ARE WE IDIOTS?
So Why Is No One Saying It?
There’s a particular kind of failure that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t crash, it doesn’t explode, it doesn’t give you the satisfaction of a clean, cinematic moment where everyone agrees something has gone wrong. It just drifts. Quietly. Relentlessly. You don’t notice it day to day because nothing looks dramatically different in any single moment. And then, eventually, you look up and realize you’re living inside something that no longer resembles what anyone was trying to build in the first place.
That’s where I am. Not confused. Not curious. Angry.
Because what I keep hearing (from television panels, from podcasts, from people who want very badly to sound reasonable) is not outrage. It’s commentary. It’s the language of people who have learned how to discuss things without ever actually reacting to them. Everything is “complicated.” Everything is “nuanced.” Everything requires “both sides.” And maybe, in some abstract sense, that’s true. But it also becomes a very convenient way to avoid saying something much simpler: that some of what we are watching unfold is not complicated at all. It’s just bad. Obviously, plainly bad.
We are watching systems that are supposed to hold a society together such as healthcare, public health, education, basic civic trust, all erode in real time. Not collapse dramatically. Erode. And instead of reacting like something is wrong, we’ve adapted. We’ve absorbed it. We’ve turned it into background noise, the way you stop noticing a constant hum in a room until someone points it out and suddenly you can’t hear anything else.
• Time it takes for something shocking to become routine: shorter than it used to be
• Number of times something absurd happens and is immediately reframed as “just how things are now”: increasing
• Collective tolerance for low-grade dysfunction: apparently bottomless
Ricky Gervais (comedian) has built an entire career out of pointing at things people have agreed not to say out loud and then saying them anyway. One of his recurring observations is that people can get used to anything.¹ It usually gets a laugh, which is part of the trick. It’s easier to accept something uncomfortable if it arrives dressed as a joke. But the point underneath it isn’t funny. It’s a warning.
Because adaptation sounds like resilience until you realize sometimes it’s just quiet acceptance of things that should never have been accepted in the first place. It’s how you end up in a culture where people are more animated about the tone of a conversation than the reality it’s describing. Where outrage gets flattened into performance. Where anger is filtered into something safer, something more acceptable, something that doesn’t risk offending the same systems that are causing it.
I don’t feel that. I don’t feel measured about this. I don’t feel particularly interested in sounding balanced if the situation itself isn’t. There’s a version of this where people respond to what’s happening with the kind of clarity it deserves, and this isn’t it. This is the version where we keep talking, keep analyzing, keep explaining, and in the process, keep letting it continue.
And that’s the part that’s hardest to ignore. Because if you strip away the language, the hedging, the constant need to sound thoughtful, what’s left is not especially complicated. We’ve just forgotten what this was supposed to be.
THE THINGS WE DECIDED TO LIVE WITH
About thirty years ago, a friend in London asked me a question that, at the time, felt mildly irritating in the way simple questions sometimes do.
“Why do you have so many guns?”
I gave the standard American answer. History. Culture. Freedom. The Constitution. A kind of verbal shrug wrapped in confidence. It sounded coherent. It sounded practiced. It also didn’t really answer the question.
Because the question isn’t actually about guns. It’s about thresholds. Every country has problems. Some are worse than ours. Many are not. But we are the only country where this particular combination: availability, frequency, and normalization, has settled into the background noise of everyday life.² And once something becomes background noise, it becomes very hard to hear.
• Civilian-owned firearms in the United States: ~400 million²
• Countries with more guns than people: one²
• Schoolchildren participating in active shooter drills: common enough to be routine³
And then there was Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Twenty children. Six adults. A place designed, very specifically, to be safe. If there were ever a moment where a country might collectively stop and say, “No. This is the line,” that was it. Except it wasn’t.
Nothing snapped. No cultural breaking point. No sustained, collective refusal. There was grief, there was outrage and then there was something else that is harder to name but easier to recognize.
Continuation.
Chris Rock (comedian) once joked, “You don’t need gun control. You know what you need? We need some bullet control.”⁴ It lands because it’s absurd. It also lands because it’s not entirely absurd. It exposes how we orbit around the mechanics of a problem without ever quite deciding to confront the center of it.
Which is this:
We have not decided what is unacceptable, then the line doesn’t hold. It moves. Quietly. Gradually. Almost politely. Until things that would have once been unthinkable become tragic, then familiar, then expected.
And eventually, just part of the landscape.
