The one about stupidity

So, hey, we have spent a lot of time these last few days moralizing. And yes, yes, yes, I’m a moralizing imbecile, but that’s only for my friends and that one ex-girlfriend.

So, we’ve been going on and on and on and on about good and bad, and what makes good and what makes bad, and we will keep at it because, again, moralizing imbecile.

But in the meantime, I wanted to delve into the dichotomy that is more dangerous, more important, and more immediate than good and bad.

Hey, I know bad people who are quite all right. I’m not exactly good. I was called an anti-hero just today.

So, in this one, we won’t go into the nature of good and evil as primal forces. In this one, we are gonna dwell on the left side of evil, where we find the most dangerous thing in all of creation.

This one is about stupidity.

There is this piece written by an Italian economist. His name is Cipolla, and it has replaced a lot of more complicated texts as one of my absolute moral guides.

I try to come back to this piece a few times a year, reread it, gift it sometimes as a warning, sometimes as a, “Yeah, you’re stupid, and I’m onto you. Look, read this book. You’re so stupid, you will never know you are stupid, but this book is speaking about you.”

And it’s called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

And it’s basically kind of joking, but kind of not. It’s very interesting.

And the laws of human stupidity are something you should go read from the man himself, but the most important part is, yeah, you can’t tell if a person is stupid by any other feature they have. You can’t correctly estimate the number of stupid people in the world. You can’t cure stupidity.

Yeah, this guy really put his finger on the pulse of creation, and the only problem the bastard had is that he was already at the neck and didn’t really throttle creation out.

So yeah, fuck you, Cipolla.

Really, it’s like scripture by this point, but I won’t simply send you his way because I have a deadline to meet and he already met his...

Definitely...

In, like...

Lucky guy.

No 9/11, whatever the Kardashians are, or trap music.

Sign me up.

This millennium has been all kinds of weird, right?

So, what are we gonna do about the stupid people?

We need this guy back. Get the Ouija guys on the line, because we need this motherfucker back, because I have 26 extra years of evidence to show the motherfucker, and he’s not gonna like it.

Stupid people have always existed.

Just as evil is a fundamental concept that tends to emerge from innocent human interaction, so is stupidity.

And the very dangerous thing about stupidity is that stupidity doesn’t mean, “I have low IQ. I can’t understand nuclear physics, and I am kind of slow in my econometrics.”

Econometrics are useless. Ask an economist.

Now, the real problem with stupid people is that you can have someone who has the functional IQ of a normal, average, or very smart person and still have a stupid person.

And that’s absolutely crazy.

And I’m not saying every stupid person is smart, and I’m not saying every smart person is stupid.

But there is, I don’t know, just alongside the banality of evil, we should place the banality of stupidity.

Because what does it mean to be stupid?

Cipolla said that stupid people are people who create losses for other people in the system while, at the same time, creating losses for themselves.

And when you start thinking about stupidity just this way, not like, “Oh no, he can’t freaking add Euler’s constant to a googolplex in his head in a second, so he’s stupid.”

No.

I know very dumb people who are not stupid, and I know functionally intelligent people who are very stupid.

So this one is gonna be a doozy.

And yeah, that last piece, I really want to apologize to all the Brits out there. I do not want to throw heavy stuff at you guys.

And yes, yes, that Napoleon guy sucked, okay?

Recall the fucking regiment, guys. And Gurkhas? Really? Long live the King. There, I said it. Now put that fucking Walther PPK away!

That out of the way, let’s go.

And don’t misunderstand me. I know at least one stupid and dumb person, and they are absolutely entertaining to watch.

Absolute—and I say this with love and as much respect as I can muster—absolute reptile.

No personality, no depth, just a hot-air balloon filled with spite and reactionary bad actions.

It’s really interesting.

And yeah, well, every metric in life has, like, limits.

And the limits of stupidity don’t limit stupidity; they limit everyone else.

Because if you’re a nice person, which I am not, or if you are trapped, which sometimes we are, you will try to reason with a stupid person.

And the thing is, this is not possible, because intelligence is capacity, but stupidity is behavior.

You can work around capacity, but you can’t fix behavior.

