We live in an era where anyone can beam their thoughts into the ether at the push of a button. This would be a miracle if those thoughts weren’t so reliably idiotic. The internet promised democracy of speech; what it delivered was a landfill of charts no one understands, memes that spread faster than viruses, and the gnawing sense that humans are simply not rational enough to handle the privileges they’ve been given.

“Democracy may trust everyone with a voice, but civilisation can’t survive everyone with a megaphone.”

– I just made this up – smh

The Enlightenment told us we were “rational animals,” armed with Reason, the noble faculty that would lift us out of ignorance and into perpetual progress. What a joke. We aren’t Vulcans; we’re apes with Wi-Fi. We mash the publish button before our brains have caught up, then scream “free speech” when anyone suggests that words might require responsibility.

Imagine if driving worked this way. No test, no licence, no consequences: just a toddler at the wheel, claiming God-given rights to swerve across lanes. That’s social media in its current form. The people most in need of regulation are the least likely to pass even the most basic competency exam. Yet they strut about, convinced that posting a graph about Mississippi’s GDP makes them the second coming of Adam Smith.

@theashtoncohen

5 Brutal facts about Europe’s economy. Europe’s richest countries are now poorer than Mississippi. Americans have way more spending power, their companies are getting crushed, birth rates are tanking, and they’ve been left out of the industries that will define the future. Here are 5 hard truths Europe can’t afford to ignore.

♬ original sound – Ashton Cohen

The truth is obvious but inconvenient: rationality is not humanity’s natural state. It’s a rare, costly condition, summoned only with discipline, education, and luck. Most of the time, we prefer shortcuts — tribal loyalties, gut feelings, dopamine hits. And yet we hand out the privileges of unfiltered speech, instantaneous broadcasting, and algorithmic amplification as if every citizen were Kant’s ideal autonomous agent.

The result? Chaos. Outrage machines. “Debates” about whether Europeans are backward barbarians for drinking water without ice cubes. These aren’t signs of liberty. They’re symptoms of a species drunk on its own mythology of reason.

Maybe we don’t need a new Marshall Plan for air conditioning in Europe. Maybe we need one for sanity. Start with a licence to post: a simple exam to prove you know what a source is, can tell a correlation from a cause, and won’t confuse market cap with civilisation itself. Civilization would be quieter. And perhaps, mercifully, a little less stupid.