I think if you’re intelligent, the single hardest thing to empathize with is being stupid. You’re gonna be tempted to jump to some conclusions about what I mean when I invoke “intelligent” and “stupid.” Resist that. Consciously uncouple from assumptions as you proceed. This is my first signal to your intelligence, and claim to my own.
Language is forever imprecise and incomplete. That’s not a bid for postmodern absurdity-making circular sensibility. It means no matter what you say, no matter what you hear, if you want to practice intelligence, you give it time to breathe. It means you look for the context that might help you best understand where it was coming from. It means you build the instinct to take the infinitely abstract and look for your choice on how to relate to the information.
I’ve been told I was smart my whole life. I could “prove it” through grades in school, the quickness of learning an instrument, or the engineering of acquiring what I desired. All of this means nothing about my capacity for stupid. I’m easily, if not infinitely as stupid, as anyone who has ever lived. I suffer some aspect of my dumb, stupid self, every day. It might be in how I treat my body, my time, or how I conceive of “the world.”
For me, intelligence can grow with practice, and wither without practice. Stupidity can too. They aren’t opposite ends of a bell curve, more than they are modes of being we recognize as choices, or don’t.
I think it’s stupid, for example, to think I’m going to get “positive” or “productive” conversation about this writing, or anything else I’ve written, on a forum like reddit. It’s a heavily-skewed “internet culture” kind of place with a very particular kind of internet personality that inhabits it. The stupid is rewarded and part of the incentive system for how to maintain and embolden that ecosystem. In the 16 years I’ve been on the site, have I had a handful of decent exchanges or solid piece of information shared on the site? Sure, mapped against thousands of troll-esc nonsense. I’ve deleted everything I’ve ever posted across different accounts a dozen times. I’m practicing stupid in every moment I “hope” that I’ll accidentally encounter someone not wearing an internet-asshole hat.
There’s going to be a temptation, soon if it hasn’t happened already, to begin feeling like I’m making a moral judgment about reddit or the people on it. You’re maybe gonna wanna jump at my *hypocrisy* because that’s the priming and game the internet has trained you for. I’m going to ask that we return to refraining from assumptions.
It is hard to practice intelligence. It is hard to suffer stupidity.
For me, I find myself suffering the consequences of what I might frame as “other people’s stupidity,” superficially, before the intelligent practice tempers my enthusiasm to see it as anything more than an extension of my stupidity too. I, of course, still engage in the internet and the occasional troll. I feast on unhealthy things. I don’t exercise enough. I’m politically engaged, but could always be “doing more” or trying to better organize forces I could intelligently pick apart.
A little more concretely though, if I were to knock up my friend and she wanted to get an abortion, we’d have to suffer the stupidity of religious ideologues and scientific illiterates in order to get her healthcare. If I want to live a “normal middle-class lifestyle” it’s going to be at the expense or sacrifice of things they don’t have to in every other developed part of the world. If the measles shows up near me, that’s such a powerful exercise of stupidity that’s compounded in so many ways, you really start to wonder if we “deserve” this thing called existing.
I’ve considered Sam Harris a clear thinker for decades. I’ve watched and felt what feels like his decline in the last couple years. He’d, no doubt, take this as a point of pride in how often he annoys or alienates people “on both sides” of any given issue. To be sure, I don’t think an exercise of intelligence is to “pick a side.” I think you pick a practice, and your practice needs to incorporate new information and stay sensitive to its, perhaps extreme, biases.
I find “lumping” stupid. “Israel” doesn’t do things, Individuals in its government do. Individuals in the IDF do. So it goes for every country, population, army, etc. “Radical Islam” is a boogeyman hiding in every corner, changing shape to fit the extremist ends of any individual with the balls to blow themselves up. The “Christian Nationalists” are the same kind of thing, looking to absolve themselves of individual culpability for the cloak of righteousness or sanctity. Who knew God always wants things precisely how I want to do them? Crazy, right?
