Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only two or three times a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.
The Roundup
A quick review of the stupidest things said to me this week:
“Don’t read so much.” Sounded like a joke the first time; but by the fourth utterance, it clearly was an exhortation. The person in question apparently feels more comfortable with getting all his information from Fakebook.
“Brexit advocates are idiots.” Reason? They lost their free pass to Europe. (And of course there have been financial consequences.)
“Look! It’s science.” Context? Using the static in his finger to roll a cigarette along the bar. This was proof that there is no magic. I told him he was so full of science, it was staggering. Went right over his brilliant head.
Other stupidities included a reverence for nature documentary voice, David Attenborough, and comedian, Stephen Frye, as sources of reliable scientific information. At least Attenborough has an MA in natural sciences from Cambridge. But Frye is literally just an actor. I’m not saying that one cannot be an excellent researcher outside one’s field of certification. (That would be hypocritical—though I am trained in historical research methods, for what that’s worth.) But when you consider how folks are informed by these celebrities without critical research of their own, and when you consider that Attenborough presents one-sided narratives and gives one the idea that TheScience™ is settled on everything—maybe you can see my objection to taking him seriously.
Lesser stupidities included reverence for pop-scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, former host of the Cosmos reboot and one of those New Atheists who refers to himself constantly as a scientist when holding forth on any and all subjects… another guy who subscribes to the idea of “settled science.” Apparently, his degrees in physics, astronomy and astrophysics mean he has a Gnostic relationship to Truth by which knowledge is transferred to him directly from the source without the need for research and study. Hence his ability to speak authoritatively on subjects like epidemiology, virology and vaccinology during covid. Apparently his numerous degrees from the most prestigious universities on earth did not teach him the complexity of each discipline, but instead the reverse. According to his worldview, one can just pick all this stuff up off the cuff by some form of osmosis. Well, as long as you’re a certified scientist. If not, then shut up!
I passed along this article about Stanford professor Gary Nolan, a researcher of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—the new term for UFO—for the US government, who says extraterrestrial intelligence has not only visited earth but has “been here a long time and it’s still here.” Response from my buddy? “Ya no shit lol.”
My reply: must be great to be you and literally know everything morons like me actually have to research things sorry to bother your hyper-intelligence His reply: It sucks actually
Later he told me that he’d figured this out at the age of twelve. This is how he apologised for being a know-it-all.
So I’ve been in what you might call a stupidity shitstorm all week, and so I felt the universe was pushing me to write a Barstool Bit on the subject: How is it that intelligent folk can be so darn stupid? Let’s face it, this is THE question we face post covid. . . Speaking of which:
In case you thought this couldn’t happen again in a snap. Keep in mind, northern hemisphere folk, that the Aussies are entering their cold/flu season. You’ll note that the article provides numbers without five or ten year context, so the numbers are just numbers to be afraid of. Sound familiar? It’s the new normal to be afraid of the common cold (SARS) and the flu. So don’t throw away those face diapers just yet!
On May 11, a video came out with immunobiologist, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, in which he explained how bacterial DNA plasmids are used to produce mRNA vaccines® and how these have wound up enveloped in the lipid nanoparticles that protect and deliver the lab engineered pseudo-mRNA to our cells in the covid jabs. Apparently the introduction of this bacterial DNA is even more dangerous than the engineered pseudo-RNA.
Now, my question here is How stupid can you be to think that messing with any part of the genetic code and processing system is a good idea? It seems that at a certain point, one’s apparent understanding of the genetics leads one to believe we can mess with it without consequences. Why? Because the mRNA only toys with the ribosome, not the nucleus where the DNA resides. Oh. Okay then. Let’s go ahead and see what happens. Directly on humans. Billions of them all at once. Ooops! We overlooked a couple of things. No biggie. Pharma has immunity from prosecution and Fauci thinks it’s funny that anyone would prosecute him.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned last week, there seems to be a cohort who have developed amnesia regarding what it is vaccines are supposed to do if you want to call them vaccines in the first place. These folks are saying that vaccines® never conferred immunity. They only ever induced an immune reaction. . . which apparently is meant to make you sick, because that’s what an immune reaction does. Whaaa?
