by Kevin Groh

People are inherently stupid. Why? Because humans are the only animals that create necessity.

As it has been said that necessity is the mother of invention, it would stand to reason that without our ability to come up with an endless number of things we “need” to live, then we would never invent anything at all. But invention inevitably leads to new necessities, so I must ask the question: “What’s the point?”

It’s all just one dizzying cycle that seems to lead to enlightenment, or at least to the possibility of enlightenment, but in fact leads to the same place it has always led, even when we didn’t have computers and espresso and fahrvegnügen, which is a hole in the ground and a big unanswered question. We are the only species that has taken something that was already incredibly difficult to do, that is living, and made it even harder by piling on more stuff to deal with, like break dancing.

And people are not any less stupid than they used to be. The ultimate result of human “achievement,” it seems to me, has been to produce millions more ways in which we may demonstrate our stupidity to others.

Take break dancing, for example, which I think we can all agree represents the pinnacle of modern American culture. It is, in fact, no more than a complicated mating ritual designed to impress upon the female of our species our muscular prowess and dominance over lesser males by means of limb flailing and spinning on our backs rapidly.

But let’s be honest; it looks just a little bit foolish. The purpose of break dancing relates directly to one of the primary animal instincts, which is the necessity to procreate. In prehistoric times, the caveman had the mating ritual honed to what could be asserted as the simplest and most efficient method. The male caveman would find a suitable female caveman and then bludgeon her on the head with a flat or blunt object.

If one were to attempt this method today in any of the conventional social environments, such as a bar or night club, the outcome would be a swift beating by either the police or another male suitor, who is no doubt a better break dancer. You might think to explain to the authorities that you are mainly attempting to spread your progeny and in so doing assure the continuance of the human race, but apparently, as I have found, this is not a sufficient argument.

There is also the problem of food, another of the primary animal necessities. Today, the problem with food is that there is too much of it for those that don’t need it and not enough for those that do, which I suppose is self-explanatory.

The caveman’s problem with food was that he was compelled to get it for himself. He had no need for diet pills or stomach staples because before eating his food, he inevitably was forced to stalk it across the tundra and kill it with a spear or other sharp object. Of course, the spear, as the first human invention, was the very thing that got the ball rolling on this whole progress mess that we find ourselves in currently.

If he was smart, the caveman would have foreseen the potential catastrophe of civilization that would follow his attaching a sharp rock to the end of a stick. He hence would have been unable to kill his food and would have starved to death and saved us all a heap of trouble. But of course the caveman, being human, was not smart, which brings us back to the thrust of my original argument. People are inherently stupid.

The most pivotal modern invention, television, is by far the most useless, designed to simultaneously distract us from and increase our stupidity. It allows us to watch other people being stupid and thus makes us feel less so in the process.

This paradoxical effect is not unlike alcohol, another intelligence-inhibiting creation, which amplifies our capacity for idiocy, yet somehow increases our ability to procreate. Come to think of it, maybe alcohol isn’t such a stupid invention after all. One obvious drawback, though, is that alcohol has a negative impact on balance, which can seriously inhibit one’s break dancing.

Perhaps our innovations themselves aren’t idiotic in their own right, but merely serve to illuminate the human aptitude for senselessness. The Internet, for example, is arguably more significant than television in terms of technological impact and social significance yada, yada, yada. It allows us to exchange vast amounts of information globally. There is limitless potential for the sharing of knowledge, and what do we use it for?

To download pornos and videos of monkeys sniffing their butts.

Ironically, while we might find this sort of spectacle entertaining, it is actually the monkey who is enjoying the last laugh. According to an obscure study, when a monkey rubs his paw across his butt and then sniffs his finger, he is in effect giving the monkey equivalent of the middle finger. I believe this was discovered by Jane Goodall, but I’m not sure. You can look it up online if you like.

In any case, it turns out that the “butt” of the joke is us, and not, in fact, the chimp. Had we not regressed from our purest caveman state, it would be painfully obvious that we are the subject of ridicule by so many monkeys worldwide.

This relates directly to my previous assertion regarding our backward evolutionary progress. That is to say, I have yet to see a chimpanzee attempt to break dance.

Any intelligent human, whom I believe I have successfully demonstrated are few in number, can tell that the chimps have effectively made us into chumps. In fact, I would speculate that there is some etymological connection therein associated.

After all, were they as interested in us as we seem to be in them, they would make habitats for us to live in, where they could gawk and make asinine faces at us. And it would be us flinging poo at them.

But no, it is the humans that take care of the monkeys, while the monkeys get to sit around all day and sleep and eat and fling the occasional stool and procreate to their hearts’ content with the many suitable female chimps we have provided them, and without having first to spin around on their backs or dance like a robot or some other such nonsense. I ask you, who is it that got the short end of the stick?

Ultimately, the entire progression of invention and technology throughout history has been merely an attempt to impress the female of the species and thereby get laid. This began with the first caveman who discovered fire because his wife kept nagging him about how cold it was in the cave. Then he invented the spear in order to kill mammoths because she wouldn’t shut up about how nuts and twigs did not make a balanced diet.

So on and so on throughout the course of civilization. Science, mathematics, and literature were all brought about through our efforts to show off in front of the opposite sex. And in the case of poetry and drama, the same sex.

If you think about it, it is pretty amazing that we have flourished so much as a species considering the ridiculous lengths we are forced to go through in order to procreate. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go work on my head spin.

© 2004 Kevin Groh, All Rights Reserved.