Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce (PDF)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe three Great Premises of Idiot America:· Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units· Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough· Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it With his trademark wit and insight, veteran journalist Charles Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. Pierce asks how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate. But his thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated. Erudite and razor-sharp, Idiot America is at once an invigorating history lesson, a cutting cultural critique, and a bullish appeal to our smarter selves.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Charles Pierce certainly was not writing with Trump in mind nor do I think in 2009 he was anticipating Trump, but this book provides a good analysis of the social consensus and summary of the cultural conditions that created the necessary conditions precedent making the election of Trump possible. Ironically, on the back cover of this edition Pierce muses how the simpletons of the country are more apt to vote in a realty show contest than in a presidential election. Little could Pierce have realized at the time, but the simpletons conflated both activities and actually elected a reality TV show host as president, or possibly the presidential election itself became a reality show – the antecedents and accretions of such astoundingly stupidity are delineated in this book.Long forgotten by the voting public is that in a multicultural and multireligious democracy, clear thinking is a moral obligation. Democracy is a moral tradition, it depends on mutual respect and honest intellectual collaboration for the common good, not bigoted, anti-intellectual pandering to the inverted virtue of stupidity.Cranks & IdiotsMuch of the book displays the author’s struggles to define where the much-desired public crank leaves off and the now much-admired public idiot takes up. Needless to say, the cranks are all but extinct and a new species of idiot reigns supreme. The crank is the one who presents the public conscious with uncomfortable facts as well as valid alternative perspectives and challenges to common sense and received wisdom whereas the public idiot is the one who flames the fans of spurious conspiracy ideas as theory and accepts dogmatic beliefs as genuine theory. Examples of idiocy include the war an expertise, the popularity of anti-intellectualism, the notion that all opinions are valid, and that all points of view deserve a fair hearing. These are the manifest examples of professional stupidity as a virtue and willful ignorance as a profit center.The Market Place of Ideas:In my own opinion, one of the most idiotic notions in current circulation is the market place of ideas. The one place that market principles do not belong is in the realm of ideas. This is how idiot ideas see their first light and draw their first breadth. The appeal to the market place is a reduction to lowest common denominator and based on the principle that all ideas deserve equal respect and that the best ideas will win out grounded on consensus or some sort of market process. Not all opinions are equally valid, deserving of respect, or a hearing by thinking self-reflective people. The market place may be the appropriate venue for goods and service, but not ideas. Truth, to the extent we can apprehend it, is not a matter of consensus, popularity or profitability. The risk is that the consensus soon becomes a notion of common sense or received wisdom that cannot be challenged or changed. This is how orthodoxy is formed and ideology is created.The Foundation of all Nonsense:Again, in my opinion the ability to believe in nonsense starts with the ability to accept the claims of religion. If a person can believe in God, they can believe in anything. This is what I think is meant by “… with God, all things are possible…” There is no end to the possibility of nonsense beliefs – with God in the picture. If a person can accept the sweeping metaphysical claims made by religion which have no evidence and are contrary to what is known about the natural world from science, then there is no claim that cannot be believed. This creates a world of idiots where truth claims become whatever is fervently believed. Worse yet, the believing idiots act upon their beliefs.In a way, religion is the ultimate secret society / conspiracy theory combination. Religion has the elements of both secret societies and conspiracy theories, both of which rear their ugly head when the culture is uncertain or when the social consensus is changing rapidly. When people are desperately looking around in all directions for reasons and causes, the simple explanations provided by a conspiracy theory and the ingroup comfort offered by religion are very satisfying.The author lays out his three great premises of idiocy:1. Any theory is valid as long as it is marketable2. Truth becomes what is yelled the loudest and most fervently believed3. A fact is that which enough people believeIn relation to the first premise, I have come to realize that nothing is real in a market economy if it cannot be assigned market value. Much is lost through this blind spots of the market economy. This creates the odd irony of marketable megachurch Christianity and its touting many products for profit.Examples of high profile idiocy offered by Charles Pierce include, but are not limited to:The 1980s AIDS panic, the Dover, PA Intelligent Design v Evolution case of 2005 and the Terri Schiavo hospice case that wore on into 2005. There are also stunning lies, or idiotic truths, that allowed the U.S. to stumble into the Iraq war in 2003. These show that many ideas and opinions should be treated with contempt, scorn and rich derision.Why Religion is so Prominent in the U.S.? (not in the book):Compared to its European counterparts, the U.S. is a much more religious (Christian) country. I think there is a very simple reason for this difference. In Europe, religion and the church were part of the ruling class, associated with monarchy, the aristocracy and hierarchal class structure. It was much easier to overthrow religion when it was overthrown as part of an oppressive political structure and social hierarchy. In America, religion was seen a source of freedom from the state, a buttress of personal liberty. In America, the church became separated from the state and was thus seen as a source of freedom, a counterweight to the state and not a tool of oppression. Ironically, the first setters in America were religious decenters from Europe in search of the freedom to practice their own form of repressive religion.With the separation of church and state, religious belief expanded and even exploded in the U.S. The problem is that as society has naturally evolved into a more secular awareness through the advance of science with a more humanist consciousness through the development of philosophy, religion manages to maintain its grasp on an independent existence. The separation of religion from that state has had the unintended consequence of keeping the ancient superstitious nonsense and idiocy of religion alive and thriving in our midst spewing its venomous poison into the body politic and infecting the culture with the disease of TB (True Belief). If church and state were not separated, it is possible the U.S. would have experienced a development more in line with the European nations, viz., with the secularization of the state with religion, as real political force at least, withering and dying.Misunderstanding Sartre (in the book):It always unfortune when it occurs, and I take no pleasure in pointing out an author’s errors, but I feel obligated to do so by having the temerity to post of review. On p. 40, we find, “…the old Catholic notion of Purgatory. And it’s made up entirely of other people-which, as you may recall, was Sartre’s precise description of hell.” If we are going to be precise, then lets by all means do so. Precisely speaking, Sartre did not literally mean that the existence of, or coexistence with, other people is hell. I believe that Sartre meant that our relations with other people cannot help but be infected because when we think about ourselves, we think in terms of how other people know us and see us. We judge ourselves by the standards of other people. Thus, our relations with other people are always poisoned by us, by our fetish for how the others are perceiving and judging us. This is the hell of which Sartre spoke, it is self-created. This is always the danger with a philosopher who writes in an engaging and quotable aphoristic style – the aphorisms are taken out of context, misunderstood, misapplied and enter public currency twisted into a new meaning, confused and contorted thus contributing to public idiocy based on over simplicity.