THE PEOPLE QUIETLY HOLDING THIS TOGETHER
While all of this is happening, while we debate, analyze, and politely reframe things that probably should not be polite, there are people still showing up every day and keeping the whole thing from coming apart completely.
Teachers.
Not in the abstract. Not in the “we value education” way people say at school board meetings before voting against funding. I mean actual human beings who walk into classrooms every morning and try to hold together thirty separate nervous systems, each with their own attention span, stress level, home life, and, increasingly, baseline anxiety about the world they are growing up in.
We talk about teachers like they are heroes, which is usually what you do when you want someone to keep doing something difficult without asking for anything in return.
• Average pay gap between U.S. teachers and similarly educated professionals: about 20%⁵
• Teachers who report spending their own money on classroom supplies: over 90%⁶
• Average annual out-of-pocket spending: roughly $500 to $750⁷
Think about that for a second.
The people responsible for building the cognitive and emotional foundation of the next generation are subsidizing the system themselves. And we do not treat that as a failure. We treat it as a personality trait.
“Dedicated.”
“Passionate.”
“Called to the work.”
All very nice words that conveniently avoid the more obvious one: Under-supported.
The job itself has changed in ways that no one really sat down and designed. It used to be primarily about teaching. Now it is teaching plus behavioral management plus emotional regulation plus low-grade crisis intervention plus, in some places, preparation for scenarios that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
There is no training module for that. There is no line in the budget that says, “handle the ambient psychological stress of a society that feels unstable.”
And yet that is part of the job now.
George Carlin (comedian) had a way of compressing entire critiques into a single line. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”⁸ It gets a laugh because it feels exaggerated. It is not, really. Systems do not drift this far off course because of one bad decision. They drift because enough people, over time, decide not to notice what is happening.
And education is where you see that drift most clearly.
Public schools were once framed, correctly at least in theory, as one of the central pillars of public health. Not just places where kids learn math and reading, but where they develop the basic capacity to function in a society. Attention, cooperation, emotional regulation, problem-solving. The things that make everything else possible.
If you wanted to design a system to support long-term societal stability, you would invest heavily in that.
We do not. We rely on it. We talk about it. We argue about it.
But in terms of actual support, financial, structural, cultural, it exists in a kind of ongoing negotiation, always slightly under pressure, always expected to do more with less. And like everything else in this piece, it has not collapsed. It is just drifting.
Held together by people who keep showing up anyway.
WHEN REALITY BECOMES OPTIONAL
At some point, the problem stops being disagreement.
Disagreement assumes something important. It assumes that two people are looking at the same set of facts and coming to different conclusions. That is uncomfortable, but it is workable. Systems are built to handle that. Science, policy, even basic conversation all depend on the idea that there is a shared baseline, even if people argue about what it means.
What we are dealing with now feels different.
It feels like people are starting from entirely different versions of reality, and those versions are no longer sitting quietly at the edges. They are showing up in positions of influence, shaping policy, guiding decisions that affect millions of people. Once that happens, the usual tools stop working. You cannot argue evidence with someone who rejects the process that produces evidence. You cannot build public health policy on a foundation that does not agree on what counts as real.
Vaccines are the cleanest example because they are not subtle. They work in ways that are measurable, repeatable, and historically overwhelming. Entire diseases have been reduced, controlled, or nearly eliminated because of them. And yet, here we are, watching diseases that were once held in check begin to reappear, not because the science changed, but because belief did.
• Reduction in global measles deaths from 2000 to 2018: about 73%⁹
• Reduction in global polio cases since 1988: greater than 99%¹⁰
• Measles outbreaks in high-income countries in the past decade: increasing¹¹
That is a strange place to find yourself as a society. Not arguing about how to improve something, but arguing about whether it works at all.
Carl Sagan (astronomer and science communicator) saw this coming with an almost uncomfortable level of clarity. He wrote that we have arranged a civilization that depends entirely on science and technology, while at the same time ensuring that very few people actually understand either.¹² That is not a small oversight. That is the kind of structural weakness that does not matter until it suddenly matters a lot.
Because once understanding erodes, something else moves in to take its place. Not nothing. Something. Usually a story that feels simpler, more intuitive, more emotionally satisfying. Stories are easier to hold onto than data. They do not require interpretation. They do not ask you to change your mind. They just ask you to believe them.
Ricky Gervais has a way of making this land without people immediately bristling. He jokes about how people do not change their minds because of evidence. They change their minds when holding the old belief becomes more uncomfortable than letting it go.¹³ It gets a laugh, but it also explains more than most policy papers ever will.
