Our society has become ‘stupidogenic.’
You have the word ‘obesogenic’—used to describe a society (such as America) where the food is full of fat and the servings are always too large, hence it breeds obesity.
‘Stupidogenic’ is the mental equivalent.
It is a society that encourages citizens to shut down their brains and stop thinking. This is a society in which too many people have discarded books—and even newspapers and magazines—in favour smart phones; in which people only go to websites or social media sites where everyone agrees with them, so their thinking is never challenged.
IQs rose generally throughout the western world during the 20th century.
IQs are now starting to fall again.
That’s the evidence for our ‘stupidogenic’ society.
So far, this new word ‘stupidogenic’ is not found in any of the dictionaries that I consulted (and I checked out all the major dictionaries).
It is now even found in the hyper-hip online Urban Dictionary—so we are way ahead of the curve here!
It was Richard Godwin writing in the always delightful The Oldie magazine who alerted me to this word family of ‘stupidogenic’ and ‘stupidogensis’.
These days, he points out, we let our computers do a lot of the work for us that our brains would have done in days gone by.
We used to know how to do proper research (it might even have involved a trip to the library to consult a large selection of reference books.
These says we just Google it!
And we don’t even use our brains to read maps anymore—we just ask our GPS to do that for us.
According to the UK’s National Literary Trust one third of British adults have given up reading books entirely.
And The Economist recently reported that the sentences in best-selling books are getting shorter.
The real researchers, in this case at the MIT, call what is going on now ‘cognitive offloading.’
And, or course, the emergence of AI to take over writing out emails, assignments and reports just makes it all worse.
And what sort of democracy can a ‘stupidogenic’ society become?
What kind of leaders will we elect?
I suspect that this new word ‘stupidogenic’ is the most important word I have written about in the past 12 months.
Think about it I’m sure you’ll agree.
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