The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – If we had only known that ignorance really was bliss, that human stupidity was the ultimate goal in life, that to be “woke” was not just a bad thing but the worst thing a person could strive to be, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time, trouble and money chasing a university education. Not to mention trillions of dollars building schools and universities and passing laws to fund education.

Could it be that Greek philosopher Aristotle was wrong all along?

In lecture notes that came to be called Metaphysics, he wrote: “All men by nature desire to know.”

But in these crazy times, it seems clear that many men do not want to know anything except who won the football game on Saturday night or the price of gas and eggs.

Donald Trump’s true genius is in knowing that men don’t want to know shit, and popularizing the notion that being dumb is really smart. No wonder he won the popular vote in November, as well as the Electoral College.

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience,” Trump famously said back in his early pro wrestling days.

No, I’m not making this up.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla recently wrote about this in a guest op-ed in the New York Times: The Surprising Allure of Ignorance.

“Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so,” he argues. “This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.”

He writes of “mesmerized crowds” following “preposterous prophets,” and a world where “irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts” and “magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” And to top it off, he said, “we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize ‘the people’ and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.”

He says there are people who, for whatever reason, “have developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know. These attitudes are not limited to the uneducated…”

Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, he writes. “Just in doing wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness,” he says. “We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.”

“It feels as if our lives are at stake,” he says. “And they are.”

Florida Bans Sociology

But not so much in Florida, where conservative Republicans are targeting the social sciences, including the study of society itself, to root out this search for knowledge from our education system.

Led by Governor Ron DeSantis, who is trying his best to follow in Trump’s anti-woke footsteps for his own political benefit, the state passed a law last year that banned “identity politics” in the school curriculum. Florida has become a testing ground for a raft of conservative policies meant to limit or expunge what Republicans describe as “woke” indoctrination in the state’s schools and colleges.

Sorry, but I was under the impression that waking people up to a search for knowledge was the purpose of an education, along with getting a better, higher paying job. If I had known that being a dumbass redneck was the goal of American democracy, I could have just killed myself with an overdose of drugs a long time ago and saved myself from all this trouble.

The Florida Board of Governors eliminated Principles of Sociology from the core course requirements, for example. Sociology is the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. Sociologists investigate the structure of groups, organizations, and societies, and how people interact within these contexts.

Nah. That’s not something we need to know anything about in these crazy times. Just follow the crowd at chow time and vote for an idiot grifter who promises to be the king of ignorance and the dictator who will kill off the search for knowledge once and for all time. He doesn’t tell anyone this will be the death of us all and the planet that spawned and sustains us. That would not be so smart politically.

Five Laws of Human Stupidity

But I can’t help myself. In my never ending search for knowledge, even if it means jail or death, I’ve discovered the Five Laws of Human Stupidity.

In 1976, Professor Carlo Maria Cipolla published a 60-page essay describing the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as the greatest existential threat to humanity: stupidity. He divides humanity into four main categories: Intelligent, Bandit, Helpless and Stupid.

The first law is that everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation.

“No matter how many idiots you suspect you are surrounded by, you are invariably underestimating the total.”

In the past, I have written about this in terms of average IQ, which is 100 for a reason, because most people have an average IQ, making most too stupid to complete an undergraduate college degree anyway. No wonder they respond to a politician who tells them they are the smart ones, not those with a higher IQ and an education.

But Cipolla calls this mass stupidity dangerous. Law Five is that “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.”

“Essentially stupid people are dangerous and harmful because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior,” he says. “An intelligent person can understand the logic of a bandit.”

Word of the Year: Brain Rot

And finally, in an expression of how social media makes this problem of glorifying stupidity even worse, the Oxford University Press has chosen the word of the year, which is really a two word phrase, Brain Rot.

After digging through its database, it has chosen this thing brought on by digital overload. Its earliest known appearance came in 1854, in Henry David Thoreau’s classic work “Walden.”

“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,” Thoreau lamented, “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

In these crazy times, the term is often invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial content online like TikTok videos and Facebook Reels.

So there you have it.

From dumb to dumber. What a world.

___
If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.