Recently, I read that stupidity will become a trend in 2026.
It was shocking. Perhaps because it felt so familiar.
Being stupid describes a feeling I’ve had about myself, my neighbors, politicians, and the world quite often in recent years.
Stupidity seems like an obvious explanation for things happening in our time.
Oh, yes! That was what everything was about. An obvious cause for the world’s decline. Which, by the way, we are not the first generation to believe.
The talk about stupidity is so pervasive that New York Magazine dedicated an entire issue in November, ’The Stupid Issue,’ to investigate why Americans’ (and probably the rest of the world’s ) IQ has started to drop drastically since the 2000s.
It has become a recurring lament today for a researcher, author, journalist, or politician to declare that our lifetime is the golden age of stupidity.
A few months ago, ’Short History of Stupidity’ was published, written by British journalist Stuart Jeffries. He writes that with all the preoccupation with stupidity, the book is just a smart way to secure his pension. Besides, reviewers are welcome to write that it is a sharp analysis of our contemporary dominant affliction.
It is an affliction that splits into two: There is cognitive stupidity, which is about our attention and ability to think deteriorating. And then there is cultural stupidity, which spreads because it has become possible to capitalize on one’s ignorance in entirely new ways than before.
Simply because stupidity is quite entertaining for all of us.
All of this – with a bit more nuance – I get answers to in this article, when I speak with two prominent voices who have sparked the stupidity debate internationally.
I ask them where they see stupidity thriving. And what we should understand when people from both the right and left say we live in the golden age of stupidity. Because it might feel that way, but is it true?
The two are not at all in agreement about what stupidity says about us. And whether we have indeed become dumber.
Stupidity Theory
While I write this, I know that few will reach the last sentence of the article. Online, we can measure when people find an exit. And for longer articles, it’s satisfying if a quarter reads to the bottom, as we call it.
I probably don’t read most articles to the end myself.
My intellect is pretty average, and in that way, I resemble most others. In January, I wrote an article that took half an hour to read aloud, and I could see that the average reading time was one minute and 46 seconds. I was quite satisfied with that.
Therefore, I am actually quite stupid when I’m now writing another long piece that no one apparently really bothers with.
Journalist Lane Brown is also not the sharpest tool in the shed in some respects. He is a long-form writer for New York Magazine and spends a month and a half writing articles that few read from start to finish.
I meet him in front of the webcam at his home office, where he sits in a flannel shirt, airpods, and with a dog that occasionally barks in the background. He always works from home because he can’t concentrate in the open office landscape in Lower Manhattan, he says.
He has also been an editor at the magazine’s culture section for 15 years and helped launch the culture magazine Vulture.
And he is the man behind the essay, Theory of Dumb – which is the cover story in the magazine’s stupid issue in November.
»I’m sure you’re familiar with this a little bit, it’s just it seems like nobody reads an entire piece anymore«, he says.
»I’m trying to think what would hook a lazy reader. You know, I’m no better. What would hook me or what would make me keep reading«.
The Reverse Flynn Effect
It is far from the first time in world history that we agree we have become dumber, says Lane Brown.
In earlier times, experts believed that the spread of books to everyone would make us dumber. They also thought that light bulbs were to blame. That newspapers would make us dumber. The same with television. Calculators and porn were also supposed to make us dumber. And rock music was truly devastating.
It just didn’t seem to happen.
Because at the beginning of the 20th century, the average IQ in the USA and other Western countries suddenly began to rise. A New Zealand sociologist named James Flynn discovered this, and therefore this sudden upswing is called the ’Flynn Effect.’
From around 1910, the average IQ score increased by three to five points per decade. The development could not be attributed to evolutionary mechanisms, which need much longer time to work, so instead, the sociologist claimed that there was simply something in modern life that had improved our cognitive abilities.
