The Priest

Formerly known as Bob (part 30)

Dec 01, 2024

The apocalypse has not made anyone smarter.

Just as the world started falling apart and just before things truly went to shit, people had embraced stupidity. I used to think that people were ignorant and if you showed them the facts then they would reconsider their position. After 2016 I had to reconsider my position.
There was a guy who wrote a book called Idiot America: How stupidity became a virtue in the land of the free. It was written in 2009, 7 years before stupidity became entrenched in society, a core value, it was prophetic. The descent into the abyss of stupidity reached its zenith in 2024 when a man who could barely utter a cohesive sentence was elected as President of the United States. There was no questioning of the ballots, no kickback from the opposing party, nothing. He got elected and people walked around saying things like, “Now we have our freedoms back,” even though they couldn’t tell you what freedoms those were exactly. They were absolutely convinced that they had gotten them back. It was a time of great anxiety for the few remaining rational humans. I was among them, or so I had convinced myself. We talked about it, we chuckled about it, we cried about it, we lost sleep over it, and some of us, unable to handle what was coming, checked out.

This time period, a few years shy of a decade, became one of the bleakest times in modern human history. I think it was because when bad things happened in the past there were some intelligent people who could help to drag us out of the hole we were in, but from 2016 to the end there weren’t. There were ugly, stupid, violent, sociopaths whose numbers grew almost exponentially. They got louder, more aggressive, and less intelligent by the day. You could actually see it happening. It was like watching the milkshake disappear from the glass as you sucked on it with your straw. It became a lot scarier just about 2 years into the COVID pandemic because a significant number of, what I had supposed were, rational people began to get infected with the STUPID/AF-1 (That stands for STUPID/As Fuck-1) virus that was unstoppable. There were no vaccines or interventions. The Stupid/AF-1 virus spread rapidly, and other than a few rational people, society was swirling around the drain. It was almost harder than the collapse because, even if you acknowledged that collapse was imminent, the time leading up to it made the end seem almost like a reprieve. There were crazies everywhere, and I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill, tin-foil hat crazies, I’m talking about full-blown, balls out crazies. There were so many of them that you took your life in your hands every time you walked out the front door. I became even more insular than I had been during the early COVID years because the risk to reward ratio was skewed toward risk in a big way. I had a cousin who lived in San Francisco, and we talked a lot about how glad we were that we had decided, well before any of this happened, that alone was better.

Anyone who had been a “people person” was kind of fucked. The social types had a lot of trouble because they couldn’t seem to wrap their mind around the idea that interacting with humans was just plain dangerous, a lot of them got hurt when they kept up with a lifestyle that was no longer tenable.

I found myself wondering how many of them had made the cut and were still alive. There was a myth going around that, in the event of a collapse, you were better off having people around that could help you. The problem with that particular fabrication is that having people around increased your chances of being hurt or killed.

I will always be thankful that I could number myself among the very few real loners.

Way Past What the F**K

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