If there’s one thing people love, it’s feeling better than others.
And as America has undergone its “Great Sort”, pop psychology has provided a dysfunctional society boundless opportunities to do just that. Those opportunities are scientifically dubious, but just plain feel good, because they satisfy that primal need to dunk on other people.
These opportunities came in successive waves of theories: “Conservative/liberals have better sex lives than liberals/conservatives”, self-adulatory navel gazing about Boomers/Xers/Millenials/GenZs, the brief fixation on the joys and superiority of introversion, endless diagnoses (during the Trump years, “narcissistic personality disorder” was in vogue)…
…and, I suspect, this latest one: pathologizing “stupidity”.
In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:
The “five laws” are there, and make sense, more or less.
But I’m wondering – does nobody think this sort of affectation through? Ever?
Because if combine this (I predict) fad-to-be with the fad that is currently ebbing – the “Dunning Kruger Effect – people doing the diagnosing will realize that they are, largely…
…well, subject to which facile, self-adulatory cultural trope?
Again – don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here…
I’ve tried to understand these various theories of stupidity, but they never seem to make the slightest effort to describe what stupidity is. I mean, before pontificating on it. Seems like a cart bef-… no, without a horse. Moreover, the Dunning-Kruger effect is apparently not a thing. You can look it up.
Seems to me that these stupidity theories are mainly intended to flatter the reader.
Mitch must subscribe to meme of the day:
When you are dead, you don’t know you are dead. The pain is felt by the others.
The same thing happens when you are stupid.
Nobody understood this better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is probably why the Nazis killed him. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this recently, but it’s good to keep this close at hand. It certainly guides my interactions with certain commentators.
On folly (or “stupidity”):
Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. You can protest against evil, you can unmask it or prevent it by force. Evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction, for it always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. There is no defense against folly. Neither protests nor force are of any avail against it, and it is never amenable to reason. If facts contradict personal prejudices, there is no need to believe them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be pushed aside as exceptions. Thus the fool, as compared with the scoundrel, is invariably self-complacent. And he can easily become dangerous, for it does not take much to make him aggressive. Hence folly requires much more cautious handling than evil. We shall never again try to reason with the fool, for it is both useless and dangerous.
To deal adequately with folly it is essential to recognize it for what it is. This much is certain, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.
There are men of great intellect who are fools, and men of low intellect who are anything but fools, a discovery we make to our surprise as a result of particular circumstances. The impression we derive is that folly is acquired rather than congenital; it is acquired in certain circumstances where men make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We observe further that folly is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals or groups who are inclined or condemned to sociability. From this it would appear that folly is a sociological problem rather than one of psychology. It is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances upon men, a psychological by-product of definite external factors.
Moderation for all things, it appears.
Almost, 25 years ago a fellow student at my highschool did his Senior Speech on the theory of Group Dumbification Theory. It was more in depth explanation than Tommy Lee Jones’ line, from about 25 years ago also, as Agent K in Men In Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”