He believed it was due to better education, as school no longer focused on learning by heart, and at the same time, more office jobs and less manual labor were created, requiring brains to work. And perhaps most importantly, the development of mass media in the 20th century was crucial for stimulating our brains: Books, newspapers, radio listening, films.
This led to us collectively becoming better at generalizing, reflecting, and thinking beyond our narrow everyday life, which a higher IQ among other things entails.
What follows now is probably not so surprising. After the fantastic story that we actually just became cognitively sharper and better at reflecting over a longer period, newer studies show that there has now been a reverse Flynn Effect.
Since the 2000s, the average IQ has dropped significantly in the USA.
The study is conducted by Elisabeth Dworak, and in 2023 she analyzed 394,378 IQ tests between 2006 and 2018. At first, she didn’t believe the numbers and felt like she was in a science fiction movie, she told Lane Brown.
The decline could be seen across age, gender, and education level but was most significant among 18-22-year-olds and those with the shortest education.
There are a couple of objections that are important to include. Among other things, there was no decline in the category that deals with the ability to rotate three-dimensional objects (which Lane Brown points out is crucial when playing the computer game ’Fortnite’).
And then there is the most important caveat: One cannot say that the decline in IQ means that people are just becoming dumber.
IQ has always been a rough or imagined measure of intelligence and is not necessarily an expression of how smart one is, but rather a picture of which cognitive abilities society appreciates in a test.
»It could just be that they’re getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests«, says Dworak in a press release about the study.
But regardless of what one might think about what IQ tests measure, Americans are doing worse in them. We are also doing worse in Europe. A large study in Norway from 2018 showed that Norwegian men’s IQ peaked for those born in 1975, and it has been going downhill ever since.
The claim in Lane Brown’s essay is that all the stupidity we experience right now is really a question of which mass media we use. The popular media of the previous century, such as books, films, TV, and newspapers, required our attention and our imagination. They made the world feel larger and more complex.
In practice, mass media trained the abstract thinking that an IQ test measures.
»Today’s media do almost the exact opposite«, writes Lane Brown.
»Instead of expanding our sense of the world, they shrink it and place each of us at the center of our own private universe, surrounded by voices insisting that everything is much simpler than it really is«.
The least controversial idea ever
Lane Brown began to zero in on stupidity during the COVID lockdown. Here he ended up spending way too many hours scrolling on his phone. And watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
When society reopened, he asked his friends: Do you also feel like you’ve become dumber? And they did.
When I ask him how the magazine’s stupid stories have been received, he replies:
»I’m always a little bit nervous: Have I gotten this wrong? Is it completely incorrect? Are people going to say this is, you know, you’re completely off base«.
»This is the least controversial idea I think I’ve ever had. Everyone agrees with it. You will not find anybody who thinks that people are getting smarter«.
In his research, he spoke with people who were at the frontline of the knowledge society.
For example, teachers and professors who said: Our students can’t read anymore. In the past, they could fight their way through a difficult text, but now they are at a loss. Reading skills in the USA are the lowest in many years (which we also described in Denmark in the article series Reading Hate last year). Moreover, the annual entrance exams to universities have the lowest results ever, he says.
Lane Brown even spoke with a man who organizes weekly bar quizzes in a major American city, who said that the teams’ total points have dropped year by year, even though he has made the questions easier.
»And yeah...«, says Lane Brown, »it’s obviously it’s not a perfect sample, but it’s still it’s yet another data point«.
I tell Lane Brown that my editor and I have discussed back and forth how to write a story about people getting dumber so it comes across as something new. It fits almost too well into the typical newspaper reader’s worldview. And the narrative about the younger generations: The world is in disarray.
How can one say something surprising?
»People have always thought we’re getting dumber. The new thing is that now it can be actually proved that we are«, he says, referring to the significant drop in IQ.
It’s the others who are stupid
But it’s not true that we are getting dumber.
That’s what Stuart Jeffries believes, who has spent the last four years writing ’Short History of Stupidity,’ which was published in the fall.
