Is America Raising a Generation of Idiots?The principle of the idiot is self-sufficiency, self-ownership. The motive force is self-will.
By Anthony Esolen
July 7, 2022
“Ihate everyone who doesn’t like me,” says little Anthony Fremont, who has held the whole town of Peaksville in terror. That is because he has a power to read minds—at least, to read any intentions that anybody has which may oppose his own, including any disapproval of himself and what he has done—and a power to make things and destroy them. The things he makes, though, are those to the taste of a small boy who delights in what is hideous and cruel. He kills the neighbor’s dog because the animal barked at him. He kills another neighbor’s children because they didn’t want to play the way he did, wishing them “into the cornfield,” as he says. And he is not troubled by the least glint of a conscience. He is an utterly innocent sociopathic monster.
Even his father, who comes as close as possible to expressing some degree of disapproval, is reduced to pretense, to agreeing with him lest the fury come down upon him. That includes when Anthony makes it snow in the summer, ruining the crops. “But it’s a good thing you did, Anthony,” he says, backing up, with a tremor in his voice. Everyone has to say so.
Our readers may recognize the setup here of the famous 1961 episode, “It’s a Good Life,” in the old “Twilight Zone” series. Of course, no one among us would accept the principles—if we can call them by that name—that animate little Anthony. Or would we? He pursues what he wants, regardless of what anybody else wants. He makes “television” for everybody—a movie about monsters fighting each other to the death—and he assumes that everybody will enjoy it as much as he does, or rather they had better enjoy it, because if they do not, that means that they disapprove of him, which means they don’t like him, and, of course, he responds with the monstrous equation above, dealing out justice.
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We might say that the episode is about original sin. Give unlimited powers to any human being, and we should expect cruelty and horror. But here I would like to add another consideration, one that corroborates our sense that man is radically flawed, and prone to wickedness when there are no checks on him. It is the Greek notion of the idiot.
Anthony Fremont, for all his power and his considerable intelligence, is an idiot, like the Cyclops in his cave. Polyphemus and his one-eyed fellows, says Homer in the Odyssey, raise no crops, tend no vines, build no buildings, and never meet in assemblies; all they do is herd their sheep and goats, live in their caves, deal with their wives and offspring, and every Cyclops family ignores its neighbors.
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Are we raising idiots in America? Well, as soon as you say that in any single realm of human action each person may possess his own moral vision, as if he were the god of his little Peaksville, you have sought out your cave, and only your physical limitations, the civil law (sometimes), some fear of vengeance from your victims, and some residual non-idiocy from the religious traditions of what used to be your culture will keep you from being Anthony Fremont as far as you can be.
It is the property of the idiot to refuse to look beyond himself or the small group of like-selved people. He may trick up his insistence with the frills of an argument, but all it is, in the end, is a stamp of the foot and a shout, “I wanna!”
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The idiot has a radically foreshortened field of thought. Anthony Fremont does not care what is going on beyond Peaksville. It doesn’t matter. It is easy to say, “Whatever it is, it’s not as good as here, because here I get what I want.” Just as the idiot does not consider the common good, so too the idiot is unimpressed by the past. He acknowledges no debt of gratitude to those who came before. To his own forebears, he cries, “You were bad men! You were very bad men!” And he wishes them into a cornfield of ignorance, distortions, and outright lies. For you can be a Cyclops in time as in space, if every generation ignores the generations past, or, in the playing-out of the premises of their actions, the generations to come.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/07/is-america-raising-a-generation-of-idiots/
