Dear Friends,
It seems to me, there are consequences to adopting, celebrating and promoting stupidity… and we are experiencing them today. By stupidity, I am using the term in the Bonhoeffer sense, that stupid people make the world worse, for themselves and everyone else. Bonhoeffer went on to explain that there are four kinds of people on his “stupid” diagram. The stupid, obviously, then there are the hapless, who make things better for others but worse for themselves. Then there are the robbers, who make things better for themselves but worse for everyone else. Finally there are the un-stupid, who make things better for themselves and everyone else. Today, stupidity is celebrated in the movies, taught in our schools and the stupid are allowed to act stupidly without correction.
There are some people who claim that movies today suck snot from a sewer. Movies in the past had real people, living up to a situation. Now a movie that doesn’t have its cast have at least one total breakdown at a critical point… is dull. The example then, for young people, is a guy going all to pieces over losing his dog, and killing hundreds of people, super heroes that are emotional wrecks and action movies that would have no plot if the characters were not stupid. Certainly not Gary Cooper, holding out against impossible odds… and keeping his cool the whole time. In a remake of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They would have a total breakdown, crying, screaming and wetting themselves, then turn themselves in, rather than jump off the cliff.
Stupidity is cheered in our schools and inculcated as the greatest virtue. Children are taught that the best people are those that get in the way. They may not benefit themselves, or others, but the environment suffers less. Children are shown how they are bad because of the color of their skin, while very progressive, such stupid teaching only serves to make people act stupidly. The teaching itself the epitome of stupid. I am not saying that the teachers, administrators or even the education bureaucracy is not well educated, intelligent and hard working… I am just saying they are stupid. What better proof could there be than the graduates they are producing. Unable to help themselves, or others, they are made living examples of what Bonhoeffer meant when he defined stupid.
In functional societies, when people act stupidly, they are corrected. Someone using a flame to light the area when they are siphoning gasoline… is stupid. That same person siphoning gasoline by flashlight is a robber, while the person standing lookout is hapless. The un-stupid person would point out the stupidity of all those actions. The problem today is that we have been shown so much stupidity, taught to accept stupidity and even to embrace it. So we see someone standing on a ladder, in the back of a pickup truck, using a sledge hammer to pound in a signpost… while two men are holding the signpost to keep it straight, and the stupidity of the situation is lost on us. Until one of the guys holding the post is brained, the guy on the ladder falls shattering his tibia, and the falling signpost causes an accident.
Societies that embrace stupidity don’t last long. It could be, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by Godly fire, or by rampant venereal disease, either way, enshrining stupid as a virtue was, and is, a sub optimal path to longevity. Whether for a person, nation or culture. Today, our heroes are stupid, our government is stupid and our schools teach stupidity, instead of reading, writing and arithmetic. That we are becoming stupider is the natural result. Each year we act to make our own lives, and the lives of everyone else, worse. Instead of using that effort to make the world better, since that would be intolerant of the stupid, we laugh nervously instead. Wouldn’t it make more sense not to be stupid though? Who knows how much mankind would benefit… if a few people stopped acting stupid?
Sincerely,
John Pepin
