[486] On Stupid

In theory, this shouldn't be very long. My consideration to write it is because I can talk about the big and small. We have national examples and I have my personal life. I hope to explore the parallels and differences.

Why and when do we bother calling something stupid? At first pass, it's to create a kind of dismissing distance. If something is stupid, it can be written off, ignored, or ridiculed with impunity. The stupid object or person has to run against a kind of grain that the person judging takes as correct. It's stupid to dart out into traffic. Stupid then has to be qualified. Is it stupid for a child to run out into traffic? If they don't know any better, we're more comfortable calling the parents stupid instead of the child. Stupid suggests we know better.

Like all words, it can start to bleed into other kinds of judgments. Is it stupid to lock your keys in the car? You may feel stupid or call yourself stupid even if it only happens once every 5 years. If it was every other week it would prompt you think of yourself as “absent minded” or in the same way someone who falls over a lot is a “klutz.” Stated differently, stupid is a variation from the normal. The degree and frequency of exhibiting “stupid” pushes you to more specific or more forgiving language.

I want to quickly distinguish “stupid” from “good” and “bad.” This isn't meant to be an abstract about interpretation. I'm hoping to get at what using stupid means about the person employing it and how we should receive it.

So let's consider my personal life. I readily admit that I purposefully engage in stupid things. Whether it's a night out of drinking too much, getting bored and toying with something in my house until it breaks, or online trolling pissing matches. It's the last one that has prompted this.

It's safe to say I have an exceedingly easy and relatively stable life. Part of engaging in stupid activity is to even provoke something to talk about. This doesn't make it right, but it does make me a simple human cliché. Coincidentally, I just watched a Jordan Peterson philosophy lecture a few days ago where he talks about, I think Dostoevsky, claiming that had man all of their worries fixed and sound reason to rule them all, man would go insane to keep asserting their choice and dominance of the situation. Or, my problem is one that philosophers have mused about for a rather long time.

I tend to think pissing matches and being a little stupid are okay. The problem can be in identifying when a line has been crossed. I'll talk shit all day, but I'm not going to threaten your life. I'm not putting together a plan to find and destroy your real life. Unfortunately, you don't know who might be opting to do that towards you.

So my specific situation is shit talking getting out of hand, me deciding to talk to police and put it on their radar, and then block and hopefully move on from a crazy townie. He decided to invoke my family's names and set off a massive red flag, as he did the first time when he used mine. Cops, still trying to help, explain this as legally gray. Girlfriend, very pissed off, helps turn the line red.

Now say we move it away from small potato idiots with too much time on their hands. What are we supposed to think about Drumpf or the republican party in general? When they make a threat, what should we think? When they make a “joke,” are we supposed to find it funny? How many little points of stupid do we merrily skip past out of our fellow man that eventually add up to Hitler 2?

The line starts to blur in peoples' minds as to when things get “serious.” Is it always serious when I get into a pissing match? Potentially, but the evidence is lacking and nothing has ever come from it. Are there always going to be crazy people running for president or in politics? Absolutely, but their voice isn't just them, their combatant, and the local police. They're taste makers. They're standard bearers. For as many times as I've invoked “be the change you want to see in the world,” that doesn't mean there aren't people with significantly more influence actively being the change I'm completely terrified to see. You can't think of these people as “just” anything. They don't get the hazy middle ground of interpersonal antics we might enjoy to stave off boredom.

When someone wants to fuck with me online, in general, I find it kind of funny, kind of annoying, and kind of a point of pride about pissing faster and longer than the asshole on the other side. When it pisses off my girlfriend or invokes family, there's a kill switch. It's no longer serving the right kind of purpose and the wheels have come off. The kill switch for what we're going to accept in our adult lives needs to be made larger. The first racist and violent comment needs to disqualify you. The first threat should get the police involved. The first defense of their “political acumen” should be met with argument and anger. Otherwise, we're all as dumb as our worst personal lives in online forums, but with significantly greater consequences.

So, be stupid, but don't sacrifice what it means to be a healthy adult who recognizes what there is to lose by giving it the power to dictate the rules.

[296.5] Stupid Vs. Smart

This is a blog I should have written weeks ago so excuse me if it’s a little scattered. For just as important as thinking about time shapes my perspective, the eternal struggle between what I’d call “smart” and “stupid” rages on. I would love to be able to draw a strict demarcation between the two. As far as I can tell, everyone is both smart and stupid given a specific context, so how do we get to the “meta-smart or “meta-stupid” person?

