Dumbing down of society has benefited the ruling and wealthy classes to the point that, more likely than not, it’s been done on purpose. Discussing with any seriousness the lowering of average individual’s IQ is quickly marginalized as a conspiracy theory. Yet paradoxically, it’s the same « Joe Average » in society who’s sounding the alarm on a situation that’s becoming self-evident even to the intelligence challenged. This is akin to an obese person looking at themselves in the mirror and acknowledging that they have a weight problem.

The internet has undeniably changed the way humans consume information, share ideas, and engage with one another. While it has led to tremendous advancements in various fields, it has also had an effect: the dumbing down of the general population. This phenomenon leaves many people vulnerable to manipulation by governments and corporations. Whom appear to have purposely orchestrated this process for greater control over society, thereby securing their interests.

There’s no shortage of political and financial organizations where the self-titled « elites» of society interface with one another. Despite globalization policies, a conspiracy for control of the entire world still seems improbable. More easy to accept is how the late George Carlin put it, « There are no conspiracies when there are convergent interests. » Or, people will inevitably support and cooperate with others whose actions / policies fit with their own agendas. – It’s obligatory to explore the reasons for the dumbing down of society, the role the Internet plays and the benefits which governments and large corporations gain from it.

Internet and the Dumbing Down of Society

Regardless of its quality, the internet has made information more accessible. However, this saturation of information has led to a decline in critical thinking and the ability to discern credible sources. People are increasingly relying on headlines, tweets, and soundbites to inform their opinions, rather than engaging with in-depth, well-researched content (Brock, 2020). This superficial engagement with information has resulted in a dumbed-down society, where people are easily swayed by sensationalism and emotional appeals.

Social media platforms, in particular, have contributed to this phenomenon. Ignoring for a moment the prevalence of bots, marketers, lobbyists and other goal oriented people and organizations. The majority of people using social media rarely contribute to any conversations and only haphazardly share links. Among private citizens, it’s the hated troll who is the instigator of much of the conversations. The different sites were quick to take notice and structured their algorithms to favor arguments and amplify sentiments of being offended.

The algorithms were also subsequently structured that drive these platforms designed to show users content that aligns with their interests and beliefs, creating echo chambers that reinforce pre-existing biases and further amplified hostilities, because anyone questioning perceived dogma was attacked. (Sunstein, 2009). This in turn shuts down rational dialogue and debate. Hampering the development of critical thinking skills and stifling intellectual growth.

The Role of Governments and Corporations

Governments and large corporations have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and retaining control over the population. A dumbed-down population is easier to manipulate and control, as they are more susceptible to propaganda and fear-mongering (Huxley, 1932). By keeping people misinformed and disengaged from meaningful discourse, governments and corporations can continue to pursue their agendas without significant opposition. In some cases, governments have even resorted to censoring information or promoting disinformation to further their goals. For example, during the Cold War, the United States government engaged in a campaign of misinformation and censorship to discredit and silence voices that were critical of its policies (Chomsky & Herman, 1988).

A dumbed-down society offers several advantages to governments and large corporations. Firstly, it allows them to maintain control over the population by keeping people misinformed and compliant. A population that lacks critical thinking skills is less likely to question authority or challenge the status quo (Orwell, 1949). Secondly, it enables them to manipulate public opinion and shape it in their favor. By controlling the flow of information and promoting certain narratives, they can sway public opinion to support their policies or products. One example of how large corporations spread misleading information to protect their interests was evidenced by the tobacco industry’s efforts to deny the health risks of smoking (Glantz & Slade, 1990).

The Benefits of a Dumbed-Down Society

Moreover, a dumbed-down society is more likely to consume goods and services without considering the long-term consequences or hidden costs. For corporations, this translates into increased sales and profits, as people become more focused on short-term gratification and less concerned with the broader implications of their actions (Schor, 2007).

Undeniably, the internet has contributed to the dumbing down of society, making people more susceptible to manipulation by governments and corporations. This process has been facilitated by the design of social media platforms, which encourage superficial engagement with information and create echo chambers that reinforce pre-existing biases.

Furthermore, as the Internet has moved from text to video, the average user doesn’t read but rather passively listens or browses content. And for all the diehard Jordan Peterson fans, who feel an inflated sense of ego brought about by listening to the man of big words, there are a thousand Internet surfers who live by the acronym TLDR (too long ; didn’t read). This dumbing down of society is a deliberate and strategic process that benefits governments and large corporations. By understanding the role of the internet in this process and the motivations behind it, we can take steps to mitigate its effects and hopefully promote a more informed, critically thinking population.