Behavior will be enforced in just the same way every time. These people are broken. They come to kill, to steal, and to destroy, and boy, do they love it. They damage everyone, including—and starting with—themselves.

So, you don’t reason with stupid people. You just try to do your best to deal with them and vote them into office, and they get all the credit if there’s any credit to be had because, again, stupid.

Losses all around.

But you must be asking yourself: how can a smart person be stupid?

And it’s a very valid question, because we tend to idealize smart and very smart people, but I’ve had both the honor and the horror of dealing with some, dating some, and meeting a few more very smart individuals, and for a lot of them, life—especially social life—is very chaotic, complicated, and more or less unwanted.

Also, some of them were very stupid.

Imagine you have a beautiful yard. Not big, but good grass, a couple of small trees, and one big, beautiful, mature tree that’s been there for 60 years or more.

And you discover, to your absolute horror, that taxi drivers waiting for fares are—gasp—waiting in the shade of your tree.

Those bastards.

How dare they.

There’s only one solution.

Ask them?

Mind your own business?

No.

You’re smart.

Think stupid.

You’ve obviously got to cut the tree.

And yes, yes, such a monstrous decision will get you in trouble with the city, so you do it on the down-low, but it’s done.

No more goddamn taxi drivers waiting near your house.

Oh, yeah, 20 years later, you’re complaining about your electricity bill and the effect air conditioning has on it.

And hey, I hope you choke on it.

Asshole.

Stupid fucking asshole.

And that’s the beauty of a smart yet stupid person: they can navigate bureaucracy, they can plan, execute, do—but in the end...

Well, everything they end up doing is stupid shit like cutting down a tree because some people enjoyed the shade.

And you should always be on guard, because this kind of person—the-raze-you-to-the-ground-until-nothing’s-left, nuclear-warning-shot kind of person—is out there.

And some of them work in the French Nuclear Baguette Brigade, Sacrebleu Ma Foi, or whatever it’s called.

And damn.

Now we’re in hot water with another former empire.

This piece may seem a little too on the nose, but I have finally arrived at what I consider the deepest, most dangerous, and worst of all human moral deviations, and nothing—nobody—will convince me that stupidity is not a form of evil.

Maybe the root of all evil.

Why?

Because evil usually still contains some internal logic.

Greed wants something.

Cruelty enjoys something.

Revenge seeks satisfaction.

And you can think your way out of at least some of those situations. You can outgreed the greedy or take the taste out of revenge for the vengeful, but you can’t think your way out of another person’s stupidity.

It’s...

The lowest common denominator of any given group of people isn’t the stupidest person—oh, they definitely have an impact—but the first stupid person available, because, for a stupid person, the concept of the common good is perfectly clear.

Probably.

But it’s impossible to act on.

You probably got to politics all on your own by this point, and yes, politics is one of the places that really, really gives stupid people nuclear—sometimes literally—levels of power, because the political establishment is the dream for the deeply, irredeemably stupid.

Am I saying that all those fucking idiots who get to vote on how fucking bad global warming is gonna be and decide that fucking awful is not bad enough are stupid?

Yes.

And the whole system is fucked, and hey, great news: if you’re under 40, you probably will live to see some of your favorite animals go extinct.

Long live democracy.

Government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid, because, remember:

They limit the functioning of everyone else.

Remember that guy?

The one from the tree story?

Now give him authority over whole forests and you start to see the pattern emerge.

And you may be saying, “Those evil fuckers are not stupid. They are evil, because they are getting position and power and money.”

But they are stupid.

They are digging into the floor under all our feet...

Including theirs.

One thing we have to understand about stupid people is that one of the things they lack is a time horizon.

Also, they tend to judge everyone by their own standards, and that’s very bad, because they are capable of just about anything, and they will accuse you of everything they themselves are guilty of with zero shame.

And that gives them a power only God wielded until stupidity emerged from the void at the edge of the universe:

The stupid are almighty.

They have a system that checks out internally as justification for everything.

Why?

Because human beings judge other people starting from their own morals.

A decent person looks at some possibilities and thinks, “Nobody would actually do that.”

The stupid person looks at the same possibilities and thinks, “Of course they would. I would.”

That turns good people into victims and stupid people into gods.