How can we call folks who believe this garbage intelligent? Is it because they’re functional? They can hold a job? Is it that they earn money? Sometimes a lot of money? Is that a measure of intelligence? I hope not. Because I know a lot of idiots who earn six figures. I know the military uses a baseline to determine whether a recruit is competent. There’s a basic functionality below which you’ll be rejected because you’re essentially useless and untrustworthy. So these folks are stupid and what? everyone else is intelligent? I really hope we’re holding each other to a higher standard than that when we call one another intelligent. Surely intelligence has something to do with one’s ability to distinguish bad ideas from good ones and fraud from honest dealing. If you don’t have this basic street smarts, no amount of education will help. In fact, it looks like if you don’t have street smarts, any education you acquire, works against you.
An Anatomy of Crazy Stupid
A theme I keep returning to in analogy magazine is the problem of relating to knowledge as a thing, a cudgel to beat others with. There’s a sort of spiritual materialism at work there, as though one’s library and extensive reading is an actual acquisition of hard matter that once registered, gives you authority to thump your bible (or fact book). I’ve talked about “paint can reading,” a relationship to reading that makes you seek out lines and passages in various texts (like the Bible or some science textbook) that you can point to as though it represented some instructional bit of final revelation—but kind of like something out of an instruction manual or like a hazard warning. So there’s that aspect of stupidity: one’s relationship to a text without context.
A friend has pointed out that a lot of what went down during covid despite intelligent folks knowing better, and in spite of being aware of the fact that lockdowns were causing more harm than good and the fact that those mRNA jabs were experimental and that we were the guinea pigs of big pharma… was simply the desire to fit in, to conform.
So I’ve been considering how much of this contributed to the mass stupidity we witnessed, and I have to say that yes, there is likely a strong correlation to conformity and obedience in the face of stupid and reckless authority. To give an example, the type of pedestrian who waits at a red light when no one is around is the sort of person who will obey the foot markers on the floor of the supermarket and adhere to so-called “social” distancing. In fact, this is the sort of person who would likely police the arbitrary two-metre rule.
Then there’s the type who looks at a personal washroom in a bar or cafe and sees the gender sign for lady’s or men’s and thinks, “That’s kinda stupid. It’s a private room. What does it matter?” And proceeds to use the washroom not assigned to his gender. Yeah. I’m that guy. Never understood why you’d bother to gender single-stall toilets. Kinda stupid, no? Then there are those who obediently wait in line while perfectly viable toilets remain available. No doubt, this sort is more likely to be obedient to other stupid rules. Though unlike the moron at the street corner on an empty street waiting for the light to change, this gendered toilet respector is less likely to police germaphobic distancing. Let’s face it, that red-light-obedient type is likely the same you’ll see on an empty street or alone in his car wearing a face diaper.
There are different degrees of conformity, the desire to fit in. But there’s also that type that is a “slave to the plan.” Ted Hughes (1930-1998), the late Poet Laureate of England, uses this term in a brilliant essay called “Myth & Education.” He proposes that some folk simply have no imagination and explains why such people are dangerous. A person with no imagination is one “who simply cannot think what will happen if he does such and such a thing.” Such a character must “work on principles, or orders, or by precedent, and he will always be marked by extreme rigidity, because he is after all moving in the dark”:
We all know such people, and we all recognize that they are dangerous, since if they have strong temperaments in other respects they end up by destroying their environment and everybody near them. The terrible thing is that they are the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan — which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation: where others see alternative courses, they see only a gulf.
In the same essay, Hughes discusses a troubling contradiction that speaks directly to the concept I’ve used for the title of this Barstool Bit. How can intelligence be stupid? As he saw it, we are a culture obsessed with notions of rationality and objectivity. These are scientific ideals without which “the modern world would fall to pieces” and “infinite misery would result.” However, due to this narrow vision, our civilisation “is heading straight towards infinite misery” anyhow (146).
He attributes this contradictory state of affairs to what he terms “the morality of the camera.” We place ourselves behind the machine (a camera, or these days, a cell phone or computer) and we are determined to look at things “objectively.” What we wind up with is “A bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity”—a sort of cyborg cyclops. Examples of photographers shooting photos of someone being attacked by a tiger or recording video of a subway rape exemplify this sort of morality. Instead of getting our hands dirty and intervening, we stand back and remain “objective.” When being “objective” involves a lack of imagination, that’s a kind of horrifying stupidity—the sort that allows folks who know better to allow for mass human experimentation by TheScience™, segregationist policies against the “unvaccinated” and the trampling of human rights. As Hughes put it: “The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns to stupidity—of the most rigid and suicidal kind.”
