The Savageness of Stupid People
A U.S. Governor, an Economic Historian, a Theologian and a Philosopher-Political Theorist Warned about the Cruelty and Danger Stupid People Inflict and Pose.
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“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” — Charles Bukowski
As fascism's shadow hovers over the United States like Count Orlock's clawed hand, the same overpriced and overexposed Democratic and Republican “experts” have transitioned from criticizing Vice President Harris for losing the U.S. Presidency to convicted felon and adjudicated rapist inmate number P01135809. Now they attack President Biden for pardoning of his last living son. In the meantime for the marginalized, we're not aggravated. We are pissed.
Our anger stems not only from the election results but by the attention and energy corporate media and thought leaders devote to these issues. Some ask why did half the voters select a crook for POTUS? Some ask why journalists and media ignore the totalitarian danger at the United States' front door? Is it corporate profits? Denial? Is it because of anti-Blackness, misogyny or whiteness and white supremacy? Is it all three smothered in xenophobia and transphobia? Is it because people skipped or fell asleep in their world and U.S. history classes?
Yet perhaps the answer we seek can be found in this Occom’s razor.
Stupid people.
Stupid people are not dumb because dumb is not stupid. At various moments throughout our lives, we do and say dumb things. I've done and said dumb things. I’m sure you have too. I'd like to think all of us who have done and said dumb things regret them later. I’d like to think all of us learn from our dumb choices and we work to not make them again. I’d like to think all of us learn from our mistakes, expend the effort to correct the errors, atone for the harm we may have done to others and move on as better people
But I would be wrong.
Stupid people do none of the above. Believing stupid people do all that is what causes aggravation and anger. That frustrated belief diverts our valuable energy and attention.
Stupidity has nothing to do with the level of a person’s formal education or how many languages they speak. It has nothing to do with how many degrees and certifications one earns. I've taught alongside PhDs who are stupid people.
Stupid people are insidious. Stupid people follow laws from the 250th dimension. Stupid people tap dance on a lake’s thin ice with metal stilettos, and after the ice breaks, they hold their nose and go beneath the water to breaststroke toward an impenetrable sheet of frozen water above them. Stupid people complain about the cost of milk and bacon then blow their entire paycheck and emergency savings on Black Friday. Stupid people do not have or abide by morals. Stupid people create messes they leave others to clean. Stupid people take advantage of the vulnerable and marginalized to benefit themselves. Stupid people remain oblivious to the humanity surrounding them. Stupid people do not help others. Stupid people laugh at the physically and intellectually disabled and think its wit but whine when people laugh at them because they are stupid people. Stupid people are a fact of life, and Stupid people are infinite.
Joe and Mika are stupid people. Bill Maher is a stupid person. Ted Cruz is a stupid person. Chris Cillizza is a stupid person. Joe Rogan is a stupid person. Mark Zuckerberg is a stupid person. Chuck Todd is a stupid person. Josh Hawley is a stupid person. Jeff Bezos is a stupid person. Kristi Noem is a stupid person. Maye Musk is a stupid person. Vivek Ramaswamy is a stupid person. Linda McMahon is a stupid person. Elon Musk is a stupid person. J.D. Vance is a stupid person. Convicted Felon and adjudicated rapist inmate number P01135809 is a stupid person.
I could go on, but let's watch George Carlin instead.
During the later half of his career, Carlin's profane eloquence waxed about bullshit from and the fatuousness of stupid people. His divine intelligence elevated Carlin to a social theorist on stupidity and philosopher.
But he was not the world’s only stupidity theorist and philosopher. Other stupidity theorists and philosophers include an Illinois governor, an Italian economic historian, a German Christian theologian and pastor killed during The Holocaust and a polarizing German-American philosopher-political theorist and Holocaust survivor.
How about we enjoy their wisdom and words?
J.B. Pritzker
Before he became a successful businessman, J.B. Pritzker served as a legislative staffer for two Democratic U.S. Representatives and the Illinois U.S. Democratic Senator Alan J. Dixon. He's also a philanthropist and attorney who belongs to the Chicago Bar Association and the Illinois Bar Association, Pritzker first ran for Illinois' 43rd governor in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022. I voted for him both times.