⭐I enjoyed the book, but it does take intellectual effort to understand it. Not because the premise and the arguments are hard to comprehend, but because the book lacks a clear narrative. It is as if the author knows what he wants to say, but does not know how to say it. And on top of that, there are some contradictions.First, let me tell you what I understand from the book. The author argues that a wave upon a wave of idiocy is washing over America, and each wave is getting worse. He discusses and analyzes a number of examples ranging from such things as conspiracy theories, intelligent design vs. evolution, 1980s AIDS hysteria, denial of global warming, invasion of Iraq and even the Terri Shiavo case. Even reality TV gets a treatment. Some of these are discussed for whole chapters, some get only few paragraphs.The author is irked not so much that there is debate about those things and that there are passionate people on both sides of the issue, but that the arguments are not based on research, education and careful analysis, but uneducated, irrational emotion that is uninterested in researching the problem. The author calls it the “Gut”. What bothers him is that the Gut is not limited to a fringe of crackpots and fanatics, but is part of the mainstream in the medias and the political establishment.Time and time again he brings in his Three Great Premises of Idiot America.Premise 1: Any theory is valid if it moves units. (Does sufficient amount of people pay attention? Do ratings go up?)Premise 2: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough. (If you are passionate and persistent and manage to get broadcasted or published, then what you say is true, even if it isn’t.)Premise 3: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.Not only are crazy views and theories shoved down the collective throat of America, they are not disputed. Genuine experts who can challenge them through learned arguments are ignored in favor of witty, entertaining pundits who gladly offer their opinions (which are not presented as “opinions” but truthful, correct judgments) on matters they have no training or education to make decisions about. Expertise, training, experience, education, even intelligence are disregarded and seen as suspicious. To be well educated is to be elitist, and to be elitist is to be ignored.The author has some sort of fascination with the person of James Madison whom he sees as the best educated and intellectual of America’s Founding Fathers. He often talks how Madison argued that the American government is the government of the people, and it can function only if its citizenry is well educated and wise.Fair enough, but I think that this is a glorification of the past. In Madison’s days the population tended to be less educated than today. Many never went to school or dropped out early and college was reserved for small, wealthy elite. And for all the fairy tale talk about government of the people, through the people and for the people, in reality US government was (and largely still is) dominated by white men coming from rich and upper middle class families.Nor was idiocy absent in the past. The author talks about modern conspiracy theories and how people for some reason like to blame everything on Freemasons (or Illuminati). Then he brings an example of anti-Mason hysteria that broke out in 1827 (when James Madison was still alive). The hysteria was caused by allegations that Freemasons murdered one of their own to stop him from revealing the order’s secrets. By all accounts, the hysteria that followed met the Three Great Premises.The author feels admiration for something he calls “American Crank.” Those were individuals who dedicated a lot of their time and energy (if not their whole life) to propagation of crank ideas. The author names only one such American Crank, and that is a gentleman by the name of Ignatius Donnelly.Donnelly was a man living in 19th century. He started as an entrepreneur and then failed. So he went into politics and then failed. So he went home and devoted his life to research and writing books. He wrote a book proving the existence of Atlantis (which became a bestseller), then he wrote a book proving that Earth’s continents were formed by an impact of a comet (the book flopped), and then he wrote yet another book proving that Shakespeare’s plays contain a secret code indicating that they were in reality written by Francis Bacon (the book was ridiculed). Despite being a crank, the author admires Donnelly for his painstaking research and hard work.Donnelly is contrasted with modern Cranks who do not work hard, who do not do any research and who are able to spread their cranky ideas far and wide thanks to mass medias and internet.Ok. First, Donnelly was not the only 19th century Crank (but the only one who gets mentioned in the book). I’m sure that there were lots of lazy, uneducated Cranks back in those days. Two, there was no TV, radio and internet in the 19th century. Had they had them back then, Donnelly might have been appearing regularly on television and blogging like crazy to prove that Shakespeare is Francis Bacon. And thirdly, a crank idea is a crank idea no matter where and how it comes from. In fact, if the Crank who produced it is well educated and works hard, then his ideas will gain a halo of legitimacy, which only makes it harder to disapprove, thus allowing the idea to persist for longer and inflict greater damage.It is also here that I see a big contradiction. The author makes fun of Cranks who try to prove that Sasquatch exists or that an alien spacecraft crashed at Rosewell. So, Donnelly’s painstaking research into Shakespearian writings to prove that Francis Bacon wrote them is to be admired, but people who painstakingly research and gather evidence on sasquatch or UFOs are to be scorned at?There are other contradictions, but I won’t go over them all. What I am trying to say is that overall the book is interesting, but the author seems lost at times (quite often, actually). He gives great examples, but does not clearly lay out his thesis. He jumps from one example to another and back again with little reason or rhyme. Like when he talks about false image created around American presidents and then starts talking how movie novelizations are stupid and a swindle and how E.T’s novelization sexualizes the relationship between E.T. and the boy’s mother. And then off we go to talk about war in Iraq. I know that when I write it, it sounds hilarious, but when I was reading that part I was scratching my head.The author talks about how idiocy is pushed as a product, so he implies that there is some agenda here, but he never develops the idea further. When talking about Iraq, he says in one part that the people at the top deliberately planned it, but then he says they were themselves victims of idiocy. So which one is it? Or maybe a little bit of both? The author is not clear.Still, the book is nevertheless very interesting and humorous (both intentionally and unintentionally) at times. You should definitely read it.

