Nice summary. UD likes the addition of stupid. UD feels stupid is insufficiently referenced in this matter.
Nice summary. UD likes the addition of stupid. UD feels stupid is insufficiently referenced in this matter.
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October 5th, 2020 at 10:36AM
First time responding:
Would you have any interest in writing on the subject of “LEARNED stupidity”?
Given the Bell-shaped curve, there couldn’t be that many people BORN stupid, so the huge additional numbers must have “learned” it. These people aren’t really ignorant. It’s actual stupidity.
It’s just a thought, one that it took me eight decades and the most recent iteration of the Republican political phenomena to realize.
Your almost daily commentaries are not only very well written but you’ve managed a tone that’s smart, maybe caustic but never cynical.
That’s all from smoky California.
October 5th, 2020 at 11:22AM
Gerald: Many thanks for those kind words! It won’t surprise you to learn that I think bad college professors (there aren’t that many – most are very good) are an important source of learned stupidity. Here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about a Georgetown University student who exemplifies college-induced stupidity.
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=46540
It’s like the consul’s death at the end of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, where he realizes, as he’s expiring, that he’s actually been killed by “bad ideas.” Or think of the main character in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, a way-committed Communist in 1950s England who one day grasps that this whole thing has been one hell of a bad idea, a stupid stupid mistake, and she’s somehow got to work her way out from under it and start getting smart.
Learned stupidity is understandable – we’re always groping for ways to live, commitments, moral clarity – but you’re supposed to worm your way out of it, like Lessing’s heroine, at some point. What’s unforgivable is the animal stupidity of political reactionaries, lazily led by their most brutal instincts.