This is the part that people try to smooth over. It is easier to call it a difference of opinion. It is easier to invite both sides, to keep the tone calm, to pretend that what we are watching is just another version of healthy debate.
It is not. There are places where nuance matters. There are places where multiple perspectives are useful, even necessary. This is not one of those places. Because if you lose the idea of a shared reality, you do not just lose the argument.
You lose the ability to have one at all.
THE PART WHERE WE PRETEND WE’RE DIFFERENT
In medical school, I spent time in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa first, then further south in a place called Ziway. In many of those settings, I was one of the only white people most of the people I met had ever seen. That feels like it should be a meaningful difference. It looks like one. It registers immediately.
Biologically, it is almost nothing. Humans share about 99.9 percent of their genetic material.¹⁴ That is not a metaphor. That is not a poetic way of saying we are all connected. That is the actual number. Which means most of what we build identities around, most of what we divide ourselves over, lives in the remaining fraction.
That fraction is doing a lot of work. There is a line of research that has been quietly uncomfortable for decades. It shows that there is often more genetic variation within a given population than between populations separated by geography.¹⁵ In other words, the categories we use to sort people feel far more distinct than they actually are.And yet we organize entire systems around them.
We build identities out of them. We build conflicts out of them. We build narratives that explain who belongs and who does not, who is safe and who is not, who is “like us” and who is something else. Staring me in the face was the result of so many hindrances to any kind of access. What we take (took) for granted growing up in the US is not a dream to the people I met in Ziway, as they developed their own way of dealing with things. But I learned from my Ethiopian medical school counterparts in Addis Ababa that it really doesn’t matter from where a doctor comes. It feels real.
That does not mean it is real in the way we think it is.
Robert Sapolsky (neuroscientist) has spent a career studying how biology intersects with behavior, and he is careful about what it does and does not explain. “Biology is about potential, not inevitability,” he writes.¹⁶ That is a polite way of saying that we come equipped with the capacity for a wide range of behaviors, but what we actually do with that capacity is shaped by environment, repetition, and reinforcement.
We are not hardwired for division in the way people sometimes suggest. We are trained into it. Which would be less concerning if we were also not so good at it.
There is something deeply human about drawing lines. It simplifies things. It creates a sense of order. It tells you where you stand without requiring too much thought. It also makes it very easy to forget how thin those lines actually are. Because once you start looking closely, they blur.
The person on the other side of whatever boundary you have drawn is, biologically speaking, almost identical to you. The differences that feel enormous from a distance shrink under scrutiny. What is left is a recognition that is harder to hold onto if your identity depends on the separation being real.
This is where things start to overlap with everything else in this piece. Because if you can convince people that the differences between them are fundamental, permanent, and meaningful enough to justify distance, then cooperation becomes harder. Empathy becomes conditional. Public health becomes fragmented. Education becomes uneven. Systems that depend on shared investment start to fracture.
It does not happen all at once. It drifts. And before long, you are no longer arguing about policy or resources or priorities. You are arguing about who counts. That is a much harder problem to solve.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SYSTEM
If you step back from all of this, the argument about guns, the drift in education, the slow fracture in shared reality, the lines we draw between each other, you start to notice something simpler underneath it. The system itself does not seem to know what it is trying to do anymore.
Public health, at least in theory, is not complicated. It is not mysterious. It is not supposed to be reactive. The goal is to create the conditions where people can stay well in the first place. Clean water. Stable food systems. Sleep. Safety. Education. Access to care before something turns into a crisis. That is the design.
What we have built instead is something that looks very different. We are extraordinarily good at intervening after things go wrong. We can treat disease, manage complications, extend life in ways that would have been unimaginable not that long ago. There is real brilliance in that. Real progress. But it is not the same as maintaining health. And somewhere along the way, those two ideas started to blur.
• Percentage of U.S. healthcare spending devoted to prevention: small relative to treatment¹⁷
• Adults in the United States with at least one chronic disease: about 60%¹⁸
• Healthcare dollars spent after disease onset: the vast majority
That is not an accident. It is a structure. It is a system that rewards intervention more than prevention, response more than stability, treatment more than maintenance. You do not have to assume anything malicious for that to happen. You just have to follow incentives long enough and watch where they lead. And they lead here.
To a place where we spend more time managing breakdown than preventing it. Where the baseline expectation is that something will go wrong, and the system is designed to step in after the fact rather than reduce the likelihood that it happens at all. There is a strange comfort in that. It creates the illusion that we are in control, that whatever happens can be handled, addressed, treated.
