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Stupidity

October 17, 2023

"Stupid" redirects here. For other uses, see Stupidity (disambiguation) and Stupid (disambiguation).

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, or wit, an inability to learn. It may be innate, assumed or reactive. The word stupid comes from the Latin word stupere. Stupid characters are often used for comedy in fictional stories. Walter B. Pitkin called stupidity "evil", but in a more Romantic spirit William Blake and Carl Jung believed stupidity can be the mother of wisdom.

Engraving after Pieter Breughel the Elder, 1556. caption: Al rijst den esele ter scholen om leeren, ist eenen esele hij en zal gheen peert weder keeren ("Even if the Ass travels to school to learn, as a horse he will not return")

Etymology

The root word stupid,[1] which can serve as an adjective or noun, comes from the Latin verb stupere, for being numb or astonished, and is related to stupor.[2] In Roman culture, the stupidus was the professional fall guy in the theatrical mimes.[3]

According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the words "stupid" and "stupidity" entered the English language in 1541. Since then, stupidity has taken place along with "fool," "idiot," "dumb," "moron," and related concepts as a pejorative for misdeeds, whether purposeful or accidental, due to absence of mental capacity.

Definition

Stupidity is a quality or state of being stupid, or an act or idea that exhibits properties of being stupid.[4] In a character study of "The Stupid Man" attributed to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BC), stupidity was defined as "mental slowness in speech or action". The modern English word "stupid" has a broad range of application, from being slow of mind (indicating a lack of intelligence, care or reason), dullness of feeling or sensation (torpidity, senseless, insensitivity), or lacking interest or point (vexing, exasperating). It can either imply a congenital lack of capacity for reasoning, or a temporary state of daze, or slow-mindedness.

In Understanding Stupidity, James F. Welles defines stupidity this way: "The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed, deliberate and maladaptive." Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a forced act or accident. Lastly, it requires the activity to be maladaptive, in that it is in the worst interest of the actor, and specifically done to prevent adaption to new data or existing circumstances."[5]

Measurement

There are various tests to measure Intelligence quotient, as well tests that measure aptitude, such as the Marine Corps’ required General Classification Test (GCT), and the Army General Classification Test.

Researchers Michael Klein and Matthew Cancian have reported a declining aptitude among college educated applicants to the Marine Corps over the past 34 years, although this effect was not observed in the general enlisted population.[6]

Researchers Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer, and Aaron Reuben report those born between 1951 and 1980 may have lost an average of 2.6 IQ points from exposure to leaded gasoline.[7]

Playing stupid

Eric Berne described the game of "Stupid" as having "the thesis...'I laugh with you at my own clumsiness and stupidity.'"[8] He points out that the player has the advantage of lowering other people's expectations, and so evading responsibility and work; but that he or she may still come through under pressure, like the proverbially stupid younger son.[9]

Wilfred Bion considered that psychological projection created a barrier against learning anything new, and thus its own form of pseudo-stupidity.[10]

Intellectual stupidity

Otto Fenichel maintained that "quite a percentage of so-called feeble-mindedness turns out to be pseudo-debility, conditioned by inhibition ... Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it".[11] He suggests that "people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium."[12]

In rather different fashion, Doris Lessing argued that "there is no fool like an intellectual ... a kind of clever stupidity, bred out of a line of logic in the head, nothing to do with experience."[13]

Persisting in folly

In the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom, a valorisation of the irrational, the foolish, and the stupid emerged, as in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise";[14] or Jung's belief that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity. Stupidity is the mother of the wise, but cleverness never."[15]

Similarly, Michel Foucault argued for the necessity of stupidity to re-connect with what our articulate categories exclude, to recapture the alterity of difference.[16]

Impact

In his book A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity (1932), Walter B. Pitkin warns about the impact of stupid people:

Stupidity can easily be proved the supreme Social Evil. Three factors combine to establish it as such. First and foremost, the number of stupid people is legion. Secondly, most of the power in business, finance, diplomacy and politics is in the hands of more or less stupid individuals. Finally, high abilities are often linked with serious stupidity.[17]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer indicated stupidity to be "a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil" because there is no defense: "Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved."[18] The great danger of stupidity manifests itself when it affects larger groups. In a larger group, "the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil".[18]

