Why Can Some of the Smartest People Get So Stupid?

Several years before his death in exile due to Nazi charges, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil gave a lecture in Vienna on "stupidity", the idea of ​​which was that stupidity is not just "folly", nor a lack of understanding.

Stupidity for Musil is straightforward, and in fact almost honorable, and foolishness is something very different and more dangerous because some of the smartest people, the least foolish, were often the most stupid.

The Musil lecture carries an important set of questions like what exactly is stupidity? How is it related to ethics? Can you be morally good and stupid? How is foolishness related to vices? Is it some kind of bigotry? And why is it so narrow in scope? Why are people so often stupid in one area and insightful in the other?

Specialized in arrogance and pretension, Musil's answer is very focused on the artistic flair of interwar Vienna, but his questions and intuition about the danger of stupidity are more relevant to us than ever.

Folly is a particular cognitive failure. To put it harshly, it occurs when you do not have the correct conceptual tools necessary. The result is an inability to understand what is happening and a tendency to make phenomena difficult.

It is easiest to give an example with a tragic case. The British high command during World War often understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies inspired by equestrian battles in their youth.

As one Field Marshal pointed out - Field Marshal Douglas Haig is an officer of the highest rank in the armed forces in some countries - they thought trenches were "mobile front-line operations", but they never budged, and it wasn't surprising that it did not serve them well in building a strategy. They have been hampered, aside from a lack of material resources, by a kind of "cognitive neglect", a failure to update their cognitive tools to rise to the accomplishment of their task.

Folly will often appear in such cases, when an old perceptual working structure is forcibly put into service, and this hinders one from controlling some new phenomenon.

It is important to distinguish this from mere error; We make mistakes for different reasons, and foolishness is rather one of the specific and intractable causes of error. Historically, philosophers have worried about the irrationality of not taking into account the reasons available to achieve goals.

Folly is very different from this, for it is a lack of necessary intellectual means, and resisting it would typically require building a new way of seeing ourselves and the world, not brute force of will.

Such foolishness is quite consistent with intelligence. "Haig" was a man of intelligence by all standards, and in some cases, at least, the intelligence effectively induces foolishness. When illusion professor Harry Houdini introduced Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes series, the tricks of witchcraft sessions, Conan Doyle believed Honestly, the author's reaction was to invent a ridiculously detailed counter-explanation.

Although we put it forward through "cognitive neglect", the folly corresponds to a kind of misguided innovation. Consider a country enthusiastically adopting new concepts and ideas, not from a bygone era, but from a very different place. Global discussions of social justice are now dominated by, for example, a set of ideas and terminology taken from the United States, a nation marked by a very specific cultural and historical trajectory.

The transfer of this practical structure to other countries, such as in which social classes are less visible, for example, countries dependent on the exploitation of the labor of white immigrants from Eastern Europe, or where racism is more complex. For example, in South Africa, it is a cognitive and social risk.

Folly has two characteristics that make it dangerous, especially when compared to other vices:

First feature:

Unlike personality defects, they are primarily specific to groups or traditions, not individuals. After all, we derive most of our concepts from the society in which we grew up.

Assuming that Haig's problem was laziness, there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him, but if he worked very hard within the intellectual prison of nineteenth-century military tradition, then the obstacle would be more difficult to solve; You will have to put in place a new cognitive framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it, and once a group or society has taken hold of stupidity, it is very difficult to eradicate it. Inventing, distributing, and normalizing new concepts is hard work.

The second feature:

Folly begets more foolishness because of the deep ambiguity of its nature. If foolishness is a matter of using the wrong tools for a task, then the act of foolishness depends on what the task is, and a hammer is ideal for some tasks and unsuitable for others.

Take politics, for example. A stupid slogan corresponds to a foolish voter, and this reflects their way of seeing the world. The upshot is that stupidity can, ironically, be very effective in a suitable environment.

It is very important to separate this point from the usual claims about the stupidity and lack of culture of the other side. Folly corresponds to high culture, which is more characteristic of political culture than of its individuals, who need to be dealt with at that level.

Musil's attitude toward "honorable" foolishness was certainly dangerous. Consider the role of this in the spread of the anti-vaccine phenomenon, but foolishness alone is rarely the main danger. At the head of almost every foolish movement, you will find stupidity responsible.

We can now explain why foolishness is so narrow in scope, why someone can be so smart in one area, and so stupid in another?

Relevant concepts are often in a particular field.

Not only did he fail to understand the concept of treason, but he did not think of it literally. He was disconnected from reality by emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, people have the necessary intellectual supplies, but they unintentionally lock them away; This points to an important difference from folly. We can make ourselves dupes, but not fools.

Folly, then, is hard to fix, and this is exacerbated by the way it relates to other vices, but once we understand the nature of foolishness, things get a little brighter than they might seem.