The marching morons
In the distant future a man from the twentieth century wakes to find himself in an almost incomprehensible world...He realizes that the world has left him behind, but he just might have the key to the future of all mankind. Cyril M. Kornbluth was a highly influential science fiction writer who won both a Hugo Award and a Prometheus Award.
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- I would add that after reading The Machine Stops you should read Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" from 1951. Talk about prescient! It reads like a meld of Idiocracy and the current U.S. administration.
From the Wikipedia entry: "In 1988, real estate agent and con artist John Barlow is placed in suspended animation after a freak accident. He is revived in the distant future, in a confusing world filled with hypersexualized advertisements, vapid entertainment, and people who exhibit erratic, nonsensical behavior."
- Or even Venus, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
(Text here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm)
Both involved Cyril Kornbluth, what a great talent, taken far too soon.
Interestingly, Pohl wrote a sequel to The Space Merchants decades later, and I picked it up, fully expecting it to be terrible, and it was brilliant, and made me cry at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_nov...
- > The stuff I've read that touches on this idea is almost all from 2006 and onwards, mainly 2010s. The earliest example is a bit of an outlier: Douglas Hubbard's 1985 How to Measure Anything -- but it's also only tangentially related.
I didn’t keep good track of such things but a lot of my early reading in the 70’s was in operations research and decision support systems, mostly sort of what we call operational analytics these days with a big helping of statistical process control too. World War 2 logistics practices and ‘50s and ‘60s “scientific management” fads generated a lot of material, some insightful. Many medium-sized businesses could afford significant R&D then, so you’ll find e.g. furniture factories developing their own computer systems from PCBs to custom ASIC components, just to manage statistical process control and decision support systems.
> That said, I did mention it was obvious to me. I still find it hard to convince management and colleagues of its importance...
I think the reason I keep having to justify this every few years is the tendency towards abstractions in management which try to simplify things into “anecdotal analytics”, e.g. preferring a persuasive narrative over reality...for a good cynical perspective from the ‘50s I recommend C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons>).
- Only if intelligence leads to greater fitness in the Darwinian sense. Don't confuse higher socio-economic status with Darwinian fitness. Plenty of people of quite modest intelligence and limited achievement are successfully passing their genes on to the next generation.
Recommended reading: The Marching Morons by Cyril Kornbluth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
- From the article:
"My favorite along these lines is a classic, Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons." It's the original version of "Idiocracy" — the basic idea is that selection now favors the stupid, and so if we go forward in time, that's what we'll see. The concept is simple and well-drawn; the consequences unexpected."
I would say the current state of American politics is a warning sign for this condition.
edit: quote was taken from John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison:
- The classic version is Kornbluth's 1951 story "The Marching Morons", itself pretty clearly the basis for Idiocracy.
(You could argue that "The Time Machine" was the original example.)
