"The Marching Morons"

Next April will mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of "The Marching Morons", a sci-fi novella by C.M. Kornbluth. As far as I know, it was never published as a separate book -- it's just a short story -- but you should be able to find it in a science fiction anthology such as The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

I think about "The Marching Morons" almost every day, as I read and listen to the news. Airplanes fall out of the sky because of human error. Offshore oil wells spew millions of gallons of crude into the sea because of human error. Billions of dollars are "lost" in stock exchange meltdowns because of human error. And so on.

The world, it seems, has fallen into a deep and abiding stupidity from which there is no hope of recovery. This is the theme of "The Marching Morons".

The story is set hundreds of years in the future. John Barlow, a man from the past accidentally put into suspended animation, is revived in the year 7-B-936. He finds a world gone stupid, where, despite a veneer of progress, things have actually got worse than they were in Barlow's time.

A scientist named Tinny-Peete explains the Problem of Population (PopProb). Because the intelligent people didn't have enough children, and less intelligent people had too many, the world is full of morons, with the exception of an elite few who work slavishly to keep order. I can't imagine a more bang-on description of the world as we know it today!

Barlow, who was a shrewd con man [salesman, surely! ed.] in his day, proposes a "final solution", based on the example of Hitler's Germany. Convince the morons, he suggests, to travel to Venus in spaceships that will kill their passengers once they fly out of view. Propaganda depicts Venus as a tropical paradise, with "blanket trees", "ham bushes", and "soap roots". In a frenzy of nationalism, every country tries to send as many as possible of their people to Venus to stake their claim.

I don't want to spoil the ending for you so won't reveal what happens to Barlow. Read it yourself and enjoy (or shudder at) Kornbluth's amazingly accurate vision of the world of stupidity in which we live. Then sign up all your stupid relatives, neighbours and colleagues for the expedition to Mars...coming soon courtesy of NASA.