The Psychology of Stupidity

Everyone sees bullshit, listens to it, and reads it, every single day. At the same time, each of us is guilty of generating it, thinking it, mulling it, and speaking it aloud. We are all morons from time to time, spouting nonsense as we go about our lives, without any real consequences. The crucial thing is to be aware of it and to feel sorry about it; because to err is human, and admitting your faults is halfway to having them forgiven. There will always be those who take us for fools, but we recognize our own folly far too rarely. Apart from the perpetual purr of idiocy that surrounds us, day in, day out, there's also, sadly, the roar of the masters of stupidity, kings of stupidity-assholes with a capital A. Those assholes, whether you encounter them at work or at home, do not strike you as anecdotal. They hound you and harass you with their obstinacy in crass wrongheadedness, their unjustified arrogance. They prosper, they sign on the dotted line, and they would happily cross out all of your opinions, emotions, and dignity with one stroke of the pen. They erode your morale and make you doubt there can be any justice in this vile world. No matter how hard you try, you cannot detect a speck of kindred connection in them.

Stupidity is an unkept promise, a promise of intelligence and confidence that the idiots among us betray, traitors to humanity. These jerks are like dumb beasts-they're total animals! We might want to indulge them, to turn them into friends, but they're not on that level, which is to say, our level. They suffer from a disease that has no cure. And since they refuse to heal themselves, convinced that they are one-eyed kings in the land of the blind, the tragicomedy is made complete. It's no surprise that people are fascinated by zombies-with the simulacrum of existence they embody, their intellectual vacuity, and their overwhelming, fundamental need to drag the living, the heroic, and the simply decent down to their own level. And that makes sense: idiots, like zombies, want to eat your brains: these failed human beings never fail you. The worst thing about them is that they can sometimes be intelligent, or at least make a show of it. They're so skilled at transforming the lineaments of learning to the bars of a cage that they would gladly burn books-along with their authors-in the name of some ideology, or of something they learned from some purported sage (idiotic or not).

 

Uncertainty Makes You Crazy, Certainty Makes You Stupid

Morons will condemn you instantly, with no appeal possible and no extenuating circumstances admitted, on the sole basis of the appearances they glimpse through their narrow blinkers. They know how to rouse their sympathizers, to goad them to lynching in the name of virtue, custom, respect. The idiot hunts in a pack and thinks in herd fashion. As the Georges Brassens song goes, "The plural is useless to mankind; whenever / More than four are gathered, you'll find a band of fools." He also declared: "Glory to the man who, lacking lofty ideals / Contents himself with not being a nuisance to his neighbors." Alas! Our neighbors don't always return the favor.

Not content with making you miserable, the irksome id