How My People Became the World’s Greatest Idiots
Why America and Britain are Global Laughingstocks
Sorry. I’m going to apologise up front, because I have to say something ugly. But necessary. If I don’t say it, I feel like my head’s going to explode.
My people, Anglo-Americans, have become the world’s and this age’s most spectacular, gigantic, colossal, hateful, preening, grinning, violent idiots. My people are the great, historic idiots of now. They’re idiots to an incredible degree: cheering each other on all the way to the cliff’s edge, and then jumping, hand-in-hand into the abyss. And then roaring in delight all the way down the abyss. By and large, my people don’t know the most basic thing about the modern world, they don’t want to know why it matters, and they don’t even want to know why they don’t know it. Do you know what that blinding level of wilful ignorance makes a person? You guessed it, an idiot.
I’m going to discuss exactly those three things in turn — three things about the modern world you should know, but probably don’t. Because if you’re reading this, odds are that you’re Anglo-American, by which I mean American or British. And it’s way past time for you to face up to some brutal truths. Right about now, Anglo-Americans are the world’s laughingstock, the butt of its jokes. They have made fools of themselves, whether through Brexit or American style gun-firing extremism. Friends, we have met the enemy — and it’s us. Nobody in the world today — nobody — is as painfully, tragically, comically dumb as American and Brits. Why is that? How did it come to be?
America and Britain are the world’s two newest failed states. They have imploded — wilfully — into stupidity, despair, ugliness, hate, violence, and brutality. So what does their collapse teach us, history, futurity, civilisation?
You might not know it, but there’s been a contest of what you might call “values” over the last few decades. Would the Anglo-American way win — or the other one? Let’s call it the European-Canadian one.
What I mean by that is this. Anglo-Americans are not like other societies and cultures in the world. Most cultures and societies seem to value friendship, goodness, truth, social bonds, emotions, happiness, community above their opposites. Anglo-American culture doesn’t. It values selfishness and greed. Ruthlessness and cunning. Acquisition and materialism. Brutality and punishment.
Europeans will give each other effusive, affectionate hugs and kisses. Even “cold” Germans and Scandinavians. Men in Pakistan and India — straight ones — happily walk down the street holding hands. I could go on endlessly. These aren’t mere anecdotes. They are signs that cultures really are different. Anglo-Americans regard each other — not to mention the world — as adversaries, enemies, rivals. It seems their capacity for friendship and warmth is more or less nonexistent. Anglo-American culture — individualistic, materialistic, self-centred, acquisitive, dominating — is in stark contrast to other cultures, which are cooperative, communitarian, friendly, emotional, and warm.
So which way is better? It should be blindingly obvious by now.Anglo-American culture is a complete and total trainwreck of a car crash. It’s produced populations that are idiots, hateful, ignorant, clueless dopes, and proud of it. People who are obsessed with some dumb celebrity but couldn’t tell you where Africa or Asia is or how many countries are in the EU or what social democracy is.
It turns out that bitterly competing with one another as rivals and hated adversaries in an endless game of survival, where the stakes are life and death, didn’t make Anglo-Americans virtuous — wise, intelligent, resourceful, and so on. It just made them dumb, hollow, and mean. The European-Canadian way has proven to be far, far superior: the way of cooperation, community, sociality. Think of a Canadian’s proverbial “niceness” versus the way the entire world expects an American to be a puffed up idiot of a jerk. Think of European gentleness and warmth.
There’s a deep lesson there. Anglo-American culture has failed. Failed to produce societies of decent, civilized human beings.
You might imagine I’m just casting moral aspersions, but fear not. I’m going to put this in hard economic terms. What does a culture of individualistic materialism, of dominance and acquisition and exploitation over cooperation and community and fulfillment do?
It makes it impossible for a society to ever develop public goods. Think of the way Americans don’t have decent healthcare — and get bills for a million dollars. The way their kids are made to do “active shooter drills,” which to the rest of the world means “masked men burst in, pretend to shoot them with real guns, and they have to pretend to die.” Think of the way American media is just a daily exercise in complete nonsense and disinformation. What the? Now think of the way that Britain has chosen the American path over the European one. What on earth?
A culture of cruelty, exploitation, materialism, and individualism makes it impossible for a society to cooperate. Even if the purpose of such cooperation is something as basic as “we should all have healthcare, retirement, income, housing, medicine, education.” Anglo-Americans can’t do it, can’t cooperate — and so they don’t have these things. America never did — and Britain’s about to lose all of them.
