Stupidity, the doom of Mankind

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Human stupidity is a far more dangerous and destructive power than evilness. And in the time of social media and the pandemic of fake news, it is even more so than ever.

We can fight against evil. We can expose it. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its destruction. As evil makes people uneasy, frightened, and thus we strive to destroy it. We can prevent malice, or suppress it, but against stupidity we are defenseless.

The nature of stupidity

The nature of stupidity has deep roots inside our subconscious. It is a part of the human social system. It is our sociality that is at the base of stupidity. People who isolate themselves from others are less prone to stupidity. This implies that stupidity is more of a social problem than a psychological one.

An individual can act stupidly, but in itself, it is harmless, or only harmful to the individual. But in groups, stupidity acts like a virus. It spreads, it evolves, becoming more dangerous, and with the compound effects of a group, it can be very destructive.

Homo sapiens, the social animal

Evolution is slow, very slow. The inner workings of the modern people are the same as of our ancestors, living on the savannahs 40 thousand years ago. Many of our emotions and processes date even further back.

Numerous processes evolved in order to help individuals navigate the world. Among these, the herd mentality is one of the most important. This makes sense. Alone no one can survive. When information is scarce, doing what others are doing is the best course of action. But this comes with a caveat, it doesn’t work all the time. Herd mentality can bring bad results, even without us noticing, due to cognitive biases.

Herd behavior is the dominant cause of stupidity. Numerous scientific studies have shown how individual humans can be swayed by the crowd to adopt positions that go against all logic. In a classic examination of human folly, the psychologist Solomon Asch looked at how individual people respond to the majority group around them.

Do they conform to the group’s view? Or do they strike out on their contrarian, but ultimately correct path? The results were mind-boggling, but incredibly telling for showing how stupidity arises. In the course of the experiments on conformity, around 75% of the participants conformed to the majority view at least once.

This means 3/4ths of the people doing the study were pushed to say an answer which was clearly wrong, just by peer pressure from the group around them. This type of process is at the core of how stupidity allows evil to rise up.

Stupidity and its powers

An easy way for one to rise among others is to use the stupidity of others. Under the impact of a rising political/entrepreneurial power, other people close to the source of power become deprived of their independence. All kinds of populists, entrepreneurs, and bullshitters take advantage of this mental state. Without support from the wider aspects of society, none of these power-hungry individuals would be able to access power.

People overcome with stupidity act as if possessed. Their logical part of the brain is shut down. Such a person starts acting as a political zombie, with whom any type of logic or discussion of facts fails. Instead, they function on the level of slogans, catchwords, and low-level rallying cries.

When dealing with someone overcome with stupidity, it feels like we deal not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchphrases, ideas. The stupid person is under a spell, blinded and abused in his very being. And under this spell, the person becomes a mindless tool capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Stupidity facilitates the process of the capture of society by spineless, evil forces. A narrative is created that incorporates simple explanations for complex problems, offering “solutions” and scapegoats. Whoever doesn’t conform to this standard orthodoxy becomes the “other”, an enemy to be destroyed.

Of course, these stories would never amount to anything if people didn’t believe them. Unfortunately, they do. Stupidity wins out over reason.

Stupidity in the 21st century

The 21st century is seeing these internal failures of the human mind unfold in full swing. The first decade saw cognitive biases create economic bubbles which resulted in the crash of 2008. The second and third decades are seeing malicious forces from different sides of the political aisle hijack the world at large. While a combination of ideological true-believers and political bullshitters is leading the charge, all this is facilitated by stupidity.

Recent upsurges of power have infected certain swathes of the population with great amounts of stupidity. We have witnessed it in the Trump rallies, which resulted in an attack on the US Capitol, in the BLM protests, which degenerated into looting. We come across it every day in the filter bubbles on the internet, which often foster vitriolic groupthink. Stupidity is an ever-present danger, lurking at every corner of the political spectrum.

Yet, argue with the individual actors using logic and facts, and you get nowhere. Their brains are locked, captive to pre-conceived notions and biases. It is wiser to abandon all attempts at convincing the stupid person. It’s of no use.

“Brexit is Brexit” is the slogan often repeated by those in power in the UK. What Brexit actually means, no one knows. Not even them. Even now, when it became apparent that quitting the EU has meant empty shelves and disrupted supply chains, the Brexiteers haven’t woken up to reality. The same Brexit slogans and chants are still being shouted. The European Union is still the big bad bogeyman at fault with everything. The same thought patterns as in many a cult repeat themselves.

Alienation

These types of processes are at play every day with ordinary people. Ordinary people get constantly confronted with facts that prove their dearly held beliefs are not true. Yet, most just ignore them. This effect is magnified manyfold in today’s age. The world is full of chaos. There is too much junk passing around masquerading as information. This makes people confused.

The results of this influence are twofold. On one hand, a childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority on the other is skepticism and cynicism toward everything which is said or printed. This combination of cynicism and naïveté is very typical of the modern media. And it discourages the individual from doing his own thinking.

Modern western society is built on freedom, but this very thing is also its doom. Individuals in the modern world received a sense of independence, but this filled them with anxiety and doubt toward everything. People end up alienated and seek a sense of security with other like-minded people. This is what promotes the rise of authoritarianism and other sick ideologies. In a way, you could argue that this sense of alienation leads to a rise in stupidity.

The alienated individual finds himself home with all other similarly alienated individuals. The whole culture is geared toward this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual doesn’t experience separateness and isolation, as he feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation. In fact, it is the sane person who feels isolated in the insane society.

Insanity, the backbone of media. On one hand, you have people believing Trump won the presidency, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, you have people ruminating on the eternal sin of “white people”, whoever they are. As an individual who tries to use reason and common sense, you often end up feeling isolated amid all the madness.

Stupidity 4ever

The mass of people are stupid, gullible, not because on the individual level they are, but because as a mass they want to be misled by an idea they can together believe in. This is why stupidity reigns supreme.

The average person acts as if they wilfully wanted to be misled. They fall for lies, cons, and half-truths. The political entrepreneurs, the populists, can come and play them at will. The power of the bullshitters is a direct result of the stupidity of the masses who fall for their BS.

The problem is with the group

The majority of people are not stupid in every circumstance. Rather, the problem is with a group of individuals. Madness finds its force in crowds.

This is what echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, that while insanity might be rare in individuals, it is generally the rule in groups.

TL;DR

People when in groups believe anything, even when it goes against any common sense. Today's media exaggerates this problem and tests our society as a whole.