On the Reign of Stupidity

Dr. Sarfaraz K Niazi (e-mail: niazi@niazi.com)

"There is no sin except stupidity." Oscar Wilde

Stupidity Identifiers...

Shame, fear, prejudice, societal class, royalty titles, red tape, hero worship, doubting, law, credulity, prophecies, love..

Stupidity/stupid is.....Doltishness; muddleheadedness, incapacity, hebetude, vacuity, shortsightedness, fatuity, idiocy, folly, giddiness, desipience; addlecoves, witless, weakheaded, short-witted, half-baked, shallow-pated, lackbrained, crackbrained, balmy besotted, unballasted, callow, anile, tomfools, simpletons, ninnies, boobies, noodles, numskulls, noddies, goosecaps, zanies, dunces, dullards, numps, loobies rantipoles; irrational, footling, nonsensical, silly, ill-advised, feeble-minded, imbecilic, etc.

An idiot is a person who has congenital brain defects that keep him from practicing his faculties to make decisions of wisdom; a stupid person has perfectly normal brain apparatus but fails to use it properly for a variety of social, cultural and historical reasons. Roget's Thesaurus devotes full six columns to describe stupidity while devoting less than one column to describe wisdom.

Psychologists don't say much about stupidity, except for the pupil of Freud, Feldmann, who defined stupidity as not knowing causes of things and not being instinctive. There are stupid men who posses vast knowledge and there are wise men with limited knowledge. Prolific luxuriant knowledge masks stupidity while the wisdom of a man becomes evident in spite of his ignorance and inability to express. It is portrayed in the wisdom of infant in knowing how much milk to consume or in the instinct of birds to know when and how far to migrate. A wise man has the instinct to know what is right without thinking about it. It is when the instinct and thought are merged then we have a genius, human beings who can express human qualities completely.

Stupidity is also not a complete state. It can take different forms and manifestations. Some are stupid only in their immediate family or with certain acquaintances, or in public. Some act stupid only when they have to speak or to write. Bright and intelligent children at home often fail in school and vice versa. What infuses stupidity in us is our culture and tradition. Fear, guilt, and shame are the three most important forces that initiate stupid behaviour upon us. Consider the acute and temporary stupidity born of shame in the period of puberty. Trained to hide the evident, the entire expression of personality gets goofed up in the giggles of young girls, the shambling uncouth gait of adolescent boys and the strange contradiction in their behavior. Much of stupidity is learned early in life, around 4-5 years of age, when children begin to discover sexuality. Cultural and social snubbing of inquiry breed the thought that cause and effect need not always be discovered. Children left alone to answer many other queries tend to act more stupid when they grow up. Fear, the basic human defense response, plays its role in helping us succumb to stupidity readily.

Much has been written about stupidity starting from the Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant in 1494 to Professor Pitkin's (1932) A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity and more recently, Paul Tabori's The Natural History of Stupidity exactly 500 years after Sebastian Brant exposed his collection of fools aboard his ship. There isn't much dispute about what is stupidity but what causes stupidity continues to change with changing cultures and environment.

Prejudice is certainly one of the most striking forms of stupidity. But what makes this "desire for self-approval" damaging is the intolerance that it breeds. Cultural and racial prejudice is the most common example of prejudice in our society: Punjabi, Pakhtoon, Sindhi, Mohajir are some of the titles of prejudice. A prejudiced person may not want to live among those he considers lesser people but an intolerant person would deny others the right to live. Prejudice is a motive and intolerance is a propelling force. What begins prejudice is the fear of being rejected in an alien culture.

Stupidity also comes in the form of professions or classes of people. Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma of how a surgeon believes in nothing but the knife; the stupidity of the politician, who thinks that promises unfulfilled are forgotten just as easily as his voting record in Assembly; the stupidity of the general, who is always fighting the last-war-but-one. The class stupidity of the French nobility before Revolution, the stupidity of the Pakistani feudal lords after independence from India, the stupidity of the Arab Effendis in their unenlightened self-interest and betrayals of the humble Fellahin or the self-destructive stupidity of much of Spanish history are some good examples.

Perhaps the costliest stupidity is that of red tape. The cost is double: for bureaucracy not only drains the population of useful labor strength but at the same time makes it difficult for the remaining labor force to operate. If just one-tenth of the paper used by the US bureaucracy is used to print textbooks, there would be no illiterates in the world. Pakistan has one of the worst structured bureaucracy, the left-overs of the departing British masters. It is amazing how jealously our bureaucracy guards itself.

Law has been an ass more often than not. Lawyers live to a considerable extent on the stupidity of mankind; but they themselves generate this when they smother in legal verbiage, delay the desirable, and frustrate the creative. Shakespeare bode well when he said about lawyers, "Let's kill them all." A quick browse through the legal rigmarole of the Acts under which our government operates is enough to appreciate why things would not work; the legal system stinks and the law keepers more so.

Doubting has long bred stupid skeptics of inventions. The smallpox vaccine of Jenner, the steamboat of Fulton and airplane of Wright could have come decades earlier had it not been the doubting of the new, the innovative, the unusual.

The stupidity of hero worship breeds totalitarian rule and such atrocities as Hitler, Mussolini and the Stalin. Read a few pages of Mein Kampf, study Mussolini's speeches, Stalin's pronouncements and Mao's Redbook and you would have read some of the world's best literary trash designed to wipe out wisdom and make a slave out of you

The stupidity of royalty titles and those of the nobles are the most blatant examples of the wise fooling the stupid. The Barons and Baronesses, the Bahaduryarjungs, the Nawabs and Nawabzadas, the Emirs, the Sahabbahadurs all have suffered from a sort of mental derangement that required slamming on them colorful ribbons to soothe their ego to commit their thinking to perpetual stupidity of egotism.

Then there is the cost of credulity, of superstition. What are we paying for the folly of love, or rather, the many idiocies that flourish around the sexual instinct. Cupid does rhyme with stupid. Forget about the moral aspect for a moment and just think of the frustration, the torment, the destructive power of the thwarted lovers throughout the ages. For every masterpiece a star crossed lover created there were a hundred lives wrecked, a thousand fine beginnings cut off long before their end. Taj Mahal smacks as the wonder of the world, an ugly example of the waste of resources, material and human, that should have gone to better use.

The stupidity of "miracle" cures, mental therapies, an insight into future offered by phony healers, the astrologers and the palmists tips the balance sheet of human stupidity. The wish-dream fosteres continue to point to flying saucers and track the Loch Ness monsters. Strange habits of collectors of odd objects are a study by themselves. All of it adding to the total cost of human stupidity which is incalculable.

Historians write of cycles—of pyramidal cultures and the decline of the West and try to relate this to cycles of mass stupidity. We only need look around us and at every corner of life and the road we travel we find indelible marks of ingrained stupidity: a population growth that is one of the highest in the world, a literacy rate that is one of the lowest and fast declining, a bureaucracy that is clearly the worst in the world, a political system that smacks at all other systems, a racial prejudice that has turned us into intolerant beasts, a feudal lord system running a muck, a moral turpitude that breed run-for-all attitude, a religious exploitation that grinds the intelligence out of young souls, a nouveau culture that breeds self effacement and quick gratification and above all the commitments of our leaders to keep us stupid for a very long time to come. Is there a way out? Well, that depends on us. And only us. If we are born stupid then we are idiots and that condition is incurable. If we act stupid because of our cultural heritage then it is about time say good-bye to traditions. One of the most beautiful thing about stupidity is that it is never too late to give it up.

[Tuesday Review, The Daily Dawn 1996]