Not being able to cooperate will do that to you. When you’re steeped in the myth that brutal, endless, perpetual, ruthless competition is what brings out the best in people — then why would you bother investing in anyone else? But when nobody much in a society is willing to invest in anyone else…where can it go? It can’t develop and keep and expand public goods like Europe and Canada have — public healthcare, retirement, education, and so on. And yet such systems and institutions are precisely what make a society modern — driving a bigger designer truck than the next guy doesn’t. And so America and Britain have simply stopped being a part of the modern world — because individualistic, aggressive, hostile, materialistic, exploitative cultures can’t adapt to an age where cooperation is the prime mover of social success.
Let me put that more bluntly. Anglo-American culture has failed in very deadly way: it’s failed to create societies of civilized, decent people. Anglo-Americans are regarded the world over as its biggest a-holes, jerks, dunces, fools, morons, addicts to money and power and violence, junkies overdosed on the opiate of narcissism. They’re the kinds of people you don’t want to know, because you never know when they’re going to lash out in rage at you. Anglo-Americans are the world’s idiots.
I mean that in a classical sense. When I say “idiot,” I don’t mean it as an insult. And of course, I don’t mean every single American and Brit. I mean it in a precise way.
I mean idiot the way the Greeks did: someone who was only interested in private gain, advantage, profit. For the Greeks, the creators of democracy, there was nothing worse than an idiot — because the road to tyranny lay through idiocy, by way of a lack of virtue. That’s a strange idea to Anglos, who’ve been taught for ages now that virtue is selfishness, greed, cunning, ruthlessness, abandon. But to the Greeks, all these things would have paved the way for social collapse — and indeed, they did, as Athens fell to the Fifty Tyrants.
Idiots can’t build modern societies. That’s because, since they don’t value anyone else, they can’t cooperate. They can’t build communities, social bonds, care for anyone or anything. They’re too busy looking for an angle, an advantage, trying to put one over on you, seeing you as a disposable commodity, a “resource”, something to be exploited, abused, and discarded. Like Britain is still doing to the EU, or Americans do to each other all the time and call it “work.” But such attitudes leave societies completely unable to modernize — to offer and expand social contracts rich in public goods as basic human rights.
Those are my first two lessons. Here’s my third one.
Idiots make failed states. And failed states make idiots. That’s the vicious cycle of social collapse. But it usually begins with idiots. And that is how America and Britain collapsed.
I’m going to put this one to you a little bit more formally. If we know — empirically, factually — that the European and Canadian way works much, much better than the Anglo-American way, what are we really saying? Let’s say it the way pundits would — because it will reveal a truth they never tell you, at least in Anglo-American culture, which is my people are so painfully, tragically dumb.
Social democracy works. “Conservatism” doesn’t. What unites Britain and America? They are the world’s two most conservative rich countries —and outside maybe Iran and Pakistan, some of the most conservative now. It’s not some kind of cosmic coincidence that they’ve plunged into collapse simultaneously. It tells us that “conservatism” is the modern world’s biggest failure.
Again, that’s not my opinion — it’s just an objective fact about the world today. Conservatism — the Anglo-American variant says: nobody should have much of anything. Nobody has intrinsic worth. Therefore, nobody deserves to have public goods as basic human rights. The only thing anyone deserves is to be made to compete, endlessly, for the basics — food, medicine, education, even money, and so on. If you can’t win in that endless contest of violence and brutality that daily life is, then, shrug…I guess you die.
Americans once though this way was indisputably the path to beauty and goodness and virtue and prosperity. It only led America to become a failed state. So let me say it again: Anglo-American “conservatism” is the modern world’s greatest political failure. The greatest political failure since Weimar Germany. Can you think of anything else that could’ve wrecked two of the world’s richest countries so fast and so completely? Maybe a meteor, or maybe a nuclear war — but that’s about it. Only my idiots did it to themselves.
I put “conservatism” in quotes because it should be said that Anglo-American conservatism is different. From the European-Canadian style. It’s closer, truth be told, to fanatical parties in the Balkans, or maybe just the Taliban. European-Canadian conservatives don’t (usually) believe that some people aren’t people, or that everyone shouldn’t have healthcare, or the “market” should solve every problem. Only Anglo-American ones do. It’s a peculiar belief system — extremist, fanatical, violent.
But what you must understand about it most is that it has been disproven. It is a false belief system. If Anglo-American conservatives were right, then Europe and Canada would be the failed states, and America and Britain the successful, happy, wealthy societies. Of course, the precise opposite is true.
One of the things that makes my people such goddamned tedious idiots is that they don’t understand this. They don’t seem capable of understanding it. This most basic and simple fact about the world today. That is because, perhaps, having become idiots, they don’t want to.
Anglo-Americans just go on beating each other over the head — and looking for someone weaker in the world to beat up, too. But increasingly the world rejects this foolish stance, culture, the economics it creates, seeing that America and Britain’s way has failed so badly, they can’t even civilise or provide for themselves.
Umair
March 2021