What happens when useful idiots cease to be useful, continue being idiots
I don't remember when or in which sci-fi anthology I first read "The Marching Morons," Cyril M. Kornbluth's short story about a venal 20th-century man who wakes up in the future and provides a solution to a problem bedeviling global elites. All I can tel you about that first encounter is that I must have been quite young, because there was a lot I did not understand in the story -- to the point where, for the next decade of reading and schooling and whatever else, a soft "ping!" would go off in the back of my brain and I'd think about "The Marching Morons" again with fresh understanding. Today, my brain pinged again.
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Let the spoilers for a story written 69 years ago commence.
"The Marching Morons" is about "Honest John" Barlow, a real estate developer who is inadvertently rendered comatose during dental surgery; he somehow survives in this state for centuries until he's awakened into a future where everything, from language to culture, has been degraded thanks to the population's lowered I.Q. There is a tiny cadre of elites who secretly run everything, justifying their work by reasoning that without them, the planet would be much worse off, and justifying their secrecy thusly:
"Tinny-Peete had no wish to be torn limb from limb; he knew very well that it would end that way if the population learned from this anachronism that there was a small elite which considered itself head, shoulders, trunk and groin above the rest. The fact that this assumption was perfectly true and the fact that the elite was condemned by its superiority to a life of the most grinding toil would not be considered; the difference would."
Barlow tells these elites he'll fix the problem of a booming population of undesirables but they have to agree to make him world dictator, build him a classy palace and pay him anything he wants. The elites agree, then listen to Barlow's as-yet undetailed plan:
He presented his program, was asked whether his conscience didn't revolt at its callousness, explained succinctly that a deal was a deal and anybody who wasn't smart enough to protect himself didn't deserve protection—"Caveat emptor," he threw in for scholarship, and had to translate it to "Let the buyer beware." He didn't, he stated, give a damn about either the morons or their intelligent slaves; he'd told them his price and that was all he was interested in.
We learn Barlow's copied the Nazi propaganda playbook. In 1944, German concentration camp guards at Auschwitz forced newly-arrived inmates to write postcards to their relatives back home speaking of "Waldsee" in glowing terms; the inmates were then gassed. The postcards acted as a data collection point for the Nazis and as a way to deceive the next round of victims. In "The Marching Morons," the postcards lure the non-elite populace into believing they've been selected by lottery to colonize Venus. They're then rounded up in spaceships located far from cities: "They weren't very good space ships, but they didn't have to be."
The short story ends with Barlow throwing a fit over not being apprised of a very important government plan, then learning the hard way that the plan is to erase the now-elite society of its one final flaw -- him.
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I thought of "The Marching Morons" when I read Suzette Elgin Haden's excellent Native Tongue trilogy in high school and realized that language simultaneously defines and reflects the values and traits of a culture.
I thought of "The Marching Morons" when I read Stephen Jay Gould's book on the use and misuse of scientific research to measure intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, before covering his university keynote as a student reporter. That's when I realized every society's values should always be interrogated: Why do we think this is good? Who benefits from this? To what end?
I also thought about "The Marching Morons" when I read Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and the elite eugenists in the book refer to themselves as "the damned few." And I thought about "The Marching Morons" when I read Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, and took notes on the power dynamics that emerge when a group engineers itself into elitism.
I thought of "The Marching Morons" while sitting through the opening sequence of Idiocracy. (And wondering, again: What values are being reflected here? Who benefits from society adopting those values?)
I thought of "The Marching Morons" while reading Paolo Bacigalupi's short story "Pump Six," which takes place in a disintegrating New York City seen through the eyes of someone who dimly knows something is wrong but can't tell you what or who's responsible.
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As you can tell from the reading list above, Kornbluth's story is part of sci-fi's ongoing fascination with eugenics and ethics, trying to plumb where individual rights end and the good of society begins, where a person's unique selfhood begins and society's ambient influences end. The story feels extremely mid-century in its narrative insistence that an "undesirable" population is no more a reflection of the civic policies that caused it and defined it than losing a house to flooding is a reflection of one's decision to build on the shore of Willoughby Spit.
For all the things that don't work now -- Barlow's observation that people "still smoked and bought tobacco" doesn't hold up to data trends, the gender roles are regressive, the bit about lemmings marching off cliffs is scientifically wrong -- there are so many things in "The Marching Morons" that are timeless.
After reading the news this morning, I was reminded especially of the end of Kornbluth's story, where Barlow realizes all too late how he's been manipulated, then discarded by the elites when his usefulness ended and they needed to think of themselves as moral again:
"Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily."
"The Marching Morons" was written in 1951, twenty-four years after Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" and Buck v. Bell gave U.S. eugenicists license to push for laws that would permit the states to sterilize those they deemed undesirable. 1951 is also five years after the end of the Nuremberg trials -- enough time for people to learn how much of a fan Adolf Hitler had been of American eugenics policies and practices, and how he had modeled Nazi Germany on them -- and how, throughout the 1930s, a lot of Americans were cheering his work. Once one considered those historic antecedents, it's not hard to see Kornbluth grappling with the question of moral culpability after committing atrocities for a "greater good."
I re-read "The Marching Morons" before writing this and I was struck by how oddly current the story feels at this moment in American history: A group of elites decides a real estate huckster and cultural outsider can help them solve a problem; he's overtly racist, blinded by ego and susceptible to flattery; he sells his marks on their own doom with disinformation disguised as "known" truth after it's strategically percolated through pop culture ("for you and your neighbors, folksy people, ordinary people, real people!"); he manipulates politicians into climbing on board the scheme by appealing to American exceptionalism; the elites carry out his orders and are pleased with the results. Then this outsider -- who has always bragged about his dealmaking abilities and never paid attention to the details -- is discarded when he's outlived his usefulness.
Although Kornbluth ends the story from Barlow's perspective, I've always wondered what happened after the elites put him in the rocket. I had concluded on an earlier reading that the reason the elites went along with his genocidal plan was that it came from an outsider; since none of them had come up with the idea, none of them were morally responsible for its execution. (The sole person who feels otherwise has committed suicide.) By launching Barlow into orbit, the elites are literally discarding the "bad element" they had to endure for expediency's sake, and now they can live in an unsullied world, unaccountable to anyone save themselves.
Today, that ending is what keeps pinging in my brain. Getting rid of Barlow is only the first step. The question of what the post-Barlow society would look like and what values it would hold remains frustratingly open.
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FURTHER READING
"The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics" (History News Network, September 2003) -- "Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton."
"The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2016) -- "Although the concerns of the eugenics movement don’t map neatly onto today’s political divides, patterns of thought are repeated: fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not at 'hopelessly vicious protoplasm' but at 'anchor babies'; instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners."
"The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope" (Jeannette Ng on Medium, December 21, 2019) -- "Magical lineages are hardly without baggage in fantasy fiction. They are fundamentally inseparable from the rhetoric of eugenics and racial purity."
"America's Enduring Caste System" (New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2020) -- "History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy. Their investment in this illusion gives them as much of a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority."
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