Peter Hitchens at DailyMail unleashed the fury this week against the rise of mass stupidity in the West, following Barack Obama's election success:

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually did something.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

The public loves drama because it distracts from reality; The political elite love drama, because it occupies public attention long enough to get on with their behind-the-scenes business negotiations. The Obama cult is another example of primitive mass-psychology and goes to show just how easy it is to catch people's attention through speech, emotion and symbols. What's behind it all? Slick propaganda, serving no greater purpose than to get your man into office and keep him there until the next cult leader takes his place.

People voted Obama in because he's black, not because he's going to fix our problems. He fulfilled his promise (well, kind of), so naturally we owe him a round of applause. So, what's next? During the coming weeks the media will go into a frenzy over policy announcements and denouncements from the White House. Spare yourself their chatter, because half of it or more will not become reality. Right now Obama's adjusting to his new role as a president, while trying to keep his fan club together. In fact, his entire career depends on his ability to keep himself at good foot with lobbyists and the public alike, unless he chooses to speak the uncomfortable truth and get himself booted out after the next election. Democracy is the tyranny of dimwits and rewards ignorance over clarity:

Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every doctor will soon have a political commissar working alongside him to remind him of his wider responsibilities to government and party.

Doctors in Britain are now roughly in the position of Tsarist generals, scientists and 'specialists' in the first phase of the Russian Revolution: necessary but distrusted, hated and feared, and to be eliminated altogether as soon as possible. The British revolution, however, has been carried out neither by the proletariat nor in the name of the proletariat: it is, rather, the revolution of the ambitious but ungifted, of whom there is a gross oversupply. For everyone is persuaded these days that there is only one thing worth having, and that thing is power.

Lacking the boldness to execute them as did the Soviets and French during their revolutions, we are satisfied to bully, mock and silence our brilliant members of society, all under the banner of freedom and justice. We can't stand anyone who's smart, successful and outstanding. At the first chance, we vote up the underdog and cater to minorities in order to score moral points amongst our peers. This phenomenon, whereby people seek out a sense of power from performing “more selfless than thou” acts, is known as competitive altruism. He who donates the most to charity, spends his life rescuing animals, or defending the rights of minorities will rise in social status because of our society's obsession with egalitarianism.

Obama represents the minority underdog in America, and he won the election by appealing to precisely that symbolism. His election proves that the psychology of competitive altruism is still enormously powerful in the West. When did we stop embracing and encouraging the intelligent, beautiful and artistic qualities in our people? Somehow we've let our self-esteem fall so low that we reward excellence with contempt, except in people who renounce all higher aspirations and submit to our own self-loathing dogma. The successful politician always aims for the latter category, and neither McCain nor Obama is an exception. McCain was simply less compelling a showman.

This neurotic psychology is responsible for the defense of ignorant behavior and the continuing decay of our civilization, leading to an explosion of decadent lifestyles:

It's also not meant to be an insult. Should I come face-to-face with a holidaying Sarah Palin, and should we get past early conversational pleasantries about me being from the island of Edinburgh in the South Pacific archipelago of Belarus and suchlike, I would not stand for being called ant-eye American. I like these people, a lot. They are polite and thoughtful, even here, in Key West, where they basically only come to binge-drink. There's a touch too much whooping for my tastes, but I'm open to the possibility that maybe we Brits just don't whoop enough. So please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying they are bad people. I'm just saying they are fat people. I don't mean to go on about it, but I had always assumed this was just another thing that people said, like the Eskimos and snow. It's not. It's really true. They're really fat.

As to why they are so fat, well, that's altogether more tricky. It could be because they spend so much time in their very big cars. Or perhaps they only spend so much time in their very big cars because they are so very fat. Who can say? We were desperate, the wife and I, not to have a very big car. We booked a small one, begged at the car hire place, and still drove away in an eight-seater minivan with a 3.5 litre engine. Back home, we drive a Mini. You could fit our Mini in our minivan, no problem. We made bets, the first time we pulled up at a garage, on how much it would cost to fill up. I thought $80, she thought $50. Glug-glug went the nozzle, for about 15 minutes. $34. We Europeans, we're brainwashed good. It felt like stealing. It felt like abuse.

Brainwashed isn't the right word. The basic psychology of our people is deficient, because we practice and defend behavior that would lead to instant self-destruction in smaller, tribal communities. On the scale of an entire civilization, it can take decades before this kind of behavior spreads and eventually dissolves its host society. We can see it happening right now in the West, and in other nations such as China, eager to adopt our "progress" for the promise of economic prosperity. Charismatic dimwits gradually fill our positions of leadership because our political system rewards blind ambition above leadership ability or organizational talent. We are left with fancy-talking but selfish, corrupt leaders who would never neglect to prune their investments before pausing to consider the good of the people. We are in need of a new social order – a meritocracy – that rewards ability and champions brilliance. Competitive altruism will quietly fade away if we can learn to embrace strength, wisdom and character once again. In the meantime, we will have to be satisfied with the hope that Obama can forge a legacy as more than “the first Black President of the US."