⭐So, the politically correct censorship decided that my previous review was not in line with the page guidelines, and deleted it (after threatening more retaliatory moves). Second try: the author writes a pamphlet against the Bush administration and focuses on some topics from the 2001-2008 years. Although there’s a good amount of idiocy in that, it’s hardly the real point of the book. Entire chapters are devoted to polemics involving obscure characters in the U.S. radio industry and leaves the reader agonyzing over them. Others are about climate change, others involve evolutionism vs. creationism. That’s interesting, but quite limited to one specific political party. I suggested also devoting some attention to other behaviours and features, e.g. the notorious ideology exacting the non-males virtues, or the one denying the actual meaning or existence of sex or race difference, to give a more complete picture of U.S. (and not only) modern idiocy.

⭐I purchased this for my brother, who has developed a fascination with US politics since the last election. A fascinating insight into American culture and how what were once considered fringe eccentrics have, through increasingly easy access to the media, become mainstream, their often crazy ideas being elevated to the same status as, well, reality! With some great historical figures, right up to the 2008 election (this book would really benefit from a Trump era revision), it’s a worthy read for anybody interested in America and its culture.

⭐This book offers real insight, particularly for those who want to understand more about America’s many contradictons. It is fair-minded and also writtten with great humour and insight. I highly recommend it.

⭐Being a fan of all (most) things American, I was relieved to discover this book is not wanton ‘yank bashing’. It provides a fascinating insight into the lives and values of milions upon millions of Americans. It also shows how these people – the poor, the insular, the poorly educated, the religious and credulous – are actually exploited by the very people who claim to represent them. Great reading.

⭐Someone taking a stand against the stupidity of bowing to views that go against sense because they make money or are religiously motivated.

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