Vox stultorum, vox diaboli.

Or something.

When you go around with a mentality geared toward the destruction of value, and morals to match, you’re a loaded gun pointed at the universe.

And not even a good-quality gun.

One of those crappy Russian ones that goes off at all times except when needed.

And tell me that this doesn’t explain a lot and, at the same time, doesn’t fill you with despair.

And the problem is, this cuts across society.

I can promise you: you can spend a week without seeing a doctor, a nurse, or a first responder, and a month without seeing a cop, but you’ve seen a stupid person today.

And it gets worse, because I have more terrifying news.

Be very afraid.

That person you’re thinking about?

They’re already doing their best.

The thing about this interpretation of stupid people is that it’s very wide and, at the same time, not wide enough.

And it’s the kind of wisdom I like the least.

It’s an explanation, but there’s nothing you can really do to improve the world from this information. It makes great fuel for sarcasm, but in the grand scheme of things...

You just can’t reason with these people.

Because what can you offer someone who systematically creates losses for themselves and everyone else?

Nothing.

They will take whatever they want and ruin the world, but they can’t be negotiated with.

And it seems that, in this beautiful age of information, stupidity has taken to disguising herself as a virtue and rides into battle with ignorance at her right and tragedy at her left.

Way back when I connected to the Internet for the first time, in August 1996, at the old and ripe age of six, I couldn’t go very far online without finding something or other about the “information society,” the “deepest transformation humanity has undergone,” and how everything was gonna be so different because “access to information has been solved,” and this was the problem of problems.

Hey, I’ve spent 30 years online—and that’s very sad in itself—but the worst part is how the information society just never manifested.

Because access to information was never the issue.

Not really.

Once we found our way to each other online and broke the big Internet into smaller Internets, something interesting happened.

Historians met historians.

Mathematicians met mathematicians.

Programmers met programmers.

FBI agents and Russian mobsters met innocent doofuses who needed their life savings stolen and fought over them.

Monsters met monsters.

And...

In that fertile soil...

Stupidity exploded.

We’ve never been better connected or better informed.

And somehow, we’ve managed to become spectacularly good at being stupid together.

And yes, yes, someone will come and yell at me that I’m a shill for the deep state, or that somewhere between my last piece and this one I became part of the Illuminati, or that I am—gasps—woke and part of the woke agenda.

But that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Instead of pushing human knowledge forward and bringing in a golden age, instead of kicking another problem in the dick just after we solved the ozone-layer-hole thingie, we...

Stopped.

Divided ourselves into different groups, decided that each group hates all the others, and here we are, ready to finish destroying the world.

Because that’s the final lesson of this piece.

That’s the message you take home.

And that’s the task, the hope, the calling:

You’re also stupid.

Sometimes.

And definitely to someone.

Don’t believe me?

Think about this story:

A man finds a genie who offers him one wish, with one condition:

Whatever he receives, his neighbor will receive twice as much.

The man thinks for a moment.

Then he says:

“Take out one of my eyes.”

Think about that, because stupid people can’t be reasoned with from the outside, but maybe we can excise our own stupidity and become just dumb and harmless...

Like...

Like...

That British king.

Edward VII, I think.

That man, after both kingdoms had spent the best part of a millennium—from Hastings until our friend Ed—finding increasingly inventive ways to try to destroy each other, and really, who can blame them...

Decided that what he liked most was French girls.

Some would say...

Very hard-working French girls.

About six at a time, if the stories are to be believed, and just like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

This man helped forge the Entente Cordiale, bringing France and Britain closer together after centuries of endless rounds of “Who’s the biggest asshole?”, “Who’s stolen more culture?”, and something about La Rochelle, just in time for World War I.

Think about it.

A British king steering his yacht toward France with his dick did more for Franco-British relations than any crowned head on either side since some genius decided that burning the Grand Master of the Templars was a better idea than just paying his credit-card bill on time and got cursed for it.

You know what?

Strike that.

That idea fucks hard.

Also, how exactly was the chair used, Edward?

Didn’t think about leaving a video tutorial?

Selfish bastard.

Now, you know the deal:

Go, commit your favorite sin.

But don’t be stupid about it.

Peace.