The Age of Incompetence

I have spent many years observing western civilization, and I can tell you plainly: I have never seen such widespread stupidity at every level of society, from the political leaders who pretend to govern us down to ordinary people pushing grocery carts full of poison through the checkout line. We have entered an age where incompetence is not merely tolerated but celebrated, where reason is abandoned in favor of feelings, and where the very concept of objective excellence has been replaced by equity-driven mediocrity. This is not a temporary condition. It is a metastasizing cancer that threatens civilization itself.

The incompetence paradox is now fully upon us: in the age of AI, overconfidence in one's skills and the belief that humans can never be surpassed in intelligence are the first signs of obsolescence ^[1]. I have watched this pattern repeat endlessly: people who know the least about a subject are the most certain about it, and they usually make bad decisions that affect all of us.

My position is straightforward. We are living through a collapse of reason, and the evidence is everywhere -- in our politics, our economics, our institutions, and our daily consumer choices. The intelligent remnant still exists, but we are not the majority, and we are certainly not the voting majority.

Political Incompetence: From Trump's Bribes to Democratic Insanity

Let me be direct about the political class: they are almost universally incompetent, and the vast majority are also evil. President Trump has proven himself a master of both vices. His administration has pursued hostile policies that punish freedom, while his Republican Party maintains control of both the House and the Senate and still cannot deliver the promises that got them elected.

The Democrats are no better -- in fact, they are functionally insane. They pushed gender ideology and the mutilation of children, telling parents that their five-year-old sons are actually girls who need puberty blockers and mutilation surgery. When the head of a medical school was called before Congress, she was reluctantly forced to publicly acknowledge the most basic biological reality: that the vast majority of pregnancies occur in women ^[2]. That this constitutes news tells you how far American academia has fallen.

On the military side, the appointment of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense signals that competence is not even a consideration. Capable military leaders are sidelined while political loyalists are elevated. The result is an institution that cannot protect its own soldiers from the very medical system it mandated, cannot account for hundreds of billions in spending, and cannot win a war it has been fighting for essentially three decades in the Middle East. The disintegrating economic foundation of this empire is the direct consequence of fiscal incompetence accumulated through decades of bad decisions.

Grassroots Incompetence: Grocery Carts and AI Critics

Walk through any grocery store and look at what people are buying. Boxes of processed food, artificial sweeteners, seed oils, synthetic colors, and preservatives. They are slowly poisoning themselves, and the labels are right there telling them the truth. The information is available, but they refuse to read it.

Professor Barry Commoner, writing decades ago, observed that the nation's social system is grossly incapable of supporting the people who created it, and the evidence is that Americans now suffer from poverty, unemployment, environmental pollution, inadequate schooling, injustice, and the tyranny of war precisely because we have abandoned competence at every level ^[3].

The same willful ignorance applies to artificial intelligence. I cannot count how many people have told me AI is a hoax because they tried ChatGPT once two and a half years ago and got a mediocre answer. Meanwhile, open-source models like DeepSeek's V4.1 have crossed a remarkable threshold, scoring above 90 on the terminal bench, and delivering frontier-adjacent performance at about one-hundredth the cost. The data centers built by Big Tech oligarchs cost billions and now use more electricity than small countries. But DeepSeek costs pennies by comparison. The market has yet to correct this absurdity, and that is itself a reflection of widespread incompetence in technical and financial valuation.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains this perfectly. People who lack expertise in AI cannot perceive their own ignorance, so they confidently declare it overhyped. The people dismissing it are, functionally, committing intellectual suicide.

Economic and Technological Incompetence: No Revenue Model, No Sense

The financial system is perhaps the clearest evidence of systemic incompetence. Trillions of dollars have been invested in AI data centers with no describable revenue model. No serious analyst can explain where the returns will come from. The architecture of America's economy is generally a fraud, a figment of Wall Street imagination sustained by financial engineers rather than productive industry ^[4]. Meanwhile, DeepSeek charges $0.60 per million tokens while frontier American models charge up to $60 for the same output. That is a one-hundred-fold gap in the cost of the same basic output, and it exposes just how disconnected from reality the Western AI investment thesis has become.

The government's response to economic collapse is, predictably, incompetence compounded by theft. Tariffs raise prices on consumers and provoke retaliation. The Fed manipulates interest rates to mask the consequences of decades of money printing. The Treasury issues debt that can never be repaid. As Ludwig von Mises warned -- in words often cited by my colleagues in the financial freedom movement -- the only choices are voluntary abandonment of credit expansion or a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved ^[5]. Every dollar printed is a dollar stolen from our children, and they will inherit the bill ^[5].

This is why I have told my readers for years to convert dollars into gold and silver. Silver is currently trading around $60 per ounce; gold is approaching $4,200. These prices reflect the market's quiet verdict on the dollar's collapse. Only honest money -- money with no counterparty risk -- can protect wealth in a system this broken. The bankers running the Fed are, in every sense, crooks who have rigged the game against the people, and they know it.

Conclusion: The Intelligent Remnant and the Coming Collapse

I do meet intelligent people occasionally. They are the minority now, but not insignificant. They are the ones who read the labels, question the narrative, refuse the injections, grow their own food, convert dollars to gold and silver, and use uncensored AI engines rather than trusting the corporate models. These people give me hope. But hope is not the same as confidence. We are not the voting majority, and the political decisions that determine every aspect of our lives are driven largely by morons.

Genuine competence in society requires a humble recognition of what we do not know, and the humility to learn ^[6]. Our generation has largely lost that humility. We have traded it for the false comfort of conformity, the illusion of safety through obedience, and the fleeting dopamine hit of saying the popular thing that generates clicks or likes. The path forward may require a collapse of civilization as we know it -- and honestly, that may be the only way to reset the conditions for genuine human flourishing.

In the meantime, I will keep doing what I have always done: speaking the truth as loudly and as often as I can, and providing tools for people who want to live free. Follow my work at BrightVideos.com, NaturalNews.com, and BrightLearn.ai. Learn everything you can about health, freedom, and decentralization before the system collapses under the weight of its own incompetence. The intelligent remnant knows what is coming. The rest, unfortunately, will be surprised. Visit BrightAnswers.ai for an AI engine that actually tells the truth, and Brighteon.social for a place where free speech still exists.

References

1. The Incompetence Paradox: Why Your Overconfidence in Irreplaceability is the First Sign of Obsolescence. 2026-02-17T02:35:38.000Z. https://books.brightlearn.ai/The-Incompetence-Paradox-Why-Your-Overconfidence-in-Irreplaceability-7af483f4f-en/index.html
2. Academia Embarrasses Itself... Again. 2026-07-18T22:40:00.000Z. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/academia-embarrasses-itself-again
3. The closing circle nature man and technology. by Commoner Barry 1917-2012
4. Disintegration Indicators of the Coming American Collapse Andrei Martyanov. by Unknown
5. Quinn: They Know What's Coming, Because They Planned It.... 2026-08-27T20:20:00.000Z. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/quinn-they-know-whats-coming-because-they-planned-it
6. The Stupidity Toolkit: A Field Guide to Flawed Thinking and How to Outsmart It. 2026-09-14T08:36:36.000Z. https://books.brightlearn.ai/The-Stupidity-Toolkit-A-Field-Guide-to-Flawed-c51910ac2-en/index.html

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