Theoretically, we want to “grow” as individuals. If we look at a child, it’s generally preferred that we want them to learn the ABCs and how to count and how to walk and maybe one day look both ways before crossing the street. These are “smart” if not practical, life affirming, intelligence expressing ideas. They are growing. As adults we hope to find people who can share in another’s perspective. Hopefully they’ll accept people despite their color or sexual orientation. They grow to understand that these are not things which threaten them or account for the morality of the individual.

Surely, this growth caps at a certain point academically. We don’t really go around arguing about who is more PH.D.’d or fiercely debate the merit and number of books each of us has read. So we must be expecting, hoping, that people are growing “emotionally” or “spiritually.” What’s odd, is that we consider these areas to be “too personal” to really be discussed intelligently. We don’t get smart, as far as I can tell, about how or why you grow to accept different people, or how life works, and on what basis you should do so.

It’s this kind of emotional stupidity that we somehow match against intelligence. It takes work to get informed, but anyone can feel. In my experience, my feelings only bring me back to a point where I need to explain something intelligently. If I get super pissed, I need to talk out the details for why I’m not going to burn a place down. If I’m getting close to someone, I need to venture down what it means to be emotionally manipulative. Huh, I kinda have two settings, pissed or tepid.

It’s emotional stupidity that prevents me from having too many meaningful conversations about religion. If you weren't afraid to lose something, afraid of change, or even if you don’t feel afraid still unable or unwilling to take any and every question as far as they can go, it has something to do with stupid emotions, because I’m convinced your brain works. It’s like an overbearing mom speculating about all the crazy things that can happen if you stay out too late; you know you’re just wandering around Wal-Mart or bullshitting at Steak N Shake. Even if she knows this logically, she won’t accept it. Sooner or later she’s picking you up from jail or taking you to rehab, she just knows it.

The folk knowledge is that all teenagers are crazy. They destroy, can’t be trusted, and upon reflection of your adventures as a kid, you know all you need to. Even if 98% of the time you spent it on the couch playing Halo, you remember that one fire you lit that got a little out of control and ignore you had the foresight to bring the hose around. You remember trying cigarettes, but forget not liking them. Hanging onto these ideas is problematic, much as believing in anything BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS it to be true, because the idea is incomplete. Much as my time in school, it’s too easy. Easily offered and accepted.

Emotional stupidity I see as a hindrance; it’s anything that prevents you from growing into accepting more about the world. It’s when you could apply your “reasoning by way of feeling” to the world and see a measurable decline in the reliability of information. It’s believing in a god to the point of campaigning against science or to justify some atrocity of nature or personal depravity. It’s believing in love or a relationship to bring a kid into an unstable situation because you’re searching to be complete. It’s placating a person’s entire history by one act or what they look like. It’s being ruled by the fear of the unknown or of where the thoughts might take you.

Therefore, smart should be the opposite of that. It’s learning enough about yourself and place in the world to adopt a stake worth having in it. Understanding how small or big your decisions may impact the people in your life. Holding yourself accountable for how you feel and still managing to consistently go with what makes the most sense, if only at the time. To me, if I’m to be considered smart anymore, it’s not because I read and write, it needs to come from being personally responsible and accountable. It’s not to say I won’t do stupid things or allow a twinge of emotionality to creep in, but I’m capable of recognizing when it does.

Stupid follows a pattern of avoidance while smart explores. Stupid is afraid and smart perseveres. Stupid sums things up, smart is in the details. Stupid makes excuses, smart offers different theories. Most importantly, stupid is empty and smart is a kind of fulfilling that I've never been able to experience another way. Yes, I consider myself smart. Yes, I can do stupid things. There’s a mental happy place I reach when I’m doing something smart. It’s almost like a lifestyle, where shit just makes sense, even when you can’t tell why.

This might speak to why I have two settings. Either things “are” or are going well-enough, or there’s a threat. I can react so viscerally because if I’m threatened it has to be at a very fundamental level. Luckily, that’s usually only coming from myself and over-thinking I suppose.

But as to why I don’t think we’ll make it as a species and call most people stupid, it just seems smart given everything they say or do. Given the stress and drama presented to me, given their non-productive, emotionally driven squawking, their inability to answer anything or change anything without so much undue hassle. The smart thing to do just seems to be “get by” primarily and espouse a personal set of ideals about exploring the potential extent of an intellect. If that, by happenstance, tends to help people, then yay I guess, but to truly care that much would beget me being emotionally stupid about their judgments from the onset.

Funny how the exact same words can mean completely different things.