters send out a new phrase and they all start blabbering "climate change") etc.etc.; and I'm pointing out (not claiming - pointing out) that they always conscientiously blabber what they're told to blabber, vote as they're told they'll vote and piously buy "green" products and knowingly sneer at North Korea, because they're well brainwashed by the media, which NORMALLY write, produce, direct, and stage almost the entire dumb show called human thought.
-Glen Roberts

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