But it also creates a kind of passivity. Because if the system is built to catch you when you fall, there is less urgency to ask why so many people are falling in the first place.
Jerry Garcia (musician) once said, “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.”¹⁹ It was not about public health. It was not about policy. But it captures something familiar, that quiet recognition that the responsibility is obvious, and the follow-through is not.
We know what supports health. We know what destabilizes it. We know that education, safety, and basic trust are not separate from public health, but foundational to it. And yet, we keep building a system that behaves as if those things are secondary, optional, or someone else’s problem. That is not confusion. That is drift again.
The same pattern, just applied at a different scale.
REWRITING THE PLOT
If you step back from all of this, the guns, the schools, the slow drift in public health, the fracture in shared reality, the lines we draw between each other, it stops looking like a collection of separate problems. It starts to look like the same pattern repeating itself in different places. Different settings, same movement. We are reacting instead of deciding. We are absorbing instead of rejecting. We are adapting to things that, not that long ago, would have stopped us in our tracks. And the most unsettling part is not that it is happening, but how normal it has started to feel.
There is a version of this where we go in a different direction. Not dramatically, not overnight, not with some speech that everyone remembers later as the turning point. Something quieter than that. Something deliberate. A version where public health is not an afterthought but a foundation, where education is treated like infrastructure instead of a recurring argument, where prevention is not something we gesture toward but something we actually build into the system in ways that change outcomes over time. We know what that looks like. We already have pieces of it. We just do not connect them.
And the reason we do not connect them is not because it is especially complicated. It is because it would require clarity. It would require saying, plainly, that some things are not acceptable and then acting like that is true, even when it is inconvenient, even when it is politically awkward, even when it forces trade-offs that people would rather avoid. That kind of clarity is uncomfortable. It closes off the easy escape routes. It removes the ability to keep talking without deciding.
So instead, we drift. The line moves, not all at once, not dramatically, but gradually, almost politely. We tell ourselves we will deal with it later, when it is clearer, when it is easier, when there is more agreement. There is always a reason to wait, and the reasons usually sound thoughtful enough that no one pushes too hard against them.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (author) had a way of cutting through that kind of thinking. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”²⁴ It sounds simple, almost too simple, but it lands because it removes the distance. It makes it harder to act like this is happening somewhere else, to someone else, at some other time. Because it is not.
What we are pretending, collectively, is that this is fine. That this is just how things are now. That there is no clear alternative, no obvious shift that could be made, no way to reorient the system toward something that resembles what it was supposed to be. But that is not true. It is just easier. Easier to keep talking, easier to keep analyzing, easier to keep the tone measured and the conclusions open-ended than to say, clearly, that we have drifted off course.
And continuing in the same direction is not neutral. It is a decision. It just does not feel like one in the moment. It feels like inertia. It feels like normal. Until enough time passes that you can see the distance, and by then the system you are living in no longer resembles the one you would have chosen if you had been asked directly.
That is where we are. And the uncomfortable part is that nothing about it is inevitable. It is chosen, quietly and repeatedly, over time. Which means it can be changed the same way, if we decide to.
WHAT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE
There is a version of this country, and really a version of the world, that we still reference without fully realizing it. You hear it in speeches, in mission statements, in the way people describe what systems like healthcare, education, and public health are supposed to do. They are supposed to protect people. They are supposed to create stability. They are supposed to make it possible for someone to live a reasonably healthy life without needing to fight every step of the way just to maintain it.
That was the idea.
Not perfection. Not fairness in every instance. But a baseline. A shared understanding that certain things matter enough to build around. That children should be safe in schools. That education should be supported, not constantly negotiated. That public health should prevent problems before they become crises. That reality itself should not feel like something up for debate.
None of that is radical.
And none of it should require this much effort to defend.
What makes this moment difficult to sit with is not just that those things feel unstable. It is how quickly we have adjusted to that instability, and how strangely quiet that adjustment has been. We are surrounded by things that do not make sense, and yet there is very little collective willingness to say, plainly, that they do not make sense.
The emperor has no clothes. Everyone sees it. Almost no one says it. This is why I ask, are we idiots?
Instead, we get commentary. We get tone. We get endless parsing of how something was said rather than whether it is true. People with real authority stand in rooms that used to command a kind of seriousness, and speak in ways that would have once been disqualifying. And rather than reacting to that breach, we absorb it into the atmosphere.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (U.S. Senator, sociologist) warned about this decades ago when he said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”²⁶ What he was pointing to was not just disagreement, but erosion. A slow shift away from shared standards of evidence, expertise, and basic accountability.
