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Justified by Stupidity Alone?
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We live in an era in which the great majority of people nominally considered smart (on the basis of educational credentials, position, and social status) hold and vigorously defend incorrect, demonstrably wrong, or even absurd notions about history, sex and sexuality, race, agriculture, diet, economic development, fiscal policy, climate, energy, and human nature. Joe Biden and his idiot vice president are our true leaders by virtue of the fact that they are demonstrably free from the shackles of facts, consistency, logic, and grammar. The Stupid is strong in those two.
For generations, conservatives, as heirs of Edmund Burke, Russel Kirk, and William F. Buckley, steeled themselves to win the great debate on the grounds of high principles, armed with the rich abiding wisdom of Judeo-Christian tradition, and a wealth of insights drawn from art, philosophy, religion, and the lessons of history … only to find that the left has simply removed the intellects of the audience. Yeah, it’s cheating, but it’s working.
Schoolchildren are now being subjected to indoctrination by perverts, our teens are immersed in vile confusion, and even the electrifying and uplifting victory of the Civil Rights movement is being tossed away in favor of weird new forms of dependence on the new whiteness, the patently silly woke posture. And the extent to which the right sorts, the modern equivalent of the Best and the Brightest, got COVID-19 policy completely wrong was truly stunning.
In my youth, I expected we needed to prep for the inevitable onslaught of Soviet-style Marxism. I thought the ultimate internal enemy would be some clever, smarmy intellectual along the lines of Alger Hiss. I never expected idiot hordes in groupthink lockstep to protect and serve Bozo the President while fostering the dissolution of our social and political fabric in an acid bath of pure stupid.
Published in General
I was trying to come up with the right wording for that too, I guess. People who are smart may be wrong to assume their smartness carries over to areas outside their expertise, but at least they have something. Truly dumb people have no excuse at all.
But it’s the smart and competent stupid ones who do all the damage.
Truly dumb people do plenty of damage, such as voting for Democrats.
It probably is. Clever enough to rig our elections and stay hidden.
In that case, I would say that stupidity is the opposite of wisdom, which is what we rightly do with what we know.
But just for the record, the OED has six unique definitions for stupid, and none of them imply any moral component (or even any characterizing as to being correct or incorrect) except perhaps very slightly the 5th: obstinate or stubborn. The definitions are essentially stuporous or insensate; lacking in speed or clarity of thought; boring or dull; and inanimate.
And the 6th is use as part of a hyphenated word, as in stupid-headed, which again is a particular characteristic applied specifically to someone’s cognition rather than meaning any moral aspect to his thinking.
I would just as soon accept that there are several definitions, and several connotations, and the context helps to differentiate between them.
Yes, I think the widely understood definition is unintelligent. Which is why I prefer to say these people are fools/foolish. They lack wisdom.
Y’all can have your definition if you want, and I’ll trust to context to determine what you mean. It’s a free country, for now until the stupid ones move their project a little further.
I will continue to reinforce that the best minds to write on the subject said stupidity is independent of intellect.
Yes, but would you agree that the stupid (by your definition) are fools? Lacking wisdom?
I do. Not because I am smarter and better than other people but because I read Russian literature.
Russian literature understands that people aren’t rational and they don’t even pretend to address human rationality. Old Bathos, as brilliant as his post was, was all about logic and evidence and therefore does not address what humans are in their core.
Humans are fundamentally religious and spiritual and while Wokeism is stupid, it appeals to humanity’s sense of belonging and purpose.
For example, conservatives and libertarians who vote for Trump don’t think that they are automatically good because they vote for Trump. They think that Trump’s free market policies made lots of jobs and wage growth so voting for him is a practical thing that helps people.
Wokeists vote for Biden because voting for Biden is what good people do and they want to belong to good people.
Fools, yes. As in “presides at his own hoodwinking.” The stupid are prone to it, I guess. I think more gently of being a fool, too frequently being one myself. Stupidity has a different element to it.
I’m going out on a limb to analyze minds, but I suspect stupidity begins where someone actively says “I believe” and stops their mind right there. The mind actively learns to ignore anything that contradicts it – the skill becomes encoded in synapses.
I can fault someone for being stupid, but overlook foolishness. Foolishness can be corrected, and (like Bonhoeffer said) stupidity is immune to any fix.
Stupidity is, if not intentional, then at least learned. There is such a thing as an honest fool.
Yes, the OED’s 3rd definition of stupid covers what we nowadays think of as unintelligent, specifically: Wanting or slow of mental perception; lacking ordinary activity of mind; slow-witted, dull. If the defining character of reality is spiritual then certainly a lack of comprehension of spiritual things, then one is a ignorant or stupid; and if one ignores or makes oneself insensible to spiritual things, one is a fool.
I phrase it that there’s knowledge is what we believe that is true (the opposite is ignorance), intelligence is creating more knowledge out of what we already know (the opposite being stupidity), and wisdom is applying what we know properly, in accordance with what is right (the opposite being foolishness).
Yes, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I don’t think it’s an accident that people who deny any transcendent truth (virtual, if not professed atheists) account for the majority of our destructive elites. And most of those are on the Left.
I don’t think that there as any electrifying and uplifting victory of the Civil Rights version. I think that this is a myth, and a myth used for a wicked purpose.
The Civil Rights so-called victory was corrupt from the very start, and the Civil Rights laws are the primary instrument used to enforce conformity with the indoctrination, perversion, and confusion that you identify as a problem.
Good article, good comments. Grasp of reality isn’t easy or automatic and even the most brilliant dedicated person can know only a small amount about the world economy, politics, science, weather, the environment, running a business a church, a non profit, etc, that is why the US was successful. It was ground up where folks did their own thing with relative freedom, restrictions limited to obviously harmful activities like theft and murder, and they gradually got better as they had to compete to survive and grow and figure out what above below and beside them they needed to know. Now we think experts can run things better? The world is more complex not less complex, more diverse not less diverse. The direction we’re going is self destruction; probably on purpose.
Yeah. America would be so much better without all those rights. Just a government that enforces decency. Because that never goes wrong.