Jean-Francois Marmion - The Psychology of Stupidity

Jean-Franois Marmion (editor) is a psychologist, an associate editor of the French journal Sciences Humaines (Social Sciences), and a former editor-in-chief of the French magazine Le Cercle Psy (Psychological Circle). He lives in France, where The Psychology of Stupidity was a #1 bestseller.

Good sense is the most equitably distributed thing in the world, wrote Descartes. And what about stupidity?

Whether it oozes or drips, trickles or gushes, its everywhere. Without borders and without limits. Sometimes it emerges as a gentle, almost bearable lapping; other times as a nauseating, stagnant swamp. Still other times, its an earthquake, a storm, or a tidal wave that engulfs everything in its path, smashing, trampling, befouling. No matter what form it takes, stupidity splatters us all. Rumor has it that we ourselves are the source of it. I am no exception.

Everyone sees bullshit, listens to it, and reads it, every single day. At the same time, each of us is guilty of generating it, thinking it, pondering it, and speaking it aloud. We are all morons from time to time, spouting nonsense as we go about our lives, without any real consequences. The crucial thing is to be aware of it and to feel sorry about it; because to err is human, and admitting your faults is halfway to having them forgiven. There will always be those who take us for fools, but we recognize our own folly far too rarely. Apart from the perpetual purr of idiocy that surrounds us, day in, day out, theres also, sadly, the roar of the masters of stupidity, kings of stupidityassholes with a capital A. Those assholes, whether you encounter them at work or at home, do not strike you as anecdotal. They hound you and harass you with their obstinacy in crass wrongheadedness, their unjustified arrogance. They prosper, they sign on the dotted line, and they would happily wipe out all of your opinions, emotions, and dignity with one stroke of the pen. They erode your morale and make you doubt there can be any justice in this vile world. No matter how hard you try, you cannot detect a speck of kindred connection in them.

Stupidity is an unkept promise, a promise of intelligence and confidence that the idiots among us betray, traitors to humanity. These jerks are like dumb beaststheyre total animals! We might want to indulge them, to turn them into friends, but theyre not on that level, which is to say, our level. They suffer from a disease that has no cure. And since they refuse to heal themselves, convinced they are one-eyed kings in the land of the blind, the tragicomedy is made complete. Its no surprise that people are fascinated by zombieswith the simulacrum of existence they embody, their intellectual vacuity, and their overwhelming, fundamental need to drag the living, the heroic, and the simply decent down to their own level. And that makes sense: idiots, like zombies, want to eat your brains: these failed human beings never fail you. The worst thing about them is that they can sometimes be intelligent, or at least make a show of it. Theyre so skilled at transforming the lineaments of learning to the bars of a cage that they would gladly burn booksalong with their authorsin the name of some ideology, or of something they learned from some purported sage (idiotic or not).

Morons will condemn you instantly, with no appeal possible and no extenuating circumstances admitted, on the sole basis of the appearances they glimpse through their narrow blinkers. They know how to rouse their sympathizers, to goad them to lynching in the name of virtue, custom, respect. The idiot hunts in a pack and thinks in herd fashion. As the Georges Brassens song goes, The plural is useless to mankind; whenever / More than four are gathered, youll find a band of fools. He also declared: Glory to the man who, lacking lofty ideals/ Contents himself with not being a nuisance to his neighbors. Alas! Our neighbors dont always return the favor.

Not content with making you miserable, the irksome idiot is delighted with himself. Unshakably. He is immunized against self-doubt and convinced of his rights. The happy imbecile tramples your rights without a second thought. The fool takes his beliefs for truths graven in marble, whereas all true knowledge is built on sand. Uncertainty makes you crazy, certainty makes you stupid; youve got to choose your camp. The asshole thinks he knows better than younot only does he know what you should think, feel, and do with your ten fingers, he knows how you should vote. He knows who you are and whats good for you better than you do. If you disagree with him, he will despise you, insult you, and assault you, literally and figuratively, for your own good. And if he can do that in the name of some higher ideal, he wont hesitate to attack the scum that your existence represents for him, with utter impunity.

And heres a bitter truth: justified self-defense is a trap. If you try to reason with an idiot or to change his mind, youre lost. The moment you decide its your duty to improve him, the moment you think you know how he should think and act (like you, of course), the jigs up. There it is; now youre the idiotand youre nave to boot, since you think youre up to the challenge. Worse, the more you try to reform an idiot, the stronger he gets. He delights in seeing himself as a victim who annoys othersand who must for that reason be in the right. In reproving him, you allow him to believe in good faith that hes a hero of anticonformity, someone who ought to be defended and admired. A member of the resistance... Tremble before the vastness of this curse: if you try to reform a moron, not only will you fail, you will also strengthen him and encourage imitators. Before, there was only one moron: now there are two. Fighting against stupidity only makes it stronger. The more you attack an ogre, the more souls he devours.

Thus, there is no way that stupidity can lose its power. Its exponential. Are we living todaymore so than yesterday and less so than tomorrowin the golden age of idiocy? As far back as the written record extends, the greatest minds of their ages believed this to be the case. Maybe they were right, at the time. Then again, maybe, like everyone else, they were just old fools. Nonetheless, the novelty of the contemporary era is that it would take only one idiot with a red button to eradicate all stupidity, and the whole world with it. An idiot elected by sheep who were only too proud to choose their slaughterer.

The other great characteristic of our age is that, even if we admit that stupidity has not yet reached its pinnacle, we know that it has never before been so visible, so unabashed, so outspoken, and so peremptory. Its enough to make you despair of your benighted fellow man. On the other handwho knows?it might inspire you to turn to philosophy to address the situation, given how hard it is of late to deny the vanity of everything and the narcissism of everyone, not to mention the inanity of appearances and the prevalence of sweeping judgments. If only a second Erasmus would write us a new In Praise of Folly ( but in 280-character bursts, to save us from migraines)! If only a new Lucretius would arise to bring us relief, and perhaps joywhich we could relish, safe on shore, as the ship of fools sinks in the swirl, sabotaged by its passengers, who cry for help as they drown. Like a greedy gourmand, we lick our lips at the prospect of that desirable nectar: the war of fools among themselves, hackles raised, egos cocked. Great minds think alike, small minds collide. As you struggle to remain a spectator, not an actor, in this battle scene, it would be foolhardy to imagine yourself less vulnerable to stupidity than your bitter, braying, miserable, agitated contemporaries. But if by chance you turn out to be right, what a victory! Its wiser to be modest; if you try to rise above the throng you wont be forgiven. Escape from the herd and youll still be led to the slaughterhouse. Howl with the wolves, bleat with the sheep, but never go it alone; everyone will cry foul. Needless to say, if you truly believe yourself to be smarter and more admirable than the average joe, the fateful diagnosis is near at hand: you yourself are most likely an unwitting carrier of stupidity.