We, as a people, are completely f*cking smart. Not in the wholesome, “in harmony with knowledge” way — no. We’re smart because we’ve grown wise to so much bullsh*t that we now have a counter for everything.
That’s the 21st-century condition: the reflex to rebut. Someone makes a claim, we can flip it. Someone tells a joke, we fire back with the opposite. It’s Mitch Hedberg’s escalator line turned into a cultural operating system: escalators can’t break, they just become stairs. Same thing with ideas — they don’t collapse, they just flip into their counter-idea.
Scroll X, watch YouTube Shorts, doom-loop through TikTok — thirty to sixty seconds at a time, you get a panorama of “wisdom.” Rules of thumb. Heuristics. Horse farts one minute, philosophy the next. Whether you agree or not isn’t the point. You’ve inhaled it, and your brain has a fresh counter locked and loaded. It’s mentally fatiguing, but it’s also what keeps us sharp.
But here’s the thing: advertising and media have caught on. The psychology in ad campaigns and sitcom scripts now runs deeper than a college psych seminar. Go back and watch a show from the 1950s — even when it tried to be deep, it was simple-deep. Now? You can hear Alan Watts’ philosophy coming out of Homer Simpson’s mouth. The smartest lines of the century are tucked into cartoons. And if your only knowledge of Stephen Hawking comes from a Simpsons cameo, then maybe we aren’t quite as smart as we think.
The trick is: this “smartness” isn’t the same as knowledge, and it sure as hell isn’t wisdom. You can be stupid-smart. You can be flooded with information, bouncing between truths and anti-truths, yet come out with nothing but a knack for quipping back. Worse, we gaslight ourselves: whatever you believe today will likely be flipped on its head tomorrow, and you’ll be expected to keep up.
But there’s value in that spine of counter-arguments too. It keeps us from swallowing whole the first thing we’re told. It sharpens. It hardens. It also traps us. Because if you only ever define yourself against — red vs. blue, yes vs. no — you never stand anywhere. You just pace in opposition.
So yes, we’re the smartest dumb species alive. Brilliant at counters, starved for synthesis. Maybe wisdom isn’t about having the counter. Maybe it’s about knowing when to stop countering.