»I just want to problematize this idea that everything’s going horribly wrong«, he says.
Besides being the author of several books, he has worked as a journalist at The Guardian for over 20 years. Now he is 63 and approaching retirement. Therefore, he has time to fight his way through ’Les Misérables’ by Victor Hugo, which spans over 1,000 pages in several volumes.
He shows the book in front of the webcam at his home in London, while a guitar hangs on the wall behind him next to an electric piano.
»Why the hell am I reading that?«, he says waving the book, »I think part of me is thinking I’m a more cultured, brilliant person because I can read bloody French novels«.
In the book about stupidity, he shows how it runs as a red thread from Socrates in ancient Greece to Trump’s America.
Stupidity always evolves and changes forms throughout history«, he says.
»There is no objective fact called stupidity which you can measure. It’s not like hard science, this is sociological«.
Stupidity is one of those concepts that are impossible to define and always dependent on its context. Just like intelligence is. And human intelligence is far too rich and diverse to be reduced to a number in an IQ test, he says.
»The book is a push back against the idea that IQ tests can give us a number defining stupidity«, he says.
During the Nuremberg Trials in Germany in 1946, IQ tests showed that Nazi leaders had such high intelligence that half of them could be admitted to Mensa.
»You think it has to be pretty stupid to do these things, but actually they were really clever, according to subsequent tests«.
Stupidity is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon.
Interestingly, it’s easier to see stupidity in other people than in oneself, says Jeffries.
And here we come to one of the book’s points: When we call something stupid, it’s always a way to define our own values. For 2,500 years, people have called each other stupid precisely to maintain their own way of living.
»When we call young people who can’t read long books stupid, it’s a way to hold on to the idea that it’s important to read books. But it’s not certain that it will be in the future
Literacy, that’s something we value, and therefore we keep saying it’s good that you can read. Maybe it isn’t«, he says
Just like people believed that light bulbs would make us dumber – or calculators.
»All you’re doing really is imposing a set of values based on your prejudices in favour of the 19th and 20th century experience«.
»My daughter is more emotionally intelligent than I was. I think her generation’s kinder and sweeter and generally better human beings than my generation is«.
»So I’m opposed to the doom narrative«.
When there are new major technological advances, the notions of decline are almost as certain as amen in church.
In ancient Greece, philosopher Socrates was worried that writing something down would make us dumber. Because it would weaken people’s memory and lead to a superficial understanding of the world.
But in reality, almost the opposite happened from today’s perspective. Being able to write one’s thoughts on a piece of paper not only ensured that we could store knowledge for our descendants.
Writing also came to change our way of thinking. Irrevocably.
The human noise
Now we might be facing a moment, like writing, that is really changing our brains: Namely modern digital life. And the two ’stupidity journalists’ also see this quite differently.
One might think that the stupidity pessimist Lane Brown sees the screens themselves as the main culprits. They often get blamed for many things: We never look up anymore. We numb ourselves with short videos on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
But after working with stupidity, he is not so sure that the screens themselves are entirely to blame:
»The biggest change is that we are exposed to what so many people think every day«, he says.
What if the cause of all the stupidity we feel is really... each other? Social media has, after all, been the biggest turnaround for human existence, far more than the screens, Lane Brown believes.
»The 20th century, has changed daily life for a normal person more than ever. It’s like one minute you’re milking a cow and then the next minute you’re watching the moon landing on TV«.
»But it’s like for that entire century. It’s like the number of people that you were interfacing with on a daily basis was still relatively stable«.
In that way, the new modern communication forms have put us in contact with more minds than our brains can really handle. And we are weighed down by the large amount of social interactions. It’s a thesis that’s hard to study and test, he says. And there are many different variables at play.
»Now, with the Internet it feels to me and there are a lot of cross currents«.
Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa
In his book, Stuart Jeffries calls the new media development »the economy of stupidity«. In the digital world, it has become possible to make money from one’s own ignorance. It started in the early 2000s, before social media existed.
