Despite outcries from eggheaded know-it-all bookworms, if there’s one thing that everyone knows it’s that not knowing stuff is the hippest game in town. Everyone from senior citizens to newborn babies is showing off how little they know, in what sociologists describe as a social tidal wave that’s sweeping the globe. But then, what do they know?

Widespread ignorance was originally popularized by the teenage set, many of whom found comfort in avoiding knowledge and reserving their brain power for other uses, such as sleep. But now everyone’s doing it and people couldn’t seem happier. Alexis Hendrickson, a senior at Apollonia High, finds the new popularity of ignorance among adults amusing. “It’s like, we were totally doing it first,” argues Ms. Hendrickson. When asked why she thought adults were co-opting teenage behavior, she simply shrugged. “Beats me. Who cares?”

Forty-year-old accountant Emerson Blackburn was standing on line at a local cinema to watch “AppleHead BananaPants,” a new cartoon created for children. Mr. Blackburn, who has no offspring himself, defended his decision. “It’s funny, so what if it doesn’t mean anything? What, does everything have to be like a book by Sartre? I don’t even know who the hell Sartre is.” But according to Apollonia University records, Mr. Blackburn indeed wrote his thesis on Sartre.

Even the halls of government are taken with the new know-nothingness. At a recent Government Hall meeting, Apollonian officials fought bitterly over the latest round of economic reports. One legislator accused the government of simply generating a “bunch of facts and figures that nobody with half a brain could understand,” rather than printing the report on a thick stock of bond paper in a color “that pleases the eye.”

The popularity of not knowing much has hit IQ testing agencies square in the pocketbook. “Business is booming,” says test maker guy Brad Finch. Most people, explains Finch, score at least three-digit IQ’s even if they try to sabotage themselves. “You can suppress your brain a lot, but there’s still a limit.” Test takers flock to Finch’s firm looking to score the elusive two-digit IQ and the bragging rights that go with it. Few question the accuracy of his exam. But even Finch himself is noncommittal as to precisely how intelligence testing works. “Beats me. Who cares?”