Must-read, brilliant essay about stupidity!

[Ocelot II]

The Third Force - On stupidity and transcendence
by Garret Keizer

In 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Nazis, a French clergyman named André Trocmé stepped into the open air with a revised view of the human condition. “Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil,” writes one of his chroniclers. “From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over this world: stupidity.”
....

“Stupid” doesn’t mean unintelligent or even uninformed. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin was closer to the mark when he defined stupidity as a “loss of reality.” It’s possible to take Voegelin’s definition a step further and say that stupidity is a denial of reality to the degree that one’s own survival, to say nothing of the survival of others, is imperiled. “Too dumb to live,” we might say, summoning metaphors of dodo birds and dinosaurs, creatures who may not have been especially unintelligent but who owe their reputations as lamebrains in large part to their extinction. Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me. Socrates held that human beings do not knowingly act against their best interests; perhaps his wisdom made it hard for him to imagine a human being who could say, “To hell with my best interests, and screw Socrates too.” A willful loss of reality, however death-defying it may appear, is never far from a wish for death.
....

So what prompts people to embrace stupidity and cling to it even if it kills them—might we at least be able to understand that? Anyone who believes in popular government had better try. A natural ally of all authoritarian regimes, stupidity threatens progressive democracy in two ways: first by impeding its initiatives, second and more fatally by undermining any faith that those initiatives are possible or worth the effort. What good is “power to the people” if the people are dolts?

It’s possible that some individuals embrace stupidity because they’re afraid of being alone. Idiocy loves company more than misery does. When I taught school, I often remarked on the touching inclusiveness of the druggie segment of the student population. Looks, grades, and athletic prowess were of no account; the only requirement was that you do dope. There is an even more welcoming social circle where the only requirement is that you be a dope. Who among us hasn’t basked for an hour or two in the self-congratulatory stupor of the like-minded? In contrast, thoughtfulness can be a lonely choice, especially when accompanied by courage. (Nietzsche contra Twitter: “You seek followers? Seek zeroes!”) If COVID-19 has highlighted anything as much as some people’s feckless disregard for scientific evidence and the health of their neighbors, it’s the utter and often poignant inability of many people to endure solitude—or even, in some cases, to avoid a large crowd. If they can’t be in a packed bar, gym, or banquet hall, they’d just as soon be dead.

The rest:
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/the-third-force-stupidity-and-transcendence/?fbclid=IwAR3pOTQ4vrZt8RH5ThY8K8i1OFg2Rx9PoRiEF1UloN5Ik0iy_Kt4DZug8Sc

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Let's hope there is not some major party in the US trying to foist an alternative reality on people.

[lunatica]

2. Someone is going to come along and

Exploit the stupid someday.