Collective Stupidity

A continual quiet despair of mine is how much the world spends on the military. And have you noticed how this spending is often framed? Defense spending. Not attack spending - when what they’re buying creates the capability for both. Tricky buggers!

My discourse here has been triggered by a Herald article highlighting the nine nations that spent the most on nuclear weapons last year. $91.4 billion bloody dollars! Which was a 13% increase over the previous year. This spending charge is led by the good old U S of A. And they don’t just have a nose in front, they’ve lapped the field a few times! Here is the roll of (dis)honour in $USD:

US: $51.5b
China: $11.5b
Russia: $8.3b
UK: $8.1b
France: $6.1b
India: $2.7b
Israel: $1.1b
Pakistan: $1b
North Korea: $0.8b

These are all stupidly big numbers. They are hard to comprehend when our best frame of reference is how much Lotto’s Powerball is going for this week. But try this for size; the World Food Programme estimates we could end world hunger by 2030 if countries spent $40b a year addressing it.

Think about that. In 6 years, we could potentially resolve world hunger by diverting current spending on nuclear weapons to food. (And by the way, these numbers are only a fraction of the total military spending. For example, the US spent an eye-watering $877b in total in 2023!)

This spending says we prefer to ‘protect’ our people by dropping taxpayer money on nuclear weapons (that can kill millions), in preference to feeding other people who are below the poverty line and improving their lives. Self-interest is a powerful force!

This is a sad indictment of our society. And we only have ourselves to blame. We elect our officials who make these dumb-arse calls so they can compete in this global dick-swinging competition.

Look at the countries on this list. The first-world countries that claim to seek peace and global harmony accounted for 75% of the spending last year on nuclear weapons - things designed to create destruction and death on a massive scale.

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on for me as these actions and words could not be more opposing. Kinda like stealing money from your best friend. You wouldn’t do it - unless you had a few horses loose in the top paddock.

Yet as a group, our collective top paddock has a groupthink stampede going on. Yet we ignore it and persist with the systems and structures that enable this stupid decision making. Humans are so irrational!

My only solution for this vicious circle of waste and potential destruction is education. If every nation’s school curriculum had the subject of critical thinking embedded into it and it was prioritised over every other subject, people may come to see the folly of our current ways and their yawning great contradictions.

We have proved time and time again that the best answers don’t come from the top. This level of change has to come from the ground.

We need to equip and mobilise the yoof. Because they have the most to lose and the most to gain. But our governing systems are arse-about-face when it comes to the young voice. Exhibit #1: Uncle Sam has two 70+ year-old party nominees - WTF!

Here’s an idea. Votes are weighted by age in every nation’s elections.

18 yrs - 30 yrs = 4 votes
31 yrs - 50 yrs = 3 votes
51 yrs - 70 yrs = 2 votes
70+ yrs = 1 vote

That would get the yoof voting and the chattering classes chattering about ageism!

Now, we just have to get our turkeys to vote for an early Christmas….