We’ve Suffered Way Too Many Fools for Far Too Long

My boss once told me I don’t suffer fools gladly.

“Don’t be stupid,” I told him. He was an idiot. I suffer fools all the time because that’s what we non-fools have to do. “I suffer you, don’t I?”

Fools are everywhere, I know. I bump into them all the time. Fools have only one purpose, they are a measure for our own foolishness. Without them I would skip through life, thinking everything is hunky-dory.

“When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It’s only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.” Ricky Gervais.

If fools were insufferable, I wouldn’t be here. I’d have jumped off a bridge, swum with sharks or stabbed myself with a fork 1,000 times.

I suffer them because it is not until fools articulate their thoughts that I realise, ‘Hey, maybe I got this after all.’

I mean, that guy just took in a load of misinformation and rather than process it through his ‘bullshit’ detector, he threw the lot in the tumble dryer he has for a brain and regurgitated whatever poppycock came out first.

I can excuse some of them. Life isn’t fair. The world is full of inequality. Some people are born stupid, some people grow up in an environment of stupidity. Not all of us get the privilege of a good education. I have compassion for all of them.

It’s the ones who aren’t born stupid, who haven’t been brought up in stupidity and have had the privilege of a good education (but are still foolish) who make me want to smack them on the head with a halibut.

I have a message for them:

“It’s okay to be uninformed, it’s not okay to be uninformed and have an opinion.” Malky McEwan.

‘Leave people be’, some say.

But we can’t, not if we want to drag ourselves out of the quicksand of the dim-wittedness that is dragging the world into a mire of muddled madness.

We need good people to take responsibility. To parent those who were let down by those who sired them. We need people to take their metaphorical back-of-the-hand off the back of their hysterical heads and knock some sense into them — figuratively speaking.

Alas, I fear our efforts may be in vain. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg built the first printing press, books have been our great superpower. But things have changed. Instead of the world bowing down at the feet of scholarly masters, it now positions itself at the butt of celebrity influencers.

Intellect is no longer a currency.

Conspiracy theories and paranoia are the coins we tender. Those unhinged beliefs are not to be underestimated. No matter how utterly preposterous and totally lacking in reliable evidence, they are almost impossible to disprove in the minds of non-thinkers.

Given that half our population is prone to believing something is not right with the world, it confirms to the other half that there is something not right with the world.

I’m hoping — because you read this far — you are intelligent enough not to get distracted by the ping of your phone saying, ‘Oi, psst, HEY! Look at this… here’s another monkey eating chocolate.’

I’ve always been a person who can stomach nitwits and nincompoops, but I want to change. I am motivated. I want to start a revolution.

“It’s okay to suffer fools.”

I pat fools on the head and tell them to have a good night, then leave them sitting in the corner of the pub.

If they still come quacking with their quackery, think of it as an opportunity.

It’s a chance to sell these birdbrain emperors some new clothes or a beachfront property in the Sahara.

Consider selling them London Bridge on a monthly subscription: send it brick by brick.

Don’t bang your head off a brick wall at the drivel of a dimwit or the detritus of a dullard — think of it as an opportunity come knocking.

That’s what I do.