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“National Lowered Standards Day” Celebrates Decline into Apathy and Mediocrity

Psychologists propose “National Lowered Standards Day” to ease American transition into irrelevance, through the apathy and thus mediocrity of its citizens.

August 4, 2010 — Psychologists at the Miskatonic University are proposing a “National Lowered Standards Day” to ease the transition Americans will experience as they go from being a nation of competent, hard-working people united around success, to a backwater of the third-world levels of dysfunction owing to the apathy, complacency, stupidity and laziness of its citizens.

This proposed holiday, which would occur every year on August 4, would “soften the psychological impact” of having once been the world’s leading nation, and now being “another banana republic where the cops are corrupt, the politicians are con men, the media entertainment, and the average person a total lazy idiot who thinks he’s a victim of circumstance, which justifies his further apathy,” according to lead psychologist Dr. Jungman Werther.

“What separates first-world nations from third-world nations is not geography or politics,” said Dr. Werther. “It’s degree of organization. In the first world, you have rule of law, cleanliness, social order and values in common. In the third world you have none of that, so those societies are totally disorganized through a process we call exponential entropy. When a first world nation, through the apathy and dysfunction of its citizens, becomes disorganized, it becomes a third-world type nation instead, even if it’s far from what we usually think of as the Third World.”

Werther’s group is distributing leaflets and posters to convince Americans that it’s OK to be mediocre, disaffected and oblivious. Doing so, he says, reduces the shock of a whole nation finding that it’s suddenly irrelevant. “We’re going to ease people into this transition,” said Dr. Werther. “It’s like any other transition in life — old age, death, disease or retirement. Our past phase was a vital, full life, and now it’s time to sit on the sofa in the retirement home, play bingo, eat bland food and watch lots and lots of exciting television.”

On the official website for National Lowered Standards Day, the text proclaims: “For years, we have struggled to maintain higher standards, but it just hasn’t worked. It’s inconvenient. To recognize this, we propose a Federal holiday to celebrate a lowest common denominator state of mind.” It is hoped Americans will recognize the wisdom of these words but as Dr. Werther admits, “it’s difficult” to make apathetic and mediocre people even take notice.