According to Carlo Cipolla the efforts of stupid people are counterproductive to their own and other's interest. He maintains that reasonable people cannot imagine or understand unreasonable behavior making stupid people dangerous and damaging, even potentially more dangerous than a "bandit" whose action at least has a rational goal, namely his benefit.[19]

In culture

In comedy

The fool or buffoon has been a central character in much comedy. Alford and Alford found that humor based on stupidity was prevalent in "more complex" societies as compared to some other forms of humor.[20] Some analysis of Shakespeare's comedy has found that his characters tend to hold mutually contradictory positions; because this implies a lack of careful analysis it indicates stupidity on their part.[21]

Today there is a wide array of television shows that showcase stupidity such as The Simpsons.[22] Goofball comedy is a class of naive, zany humour typified by actor Leslie Nielsen.[23][24]

In film

Stupidity was a 2003 movie directed by Albert Nerenberg.[25] It depicted examples and analyses of stupidity in modern society and media, and sought "to explore the prospect that willful ignorance has increasingly become a strategy for success in the realms of politics and entertainment."[26]

Idiocracy, a Mike Judge film from 2006, explored a dystopian future America where a person of average IQ is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 500 years later to find that mankind, increasingly dependent on technology built by previous generations that it does not properly maintain or understand, has regressed in intelligence to the standards of current-era mental retardation, and that he has become the de facto smartest person on Earth. Americans have become so stupid that society faces famine and collapse, and according to Pete Vonder Haar of Film Threat, "...each laugh is tempered with the unsettling realization that [Judge's] vision of mankind's future might not be too far off the mark."[27]

See also

References

  1. ^ "stupid". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2009-01-18.
  2. ^ "stupor". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2009-01-18.
  3. ^ Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, translated by Peter Green, Penguin, 1982, p. 126
  4. ^ "stupidity". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 18 January 2009.
  5. ^ James F. Welles, Ph. D. . Archived from the original on August 24, 2011. Retrieved June 7, 2011.
  6. ^ Cancian, Matthew Franklin; Klein, Michael W. (2018). "Military Officer Aptitude in the All-Volunteer Force". Armed Forces & Society. 44 (2): 219–237. doi:10.1177/0095327X17695223. S2CID 151459137.
  7. ^ McFarland, Michael J.; Hauer, Matt E.; Reuben, Aaron (2022). "Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood". PNAS. 119 (11): e2118631119. Bibcode:2022PNAS..11918631M. doi:10.1073/pnas.2118631119. PMC 8931364. PMID 35254913.
  8. ^ Eric Berne, Games People Play (Penguin 1968) p. 138
  9. ^ Berne, p. 138-9
  10. ^ Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2010) "Arrogance"
  11. ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 180
  12. ^ Fenichel, p. 181
  13. ^ Doris Lessing, Under my Skin (London 1994) p. 122
  14. ^ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London 1927) p. 7
  15. ^ C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (1978) p. 180
  16. ^ Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1980) p. 188–90
  17. ^ Pitkin, Walter B. (1932). A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 6. OCLC 530002.
  18. ^ a b Peter Burns (November 10, 2021). "Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly". Lessons from History. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
  19. ^ Cipolla, Carlo M. . The Cantrip Corpus. Archived from the original on February 16, 2013. Retrieved January 27, 2022.
  20. ^ Finnegan Alford; Richard Alford. A Holo-Cultural Study of Humor. Ethos 9(2), pg 149–164.
  21. ^ N Frye. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. Columbia University Press, 1995.
  22. ^ R Hobbs. The Simpsons Meet Mark Twain: Analyzing Popular Media Texts in the Classroom. The English Journal, 1998.
  23. ^ Canadian Press (29 November 2010). "'The Naked Gun' actor Leslie Nielsen dies in Florida hospital at age 84". CP24 – Toronto's Breaking News. Bell Media. Retrieved 22 June 2012. Leslie's huge heart and fierce intelligence defined goofball comedy and he was its undisputed master.[permanent dead link] – Paul Gross.
  24. ^ Once More to the Well of Goofball Comedy, New York Times
  25. ^ "Stupidity". IMDB.com. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
  26. ^ "Stupidity (2003)". rottentomatoes.com. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
  27. ^ "Idiocracy (2006)". rottentomatoes.com. Retrieved July 24, 2017.