As an individual, the linguistic term “religion” I find incredibly stupid. I think it makes a lot of sense to form tribes, instinctively fear death, catch yourself being otherwise irreconcilably depressed or anxious if you didn’t have a psychological security blanket. I think I want the consequences of people who exercise their faith in the ways that keep people fed, housed, and advocated for. I think abstracting out the material impact of your behavior into words like “love,” “faith,” “religion,” and “beliefs” is “practicing stupid.”
You might feel deep personal moral injury at my position. I would suggest that’s because you’ve chosen to refuse my advice to refrain from assuming you know what I mean.
You feel what I mean. I court your confusion or indignance. We kick off our stupid practices in our respective lanes. My aim is a quieter mind, consequences for you be damned. This might be considered its own level of stupidity if we could truly know the consequences. Instead, an immediate ironic twist as it transforms into wisdom by letting things be and focusing on what I can actually control. When and whether to stop writing, and an honest assessment of my sense of well-being is all I get.
I’m not interested in the documentary I just watched where a right-wing anti-gay preacher let’s a gay preacher stay at his house for 5 days and vice versa. Their conversations were predictable. The excuses and victimhood of the right-winger a snore. It’s “too stupid” to me to position “your beliefs” as a meaningful bulwark against your ability to accept someone else’s humanity, rights, or equality. It’s just the same conversation ad nauseam. You can read really old books that were having this “debate” since they first started recording such things.
I wonder if it’s even possible to practice the kind of intelligence that gets us to a Star Trek kind of place. I think we’re kind of stuck in the consequences of stupid. I think we’ll be picking bad guys to lay collective blame on until we kill them and then ourselves. I think it’s because we’re stuck like an addict is stuck. It’s what we’ve normalized and trained on for our entire evolutionary history. I think it’s a mode of being that is perfectly ambivalent about anything beyond how it makes you feel in any given moment, and you’re super keen to given something external the power over how you feel.
I don’t really know what to do with this relative conclusion as someone who wants to practice and lay claim to a level of intelligence. Do i want to “save” everyone from themselves? That feels silly and impossible. Do I want to sit back and watch things burn? I’m not spending thousands of hours as a social worker or building things like civic-mirror.com because I’ve given up or check out. In the meantime, I’m still suffering things like gas prices, impending fallout from ridiculous wars, increasingly dramatic weather, negligent institutions and an impending fascist takeover. In one telling, and one version, of the story.
There’s a, by the numbers, large portion of people with the power to be of consequence who are actively practicing the kind of stupid that I think gets us all killed. If you’re not one of them, I think the cancer from the secondhand smoke is no less growing in you. There will never be enough Dolly Parton’s or MacKenzie Scott’s to turn the tide. I think this because of how we respond to the examples they’ve set. We post! We meme. We mock. “We” aren’t a “we.” We’re a collective unconscious “stupid” reaction at seemingly all times.
Then, in the moments when we are humbled or curious, we want to be given all the credit for spurts of intelligent exercise here and there. We’re like my clients who think waking up on time and making it to group on time for one week means they’ve conquered something that gives them license to slack the next.
What are you doing with your wealth and privileges? Are you exercising your values, or mourning what we’ll never get back when singular forces for an immense amount of good are removed from the playing board? Are you connecting to what you should? Are you practicing patience with yourself or others? Are you contextualizing your catastrophic frame of how “things” work?
You don’t have to be intelligent to be a decent or nice person. You don’t have to be wise to know when you’re practicing something stupid. You don’t have to know anything to experience irrational and impossible to articulate hatred. But you do have to be honest. I don’t think most people know what honesty is. I think they conflate it with being “real” or pair it to earnest weaponized feelings. Honestly, you want to manipulate me in what you’re saying, often significantly more than you’re actually feeling whatever you’re claiming to feel.
I think you can intelligently approach how to learn how to be honest. I think you develop a process that connects your words to how you feel, or don’t, and then enables the actions that back them up. Or, you can “just feel” in any and every direction, and leave the rest of us to figure out how to navigate the inevitable suffering.
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