❗YES❗@theduran ~ RE STUPIDITY / STUPID PEOPLE: Follows some wording on the subject which I wrote to my son a while ago when he was puzzling as to why some supposedly very clever people he was working alongside & studying with at the Institute For Mathematical Innovation + linked university colleges could be possessed by such stupid none-Maths/AI views:-
STUPID PEOPLE are even more dangerous than evil ones. We can protest against or fight evil people, but against stupid ones we’re defenceless - reason falls on deaf ears.
Stupidity is NOT a hereditary defect, nor an intellectual defect, nor an intelligence defect, but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually yet stupid, and others who are intellectually dull yet anything but stupid. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of the same person.
Under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather they allow themselves to become stupid - stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. People, more or less consciously, surrender their autonomy to ‘group-think’. People who live in solitude manifest stupidity less than individuals in groups, which would seem to confirm that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.
Stupid people cause harm to others without obtaining any benefit for themselves. Super-stupid people not only cause harm to other people, but also to themselves.
The fact that stupid people can often be stubborn should not blind us from the fact that they are not independent. In conversation, it can virtually feel that one is dealing not with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of them.
Having become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil - incapable of seeing that it is evil. Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they're irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Until sufficient numbers of stupid people possessed by eg NATO, the EU, Modern Monetary Theory, the Woke Culture, Critical Race Theory, LGBTQI+ inclusiveness, Zionism, Wahhabism, et al, die or get killed in the conflicts initiated by their stupidity, the infectious stupidity epidemic will likely continue to infect and infest western societies as they continue to abandon personal responsibility, long-established western traditional moral code and ‘common law’, to become ever-increasingly dependent on / indebted to ‘the state’, until ultimately the populace once again reverts to serfdom and rule by barons.
Discussion, debate, instruction, argument, etc cannot overcome stupidity. Other than an act of God (a miracle), only an ‘external’ [external to the stupids] forced change such as the overthrow of the ruling state can trigger the overcoming of stupidity - in most cases a genuine internal ‘liberation’ becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then, we might as well abandon all attempts to convince the stupid people.
Action springs not from thought, but from readiness for responsibility.
