You know these people.

These are the people who don’t read signs. The people who sit right down on fresh paint, the people who walk into wet cement, the people who drive all the way down a street clearly marked “DEAD END”, get to the dead end, stare at it, get out of their cars, stare at it some more, get back into their cars and gun the engine repeatedly, as if the mysteriously disappearing road will quit messing around and suddenly reappear if they just catch it off guard, then get out of the car and stare at the dead end again, motor still running, and then finally get back into the car and very slowly and cautiously turn around and go back the way they came, as though they are afraid they will get in trouble for doing something so radical and strange.

They’re also the people who never really listen to anything that anyone says. They pretend to listen, because they’ve learned people get mad if you are obvious about mostly ignoring them, but really they are just listening for certain buzzwords they recognize, at which point they will launch into a rambling and undirected monologue about something they care about until they run out of steam and are forced, by lack of oxygen if nothing else, to let someone else talk, and they revert back into not-listening mode.

They’re the people who can watch five hours of television and then be completely incapable of telling you a single thing about any of the shows they watched. To them, the television is not an information delivery medium, it’s a sources of soothing flashing lights and distracting noises that relieve them of the burden of thought entirely, which is their dearest desire.

For you see, these people are LILEs… Low Information Lifestyle Enthusiasts. They have adopted a startlingly counterintuitive and depressingly effective life strategy centred firmly about paying as little attention to life and the information rich environment we live in as humanly possible. Reality has to force them to pay attention to it at all, and when they do, it’s always the minimum possible amount of attention required to get through the situation without getting run over too hard. They superficially pass as adults, and most people reluctantly recognize them as such, but objectively speaking, they are babies in grownup clothes.

One can only wonder what the inner life of such a person must be like. I picture their minds as being like an infants, filled with undifferentiated sensation and bright colors. Or perhaps to them, reality is something they watch on the TV in their head whilst they continuously masturbate.

Their one true skill is giving the appearance of adulthood and competence without actually having either. Hence, they tend to gravitate naturally to middle management, where others like them dwell in large herds and where therefore the ability to seem impressive and act like a manager is all that is required to impress the other LILEs around them. This puts them not only in the running for those middle management jobs, but well ahead of the sort of person who is truly competent and shows actual leadership, because those people often say things and do things which the LILEs don’t understand, and that makes them nervous. Worse, these people are often effective and perceptive, which scares the crap out of them, because their dim cowlike minds can’t handle anything that disrupts their carefully cultivated content free worlds in which they can function perfectly fine without really paying attention to anything.

Given that their one true skill is seeming important and projecting an air of authority, they are often quite good at it. Being low information people, they often notice more about the surface impressions of things than people with actual minds, and therefore become quite good at adopting the right appearance with the specific intent of therefore not having to have any of the substance.

It’s hard to decide exactly how culpable a LILE is in their own LILE-ness, because it’s hard to gauge how stupid they really are. It seems equally possible that they are people of low intelligence who have adopted the LILE life strategy as a way to cope with a world they can’t possibly understand, or that they are people of perfectly adequate intelligence who have simply decided they don’t give a shit. The outcome in terms of their behaviour is the same, but obviously, morally speaking, there is a world of difference.

Regardless of the origins of their LILE-ness, it’s my contention that these people are the primary constituents of the group of people who “ruin it for everyone”. They are the stupid people who force manufacturers to put insultingly obvious warning labels on products, the people who make life a living hell for anyone working phone support for anything, the people who clog passing lanes and cut people off without even realizing it. Their decision to get by on as little information as humanly possible means they leave a trail of frustration, disruptions, irritations, and outright white hot fury behind them, and contributes to many a sane and rational person’s feeling that the world is full of idiots. It isn’t. It’s the same LILE idiots, going around spreading rampant misanthropy wherever they go, and of course, completely oblivious to this fact.

I’m not sure what can be done about LILEs. On an individual level, they probably would respond to treatment based on making not paying attention as physically painful as possible. This would preferably involve painful electric shocks which can only be avoided by listening very carefully to what someone is saying and then reading a set of instructions.

But as a group, I don’t know what we can do about these people except try to publicize their existence so that everyone involved with them can see them for what they are and adjust their expectations and their coping strategies accordingly. A big step in the right direction is the simply realization that the person above you is, genuinely, an idiot, in the functional sense, and therefore must be treated as a child. Once you stop feeling you have to treat a LILE with the respect and sensitivity due an actual adult, a great burden will be lifted from your soul and you will, hopefully, rest a little easier at night.

By the way…. Dubya was the ultimate LILE.

But you probably already figured that out.