Cogito ergo Dumb

Often those who think have the feeling of never being able to think enough, of not knowing sufficiently; whilst those who enjoy their stupidity are convinced they have intelligence to spare.

Stupidity

Stupidity is not merely an education gap, not just poor studies. Ignorance perhaps is stupidity's sister: the two belong to the same family, but are not the same person. My thousand questions are not directed at ignorance, which is the result of factors such as social class, region of upbringing, family history, and education. Stupidity, instead, has something self-indulgent, something insistent about it. It wears its dyed, backcombed hair with immeasurable pride. If only it were merely extroverted! Instead, its loud voice and ear-splitting laughter pierce the eardrums of even minimally thinking people. It never arrives alone. It is always, always accompanied by at least one of its kind — very rarely does it pair with intelligence.

Ignorance

The world is complex and is becoming increasingly so. It becomes ever more difficult to understand, to follow developments on different fronts. Until two hundred and thirty-five years ago1, the largest part of the population was kept ignorant by sovereigns and religious figures, to be exploited to the maximum. For millennia, the world was thus explained to subjects, and it was simple: God reigned above everything and everyone. The king held political power given to him by, precisely, God. The clergy descended in a direct line from, precisely, God, and therefore knew everything there was to know about the creation of the world (science) and moral and behavioural life. That had to suffice.

The enemy

Of course, we are still only talking about ignorance. But what about stupidity?

'Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than malice,' said German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazis on 9 April 1945. Austrian psychiatrist Heidi Kastner defines stupidity as 'the tendency to ignore facts'. Carlo M. Cipolla2, economic historian, stipulates five fundamental laws that circumscribe the characteristics of human stupidity3:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who causes damage to another person or group of people without at the same time realizing any advantage for themselves or even suffering a loss.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at any moment and place, and in any circumstance, dealing and/or associating with stupid individuals invariably proves to be a costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person that exists.

Frustration

Today, unlike 235 years ago, the world has become extremely complex: God is now dead, or at least in intelligent contexts can no longer serve as the reason for natural, political, financial, and social phenomena. Instead, science explains the birth and development of the universe, the origin of stomachs in mammals4, and the fact that we are empty inside5. And it's true: it is humanly impossible to understand, grasp, and follow all these phenomena. It's complex. It's difficult. It's complicated. Everything is complicated, and the more one delves into a subject, the more complicated it becomes, branching infinitely like England's coastline6. Any question one tries to explore: one never reaches the bottom.

This phenomenon is frustrating and surely contributes to the feeling of being stupid that each of us has: we never manage to understand enough, and we never manage to get to the bottom of things.

But does this allow us to stop? To say 'I understand' when we haven't even grasped the question?

Intuition

Intuition is a fundamental gift for mankind. It allowed us to become Homo Sapiens, to leave the Savannah, to populate the world, to proliferate, to grow and develop a culture. And certainly, it remains fundamental for our personal, emotional, and intimate life. It is with intuition that we fall in love. But for explaining the world around us, intuition is no longer a suitable tool; it becomes dangerous if we want to perform heart surgery following our intuition, or drive a train, or build a thermal power station, or produce a COVID-19 vaccine.

'To cure Covid, exposure to strong light might be enough,' said Donald Trump7, and he suggested ingesting bleach to eliminate the virus in the body8, thus not only giving space to his own intuition but appealing to the intuition of an entire nation, in a subject where only science, through research, data, facts, and results, can save human lives and move humanity forward.

Equality

Often the stupid person is content with their intuition, and reinforced and confirmed by their peers, they put it on the same level as detailed research. Democracy has taught them: my vote counts as much as yours. From this, they deduce: my opinion is worth as much as yours, even if my opinion is based on intuition alone, and yours is based on a doctorate in biochemistry and 15 years of pharmaceutical research. Indeed, mine is worth more because you are a swot who never stopped studying and I, instead, live, know, feel, understand, and inform myself until late at night watching films about alternative science and interviews with people I trust.

Convenience

Today, as a thousand years ago, it is the stupidity of the people that suits those in power. A stupid population can be steered where you want, made to believe, vote, buy, and think what you want them to, a stupid population risks their lives for you and gives it away for your perverse ideas.

Donald Trump is not stupid. He knows he needs stupid people whose intuition he can manipulate at will. He doesn't believe he can cure COVID-19 with bleach – when he fell ill, he immediately went to the hospital and put himself in the hands of science. But he requires the population to believe these kinds of theories, to approach the preachers of stupidity so that he can better manipulate, steer, and abuse them in his fascism-based politics.

The triangle

Vladimir Putin9, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, the perfect triangle, the new axis of evil:

The dictator who represses his people and keeps them isolated and first more ignorant, then more stupid as possible, to be able to unleash wars, assassinate, enrich himself, and rape the world at his pleasure, supported by his population, the police, and the military. The producer of content for The Stupid10 in the United States (their quantity, as Cipolla says in his first point, is always underestimated), who exports the dictator's theories to poison their brains, to unite them under the same perverse ideas, and the richest man in the world who first buys, then makes available the distribution network of content produced by the dictator and the producer and ensures the capillary delivery of toxins to ensure that the ideologies and reasoning of the dictator and the producer's poison reach their destination.

The epilogue

The question is: what ways out are there against this transformation of our political, social, and human world?

I believe that the only possibility is direct combat against the factors pushing toward this transformation:

• Politically: avoid, at all costs, politicians close to fascism and the extreme right rising to power, whether at municipal, regional, or national level.

• Culturally: even though Cipolla notes that dealing with stupid people is always a costly mistake, I believe it's important to counter conspiracy and non-rational ideologies11, through argumentation.

• Structurally: drain the so-called social media, avoiding feeding them with our content. If they consist only of absurd theories and extreme right stuff, a large portion of advertisers will withdraw, and the network will downsize.

Clearly, in the end, the words of the old sage count: if you want to change the world, change yourself. Don't stop questioning, thinking, writing. Force yourself to be never satisfied, but continue to fight against your stupidity. Continue to learn. Work harder to create what others cannot create, do what others cannot do, and do everything to change the world within yourself, and with this, around you.

There is no hope. Seize it.

The Italian version of this article has been published in Backstage Magazine on Feb 24th, 2024

1. understood as people who are content with non-thinking and boast about it ↩︎

2. personally, I include religions as well, but this will be a topic for new discussions ↩︎

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