Back then, he ended up writing something pretty stupid in The Guardian when the TV show ’Big Brother’ premiered in the UK.
It was the first reality format that really broke through.
And one of the participants was named Jade Goody.
She came from a troubled upbringing and owed 30,000 kroner in rent when she signed up for the show. Here she had to move into a house with a group of other young people. And be filmed around the clock.
Therefore, the camera could capture all of Jade Goody’s ’stupid thoughts’.
She thought Sherlock Holmes had invented the toilet, that Parada was a fashion designer, that Pistachio had painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a language called Portuganese. She also thought Rio de Janeiro was a football player.
In the British tabloid press, Jade Goody was publicly shamed for her ignorance.
At the same time, she became a phenomenon. And in the years after ’Big Brother,’ she became a brand. She earned millions, launched TV shows, published her autobiography, sold perfumes, and built a real estate portfolio.
In a comment back then, Jeffries suggested that instead of spending money on liposuctions and breast surgeries, she should invest in education.
But who was really the stupid one?
»She was a genius...«, says Stuart Jeffries.
»I was stupid for not really understanding the world we were living in. and she did«.
In Denmark, reality star Amalie Szigethy similarly made a career after participating in ’Paradise Hotel’ in 2010, where she said things like:
»Stina, do you like walking around dressed as a Russian roulette?«.
She now lives off being a TV personality. A livelihood that many other reality participants also use.
»That’s a change in modern life with the new mass media that keeps going. It says something interesting about our society«, says Stuart Jeffries.
»When I see Kim Kardashian making money in these ways, I become quite sad«, he says, but adds:
»Maybe that’s just my values. The values of someone raised in the 20 century to love philosophy and great novels«.
Not that he wants to compare The Kardashians and Trump, but the American president also thrives on exploiting some form of human stupidity, Jeffries believes.
»The man is so extremely sensitive that if you met him at a bar, you would start to back away in horror after about two minutes…«, he laughs.
»I just thought, who is this idiot? Is he the most powerful man in the world? He’s too stupid«.
But maybe Trump isn’t stupid?, says Jeffries:
»He doesn’t speak in that bureaucratic, stiff way. Which perhaps for for some of his supporters resonates. They quite like that«.
At the same time, Trump has excelled in coming up with simple messages for the people: ’Make America Great Again’, a motto that has appealed to American working-class voters in rural areas who are struggling under globalization.
Jeffries talks about how the Frankfurt School in the 1960s argued that Hitler arose from a kind of… stupidity.
»The lower middle classes were people who’d been really squeezed because of the effects of reparations in the 1920s. They lost a lot of money, and so they were prey to a seemingly exciting idea of national renewal«.
»And, you know, they became fairly enthralled to Hitler«.
»Trump and Hitler. I went there. Oh my God«.
In the book, Jeffries quotes the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, who said the following about demagogues:
»The demagogue’s secret is to make himself as dumb as his audience so that they can believe they are as smart as him«.
The world explained in 23 seconds
Lane Brown believes that it is a major societal problem that to get your message across these days, you have to think it as simply as possible. And thus actually a little bit stupid.
»The winners are those who can boil a complicated phenomenon down to the smallest possible. A TikToker who can explain the geopolitical situation in 23 seconds«.
Or a political slogan that travels the world:
Or the Theory of Dumb...
Because we are overwhelmed by information, feeds, reels, videos, podcasts, and people who want our attention, we all end up looking for ways to compress.
»We’re trying to compress all of this abstraction, all of this nuance, all of this complication down into just one liners or one chart that explains everything«, says Lane Brown.
Online, there is the expression: TL;DR (’Too long, didn’t read’). The purpose is to give the reader the short version of the main points so one can quickly grasp the essence of a long text without reading it all.
This is also how Lane Brown has to think today when he needs to publish a 5,000-word story. How does he frame the story with one sentence that can flow through the internet’s soup?
