“My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.” – Joni Mitchell, 2007
Globally, we are all facing a crisis which is both the first we have ever faced all together as a species and also the first that threatens the extinction of humanity – and our almost universal response is to find ways to accelerate making it worse. In Europe, Putin continues to make war on Ukraine on the patently false grounds that they started it; many Russians believe him. In the Middle East, Netanyahu and his people continue to flatten Palestine,* guaranteeing generations to come of Palestinians who will, or already do, despise Israel with all their being – while he offers the rationale that he’s destroying Hamas; many Israelis believe him. Closer to home, Trump and his multibillionaires – sorry, never mind, I only have limited space for this blog – but as has recently been proved, many Americans believe him. And here at home, Trudeau quits as Prime Minister and, to delay the election, prorogues Parliament so that our national leaders cannot do their jobs – just at the moment of the first existential threat ever posed to Canada by the U.S.: Trump’s insane proposal to take over our country because, he says, we’d be better off as the 51st state. And on this last point, many Canadians – between a fourth and a third of the population, according to early polls – believe him.
So let’s talk about stupidity.
First of all, in many of the cases cited above – of the politicians, tycoons and warmongerers – the stupidity is difficult to winkle out of their tangled morass of fear, greed, arrogance, insecurity, emotional stuntedness, genuine mental illness and plain old evil. In the famously worst of these cases, Trump’s dull-wittedness is deeply tangled with a bewildering jumble of compulsive lying, a terrified ego that can’t stop stroking itself out loud, obsessive and uncontrollable greed, advancing mental illness – including, apparently, the belief, or the need to believe that others believe, that he is actually a superior being – and a weird low cunning for scoring points with some of the population. And the rest of his gallery of comic-book villains are cut from the same slack-warped fabric. And at home, Poilievre seems incapable of rising above his three-word slogans and personal insults to an intellectual level where he might actually come up with some policies to sell us.
However, such complicated cases notwithstanding, may I offer what might be a workable definition of stupidity: it is mental laziness, fear, or both. The people I consider stupid are people who choose not to do any personal research, not to try to make their own connections, not to pursue logical conclusions, and simply not to think for themselves – because they fear that either it’s too much work, or will lead them to conclusions they find intolerable, or both.
I think this definition can be applied to those other stupid people: the millions who believe the politicians and plutocrats. Yes, I know, we’re not supposed to call them “stupid.” That’s the pedantic leftist smugness that twice helped Trump get elected. However, his right-wing followers often seem wilfully determined not to learn the truth. Repeatedly, Trump has announced blatant lies that can be refuted by a simple fact-check on line. Clearly, his followers do not fact-check – even when he invites them to! In November of 2016, Obama, speaking at a rally for then-candidate Hilary Clinton, defended from his own followers an old man in the crowd carrying a Trump sign and shouting his support for Trump. That evening, at another rally, Trump turned that story inside-out, claiming that Obama had been screaming at that poor old man. As his followers obediently booed Obama, Trump was so sure of his bluff that he invited them to fact-check it for themselves, saying, “You have to go back and look, and study, and see what happened.” It’s a safe bet that few, if any, did. (However, you can, if you want, by clicking here.)
These people may have been conditioned from childhood to accept what they’re told and not allow doubt. And at this point it’s difficult not to mention religion. I can’t join those who condemn all religion outright: there are too many genuinely good, smart people who credit their virtue and intelligence to their religious upbringing. But I think we can all agree that pretty much all religions feature teachers and leaders whose style has been to instruct their followers to shut up and stop questioning God’s word. And I think it’s fair to assume that people raised in that way will tend not to question the word of a leader they have chosen.
There’s also a natural reluctance to admit that you’ve been fooled. As Carl Sagan said: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
The followers don’t show the arrogance of a Trump or a Musk; but when you watch the ordinary folks at Trump rallies discussing the issues (for example, when duelling with The Daily Show’s adroit and courageous Jordan Klepper), you see a modest version of the arrogance at work: they have their answer, and won’t risk being dissuaded.
Last year, in an interview with Ian Hanomansing on CBC-TV’s “The National,” Malcolm Gladwell helped explain the relationship of stupidity to arrogance, by discussing their opposites: “A necessary part of curiosity is humility. You have to admit that you don’t know everything there is to know about a subject. And I have tried to stay intellectually humble throughout my career. To maintain my curiosity. I always feel like there’s someone out there who can teach me something new about a subject.” The other side of that coin is the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome: people thinking they know all about a subject because they actually don’t know enough to know that they don’t know enough. (“I know more about [insert random subject here] than anyone.” – Trump, on a great many subjects about which he knows nothing.)
I’m going to close with a definition I heard many years ago, when working at a terrific theatre called Theatre Terrific, still going strong here in Vancouver, which employs differently-abled and neuro-atypical artists along with temporarily-able types. One member of the cast of the play I wrote for them was a young woman with Down syndrome. A few days into rehearsal, another young actor respectfully said to her, “Aren’t you supposed to be disabled? What’s your disability? I haven’t seen any disability.” She said, “Thank you. I try to behave so people will ask me that question. Once in high school some boys said I was stupid, and I said, “What I am is mentally challenged. ‘Stupid’ is when you don’t use the brains God gave you.”
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* A cease-fire is in place as I write this.