PRINCETON, Jan. 16—At a press conference on Wednesday, research scientists at the Institute for Theoretical Advancement announced the conclusion to their longest running study. Its aim: to discover the means by which things have turned out so poorly.

“We have determined, unequivocally, that the answer cannot be known,” said chief researcher Dr. Rufie Bentcock.

The problem, he said, arises from the monumental stupidity of human beings, both individually and as a whole.

“Our point of focus is blurred and uncertain,” continued Dr. Bentcock, “given that the instrument used to measure and classify human stupidity is the human brain itself. Our insights are therefore innately flawed, and can yield no definitive result.”

Using technical jargon that is here simplified for our readers, he explained that if we were capable of concluding how things got so unspeakably awful, then we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. And further, that the researchers would have noticed this much sooner, and not bothered with all the research, had they not been morons themselves.

“Think of it as a kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of idiocy,” said Dr. Bentcock. “Or like the incompleteness theorems in mathematics, except dumb as all hell.”

As to who is to blame, the Comprehensive Inquest into Fault Attribution was recently stripped of funding, and every contributing scholar reassigned to experimental research outposts in the Oort cloud.