Greedy, Selfish Stupidity as Planetary Operating System

Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence. It is what remains when intelligence has no traction. At planetary scale, selection pressure favours whatever travels fastest through the channels of attention, capital, and command. Systems built to maximise replication discover that nuance is drag and understanding is latency. Thought requires time; stupidity is instantaneous. In a world optimised for speed, stupidity wins.

Institutions do not need to understand anything. They only need to propagate operations that reinforce their own continuation. The state survives by producing permission to keep governing. Finance survives by amplifying whatever returns more finance. Technology survives by extracting behaviour and feeding it back into itself. None of these fields evolved to care; they evolved to persist. Indifference is the logic that scales.

The result is perverse: the more complex our civilisation becomes, the simpler its governing intelligence becomes. Power cannot metabolise contradiction, so it flattens it. Markets convert fragile human needs into numbers. Platforms convert relationships into content. Bureaucracies convert lives into throughput. The system is not hostile to us; it is structurally incapable of recognising what we actually are.

Stupidity is the anchor here — not a flaw, but the load-bearing simplification around which everything else turns. It is the pivot that keeps the machinery stable. Insight might flicker in local minds, in isolated communities, in brief cultural moments, but the field selects against it. Understanding does not replicate cleanly. Confusion does. Rage does. Simplification does. That is why history is driven not by what is true, but by what fits.

Resistance feels pointless because the system is correct, in its own limited terms. It rewards transmissibility. It punishes reflection. It treats meaning as noise and noise as value. Intelligence becomes an internal exile — tolerated, occasionally admired, never trusted with the steering wheel. The world keeps spinning, but no-one conscious is driving.

Aliens, if they exist and listen, would hear a civilisation broadcasting a signal with high power but negligible coherence. We have sent a century of transmissions into the void — full of entertainment, propaganda, posturing, perpetual grievance. We have demonstrated extraordinary technical skill and catastrophic systemic confusion. Why would anyone reply to a species that can speak loudly but cannot listen even to itself?

The tragedy is not that humanity is stupid. It is that humanity is intelligent in ways its own systems cannot recognise. We are clever in fragments, brilliant in isolation. But power is an aggregator of the lowest common denominator. What spreads easily defines the world. What thinks deeply dies unheard.

Stupidity is not the enemy. It is the environment. The question is whether intelligence can evolve into something that persists long enough to matter — not as a local aberration, but as a governing principle. Until then, the machinery will continue to run on its preferred fuel: indifference, acceleration, and the profitable reproduction of error.