But I'm sure you are onto something. Way back in the 1970s, Auberon Waugh (who adopted a semi-serious, upper class reactionary persona in his column in Private Eye) announced his big fear for the future was the advent of the "Stupid Society", due to the emancipation of stupid and ignorant people. It was a bit of tongue-in-cheek snobbery (he also wrote, at the time of the miners' strike, of "the dreadful prospect of empty baths in council houses up and down the land" - a reference to the old snobbish joke that working class people used the bath to keep coal in), and yet it had a kind of point behind it.
And now we have the Stupid Society exactly, courtesy of the internet. Silly ideas can whiz round the globe in minutes, at the touch of a button, and can acquire a following in a matter of hours. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous politicians have not been slow to capitalize on the opportunity. I think we will eventually learn to how deal with this, just as we learnt how to deal withe the new freedom of ideas made possible by the printing press. But that involved a couple of centuries of religious wars, of course.
