The term 'humilitainment' was popularized in 2013 by Richard H. Smith in his book The Joy of Pain. Based loosely on the concept of the German term 'Schadenfreude', which translates into English as 'malicious joy' (not 'shameful joy'), 'humilitainment' describes the entertainment that is provided by the humiliation of others.

In his recent article "It’s All Fake: Reality TV That Masquerades as American Politics" for The Rutherford Institute, John Whitehead focused on how humilitainment helps condition the population to accept dehumanization at the hands of the police state, I cannot recommend his article enough.

In this contribution however, I will focus on how this class of entertainment has desensitized people to - and bred acceptance for - extreme forms of ignorance. This will be done by providing examples of humilitainment designed to entertain (e.g. Jimmy Kimmel) and examples that are meant to educate the audience into recognizing just how dumbed-down the population has become (e.g Mark Dice).

Regardless of the intent behind the humilitainment, the examples provided here serve as stark illustrations of decreasing education standards as addressed in my recent contribution Behold a Failed Horse.

Uniformly, these short videos are humorous, horrific and humiliating in equal measure. Tragically, many of the subjects appear to care less about their own state of ignorance than their 15 seconds of what should be humiliating fame. So without further ado...

_A_ book. _Any_ book. _ANY_ book! How anyone can not name a single book is beyond me, it never even occurred to me that people like that exist. **Consider that bubble popped.** For a bibliophile like myself, watching this is like watching a cresting tsunami of vapidly flopping spermatozoa that is about to crush humanity in a tide of obliviousness that will rival the Great Flood.

Any country. Any... country. Again, I never imagined there were people who went to school - any school - who can't identify a single country on the world map. That and the inability to distinguish between the term country and continent was just... terrifying. The laughter that escaped my lips watching this was more disbelief than humor. Not even the USA, where you live, really?

This has been a trend for a long time, but has likely been exacerbated by the smombie (smartphone zombie) phenomenon and may explain why my students actually took down the analog clock in one of the classrooms and put up a digital clock. After watching this, the first thing I will do next semester is cover Roman numerals and how to tell time (for 20 year olds...), just in case. There is a silent persistent scream of agony slithering around in my grey matter...

No wonder the country is going to hell in a hand basket. As George Orwell once said, "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." This is an example of that principle. These victims have already had their history destroyed and now their handlers want to destroy anything that could inform them about the origins of their almost abolished freedoms. Speaking of Orwell...

Given the intentional substitution of indoctrination for education in public schools, I am not surprised George Orwell is widely unknown in the land of Big Brother and the One Party Deep State. It simply wouldn't do to have the population be able to recognize newspeak or doublethink, much less read a depiction of how the very concept of thoughtcrime destroys freedom. War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!

Man on the street interviews are a common entertainment stunt designed to make people's ignorance a commodity that earns clicks for laughs. That doesn't surprise me, but that people are celebrated for their ignorance or aren't even remotely ashamed of being completely oblivious to the world they live in does. This is a form of reality TV, perhaps the "most real" form of reality TV there is.

The horror of this, as Whitehead aptly describes it, is that, "Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the 'norm.' Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium." To put it in other words, the age-old adage of "monkey see, monkey do".

And this is how the glorification of ignorance and obedience has made being uninformed and entirely unmotivated to do anything about it acceptable in the media age. That which is most fatal to a functioning society has been recast as entertainment. It is only the boiling frog effect that stops us from considering the dystopian comedy Idiocracy a documentary of the now.