I was at that time a stupidist, and probably still am. Stupidism is the
theory that people are stupid in the measure of their most powerful
agency. They’re stupid precisely when we need them not to be stupid.
Much as I didn’t want to be a stupidist—it’s dispiriting, for starters—I
recognized that it improved my grasp on things. Whereas I used to
listen with great respect to what the Treasury Secretary or the C.E.O.
of a booming conglomerate or even your regular talking head had to say,
now I presumed that they were full of it. It was revelatory. The world
makes a lot more sense when you accept that it’s run by dingbats. And
once you’ve recognized the nature of stupidity—that it expresses a
relation between a person and that person’s situation; that it describes
the gap between what ought to be understood and done and what is, in
fact, understood and done—you begin to recognize the magnitude of the
problem. Stupidity isn’t inevitable or constant, of course, but in the
long run it almost always prevails. Alan Greenspan? Stupid, ultimately.
Barack Obama? Not as smart as he needed to be, at the end of the day.
Joe Schmo? Amazingly stupid.
The Flier
Joseph O'Neill
The New Yorker
November 11, 2019
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