Stupid People

Reading some old posts of mine, I got to thinking about the problem of confidence. Or, really, the problem of over-confidence.

So many of our arguments, be they about politics or about more mundane affairs, come down to the problem of over-confidence, because we live in a world in which people are overly confident about opinions that aren't true. But I'm not talking about the fringe wingnuts who hold beliefs with little to no evidence, and with a complete disregard for it, because their craziness quickly reveals itself. It might not be possible to change their mind, but it's pretty easy to recognize and avoid these people.

Instead, I'm thinking about a more problematic version of over-confidence that has to do with people who do have a sense of what they're talking about, and who know their topic in at least a minimal fashion. From their point of view they hold a position that is a position based on facts. But oftentimes, they're working from a limited set of facts, so that they can only hold their position at the expense of other facts. Consequently, a standard rhetorical move entails developing subtle, or not so subtle, ways of denying the existence or relevance of those facts. In other words, these positions tend to depend on a simplistic view of the world, so that these people have to resist the introduction of greater complexity if they want to maintain their beliefs.

This strikes me as a particularly difficult political problem. We tend to think of ignorance as a mere absence of knowledge, but, and here my debt to Kierkegaard should be clear, ignorance is often a willful position. That is, we will our own ignorance because we prefer it to the truth. And because these positions are grounded in fact, however limited those facts might be, this type of ignorance often passes itself off as knowledgeable.

It is possible to be honestly confident about a position that turns out to be false, and your honesty reveals itself when you accept this falsity. And such is life. We try to form the most truthful opinions that we can, and when proven wrong, we hopefully change our mind. But perhaps because of the sheer amount of will that has to be summoned in order to maintain their ignorance, the confidence of the willfully ignorant person manifests itself as an overconfidence.

Confronted with people like this, I generally just avoid engagement. Arguments can be fun, but they come off as pointless if the possibility of changing someone's mind is never present. But I still find these people quite frustrating, and in no small part because of the deception involved in passing off their ignorance as wisdom.

But what might be most frustrating is that these people can only exist as a consequence of the benevolence of those who truly know what they're talking about. Without this benevolence, the ignorance of their argument would be exposed by those who aren't ignorant. Instead, what generally happens is that those who are knowledgeable relent.

Hitting upon the willfulness with which a position is maintained, these situations quickly become personal, because of how much the ignorant person is invested in their position. Faced with this, we all have to make a decision. We either relent, and let the person maintain their illusions, or we advance, and seek to destroy them. However, because ignorance requires a denial of the existence of facts, the only way to make an advance is to make a personal attack. That is, if facts are presented whose existence is denied, then the only avenue left is to point out that the issue at stake is this very act of denial. But this is an uncomfortable argument to make, even if it is the only argument that can be made.

Up until a couple of years ago, I never used the words stupid or dumb. In a world where things like academic achievement can mean so much in terms of the life you get to have, insulting someone based on difficulties they might have with our current metric for success seems downright cruel. But beyond this, it also strikes me as foolish. We each get different gifts, and calling someone dumb only reinforces the value of intelligence, which is something I'm not always convinced of. Or, at the very least, I'm not convinced it deserves the role that our society gives to it. I know many people with many other wonderful and more important qualities, just as I know many smart people who are despicable assholes.

But recently, the words stupid and dumb have entered my vocabulary, and this is because I no longer see them, or use them, as words that refer to the presence or absence of some natural IQ-like quality. Instead, I see them as the type of willful quality that we choose to have. As Rousseau argued, human beings are the only animals capable of becoming imbeciles.

Which is all to say, maybe we should be calling more people stupid?