While he speaks, I start to think about what this article’s one sentence might be. The one most people will encounter instead of reading the text. What is the substance?
It has to be a sentence that sparks interest:
You might have a feeling that the world has become dumber? You are right
But what if that isn’t actually true?
How about: You might have a feeling that the world has become dumber? You are wrong
Who would even want to read that?
It’s probably not clickbait potential. Because when we post the article, we test which headlines spark readers’ interest and provide the longest reading time possible.
Lane Brown explains that it’s obviously not a bad thing that we journalists become better at conveying a complex world. It’s a necessity, and we must get used to it in a world where news always travels through many layers and gets remixed along the way.
In June, the journalism think tank Reuters Institute reported that social media is the most used source when Americans seek news. TikTok has become a credible news source for 17 percent of people worldwide.
Here in Denmark, DR has launched a media strategy to be much more active on social media to reach its audience. Just like we here at Politiken have to be active on Instagram, Facebook, and Google Discover to future-proof ourselves and become digitally viable. As Lane Brown says:
»Your first point of contact with any story is never the thing itself. It’s now always somebody commenting on it or commenting on a comment«.
We are made to be dumb
When I started writing this story about stupidity, I must admit I was quite convinced that we were all becoming dumber.
I no longer know if that’s actually the case. Whether it’s just the world changing faster than I can comprehend. With the help of AI, doctors can now detect cancer earlier, develop new medicine faster, and Aarhus University has become smarter about the modern breakthrough.
Our society has, in many ways, become more efficient and improved when people can work intelligently with technology.
Where would I have been without the internet? It has made my world larger while I grew up in a small town in Central Jutland.
We will never let go of that.
I talk to Lane Brown about the naive time 15 years ago when social media felt new. When newspaper circulations were still larger, and algorithms didn’t know us as well – a time Camilla Stockmann described in an essay as quite special.
Back then, Lane Brown was a young journalist in his late 20s.
»We had this idea that younger people because they were so good at multitasking, like they could sit down in front of a computer with a whole bunch of browser tabs open, that we were exercising our brains in this new way and that we would be so much more productive, so much smarter«.
»But I no longer believe that«.
Stuart Jeffries disagrees with Lane Brown. They have previously met to talk about stupidity in an American podcast.
»We may have these feelings, but usually it’s the feeling that we’re kind of struggling with the implications of new technology. We’re not sure what it’s going to do to us, and it’s easy to impose a doom narrative on that«.
I tell Stuart Jeffries that I really had my hopes up to find out what stupidity was. And whether the world is getting dumber.
»Of course you did. But I can’t satisfy that desire. I’m sorry. I can’t. What is stupidity? It’s... this.«.
»What’s the meaning of life? It’s 42«.
The number 42 is a reference to Douglas Adams’ famous novel ’The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ which, according to a supercomputer, is the answer to life’s and the universe’s greatest questions.
We always seek an explanation, a number, a definition, but unfortunately, that’s just not how it is, says Stuart Jeffries.
Once, he asked his philosophy teacher what the meaning of life was, and the professor replied that if you ask what the meaning of life is, there are two things at play.
Firstly, you want to be encouraged because you are probably a bit depressed. Secondly, you need to be cured of your misunderstandings.
»When we ask: ’What is stupidity?’, we’re kind of in the same area. We we want something which can’t be given«, says Stuart Jeffries.
And here he throws in a few more maybes:
Maybe social media doesn’t make us dumb.
Maybe AI actually makes us smarter.
Maybe we’ve hit a glass ceiling with our intelligence. Just like humans can’t run 100 meters in under 9 seconds.
Maybe stupidity doesn’t exist.
Maybe we are just happier if we are dumber.
Maybe we never really wanted to be that smart.
I tell Stuart Jeffries that I can’t write a story based on a huge maybe.
And the 63-year-old bald man sits in his office chair in North London and laughs.