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References

Brock, T. (2020). The benefits and dangers of internet use. In T. Brock & M. Bar-Ilan, The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities (pp. 1-12). Routledge.

Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Glantz, S. A., & Slade, J. (1990). The Cigarette Papers. University of California Press.

Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. Chatto & Windus.

Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Secker & Warburg.

Schor, J. B. (2007). Consumerism and its discontents. In R. W. Kemp & J. A. Parente, The Human Development Handbook (pp. 21-38). Palgrave Macmillan.

Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press.

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A porn industry veteran, Hamilton Steele, says that there’s a virginity gap between men and women. He attributes this to societal rewards for female promiscuity. To quote, “No one is compensating a woman for remaining chaste.” In fact, it’s very much the opposite. Even a very plain looking woman can earn significant money, if she’s willing to sell access to her vagina. As testament to this fact, the Internet has seen an unprecedented uptick in platforms who facilitate helping ladies monetize their self-produced pornography. So it should be no surprise that, these social porn media sites are also fueled, in no small part, by a surge in virginal and sexually inept male users.

For older male virgins, porn has become their sex life.

A pornographer has a different world perspective compared to the average person. As porn has become a dominate force in modern society, women are catching up to men in its consumption. While the growing market of female viewers should be reason to celebrate from a pornographer’s perspective, porn addiction effects women differently and long-term that may mean a complete change in the market. Because unlike their male counterparts who substitute porn for sex to the detriment of interpersonal relationships. In females, this hypersexualization tends to lead to sexual promiscuity and extreme liberal sexual attitudes when it comes to relationships.

Among addicts the virginity gap is even more pronounced, because the female porn addicts are rarely virgins, while too much porn for men means that they have trouble connecting with women. Female porn addiction appears to come in two flavors ;

(1) Hypersexuality which often proceeds a sex addiction
(2) Insecurities and/or frigidity while still having an addiction to watching porn.

A pornographer obviously sees a lot of women who want to pursue a career in the adult industry. Just a decade ago, money was the dominate reason for wanting to be a pornstar. Today, almost as many females sex addicts, view being an adult performer as a means to indulge their cravings and secondarily still manage to keep a roof over their heads. During a quick interview, one 20 year old girl happily said that she views a porn career as a way to get rodeo fucked daily, without having to worry about becoming homeless. When asked about how long she has been looking at porn and at what age she lost her virginity, she responded that probably been looking at adult videos since she was 8. She had sex for the first time on her 13th birthday, unbeknownst to her 30 year old partner, who she led to believe that she was 19.

Females with insecurities, depression and/or who are frigid, also often find their way into the sex industry. But that is nothing new in the porno world. Porn video producers and performers are most often very complimentary towards female talent, stoking egos is part of the game. So the insecure find themselves the center of attention and of course with make-up, cameras, and being called models, they feel attractive. Whereas the appeal to purely frigid females is that sexual acts are staged and sometimes almost mechanical. They’re not expected to enjoy the sex, just to make it look good. Furthermore, the relationship with their sexual partners are over when a producer says “It’s a wrap, you can go home” . It’s the large increase of this kind of woman entering the business that is unusual, and once again for many of them they started having sex at a very young age.

The virginity gap between men and women from porn’s perspective.

The Internet instills a false belief that males are the winners in the current situation. Every man believes he can quickly create his fan page and he’ll be a success because hoards of females will pay to see him naked and masturbating. The paradox is that most women have almost no interest in solo male pornography and they gravitate towards the multi-performer and lesbian videos. They want to see a woman enjoying herself. It’s gay men predominantly, who want to see a man alone. And even this demographic can be fickle, because homosexual males will also watch heterosexual porn, when the male talent is well endowed, attractive or has some other arousing feature.

More evidence for the male vs female virginity gap is demonstrated by those men who are hoping to become pornstars. There will never be a shortage of guys that want to be in the sex industry. Some find their way into a pornographer’s office and many them are both extremely well endowed and physically attractive. But those qualities, although preferable, are no guarantee to a porn career, because more often than not, size is NOT enough to get the job done. Unfortunately, for the past 5 years, many of these hopeful males are still virgins, having never had sex in their personal lives, they believe that the hours they have devoted to watching the finished product makes them an expert. These hopeful swordsmen, rarely have the stamina or control to make a porn, not to mention a complete lack of finesse with the female talent.