In a recent interview with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers (April 20, 2023), neuroscientist and literary scholar, Iain McGilchrist, explained how civilisations tend to collapse due to the need for rule-heavy administration. McGilchrist focuses on left and right brain functions to make his point, calling the left brain—that part that is focused on control and manipulation—“the know-it-all left brain” (20:31). McGilchrist addressed the kind of intelligent stupidity I’m talking about as follows, calling it a form of madness:
A lot of the really stupid things we now seem to believe, the sort of mass delusion, would never had come about if we’d used our intuition. But intuition can be fallible. Absolutely. Reason can be fallible. One way of describing schizophrenia is—and this has been said more than once by people who didn’t know that they’d said this—that the madman is not someone who’s lost his reason. It’s the person who’s lost everything but his reason. (42:55-43:31)
The “war on climate change” is a perfect example of this sort of madness—the laughably ridiculous kind of lunacy analogous to Caligula’s war on Poseidon, when he had his army stab the waves with swords and throw spears into the sea. (Whether this actually happened is besides the point here). We’re talking about the epitome of arrogance and futility. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet expressed this sort of crazy (in what has become a textbook example of the mixed metaphor): the war on climate is like taking “arms against a sea of troubles.” In our case, the madness is a runaway left brain belief in its own manipulative omnipotence: the notion that we sit at a sort of mixing board in control of planetary climate. And we’ve got Bill Gates funding a project to block the sun, like a wacked-out supervillain.
So that’s three kinds of intelligent stupidity: (a) cherry picking phrases and data out of context and presenting them as instructional; (b) conformity: the sort usually encapsulated in the question everyone’s mom and dad ask them as kids, If everyone were jumping off a bridge, would you jump too?; and (c) absence of an imaginative faculty and its substitution with “objective” rules and plans due to a kind of fear of the dark.
As I consider the subject, more ideas come to mind, but I’m going to wind up this Bit with a truly important form of stupidity. And I believe we all suffer from this flaw and it takes an enormous effort to overcome: the desire to come across as already knowing everything. By far, this is the greatest impediment to learning and the cornerstone of arrogance and stupidity. If you already know everything, you cannot learn anything. Perhaps the worst part of pretending to know everything is how it entails lying to yourself. You’ll note that most of the examples from my roundup fall under this category of stupid. Whether it’s the reverend Dr. Tyson or the settled science of Mr Attenborough or my buddy’s certainty regarding UFOs and alien presence on our planet without direct experience—we’re talking about folks who pretend to know everything.
Indeed, this kind of pretend intelligence is at least as ancient as the Hebrew Bible. In Isaiah 5:21 we get “O, those that are wise in their own eyes and prescient by their own reckoning.” And in Proverbs this idea of those who are wise in their own eyes is taken up repeatedly. Here are a couple of my favourites:
“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope of a fool than of him” (26:12).
“The boor is wiser in his own eyes than seven men of taste” (26:16).
That’s all I’ve got at the moment. If anyone has more to add on this subject, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
"Apparently, his degrees in physics, astronomy and astrophysics mean he has a Gnostic relationship to Truth by which knowledge is transferred to him directly from the source without the need for research and study."
This did give me a giggle! One does wonder if, God Emperor of Dune style, we will be forced to endure a disastrous century (or even millennia, heaven forbid!) of imperial technocracy just to get to the point whereby we can distinguish between arrogant hubris and well-formed knowledge.
Many thanks for your engagement at Stranger Worlds! Apologies if I have vexed you - never my intention. My most recent reply tries to set out my direction more clearly, but it is quite possible that our angles of approach can only result in skimming the stone, with never the satisfying 'plop' of the stone going straight in. I would suggest that while this can be frustrating, it is better than never trying to talk at all. ❤️
Chris.
Reminds me of Cipolla's 'Basic Laws of Human Stupidity' where he maintains that stupidity is totally independent of just about any variable you can think of, including IQ or education. He says it's based on research, but I think it may be just a tad tongue-in-cheek. Whatever, it certainly fits with my humble observations of humanity.