Further reading

  • Avital Ronell (2002). Stupidity. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07127-0.
  • Alice von Hildebrand (2008-01-29). "When is Stupidity a Sin?". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  • Edmund Bergler (1998). The talent for stupidity: the psychology of the bungler, the incompetent, and the ineffectual. International Universities. ISBN 978-0-8236-6345-3.
  • L. Loewenfeld (1909). "Über die Dummbeit: Eine Umschau in Gebiete menschlicher Unzulänglichkeit" (in German). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  • Paul Tabori (1962). The natural science of stupidity. Prentice-Hall International.
  • Steven J. Bartlett (2005). "Moral Intelligence and the Pathology of Human Stupidity". The pathology of man: a study of human evil. C.C. Thomas. ISBN 978-0-398-07557-6.
  • William B. Helmreich (2011). What Was I Thinking? The Dumb Things We Do and How to Avoid Them. Taylor. ISBN 978-1589795976.
  • Giancarlo Livraghi (2009). The Power of Stupidity. Pescara: Monti&Ambrosini. ISBN 978-88-89479-15-5.
  • Robert J. Sternberg, ed. (2003). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10170-6.
  • Stephen Greenspan (2008). "Foolish action in adults with intellectual disabilities: the forgotten problem of risk-unawareness". In Laraine Masters Glidden (ed.). International Review of Research in Mental Retardation. Vol. 36. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-374476-0.
  • James F. Welles (1988). Story of Stupidity: A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present. Mount Pleasant Press. ISBN 978-0961772918.

External links

Listen to this article (9 minutes)
 
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Look up stupidity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
 
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  • "Unskilled and unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" The authors received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology.
  • ‘A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organisations’, published in the Journal of Management Studies

