Avoiding The Stupocalypse | An Introduction To "Stupidology"

Take a random individual from the human population. This is your average person.

Unfortunately, the average person is a fine mix of intelligent and stupid. They have their brilliant moments and areas of expertise, surely, but equally as much they have areas of pure, unadulterated inadequacy and moments where things...don't go quite as planned (and I know that from experience!). Although compared to the possible extremes, this lot in life could be considered both a blessing and a curse. At the very least it isn't likely that they average person will accidentally off themselves (which happens more than you might think), but on the other hand they're not exactly going to be saving the world any day soon. And that's OK. No one has to try to play the hero if they're not up to the job.

But that doesn't stop the typical person from trying anyway. In fact, with how many awful and intractable problems there are in societies around the world these days there's really no other choice but to try. (Our culture being saturated with calls for activism doesn't bode well for the mildly incompetent either.) So try they will and probably fail while they're at it. All this means is that ordinary, everyday people have a tendency to try to fix some problems they see in the world yet tend to make the overall state of problems of the world worse simply because they are compelled to apply themselves in ways they're not fit for. It is ancient wisdom that people should not bite off more than they can chew. This is perhaps the most common mistake people make - and the essence of stupidity.

...Except, perhaps, the mistake of never taking the time to discover those facts. Frankly, there are a lot of people out there who are blissfully unaware of what they're capable of, whether it be moral or evil. Actually, sometimes people believe they're both capable AND effective despite palpable evidence that they haven't the faintest clue what they're doing. In circumstances like these, those ordinary, everyday people are going to have a rough time cleaning up the inevitable mess they'll cause. If they become arrogant or afraid of destroying their self-image on top of their delusions it becomes even harder to reason with them and they will continue in their ways even despite clear evidence and protests until it's too late to course correct and the consequences become too clear to deny. Although all of the warning signs are always there while they're on their merry journey to catastrophe, some people just refuse to see it coming.

Those are the severely stupid people.

Combine that with the fact that actions in society often have ramifications for other people and stupidity (your own or other's) becomes a menace to social affairs. But not just any menace - one whose dangers could be present even without most people realizing it since mildly stupid people may not be able to recognize that the severely stupid people, like themselves, have no clue what they're doing. This puts intelligent people in a difficult position as the most eager people to help solve any problem are often severely stupid and the mildly stupid people may find their zeal to be appealing. To add insult to injury, there's actually no easy way to tell if someone is stupid at a mere glance. Certainly their looks aren't enough to establish that kind of thing. And no amount of material well-being proves that a person has any clue how what they're doing impacts society at large so one can't tell by material measures of success either.

Given that stupidity is grounded in thinking doesn't help either; essentially, the only truly effective way to know if someone is stupid is to read their mind (which isn't possible at least for now, if it ever will be possible). Conversation may seem like an acceptable replacement but even then stupid people can be perfectly sensible in the vast majority of circumstances. In fact, not all thinking that could be considered faulty will produce beliefs that are out in left field one-hundred percent of the time. It's only when the conditions are right that faulty thinking produces beliefs that spur behavior to be ineffective or unethical. (Sadly, it's only when those conditions arise that many people can finally see why any kind of thinking is faulty to begin with.) In other words: stupid people are not unlike land mines - invisible yet ever present, highly dangerous yet don't always cause harm.

This phenomena gets worse when lots of stupid people gather together. For one thing, people don't have to work to be stupid (as faulty thinking doesn't require a lot of effort), so stupidity happens as a matter of course. But it's common knowledge that when people work together they can accomplish greater things. Combine this with the lack of awareness stupid people have for their own and other's stupidity and this means that stupid people will work together to make more problems than they solve without even trying to. Literally, at any given point in time the danger that stupidity poses to any population is directly derivative of how many people are in that population. Just add more people and you're more likely to make the dangers that stupidity poses greater. (The severity of the population's stupidity and the kinds of thinking that produced it will determine how easily avoided and how bad the ensuing catastrophe would be respectively.)

This little tidbit is particularly concerning given the boom in population that the world has seen over the last century. We will now have to face the problems stupidity poses on a much larger scale than before. And beside that there's still one other facet stupidity concerns: the ever growing complexity of technology, bureaucracy, and economies combine to make the ways that stupidity can manifest ever more nuanced than before. It's a simple equation: more opportunities to do more varied things means more varied ways to apply faulty thinking and therefore more ways for people to create more problems than they solve. In summary, the problem of stupidity is one that easily goes unnoticed, comes in a near infinite variety in random situations, gets more dangerous when more people are involved, and is made more volatile by increases in complexity.

At this point the message should be clear: the trends of history all point to a serious disaster on the horizon if we're not extremely careful!

So...what are we to do about this mess? An answer to this is fairly difficult to find. Trying to solve the problem of stupidity requires sound thinking since stupidity is caused by faulty thinking. This means that attempts to become less stupid may make us more stupid instead. That is the paradox of stupidity: faulty thinking about our own faulty thinking can produce even more faulty thinking - and that itself would be an exercise in stupidity. Therefore, stupidity sustains and perpetuates itself. (Personally, I find that completely terrifying.) With all of these things taken into account, it's no exaggeration to say that our own stupidity is one of (if not THE) greatest threat that humanity will ever face.

These thoughts and more are the fruits of a little known field of "popular philosophy" (or "pop philosophy"): the "Philosophy of Stupidity" otherwise known as "Stupidology". Despite being extremely small in number (and having a somewhat silly name), over the course of the last century stupidologists have contributed to a short list of incredibly thought-provoking works about stupidity, its conceptualization, and its ramifications as a phenomenon. It just so happens that I have become somewhat of an expert on them in the last three years or so and decided that making my own contribution (however small or insignificant) to this growing and fascinating study would be a decent use of a good chunk of my lifetime. It is my hope that by understanding stupidity we might be able to avoid the completely possible and unnecessary calamity engineered by our own stupidity - or what I like to call "the stupocalypse".

Luckily, there is one saving grace to everything I've written about here and that's that if the foundation of stupidity is faulty thinking then there must be such a thing as sound thinking. And that means that there is room for improvement in all of us; thinking should be treated as a skill. But like any skill, the first step in getting better at thinking is simply to admit that we may not be as skilled at it as we usually assume. It is simply to be more humble. Until we capture that en masse (and no matter what else changes) ordinary, everyday people will inevitably and inadvertently find a way to make more problems than they solve.

Ordinary, everyday people like you and me.

So from one recovering stupid person to the people of the world, I have two questions for you and two questions only:

1) What are you doing to avoid the stupocalypse?

And 2) If my argument is compelling enough, won't you join me in the fight against stupidity?

#EssentialsOfStupidology