I’m not supposed to be here sharing this mugshot of a grumpy old man; I’ve been taking a writing holiday. But if I don’t jump into splashing about and hammering on my keys in the deep end of the word pool, I’m going to drown. This break from blogging was supposed to allow me some respite from the constant nagging of saying something, but the circumstances of being out and about demand I write or lash out. Putting letters and words on the page about love and beauty would have been preferable, but that hopeful act is about to be crushed as I veer off into describing the abhorrent stupidity I’m all too frequently witnessing. I sit in public and become a reluctant listener to the asinine musings of undereducated idiots who regurgitate absurdities I feel like correcting, but their passion for vapidity will never be overcome. So I don my headphones and try to disappear into song, but every so often, something gets through, and I have to raise my eyes to be the universe’s witness to who just muttered such nonsense.
I could sit at home and isolate myself from the morass of devolving intellectual creep but I prefer turning to home in the evening to relieve myself of needing to be productive. While I’m out and about my goal is learning, be it by reading, writing, playing with music tools, photography, engaging conversation, or exploring something in nature. If I were to take to the seclusion of being safe from stupidity, other than my own, at home, I’d risk becoming a shut-in.
Certainly, I grant that it has never been uncommon to witness grotesque anti-intellectualism in all of its glorious stripes of banality, and I’ll also be the first to admit that this could well be a condition of my advancing age, but I feel that large and profound public displays of vast stupidity are becoming a mark of modernity. Maybe my sensitivity is being exacerbated by my growing awareness that the machine is quickly gaining on us humans and that; in short order, my phone will effectively be smarter than 95% of those I encounter in almost any given situation. Every day lately, I talk with ChatGPT and it’s a rare moment that I fail to be impressed with its abilities. All the while, it’s advancing by leaps and bounds even though that progress is not being made immediately available to the general public yet. So, this machine with which I converse evolves on an unseen forward trajectory while those before me are stumbling down the evolutionary ladder into dark ignorance.
To say I’m unhappy writing this is a gross understatement, but I don’t know what else to do with the seething that afflicts me when I cannot avert my senses from being abused by those who flaunt such aggressively dense ignorance. Maybe writing about it will act as a cathartic moment and exorcise these demons of the dull, but I know I’m not fooling anyone as tomorrow or ten minutes from now, the bombardment of excretory density will again fall upon my shoulders and into my senses. What’s left to do?
Leaving the moment is likely my only escape, but where can I be immune to the disease of self-righteous stupidity? The void might work, but my overall love of life lets me know that’s a bad idea. Even getting in the car is risky as it’s inevitable that someone will need to be in my space due to their impatience or incredible importance that requires them to arrive at a red light 12 feet ahead of me.
I can’t be angry about this movement towards such abysmal depths of anti-intellectualism as it’s a symptom of a frightened culture on the descent from its former heights where success bred dizziness and greed. Being humbled by the arrogance that catapulted America into a role it wasn’t prepared to carry seems the only likely outcome at this time, but I have to admit that I wasn’t really ready to see it splayed out so nakedly in my lifetime.
As I drive away from the coffee shop and get home, I realize that the thing that is different this year and maybe the past two weeks is we are not traveling as much as we did last year or even the year before, and so instead of being distracted by the writing chores of capturing our experiences, I’m spending more time in my environment where I’m intentionally not writing with the frequency I’m used to. After lunch, I think I’ll head out to take some photos of the desert bloom that’s occurring right now and see if I can’t shift my focus a small amount to help me avert my gaze from what I’d rather not see.
- This is what I wrote just before my May Day missive that took my focus off this rant.
Hello. If you would listen to an anonymous commenter, my sympathy goes with you, but your remarks on the ChatGPT are the only dark spot on this shimmering denouncement. Bots are not intelligent. They really are not. They regurgitate human intellectual output, combining random bits in predictable patterns, because the strange and unpredictable have already been filtered out, and allow the user or viewer to put the most generous interpretation on the results. Like in that old thought experiment about an ant crawling just such a line that it resembles a perfect profile of Winston Churchill. Of course the Web trawled and squeezed like an orange is going to give overall more sophisticated and useful answers than any average moron. And of course random results can be rerolled enough times to finally susprise anyone, as long as electricity lasts. But it is stilll the same cubes of dice turning. Where is the intelligence? What bothers and saddens me is that this slide into total stupidity that you observe (not limited to the U. S. by any means but universal to where technology “democratized” personal achievement) costs creative and inventive, intelligent people their lives and freedom. You or I might rant in our spare time, but there are those who have gone to jail and are going to jail for offending public hypocrisy and denial, hatred of the body, obssession with technology and servile love of being ruled – and to worse punishments too. What shocks me is the realization that humanity does not improve and that the ideas of people like Freud, Marx or Nietzsche and any number of honest minds after them have failed to make an impact. Humanity turns out to be a stale mass of protoplasm, completely inert where not pushed by material forces – migrations, economy, climate, a lump of lard afloat in water. And the generations just repeat themselves in this lard. The greatest writer of all time, in my opinion, was de Sade, but how mistaken are all those who think that the direction of freedom is open for taking! Self-discipline, yes, self-education, a stoic attitude, those are available. One can hone onself to be very efficient and be nice to the people around in small ways and make some kind of career. But that is only a way to live out the years. The rest of the world is unwakeable and uninspirable.