October 17, 2023
stupidity, stupid, redirects, here, other, uses, disambiguation, stupid, disambiguation, lack, intelligence, understanding, reason, inability, learn, innate, assumed, reactive, word, stupid, comes, from, latin, word, stupere, stupid, characters, often, used, c. Stupid redirects here For other uses see Stupidity disambiguation and Stupid disambiguation Stupidity is a lack of intelligence understanding reason or wit an inability to learn It may be innate assumed or reactive The word stupid comes from the Latin word stupere Stupid characters are often used for comedy in fictional stories Walter B Pitkin called stupidity evil but in a more Romantic spirit William Blake and Carl Jung believed stupidity can be the mother of wisdom Engraving after Pieter Breughel the Elder 1556 caption Al rijst den esele ter scholen om leeren ist eenen esele hij en zal gheen peert weder keeren Even if the Ass travels to school to learn as a horse he will not return Contents 1 Etymology 2 Definition 3 Measurement 4 Playing stupid 5 Intellectual stupidity 6 Persisting in folly 7 Impact 8 In culture 8 1 In comedy 9 In film 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External linksEtymologyThe root word stupid 1 which can serve as an adjective or noun comes from the Latin verb stupere for being numb or astonished and is related to stupor 2 In Roman culture the stupidus was the professional fall guy in the theatrical mimes 3 According to the online Merriam Webster dictionary the words stupid and stupidity entered the English language in 1541 Since then stupidity has taken place along with fool idiot dumb moron and related concepts as a pejorative for misdeeds whether purposeful or accidental due to absence of mental capacity DefinitionStupidity is a quality or state of being stupid or an act or idea that exhibits properties of being stupid 4 In a character study of The Stupid Man attributed to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus c 371 c 287 BC stupidity was defined as mental slowness in speech or action The modern English word stupid has a broad range of application from being slow of mind indicating a lack of intelligence care or reason dullness of feeling or sensation torpidity senseless insensitivity or lacking interest or point vexing exasperating It can either imply a congenital lack of capacity for reasoning or a temporary state of daze or slow mindedness In Understanding Stupidity James F Welles defines stupidity this way The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed deliberate and maladaptive Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice not a forced act or accident Lastly it requires the activity to be maladaptive in that it is in the worst interest of the actor and specifically done to prevent adaption to new data or existing circumstances 5 MeasurementThere are various tests to measure Intelligence quotient as well tests that measure aptitude such as the Marine Corps required General Classification Test GCT and the Army General Classification Test Researchers Michael Klein and Matthew Cancian have reported a declining aptitude among college educated applicants to the Marine Corps over the past 34 years although this effect was not observed in the general enlisted population 6 Researchers Michael J McFarland Matt E Hauer and Aaron Reuben report those born between 1951 and 1980 may have lost an average of 2 6 IQ points from exposure to leaded gasoline 7 Playing stupidEric Berne described the game of Stupid as having the thesis I laugh with you at my own clumsiness and stupidity 8 He points out that the player has the advantage of lowering other people s expectations and so evading responsibility and work but that he or she may still come through under pressure like the proverbially stupid younger son 9 Wilfred Bion considered that psychological projection created a barrier against learning anything new and thus its own form of pseudo stupidity 10 Intellectual stupidityOtto Fenichel maintained that quite a percentage of so called feeble mindedness turns out to be pseudo debility conditioned by inhibition Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it 11 He suggests that people become stupid ad hoc that is when they do not want to understand where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium 12 In rather different fashion Doris Lessing argued that there is no fool like an intellectual a kind of clever stupidity bred out of a line of logic in the head nothing to do with experience 13 Persisting in follyIn the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom a valorisation of the irrational the foolish and the stupid emerged as in William Blake s dictum that if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise 14 or Jung s belief that it requires no art to become stupid the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity Stupidity is the mother of the wise but cleverness never 15 Similarly Michel Foucault argued for the necessity of stupidity to re connect with what our articulate categories exclude to recapture the alterity of difference 16 ImpactIn his book A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity 1932 Walter B Pitkin warns about the impact of stupid people Stupidity can easily be proved the supreme Social Evil Three factors combine to establish it as such First and foremost the number of stupid people is legion Secondly most of the power in business finance diplomacy and politics is in the hands of more or less stupid individuals Finally high abilities are often linked with serious stupidity 17 Dietrich Bonhoeffer indicated stupidity to be a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil because there is no defense Neither protest nor force can touch it Reasoning is of no use Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved 18 The great danger of stupidity manifests itself when it affects larger groups In a larger group the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil 18 According to Carlo Cipolla the efforts of stupid people are counterproductive to their own and other s interest He maintains that reasonable people cannot imagine or understand unreasonable behavior making stupid people dangerous and damaging even potentially more dangerous than a bandit whose action at least has a rational goal namely his benefit 19 In cultureIn comedy The fool or buffoon has been a central character in much comedy Alford and Alford found that humor based on stupidity was prevalent in more complex societies as