A few years ago my husband and I watched Idiocracy, a mediocre movie with an awesome premise. Luke Wilson’s character was an exactly average army grunt who is cryogenically frozen for an army experiment. Unfortunately, his project was forgotten, and so instead of being summoned awake again one year later, he was misplaced for half a millennium. When he wakes up, he is the smartest person on earth.

After five hundred years of non-stop inane television, people have become stupid. Everybody believes the claims of advertising. Everybody laughs at stupid jokes. No one knows history, and no one knows how to think critically anymore. The media has made everybody dumb. And what’s worse is that nobody knows it.

I sometimes wonder if we’re on a similar road. Take the advertisements you see on daytime television. Blogger Captain Capitalism recently posted that the message behind most of these ads are: “you’re a loser, so come to us to get your life out of the toilet.” And I think he’s right. While we were on vacation we watched a lot of daytime television, and the ads were all for those one-year diploma colleges, bankruptcy lawyers, personal injury lawyers, and pawn shops. Are there really that many people who are going bankrupt, and think their best route out of bankruptcy is to sue someone, or sell their engagement ring? I guess there must be, but if you find that too depressing to contemplate, let’s turn to political campaigns.

For those paying any attention to American network news, candidates are slinging mud back and forth, hoping some will stick. And certain politicians’ strategies seem to revolve around telling people they’re losers, too. It goes something like this: you will never have the money to retire or to pay for anything important on your own. You need us. Vote for the other guy, and they’ll take away all your perks. Vote for us, and we’ll keep giving you stuff.

The sad part is that it works.

Interestingly, the definition of loser changes throughout one’s life. In high school, the loser is the unpopular kid who joins the chess club for the intellectual stimulation. The loser is the one on the tech team of the drama club, instead of the one up on the stage. Fast forward ten years, and they’ve almost always traded places. The losers were really the interesting ones, with enough self-initiative and motivation to go against the grain and grow their brains and their marketable skills. The real losers are not those who are unpopular. Real losers tend to be those who think they are superior, without actually realizing how dumb they can be.

I’m not sure that loser-dom was as rampant in ages past, because you couldn’t afford to be stupid then. You had to work hard to survive. Take a drive through the country in our neck of the woods and you see the land dotted with picturesque rock fences. But those fences weren’t built to be pretty. They were built because the farmers needed to move all of those rocks in order to start farming this land, whose biggest crop, to that point in history, had been boulders. It’s hard to be a loser when you’re carting rocks.

Losers have always been those who laugh at others’ work, thinking that they’re superior because they don’t have to think as much, do as much, or try as much. But in the end, it all comes back to haunt you. You get suckered in by the idea of a carefree lifestyle, without realizing that the good life will never be handed to you. Guess it’s time to call one of those colleges. Or, if worse comes to worse, you can always build character by helping a farmer move some rocks.

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