The Vein of Speech 13: How to Stop Calling Others Stupid

What a moron!

How to Stop Calling Others Stupid

These days, especially with the expansion of cyberspace, people can express their opinions more easily or, for instance, invite their followers to a “bog-boghoo” through a call. On the other hand, the market for judging others’ opinions and behaviors is also booming. In these judgments, there is a strong tendency to call others stupid. This time, I want to pitch my tent in the vein of these common judgments that label others as stupid and argue that the intense inclination to call others stupid (especially to call very different opinions stupid) is not a defensible tendency.

“Stupid” Is Often Not Stupid

Who is stupid? The answer to this question is not simple. Some people have a very lax criterion for calling others stupid; as soon as someone is very different from them in behavior and speech, they seem stupid in their eyes, or even crazy. But one cannot elevate an individual to the status of stupidity so easily. Many times we tend to equate ignorance with thoughtlessness and stupidity, but not every ignorant person is stupid, although every stupid person is ignorant; even someone who deliberately keeps themselves in ignorance is not necessarily stupid. For example, consider a person who strongly suspects their spouse is engaged in wrongdoing but does not want to pursue it or even become aware of it, hoping that the spouse will one day realize their possible mistake on their own. Such a person may have taken a wrong path in the face of their spouse’s possible mistake, but they are not stupid. Moreover, a stupid person is not necessarily someone who lacks sufficient intelligence. Because, as it happens, intelligent people may be more prone to exhibiting foolish behaviors, and people of low intelligence may lack many of the talents necessary for stupidity.

Who Is Stupid?

It is clear that in some cases in our lives, we need to distinguish the stupid from the non-stupid because the stupid can be very dangerous, and this undoubtedly includes our own potential stupidities toward others. Now, if stupidity is not the same as ignorance and low intelligence, then what is stupidity and who is stupid? Carlo Cipolla, the Italian economic historian (1922-2000) and professor at the University of California, has a concise and famous book titled “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”

(The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity). He divides people into five categories based on behavioral type:

1- Intelligent people, those who bring benefit both to themselves and to others;

2- Selfless/Naive people: those who bring benefit to others but gain no benefit themselves; if they do this consciously, it is out of selflessness, and if they do it due to a miscalculation, it is out of naivety;

3- Bandits, those who only pursue their own personal gain, even at the cost of harming others;

4- Ineffectual people, those who bring benefit neither to themselves nor to others;

5- Stupid people, those who cause harm to others without aiming for personal gain or benefiting from it, and may even harm themselves in the process.

The positive aspect of this attempt to define stupidity is that it takes benefit and harm to oneself and others as the criterion for the definition. That is, it has tried to base its definition on an objective criterion rather than a subjective one. The advantage of making benefit and harm to oneself and others the criterion for stupidity is that one can no longer call someone who behaves or thinks differently from us stupid per se—although it may still be possible to consider such a person mistaken under certain conditions. Nevertheless, the question remains: what is the criterion for benefit and harm? It is entirely possible for an authoritarian government to consider any form of thought or lifestyle it dislikes as "poison for society" and severely harmful. Accordingly, in defining benefit and harm, one must define it as minimally as possible and, in particular, consider physical benefit and harm as well as collective benefit and harm, regardless of different ideologies and schools of thought.

The conclusion is that if we consider a stupid person to be someone who harms another without seeking personal gain, then many of the things we call stupid are not stupid. Someone who invites their followers to engage in virtual squawking has most likely done something frivolous, but this act is not stupid.

For an account of human stupidity and its meaning and dimensions, you can watch the documentary "Stupidity" (2003), directed by Canadian filmmaker Albert Nerenberg. This documentary is also accessible on YouTube. It appears to be the first and only documentary to date that has specifically addressed the subject of stupidity, although overall it is a mediocre documentary.

Yaser Mirdamadi/ The Vein of Speech 13