I believe it was the SF writer Cyril Kornbluth who foretold of the rise of the “marching morons.” He reasoned that the most intelligent people would not only seek out their own kind but would be socially responsible to not over-reproduce. The dummies would be left with their own kind and would care nothing for any kind of responsibility, social or otherwise. The result would be a world populated largely by morons and secretly watched by the ever more capable and ever more distant intelligent.

In such a world, Phds would be granted in such complex subjects as filing and typing. Cars would go ever faster every year, but only because the speedometers had been modified to read 300 instead of 60.

Eventually, though, the intelligent got tired of the morons and announced that Venus had been found to be a wonderful place, far better than Earth. The morons were told to climb on the rockets and go there immediately.

As Wretchard once pointed out a dissatisfaction with the state of affairs among the scientists of Pakistan and Iran also implies the same thing can happen in Tel Aviv and Tokyo. Or in Bonn and Oxford and Geneva. It takes very few smart people to create immense destruction today. There is no guarantee that all of them will go gently into the night.