No porn producer can (or will) take a chance on a guy that hasn’t had some kind of active sex life, prior to his interest in doing porn. Viagra can’t fix broken… It can only make what works even better. A 30 year old virgin male has usually watched thousands of hours of pornography and at best they have erection and attention deficit problems. Any pornographer that doesn’t have access to a large pool of talent most often will favor taking a chance on men that are at least over 40. Money is on the line and there’s so much competition that profit margins are low. So when looking for straight male talent, it’s often necessary to be the porn industry equivalent to an FBI profiler.

The unifying factor between the sexes is early exposure to porn.

The pornographic industry has always been on the cutting edge of both technology and societal trends. It’s also resilient to an arguable fault as even the most theocratic and totalitarian governments have been unable to eliminate demand for it; on the contrary attempts to do so only increase its desirability. So the industry can be thought of as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, when it comes to alerting us to societal changes or problems. Only, when the bird dies, instead of alerting everyone to flee the danger zone, pornographers will attempt to make money selling images of dead canaries. What many porno veterans are predicting is an eminent normalization of sex with children. But the shape that normalization takes will depend greatly on society’s relationship with the sex industry. Will children become exploited in the mine, or will it be boarded up, and the old ways of marrying pubescent girls to older established men, be rediscovered? Or, do we still have hope to build a better and a more appealing future?

Hamilton and Ghost discuss the Virginity Gap in their podcast

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Mia is a very sexy Lebanese immigrant, who loves being the center of attention but Mia Khalifa regrets having done porn for three months from November of 2014 to January 2015. She got hooked up with the two biggest porn companies, Pornhub (Mindgeek) and Bangbros (WGCZ Holding) almost immediately. These Internet porn gurus’ ability to distribute and market worldwide combined with a bad decision to wear a hijab while doing a two guys on one girl sex scene made her a target of Muslim jihadists (reportedly ISIS). Now Mia is NOT Muslim, her only connection to Islam is that her birth country has a Muslim majority. But the prolific promotion of this scene in particular made Mia Khalifa a standout among the hundreds of girls that get involved with porn each year.

For most girls who dip there toes into porn for a mere 3 months, nobody really notices. But Mia Khalifa’s agreement to wear a hijab made her perhaps the most exploitable porn chick that ever was. She rose in a mere two months from unknown to the most searched for girl in porn. This was of course mostly due to death threats and the mainstream publicity that ensued. With death threats, it’s no wonder Mia Khalifa regrets having done porn.

Porn isn’t for everyone, and it puts a great strain on interpersonal relationships. Clearly this is one reason why Mia Khalifa regrets having done porn. Apparently Mia’s parents have disowned her and according to information available, she and her husband (who joined her in her first on camera sex) divorced in 2016. Mia did do some camming for a while, but working for the BangBros, those recordings have since been released as porn films, keeping the producers profiting from Mia. Most porn stars, if they cam after quitting the biz, they retain control over those shows, no recording, self distribution, it’s what Patreon fans pay the most for. In Mia’s case she had a baptism by fire, learning all the pitfalls of porn in such a short time.

Staying relevant is a full time job

BangBros retained miakhalifa.com, after she canceled their contract, but Mia made her notoriety work for her. Mia Khalifa regrets having done porn, but she has profited from it. She set up an OnlyFans account and staying active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Twitch, the 5’2” busty beauty kept herself relevant. Having someone threaten to kill you is a great way to earn the media’s ear. Having someone declare you dead, is a great way to bring people out of the woodwork to see if it’s true. Letting everyone know that you are still alive, keeps people’s interest peaked, old clients get reminded to interact with you or visit your sites, the media circulates your name and image, bringing you to the attention of even more people. And with 4.2 million twitter followers, I don’t think that the media will lose sight of Mia for very long, because they want a piece of that.

Mia Khalifa has been asked several times in interviews, if she knew what would happen, would she still do porn. Her answer, because Mia Khalifa regrets having done porn, is always a resounding NO. So I think that Mia would be happy to be known for something other than porn and she has learned the hard way that notoriety is a double edged sword. Given that and a job as a sports newscaster, I just can’t think of Mia Khalifa as a porn star, she should be known for what she does best, being a social media influencer.

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If you are following the news at all these days you would believe that managing misinformation is the crucial altruistic purpose of media venues, both social media and traditional news. In reality we are witnessing the birth-pangs of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. When we allow a third party to decide what is ok for us to know and what is not, we are essentially allowing them to do the thinking for us. Not only denying ourselves the opportunity to engage in critical thinking, but trusting that said third party is truly infallible. omniscient and benevolent enough to be allowed to make this decision on our behalf. Misinformation is nothing more than a fancy word for lies, but when the media uses it, to ascribe everything outside of the preferred narrative, that narrative becomes propaganda.

