The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the struggle between nerds and jocks. A lot can be explained about a society by observing the balance of power between these two eternal foes. The English Civil war was a result of the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s: monasteries had been used by jocks to safely contain nerds, once they were released it was inevitable that the nerds’ efforts would turn to reforming their jock compatriots.
Nerds like things to be complicated, jocks like things to be simple. This is the essential difference between the two. Naturally, nerd propaganda paints this distinction as a difference of intelligence. This is false. Jocks are not less intelligent than nerds, they just find thinking tiresome and would prefer to get drunk or talk to girls.
Modern society has become dominated by nerds. Complexity is everywhere. People pay attention to a thing called ‘the stock market’ which, so far as I can make out, is a bunch of computers full of numbers that a bunch of nerds sit around clicking on. The humble car has become ever more complicated; no longer is the car merely a cheaper and less intelligent steed, it is now a cheaper and less intelligent navigator and chauffeur. Meanwhile in politics, many nerds are attempting to introduce even more complexity. The ideal system of the jocks is as simple as possible: some suggest doing what the strongest jock wants, some support a simple head count so whichever side guy can get the most people to like him can do what he wants. Nerds see this system as far too simple. Instead of just listening to the coolest guy, they come up with a bunch of nerd shit to justify it; this is how ideologies are made.
All this nerd shit basically started in 1789. Obviously there were a bunch of nerds running about before that, but the French Revolution was when they really got going. The French Revolutionaries were almost all nerds. Most were lawyers and some were even journalists. Naturally, they wanted to come up with a very complicated system to run the country that they’d just stolen from the jocks. They wrote a bunch of nerdy articles about how everything should be run in as confusing a way as possible, rather than the simple ‘do what the king says’ system that had prevailed before. I haven’t read any of this stuff, so I can’t explain it to you, but I am sure their conclusion is that nerds should be in charge. The jocks would never resort to such trickery because it’s too confusing and they’d rather be getting drunk.
The ultimate invasion that the French Revolution brought into the lives of jocks was the metric system. Normally, if you want some beer, you think to yourself how much you want and you ask for that amount. Our ancestors have kindly provided us with some easy to understand units: the pint, the quart, the gallon and more. Even if you don’t know how many pints are in a quart, experience allows you to judge which one to order. The same applies to distance, you don’t need to know or even think about how many feet are in a mile, because you know roughly how long a mile is so when someone tells you that some place is 10 miles away you know what shoes to wear or which horse to ride. One of the most ingenious units in this system is the league: a league is the distance an average person can walk in an hour, roughly 3 miles in the UK and considerably less in Italy and France.
The nerds saw this system as far too simple and intuitive. Instead of basing units on things that people can intuitively understand, they decided to base them on a bunch of nerd shit that no one in their right mind has heard of or cares about. Originally a gram was defined as the mass of water contained in a millilitre and the millilitre as square centimetre. I have never met someone who conceives of mass in this unusual way. In more recent times, when the domination of society by nerds has become ever more complete, units are defined in increasingly bizarre ways. A centimetre is now defined based on the speed of light. The speed of light is utterly inconceivable to anybody, especially someone who has better things to do all day than sit around doing maths and looking through telescopes. Naturally, the nerds have therefore selected it as the basis for all measurement.
The tyranny of the nerds will one day come to an end. We can only wait and hope. One day, we will be able to understand how big things are in a way that a normal inhabitant of this planet can understand. If someone explains to us that the fish they caught was “the length that light travels in 5 and a half quantometapetoseconds” we shall at long last be able to respond: “Shut up, nerd.”
nerds are good tho
metric better