During his commencement speech to Northwestern University graduates last year, he told students how they can identify an idiot AKA a stupid person. It’s simple: “Look for the person who was cruel.”
Because I think it’s worth it, especially if you are a parent or a parent’s child, I’ve included his full 21-minute commencement speech. The section of his speech on identifying a stupid person begins at 08:50.
Carlo M. Cipolla
It began as a private joke between Italian economic historian and economics professor Carlo M. Cipolla and his friends. He ended up writing his joke into an essay and a concise secular book of wisdom in 1976 that he titled The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (published in Italian 12 years later as Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana). This Sprouts Schools video provides a quick introduction to Cipolla’s theory that provides stupidity’s quintet of laws.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Two weeks before U.S. troops liberated the concentration camp that imprisoned him, the Nazis executed German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While some other German religious leaders obeyed Hitler’s Third Reich, including Roman Catholic priests, Bonhoeffer was a strident and committed anti-Nazi dissident. He was also the first Christian voice to decry the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, pushing the Christian church to resist Hitler and the The Third Reich so not to "bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam a spoke in the wheel itself."1
“On Stupidity” appears as a section in his essay “After Ten Years” included in Letters and Papers from Prison published six years after his death.
Hannah Arendt
Auteur Margarethe von Trotta in her 2012 narrative film presented the origins of and the vitriolic blowback from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt pointed out that Nazi Adolph Eichmann who worked behind the scenes to make Hitler’s idea of The Final Solution a reality was not a snarling physical abomination with blood dripping from sharpened fangs. Instead Eichmann was an unremarkable mediocre man, a typical nobody.2 Though he never released the Zyklon-B gas in the concentration camps’ “showers” or shot prisoners in the yard, he remained complicit to mass murder by the administrative work he did to structure and efficiently streamline the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population to make it one of the worst crimes against humanity in world history.3
Because of his mediocrity and subpar abilities demonstrated in his school work and jobs before joining the Nazis, Eichmann found validation by becoming part of a group.4 And the Nazis were the ultimate group of mediocre and stupid people like him.
Though Eichmann had no idea what do for a career in young adulthood, he found that career in 1932 with the Nazis where he rose in rank fueled by his anti-Semitism and dull paper-pushing nature.5
According to Amos Elon in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Evil, as [Arendt] saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.6
He continues:
She concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.”
. . . .
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the bitter controversies about it that followed, she insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet and this is its horror!-it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.7
The next time you or someone close to you wonders how we got here, tell them we are here just like other people in history arrived here: stupid thoughtless people.
The way to defeat MAGA-Nazis is not to argue with stupid people. That intellectual and physical zest must be spent on collective pushback and outrage. South Korea showed the U.S. the power of protests and the power opposition lawmakers. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield folded after pushback on their bullshit plan to not cover anesthesia after three hours.
Remember convicted felon and adjudicated rapist inmate number P01135809 is a weak man in addition to a stupid person. Don’t obey in advance. Face your fear and resist this stupid man and all stupid people. Use your power for that instead of trying to figure out and argue with stupid people.
I understand if you are demoralized, exhausted or terrified. As I have mentioned on Notes and in a past Substack post, I’ve had some bad days since the election. After all, I am a human being. I know we will experience more bad days as the days move toward autocracy because stupid American voters (they make up half the United States) voted for it.
For me, I turn to music for inspiration and to help me readjust and shake off despair. Music strengthens me. While working on today’s post, I listened to Muse’s “Uprising” more than once and included it toward the top of my Democracy Fight Tidal playlist. It’s the second song after Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” that I also added and placed in the number one position yesterday. Listen to and take in Matt Bellamy’s lyrics.
David Ford, “Dietrich Bonehoeffner,” The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918, Third Edition, Edited by ,Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2013: 38
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Introduction by Amos Elon, 1963, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006: 351
Arendt, 352
Arendt, 60-61; 64-65
Arendt, 61, 64
Amos Elon, “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt,” Introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil: 12
Elon, 14, 15.