Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Is Idiocracy Coming True? Are critical thinking, intelligence and civility on the decline?

Substack post on citizenship: williamcfox.substack.com/p/what-now-a-meditation-on-citizenship?r=2fkhlr

Longer version of this piece:
williamcfox.substack.com/p/is-society-getting-stupider-a-serious

Videos that motivated this one:
1. youtu.be/LqelpONZvpw?si=21-rSeXbMvvKWHEZ
2. youtu.be/ZeitXe63P7w?si=eiRdSuJEIa6z5uwo (fairly certain this is, ironically, AI slop. Maybe someone can correct me)

★Support on Patreon: patreon.com/williamcfox

★ NOTE ON SOURCING IN CAPTIONS:
At the end of a sentence with sourcing, something like this will appear:
"The sky is blue. The ocean is blue (17,89)."
The 1st number represents the source number in this description. The 2nd number represents the page number. If the numbers are separated by a semicolon ie (2;3), the numbers represent two different sources.

1. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter. 1969 amzn.to/45zc8jP
2. The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby. 2008. amzn.to/43t78KU
3. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman 2005 ed. amzn.to/4kzZNjQ
4. The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan, 2001 ed. amzn.to/3He2FEv
5. Twilight of Democracy. Applebaum. 2021. amzn.to/4kIWGGq (reference only)
6. The Revolt of the Elites. Lasch. 1996. amzn.to/3Su6CYb (reference only)
7. The Dumbest Generation. 2009. Bauerlein. amzn.to/3Fpt6qr (reference only)
8. Age of Fracture. 2012. Rodgers. amzn.to/4muS4Fo (reference only)
9. Reclaiming Conversation. 2016. Turkle. amzn.to/4kBLfkh
10. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Carr. 2011. amzn.to/3ZIc4KX
11. Why Don't Students Like School? Willingham. 2021. amzn.to/3HhaTMg (reference only)
12. The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom. 1987. amzn.to/4mEDE5I (reference only)
13. Bowling Alone, 2020 edition. amzn.to/4kJqkvc
14. How Democracies Die. Levitsky, Ziblatt. 2018 amzn.to/43yHrJ6 (reference only)
15. Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau 1849
16. Excerpt from Jung. The Undiscovered Self 1957 (disclosure: not read in entirety)
17. Asimov, I. “A Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, Jan 21, 1980.
18. The Outline of History, Vol. 2 HG Wells 1920. Oxford Reference.
19. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. 1895. (learned wikipedia: Idiocracy)
20. 1951 The Marching Morons By C. M. KORNBLUTH (learned wikipedia: Idiocracy)
21. Letters and papers from prison by Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1906-1945 amzn.to/4jvqNzY
22. Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity” Jan 2023. Big Think. Thomson.
23. BBC June 2021. Fischer. “Generational amnesia…”
24. BigThink. “The ‘kids these days’ effect”. Oct 2019.
25. “Kids these days” Protzko and Schooler Science Advances. 2019.
26. “Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024” Oxford Uni Press.
27. Princeton. Aug 2013. “Poor concentration: Poverty reduces brainpower”
28. “Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains?” Dec 2024. Guardian. Boyle.
29. Sparrow, B., et al. (2011). “Google Effects on Memory” Science. 31.
30. “Flynn effect and its reversal…” Bratsberg, Rogeberg. NLM, NIH. 2018.
31. Intelligence Volume 98, M/Ju 2023 “Looking for Flynn effects”
32. UM Library. 1790. Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove family. Pg 186
33. OECD. “Do Adults Have the Skills…” Dec 2024
34. NBC. Survey: Growing number…” Dec 2024. Murphy
35. Gallup. “Americans Reading Fewer Books” 2022. Jones
36. Lindert et al. Front. Psychiatry, Aug 2021 Sec. Aging Psychiatry Volume12.2021
37. Harvard Health. “More than sad:” Cartreine 2016
38. Sackheim et al. “Effects of major depression on estimates of intelligence” (90s, see 39)
39. 2021 “Intelligence decline across major depressive disorder” Ohi et al. CambridgeUP.
40. BBC. “How modern food can regain its nutrients” Lovell
41. NIH. “An Alarming Decline in the Nutritional Quality” Bhardwaj et al. March 2024
42. Tereshchenko. 2023. WJP. “Neurobiological risk factors”
43. “Impact of frequency of internet” Takeuchi et al. 2018.
44. NYT Opinion. Turkle 2015. Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.
45. “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind” Wilson et al. Science. 2014 Jul 4
46. “The Filter Bubble” Pariser. 2012. amzn.to/3FGvkBF
47. NPR. “Sophomoric?” 2012. Keith.
48. CMU. Spice. 2016 “Most Presidential Candidates Speak at Grade 6-8 Level”
49. Kulman. “Susan Jacoby Attacks 'American Unreason'” March 4, 2008. NPR
50. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 6 January 1816
51. From James Madison to George Thompson, 30 June 1825
52. First Annual Address to Congress January 08, 1790
53. difficult to actually get a copy of his Letters and Papers from Prison amzn.to/3Zfqjqx

00:00-00:31 Intro
00:32-4:25 Data
4:26-8:31 Brain Rot
8:32-12:24 Anti-Intellectualism
12:25-15:57 Citizenship

Music by Epidemic Sound: nebula.tv/epidemic
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images.