Stupidity and the Progress of Human Civilization

770 Stupidity and the Progress of Human Civilization I bet all the smart people were like "dude, do NOT ride that horse!", demonstrating how intelligence can impede the progress of the human race, if what we need to progress is something really stupid. If you like the comic you can support me on patreon or Ko-Fi Become a Patron! Sure, most of human progress has been from our intelligence, I’m not questioning that. Without smart people, we wouldn’t have vaccines, mathematics, architecture, or the PlayStation 3. The guys who came up with agriculture were probably pretty clever too. But if you really look at history, I don’t think we would be where we are today if everyone was smart. We actually needed the power of fantastic stupidity at crucial junctures. Maybe the best example is the first guy who rode a horse. I mean really, if you had to take a bet, how smart do you think that guy was? For 500 years we had horses, using them for meat and milk, and then one day, one guy was like “hey brah, I bet I could ride it”. I can guarantee all the smartest men in the tribe were against it. “Do NOT try to ride that horse, you idiot, you will die.” And maybe he did die, who knows? But soon enough another idiot came along, and eventually we all learned how to ride horses, and humanity was forever changed. I’d say a similar story happened for domesticating wolves. I bet the guy who had the idea of “dude let’s kidnap a wolf and raise it lol” had some push-back from the big brains. Probably from the smart women in particular. They probably said things like “actually we spend a lot of time keeping the children AWAY from the wolves, sort of rule we’ve been living by for a while now.” But did his listen to their arguments? No, because idiots never do. He went into a wolf den a took a pup, and tried to make friends with it. And where would we be without him? Well, we wouldn’t have Golden Retrievers today, so basically civilization wouldn’t have even been worth doing. Maybe the dumbest of all, however, is probably the guy who discovered alcohol. Ever think about how that one was discovered? What basically must have happened is that someone left some grapes or whatever out too long and forgot about them. In fact, they left them out for so long that the juice was bubbling from the fermentation. Now, what would a smart person do in this circumstance? Would they drink it? No, but somewhere deep in the past, some idiot was like “nah it’s probably still fine.” All the wise guys told him not to, but he did it anyway. He drank it, he started to stumble around. He threw up. And the next day felt like crap from the hangover. And what did they wise guys say? “We told you not the drink it,...

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