The concept of misinformation comes from the Russian word dezinformatsiya, which was according to Wikipedia, a government propaganda program whose purpose was to create false information whose source was also falsely associated. It’s sort of like a false flag operation but using the media to sway public opinion. Here’s an example… Going back to Nazi Germany, Hitler didn’t have full control of the nation at first, and the communist party was his parliamentary opposition party. He called for a reelection, then the parliament building was torched. Immediately the communists were blamed, it was decreed a terrorist act signaling a communist uprising and in the upcoming weeks the communist party credibility was destroyed and members were villanized while, Hitler’s Nazi’s gained full control over the government processes, law making, right revoking, property confiscating, etc

A media today is possibly even more powerful than it was in Hitler’s era. It dominates our lives, our social interactions, the screens at work, at our gyms and in our homes. It stimulates our eyes, our ears and especially our emotions. This emotional response ripe with dopamine is a powerful tool that has split the population into rival gangs. Reason goes out the window, facts become are irrelevant, and misinformation peddlers are labeled far-right extremists. Those self elected to the task of managing misinformation, label others as a consequence of questioning the status quo or choosing one’s own narrative, even when based on personal experience, and it has nothing to do with voting history or vaccine status. A population divided is already half conquered, because we attack each other instead of the forces that truly disrupt our lives and livelihood. But this is NOT about Trump vs Biden…heck the main debate today is mandates versus precaution when it comes to dealing with Covid and both political leaders are on the SAME team when it comes to the vaccine. Trump continues to peddle the shot at every speaking engagement, it was after-all his “baby”, he is the one behind “operation warp speed” and allowed an experimental pharmaceutical solution on the market before it was fully tested. Biden just takes things one step further by trying to mandate that everyone takes it. And those managing misinformation? Well, they don’t want us to know enough to make an informed decision, because they think we are all too stupid to understand anything that they don’t tell us… Truthfully, from my perspective watching this fiasco unfold, I can see where they might get the idea that people are too stupid to make their own decisions.

A feeble mind can be overindulged

The brain like any muscle in the body responds better to good nutrition and exercise, than it does to sweets and passive activity. And just like an armchair athlete, we often think we know something because we agree with something we are told. Unfortunately even the so called educated are not exempt. So called college graduates have been increasingly unable to read at their degree certified grade level. In the 90s already less than half of the graduates showed reading proficiency of regular text , their understanding worsened when it came to reading documents. The number of graduates who regurgitate, but can’t understand what they are reading grew from there. As a consequence, so called experts, may not be. Which leaves the question, who then is managing misinformation? Those who have an analytical understanding of the articles on which they pass judgement, or is their measure merely if the information contradicts their personal beliefs? We all must be diligent and seek data, numbers, not conjecture and hyperbole.

We have been intellectually lobotomized by adjective heavy reports that quote things in such a way as to confound the average consumer. When it comes to keeping a public terrified of Covid, case numbers are quoted (without consistent testing parameters – but that’s another issue) and we never hear about how many people got better from it. Actually the way things have been presented is akin to convincing the public that the more lottery tickets are sold, the better the chances of their numbers coming up. And although death totals are more pertinent, they too must be kept in perspective to real risk? For instance. how healthy were those who Covid took out ? Were they physically active or just waiting to die ? (Sorry it seems cold, but with 80% of the deaths in America hitting those in their retirement years, one needs to ask, the hard questions.) Science up until recently was about asking those troublesome questions, challenging other people’s findings. The offspring research accounting for more parameters, and fine tuning things as a result. Conversely, when everything is excepted as is, errors are not caught, and progress dies. Sure, we’ll get subsequent “boosters”, but is a the fiscally timed development by someone with a monopoly, really the best solution?

Life isn’t about always feeling good, it’s about experiences. Bad things will happen, they are opportunities to reflect and learn. Introspection and reading are how we exercise a mind. Fail to do this and our thoughts become clouded, our attention distracted, eventually the lethargy overtakes us and we allow someone else to do the thinking for us, telling us what to believe. Managing misinformation is not the job of some faceless institution, it is the duty of every freedom loving free-thinking soul. It is an individual responsibility, to be judged against your own personal experiences, observations and discoveries. Failure to do so invites deception to control you, dictatorship to guide you and binds you to a chain gang like existence that will eventually even rob you the hope of escape. Think of this as the last decision you make. Believe what I am suggesting and get off the proverbial couch and start training your mind to think again or don’t and let you brain be directed by another to do what’s best for them, not you.

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