Will Rogers once said, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” We live in a strange hybrid of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. We have surveillance, speech policing, history revision, hate demonstrations. At the same time, we have abundance of goods, we are free of personal anxiety, and have total instant access to information delivering anything we want.
Social media directs you toward material that will trigger a response. The dopamine from seeing what you believe, or getting approval for your statements, is a little dopamine hit. If you respond with indignation, it gives you a survival response dopamine hit. Dopamine addiction allows the propaganda machine to opiate the lazy toward things that have no basis in reality, logic, or science.
The Dunning-Kruger effect used to be a quaint little cognitive bias. Now it runs entire institutions and raises the next generation. It wraps luxurious comfort around the psyche and then armors it with righteous indignation so thick that facts bounce off like rubber bullets. This is the operating system of modern progressivism. People speak in strong declarative sentences about complicated subjects they have never seriously examined, then treat any correction as a personal attack.
The typical sequence has become ritualized: confident assertion, resistance to primary sources, and eventual moral excommunication. “I’ve never heard of that” is quickly followed by “I just can’t talk to people like you.” And ends with “Don’t set a place for me at Thanksgiving”
This is not investment in wisdom. It is a sociopathic defense mechanism. Every hit of moral superiority and tribal validation delivers a reliable dopamine reward. The screens make it constant. The institutions make it respectable. The result is a class of people who are aggressively certain about things they understand only at the level of slogans and bumper stickers.
This is what produces a political class that treats consecutive generations of failure as proof; they just need to spend more on the same failing system. They do not lack data. They lack the willingness to accept data that threatens their self-image. Former President Barack Obama is an archetype. The majority of electoral votes elected a man with no strong executive or legislative record. They elected the crease in his pants and the sound of his voice. They received a dopamine hit when he spun soaring, nebulous sentences into what were (in his mind) serious-sounding paragraphs about equity and change, and voters decided that was close enough to competence. As Former President Joe Biden said, his clean articulate blackness was a storybook. The Los Angeles Times published an editorial in 2007 about Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’
The same logic produced the $1.5 billion bet on Kamala Harris. Nobody was investing in demonstrated executive ability or legislative achievement. They were investing DEI checkmarks and the emotional payoff. When performance failed to match the packaging, the response was not to question the original bet. It was to blame the track, the voters, or systemic forces that somehow only activate when their preferred candidate is involved.
President Donald Trump once hosted a popular television show that was, at its core, a brutally efficient horse race. The Apprentice forced people to perform under pressure instead of just performing confidence. Week after week, the ones who could actually deliver stayed in the race. The ones who could only talk a good game got fired in front of millions of viewers. It was basic, undignified, and strangely clarifying. The same basic test is now considered crude or cruel when applied to politics or institutions.
The alumni of the Dunning-Kruger Institute for Advanced Ignorance captured the legacy press, entertainment, social media, and academe. Abundance has made their physical survival and job security a non-issue. Stephen Colbert’s show was losing $20 million per year; who would allow that? It teaches: Technical understanding and competence is not in my wheelhouse. I can have my own truth, and it will set me free to believe anything I want. Like believing feelings can rewrite history and repeal the laws of chemistry, economics, gender, or physics. Narrative over truth, style over substance, equity of results without equity of brains and sweat.
The damage shows up most clearly in the next generation. We have spent decades weakening the family, mocking fathers, and handing children to screens and institutions that treat parental authority as suspect. Then we act surprised when many of them emerge emotionally fragile, intellectually shallow, and fluent in approved language but incapable of basic adult functioning. John B. Calhoun’s “Universe 25” experiments showed what happens when a population is given unlimited resources and removed from meaningful challenge or consequence. Social and parental behavior deteriorated even as physical needs were met.
We are running a slower, more expensive version of that experiment on human beings and calling it progress. Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw the family breakdown coming decades ago. The data since has been remarkably consistent. Yet the same voices that claim to care about outcomes for children often treat any serious discussion of family structure as reactionary while continuing to support cultural and policy trends that make stable family formation more difficult. The really dark side of this? The Confederacy of Dunces has the Useful Idiots/Zombies, but they are taught by hard-corps revolutionary believers (AKA Dopamine Whores/Pimps/Dealers) that know exactly what they are doing. You can’t be really educated in socialism/statism and not know how and why it seeks one-world government. You cannot capture society until you capture the children.
And, you cannot fix the children until you fix the parents. Everything else is expensive damage control by throwing money into a furnace of failure to heat the home. Yet as I write, Progressive Insurance runs ads around the message “Don’t turn into your parents,” as if becoming a responsible adult who pays bills and shows up is something to be avoided at all costs. A society that continues to weaken the family while expecting institutions and algorithms to raise capable people is not solving problems. It is simply manufacturing the next generation of Dunning-Kruger brats and then wondering why the same patterns keep repeating at higher cost.
P-HUSTLE UNMASKED: THE CLASS FRAUD OF GRAHAM PLATNER
The zombies are not coming.
They are already teaching the kids.
Michael Breeden is a retired U.S. Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.