compared to some other forms of humor 20 Some analysis of Shakespeare s comedy has found that his characters tend to hold mutually contradictory positions because this implies a lack of careful analysis it indicates stupidity on their part 21 Today there is a wide array of television shows that showcase stupidity such as The Simpsons 22 Goofball comedy is a class of naive zany humour typified by actor Leslie Nielsen 23 24 In filmStupidity was a 2003 movie directed by Albert Nerenberg 25 It depicted examples and analyses of stupidity in modern society and media and sought to explore the prospect that willful ignorance has increasingly become a strategy for success in the realms of politics and entertainment 26 Idiocracy a Mike Judge film from 2006 explored a dystopian future America where a person of average IQ is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 500 years later to find that mankind increasingly dependent on technology built by previous generations that it does not properly maintain or understand has regressed in intelligence to the standards of current era mental retardation and that he has become the de facto smartest person on Earth Americans have become so stupid that society faces famine and collapse and according to Pete Vonder Haar of Film Threat each laugh is tempered with the unsettling realization that Judge s vision of mankind s future might not be too far off the mark 27 See alsoAnti intellectualism Borderline intellectual functioning Bounded rationality Dumbing down The Dunciad Dunning Kruger effect Dysrationalia Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Genius Gullibility Hanlon s razor Idiot person Ignorance Illusory superiority In Praise of Folly IQ Pigasus AwardReferences stupid Merriam Webster Retrieved 2009 01 18 stupor Merriam Webster Retrieved 2009 01 18 Juvenal The Sixteen Satires translated by Peter Green Penguin 1982 p 126 stupidity Merriam Webster Retrieved 18 January 2009 James F Welles Ph D Understanding Stupidity Archived from the original on August 24 2011 Retrieved June 7 2011 Cancian Matthew Franklin Klein Michael W 2018 Military Officer Aptitude in the All Volunteer Force Armed Forces amp Society 44 2 219 237 doi 10 1177 0095327X17695223 S2CID 151459137 McFarland Michael J Hauer Matt E Reuben Aaron 2022 Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood PNAS 119 11 e2118631119 Bibcode 2022PNAS 11918631M doi 10 1073 pnas 2118631119 PMC 8931364 PMID 35254913 Eric Berne Games People Play Penguin 1968 p 138 Berne p 138 9 Salman Akhtar Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis 2010 Arrogance Otto Fenichel The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis London 1946 p 180 Fenichel p 181 Doris Lessing Under my Skin London 1994 p 122 William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell London 1927 p 7 C G Jung Alchemical Studies 1978 p 180 Michel Foucault Language Counter Memory Practice 1980 p 188 90 Pitkin Walter B 1932 A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity New York Simon amp Schuster p 6 OCLC 530002 a b Peter Burns November 10 2021 Bonhoeffer s Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly Lessons from History Retrieved January 28 2022 Cipolla Carlo M The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity The Cantrip Corpus Archived from the original on February 16 2013 Retrieved January 27 2022 Finnegan Alford Richard Alford A Holo Cultural Study of Humor Ethos 9 2 pg 149 164 N Frye A Natural Perspective The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance Columbia University Press 1995 R Hobbs The Simpsons Meet Mark Twain Analyzing Popular Media Texts in the Classroom The English Journal 1998 Canadian Press 29 November 2010 The Naked Gun actor Leslie Nielsen dies in Florida hospital at age 84 CP24 Toronto s Breaking News Bell Media Retrieved 22 June 2012 Leslie s huge heart and fierce intelligence defined goofball comedy and he was its undisputed master permanent dead link Paul Gross Once More to the Well of Goofball Comedy New York Times Stupidity IMDB com Retrieved June 17 2011 Stupidity 2003 rottentomatoes com Retrieved June 17 2011 Idiocracy 2006 rottentomatoes com Retrieved July 24 2017 Further readingAvital Ronell 2002 Stupidity University of Illinois Press ISBN 978 0 252 07127 0 Alice von Hildebrand 2008 01 29 When is Stupidity a Sin a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Edmund Bergler 1998 The talent for stupidity the psychology of the bungler the incompetent and the ineffectual International Universities ISBN 978 0 8236 6345 3 L Loewenfeld 1909 Uber die Dummbeit Eine Umschau in Gebiete menschlicher Unzulanglichkeit in German a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Paul Tabori 1962 The natural science of stupidity Prentice Hall International Steven J Bartlett 2005 Moral Intelligence and the Pathology of Human Stupidity The pathology of man a study of human evil C C Thomas ISBN 978 0 398 07557 6 William B Helmreich 2011 What Was I Thinking The Dumb Things We Do and How to Avoid Them Taylor ISBN 978 1589795976 Giancarlo Livraghi 2009 The Power of Stupidity Pescara Monti amp Ambrosini ISBN 978 88 89479 15 5 Robert J Sternberg ed 2003 Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 10170 6 Stephen Greenspan 2008 Foolish action in adults with intellectual disabilities the forgotten problem of risk unawareness In Laraine Masters Glidden ed International Review of Research in Mental Retardation Vol 36 Academic Press ISBN 978 0 12 374476 0 James F Welles 1988 Story of Stupidity A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present Mount Pleasant Press ISBN 978 0961772918 External linksListen to this article 9 minutes source source nbsp This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 30 August 2023 2023 08 30 and does not reflect subsequent edits Audio help More spoken articles nbsp Look up stupidity in Wiktionary the free dictionary nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Stupidity nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Stupidity Unskilled and unaware of it How Difficulties in Recognizing One s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments The authors received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology A Stupidity Based Theory of Organisations published in the Journal of Management Studies Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Stupidity amp oldid 1172936448, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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