ARE WE SMARTER THAN OUR ANCESTORS?

When I was a kid, the postman semi-annually delivered a booklet-sized mail-order catalog with an odd mix of hundreds of household gadgets and cheap novelties: personalized pencils, cat toys, jumping beans and kitschy doorstops, et al.

The catalog also displayed the above-pictured LP cover of Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast mockudrama. As did the sensationalistic record cover, the catalog’s caption said that panicked Americans ran screaming into the streets or had heart attacks after hearing a radio report that Martians had invaded the US; specifically, my native New Jersey. Intrigued, I uncharacteristically asked my mother to buy the record. She declined.

Fortunately, a few years later, in the sixth grade, one of my classmates brought this record to school and convinced our diminutive, permed-black-haired, forty-something teacher, Mrs. Kasper, to play it. Mrs. Kasper was very nice and didn’t push her students or herself too hard. It was a fun year in school and sports. If the schools and the town sports leagues had been closed, there would be a void in my memory where many pleasing memories reside.

Perhaps Mrs. Kasper rationalized that hearing this record would provide a pop sociology or life lesson. Regardless, I was excited to hear this bucket list LP. As they said on the TV ad for a rock anthology album, “Put the needle in the first groove and let it wail!”

It turned out that my mother had shown good judgment by not ordering that record. The radio show was, as were Coronamania Era videos of morgue trucks or Chinese guys falling onto sidewalks, hokey and unconvincing. Less than halfway through, I couldn’t wait for the record to end. Sometimes life is like that: the thing that you had to have or the place you had to go to can become that thing you’re eager to get rid of or the place you’re itching to leave.

Be that as it may, after the program ended, Mrs. Kasper reminded us, as had the mail order catalog and urban legend tellers, that, despite the show’s implausibility, many people believed that Martians were invading and consequently, freaked out.

Those who’ve studied the War of the Worlds reaction have concluded that the extent of the purported panic was exaggerated, especially by newspapers seeking to discredit the medium of radio, with which they were competing for audience and thus, advertising revenue. One historian reported that only 6 million Americans heard the program. Of those, only 20% believed the scam. Of these, only a fraction bugged out. While many called the police to see if Martians had really invaded, most correctly perceived the program as theater of the mind. They looked out their windows, saw neither UFOs nor incendiary death rays and went on with their nights.

But as during Coronamania, why let the truth get in the way of a good myth?

Having recently reached Piaget’s formal-operational stage of cognitive development, and thinking ourselves worldly-wise, we sixth graders laughed at what gullible bumpkins our Martin-fearing predecessors had been. We derisively asserted that we’d never fall for such silliness. We smugly concluded that humans had gotten much smarter as a species in the 32 years between the original War of the Worlds broadcast and when we heard it played back in 1970.

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Fast forward fifty years to 2020. Some of the same classmates who mocked those who freaked out in 1938 about a phony alien invasion—and who had four-year, and even graduate, degrees from “good” colleges—fervently bought the 2020 Corona scam. On Twitter and FaceBook, these schoolmates spread “spiking-case” warnings, hurled “superspreader,” “grandpa killer” and “MAGA” epithets and displayed photos of themselves wearing masks. Later, they proudly posted virtue-signaling images of their vaxx cards, saying they couldn’t wait to resume normal activities 14 magic days later. They declined to respond to my emails that called the whole thing an extreme overreaction.

In 2020, I applied the same logic to Covid as I did in 1970 to a purported 1938 Martian invasion. Humans have been around for a long time. If supersmart aliens wanted to invade us, why hadn’t they done so before 1938? Analogously, after millennia, why would a super-killer respiratory virus suddenly emerge in 2020? Both scenarios seemed so far-fetched that they had to be hoaxes.

The chief difference between War of the Worlds panic and Coronamania is that, in the latter instance, believing government and media lies, hundreds of millions—not hundreds of thousands, as in 1938—did buy the viral Scam and demanded that everyone else do so. Both in public spaces and on social media, I saw widespread, persistent Covid panic and aggression with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. So did you.

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Most contemporary people share a delusional conceit about how sophisticated they are compared to those in prior generations. They look back at popular acceptance of an earth-centric universe, alchemy, witchcraft and witch trials, bloodletting, phrenology and other discredited scientific paradigms and say, “Ha! We’d never fall for anything so stupid!”

Many humans still delusionally think that, as time marches on, the species is continuously getting smarter and improving the human experience. But intensive human interventions can be net negatives. For example, the CDC requires 72 serious-injury-causing vaccines between birth and age 18 for diseases that either aren’t lethal or were functionally eradicated a century ago as people lived in less squalid settings and consumed cleaner water and more protein. Pharma hawks pills and shots for an ever-growing array of conditions, while ignoring these products’ serious side effects and disregarding self-care via diet, exercise and sunlight. Similarly, “scientists” have relentlessly bred much more potent marijuana and politicians have legalized it to widen access. Farmers sow genetically uniform, hybridized seeds and use boatloads of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers to unsustainably grow nutritionally dubious monocrops. In the name of reproductive freedom, many who delayed attempts to conceive use IVF, freeze eggs, shop for sperm and eugenically select embryos and edit genes. Many live in solitude while focused on their phones or other screens. Artificial intelligence is ramping up, displacing human labor and thought and enabling deepfakes and other forms of deception.

All of the above, modern practices have caused and will continue to cause major economic, social and psychological dislocation. As time passes, more will belatedly question the wisdom of these Pandoran interventions.

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In 2025, those who opposed the Covid overreaction say that, because so many have seen that they were duped by the viral hype and the ridiculous, damaging measures that were said to protect us, people should “Never again!” fall for such a scam.

But I wonder how many of those who supported the failed lockdown, school closures, masks and tests (collectively, “NPI”) and shots have been chastened. To protect their egos, many with whom I’ve spoken and social media commenters are sticking to their untenable narrative that a virus killed over a million otherwise healthy Americans and that the NPIs and shots saved millions of lives. Additionally, as during Coronamania, some will always, during social and economic disruptions, see profits and other opportunities therein and thus, endorse various interventions or products, not caring that these will harm others.

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George Eliot closes Middlemarch by writing that “(t)he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

The growing bad of the world similarly, commensurately depends on the misconduct of the panicky masses, who bought lies dressed up as sophistication and modernity. Between 2020-25, hundreds of millions who saw themselves as well-educated and intelligent showed that they were no smarter than those who freaked out about a bogus alien invasion eight decades earlier. And Team Covid Panic had hundreds of millions more members than did the Martian Phobes.

Increasingly, some—including millions of middle school students—are reflecting on Coronamania and mocking those who fell for it. Yet, as is often said, the winners write history. And though the NPIs and shots failed and caused tremendous, lasting harm, the Coronamania “winners” who used the Scamdemic to make money and sway elections will continue to recite their false, self-serving viral narrative.

As awareness of Coronamania’s damage widens over time, those who supported the NPIs and shots will, like St. Peter and the rapper, Shaggy, revisionistically say, “It wasn’t me!” or “We didn’t know.”

But they did support these measures. And they should have known it was all a Scam.

It’s too late to undo the harm that the Covid overreaction caused. Nonetheless, to enable more people to understand what happened, we must continue to call out the many viral lies and the liars who tell them. This will help people to see the linkage between the Covid response and the growing and social and economic problems that manifest themselves daily. We can also hope that, as War of the Worlds and Mrs. Kasper alerted us to peoples’ susceptibility to media-driven scams, more people will reject future government and media attempts to induce hysteria.

But does the bulk of society really get smarter as years go by?