We are well past the warning phase. We are now in the phase where expertise itself is treated as suspect. Where the word “expert” is used less as a marker of knowledge and more as a signal that someone should be ignored. Where institutions that were built to produce and interpret evidence are either sidelined or actively undermined.
In public health, that has consequences that are almost absurd when you say them out loud. Congress effectively restricted federal funding from being used to study gun violence as a public health issue for decades.²⁷ Not because the data did not matter, but because the conclusions might. Which means we have been navigating one of the most visible and persistent causes of death in this country while intentionally limiting our ability to understand it.
That is not nuance. That is willful blindness. And utterly stupid.
At the same time, power has concentrated in ways that feel disconnected from anything resembling accountability. Enormous amounts of wealth and influence have accumulated in a relatively small number of hands, particularly in technology, shaping not just markets but attention, discourse, and increasingly, how people understand reality itself. And rather than stabilizing the system, that concentration has coincided with a kind of fragmentation, where people are pushed toward simpler, more divisive explanations for complex problems.
It is easier to turn people against each other than to ask harder questions about structure. Easier to argue about who belongs than to examine what is happening. Easier to redirect attention than to hold it. Of course, it’s not Mexicans; it’s AI and robots who will replace us. We know who stole our wealth to have their own high school sword-battle with the anti-Christ.
And while all of that is happening, the tone of leadership shifts. The level of seriousness drops. The distance between what these roles are supposed to represent and how they are actually performed becomes harder to ignore, at least if you are paying attention. These are not heroes or geniuses, they are juvenile criminals. By “they” I mean people in the Epstein Class like Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and too many others, including Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon’s arch-nemesis: Sam Altman.
Most people see this. They just are not saying it. Because saying it requires stepping out of the script. It requires giving up the safety of sounding measured and stepping into something clearer, and clarity carries risk. It forces decisions. It makes it harder to retreat back into analysis.
So instead, we adapt. We adjust. We tell ourselves this is just how things are now. And that is the part that matters most. Because the system does not hold together because everything is working. It holds together because enough people are willing to keep acting like it is.
If you’ve made it this far, you already see it. The question is what you do with that. If this resonates, share it. Send it to someone who still thinks this is all “complicated.” Leave a comment. I read them, and I respond.
If you want more of this, where psychiatry, public health, and whatever this is we’re living through intersect, please subscribe. If you’re already here, consider upgrading to support the work.
And if you’re in Boulder, or nearby, and want to talk about this in a room where reality is still allowed to exist, you know where to find me.
Notes and Sources
Ricky Gervais. Stand-up routines and interviews (2000–2020), recurring themes on normalization and social behavior.
Small Arms Survey (2018). Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers. Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (2022). School Safety and Security Report. U.S. Department of Education.
Chris Rock. Bring the Pain. HBO, 1996; subsequent stand-up material.
Economic Policy Institute (2021). The Teacher Pay Penalty Has Hit a New High. Washington, DC.
National Education Association (2020). Teacher Spending on School Supplies Survey.
U.S. Department of Education (2018). National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS).
George Carlin. HBO stand-up specials and performances (1990s–2000s).
World Health Organization (2019). Measles Mortality Reduction Report 2000–2018. Geneva.
Global Polio Eradication Initiative (2020). Polio Eradication Progress Report. Geneva.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2023). Measles Cases and Outbreaks Data. Atlanta, GA.
Carl Sagan (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, pp. 26–27.
Ricky Gervais. Stand-up routines and interviews (2000s–2020s), themes on belief and human behavior.
International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (2003). “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome.” Nature, 409, pp. 860–921.
Lewontin, R.C. (1972). “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6, pp. 381–398.
Robert Sapolsky (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press, pp. 12–15.
Kaiser Family Foundation (2022). Distribution of Health Expenditures in the United States. San Francisco, CA.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2022). Chronic Diseases in America. Atlanta, GA.
Jerry Garcia. Interviews and public remarks (1970s–1990s).
World Health Organization (2021). Screening Programmes: A Short Guide. Geneva.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2020). Health at a Glance: Europe. Paris.
World Health Organization (2019). Preventable Disease Burden Estimates. Geneva.
Jerry Seinfeld. Stand-up comedy routines (1980s–1990s).
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1961). Mother Night. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 101.
Jerry Garcia. Interviews and public remarks (1970s–1990s).
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1983). Public remarks; widely cited in political discourse on facts and public truth.
U.S. Congress (1996). Dickey Amendment. Public Law 104–208; impact on CDC funding for firearm injury research.