My current pet theory can be summed up in 3 words: people (meaning: all of us) are stupid. This replaces my former pet theory that people are an amazingly brilliant collection of neurons and motor bits unprecedented in history of the universe. Both theories may simultaneously be true, but I’m going with the new one for now.
Sure, we want to be pleasant about it and say that we’re all smart in our own special way. Or even collectively, look what wonderful things we can do. “look at the pyramids! look at the moon landings! look at ‘Jeopardy, with Alex Trebek!’” as evidence of how smart we all are.
Yes, compared to a potato, we’re very clever indeed. But there are many more cases of someone getting a potato stuck up their bum (and you don’t see any potatoes doing anything that stupid, so who is really dumber?).
The real issue, however, is that the difference between the dumbest and smartest human beings who ever lived is just one vs. two drops of water in an ocean of potential knowledge and wisdom. Even the most enlightened people ever, of which there have been perhaps 3, can barely transcend the human condition and the mysticism it engenders, and not one of them bothered to unify quantum theory with gravity while he/she was revealing the secrets of the universe.
Let’s face it. Perceptual studies show that we take in only a very small fraction of our dynamic environment and simply imagine the rest, fully believing what we see, hear and remember. We drive our cars at 65 mph, just a few degrees to the right of instant death, and do it while talking on the phone, reading a book on the steering wheel. We sometimes wallow in blissful ignorance of all we could learn or know. In fact, some people even do this professionally and on TV, and we collectively pay for it.
We are just that dumb. And yet we survive and move on, which is all the more impressive, when you think about it.
But note, my theory is more nuanced than just sheer globally staggering stupidity. Yes, there are broadly speaking two special kinds of stupid.
There are those, like me, who know we’re stupid and freely admit. Now, I might not know precisely how stupid I am (if I did, that would be quite smart!), but I know we’re pretty darn stupid on the whole, notwithstanding occasional bouts of inspiration and luck in painting masterpieces and avoiding rectal potatoes, head-on-collisions, and the like.
And yet there are those of us in the latter category, who don’t even know we’re stupid in the least. Never occurred to them, nor do they care. Some people call it arrogance, or ignorance, and some merely classify it as a clever (if ultimately stupid) coping mechanism to handle a pervasive mental handicap without letting it get them down.
I call it stupid stupid.
The stupid stupid are all around us, impossible to escape. And they really don’t understand how or why you might use some of the various methods we’ve worked to overcome our innate stupidity and bias (namely: science, history, practice, and education in general) to try to learn something and be, well, smarter and better than before. Doing this, of course, is a direct threat to the bliss of stupid stupidity, whose motto might well be “I’m with stupid” with an arrow pointing to no one.
But take those amazing pyramids or moon landings, or even ‘Jeopardy, with Alex Trebek,’ and you’ll see a pattern of people behind them, all knowing that they just don’t know and each evolving strategies for successfully overcoming that limitation. They do this much faster than evolution would normally allow, say a few minutes to a few decades vs. geologic time. Imagine how long it would take us to evolve the behavior for playing Jeopardy, if left to instinct alone.
I’ve learned in my infinite stupidity that I get along best with the first category of people and often run into problems with the latter. Surprisingly, people in the stupid stupid category think the whole situation is reversed — that I must think I’m smarter than they are — and resent my obvious discrimination.
So let’s clear this up once and for all. I think we’re all pretty dumb in the grand scheme of things, myself included. I just think some folks work harder at overcoming it than others, that’s all. And anyone who doesn’t even try is truly stupid stupid.
And still, they blindly pledge their allegiances to people who self-assuredly claim to know exactly what they’re doing and what everyone else should do. Maybe we should instead honor the people who say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
Much credit to my former boss, Alex Kipman, for calling the first phase of any new project “the stupid phase.” But I think it’s best to think of every phase in the same way, and admit we’re just making it up as we go along.
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