The term ‘stupidity’ is often used to suggest a ‘lack of intelligence or common sense’ or a ‘low IQ’. Sometimes it has comical connotations, and at others, it can sound derogatory or belittling. It denotes a lack of reasoning that results in poor decision-making and harmful actions.
But what if a person, despite being erudite otherwise, becomes unable to use his intellectual capacities independently? What if he is beleaguered by the systems or structures around him that paralyze his reasoning? What if he is shown just one side of the picture, restricting his cerebral capacities to contemplate the opposing evidence?
Aristotle said that “The greatest wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing.” It is not to make a person prone to self-doubt and intellectual inertia, but to make him more curious and a seeker of knowledge. It is to make him understand that there is always room for correction.
But when that room gets filled with stress— economic or political; bombardment of information, especially disinformation; or mobs fuming with a homogenous, belligerent disposition— then there is no space left for critical analysis, and a person finds solace in admitting to oneself that whatever he knows is the absolute, axiomatic truth of the universe. That is the point where one abdicates his disposition to independent moral judgment or reasoning. That is the point where one becomes stupid…
But do we become stupid by choice or by coercion of the system around us?
Falling into the Abyss of Functional Stupidity
The answer was found out by a Lutheran pastor sitting in a prison in 1943. His crime: not falling into the trap of relinquishing his disinterested or impartial moral judgments. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who saved himself from the Nazi propaganda through striking the cords of his muse by himself, analyzing the on-ground realities. He found a strange pattern of thinking in the people around him who were otherwise quite intelligent — i.e., doctors, engineers, or professors. All became victim of the propaganda, not because they had low IQ, but because they rejected all those arguments that tried to break the façade of their superficial, one-sided knowledge. They all were of the view that their creed was superior, and those who were not of their civilization could be exterminated. They fell into the trap of this functional stupidity through a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance: Path to Functional Stupidity
Cognitive dissonance is the intellectual shortcut that one tries to opt for when confronted with conflicting ideas. In the 1950s, social psychologist Leon Festinger argued that our brains are wired to remove the discomfort we experience due to conflicting ideas, attitudes, or values. In order to keep our ideas and actions in harmony, we automatically remove those thoughts that tend to hamper this unison. As this intellectual shortcut saves one from the exhaustive introspection and analysis of differing facts and opinions around him, this is also called willful ignorance.
But what if this whole exercise that we feel we experience at an individual level is actually a sociological problem!
Conditions For Functional Stupidity
It has been found that the process of cognitive dissonance happens at a faster pace when people are struggling with financial stress or juggling with the veracity of various sorts of information. People become so overwhelmed with the constraints of their personal lives that searching for truth becomes a time-consuming matter of secondary importance. And the powerful entities wryly keep them entangled in hand-to-mouth struggles to keep them away from their brains.
Use of Economic Structure by the Powerful
The confining corporate structure of capitalism keeps the masses busy in a rat race. People are treated as cogs in the machines of big companies that ultimately benefit the elites and their patrons only. Common masses are never at the receiving end of tangible benefits. On the other hand, corrupt mafias wrest all the resources from the general public to expand their markets and fill their coffers with big black money. And then they build parasitic financial institutions to lend money to the very same people from whom they have stolen their bread and butter.
The austerity measures imposed on the people by their local and global mafias suck the blood out of them. In this predicament, would a common man really care about critical thinking?
Use of the Media Structure by the Powerful
The Nazis spread their fascist views through newspapers. Slogans like “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (meaning “One people, One Empire, One Leader”); “Blut and Boden” (meaning “Blood and Soil”), and “Work makes a man free” on the concentration camps produced a false sense of superiority in the common German people. This pride was not rooted in human values but in human races, which dehumanized those outside their racial or religious confinements.
Common Germans became Nazi propagandists not because they lacked cerebral capacities but because they were hard-pressed to see just one side of the picture. Their leaders mounted fears of enemy— within and outside— as well as of economic destitution, through sly sloganeering and disinformation.
Anti-Nazi views were either blocked or were made to be rejected by the racially charged (functionally stupid) masses.
In this modern age of social media, AI, and deepfakes, misinformation spreads at a much faster rate, as a 2018 MIT study found that misinformation spreads six times faster than a verifiable fact. This is because the former is usually emotionally charged and more clickable.
As cognitive dissonance is a natural coping mechanism of the human brain to eliminate the friction of diverse ideas, the age of clicks, the plethora of information, and biased algorithms further hinder us from pausing and thinking impartially. We are made to constantly feed on the same information that aligns with our ideals, thus reinforcing our prejudices. Any countervailing logic is discarded as rubbish, thus obliterating the space for correction. The rhetoric, in line with our perspective, is ingested as a panacea to soothe our tiring selves from the constant drill of stressful life. It gives a farcical pretense to boost our bludgeoned ego, which then finds it hard to confront any opposing view. And when this is exercised by a large group of people, one finds a false perception of the irrefutability of his thoughts.
The Terrifying Impact of Functional Stupidity on Society
Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in the 1950s found that 75% of people will go with the group’s answer at least once, even if they know that the answer is wrong. Though willful ignorance of on-ground realities can keep an individual’s mind in the façade of calmness in the backdrop of chaos of personal struggles, but for a society, it is always chaotic. This is because it makes the society a herd that can be steered in any direction that the powerful elites desire. The public’s intellectual capacities are reduced to such a level that they see and hear what the movers and shakers want them to believe and reiterate.
This is the practice of not only totalitarians or monarchs but of democracies as well, as mentioned by Michael Foucault in his theory of “Biopower” and by Achille Mbembe in his theory of “Necropolitics.”
So the greatest harm functional stupidity inflicts is crippling the capacity to ponder, even when one possesses the agency to contemplate, and that too in the presence of all verifying arguments in front of his eyes.
That’s what made the Nazis believe that the Jews could be exterminated.
That’s what made the Zionists exercise the marauding of Palestinian territories and spread the false narrative of self-defense till today.
That’s what made colonizers and apartheid regimes plunder the lands of indigenous nations.
That’s what made the Serbians and Hutus commit genocides in the late 20th century.
That’s what made the USA wage unnecessary wars in the Third World.
That’s what has made the current US President, Trump to forcefully incarcerate and deport the immigrants.
That’s what has made Islamophobia so rampant around the world, and especially in the Hindutva-dominated India.
And in all these scenarios, conditions are orchestrated by those at the helm to achieve their devious goals, either through financial stress or misinformed demagogues.
But it is also a truth, proved by historical evidence, that iconoclasts do emerge time and again who defy the oppressive status quo. They do it either through their pen or their swords.
In this age, it can be done through clicks.
Corrective Pathway
Bonhoeffer noted that no amount of protest can avert functional stupidity. He found that the only corrective pathway to avert this sociological menace of stupidity is ‘Costly Grace’— that is, the willingness to think independently even when it’s dangerous or unpopular. As we can willfully choose to banish certain facts, we can also practice putting our brains to the test that how much of an antithesis to our established norms our brain can bear. This drill is not to torture ourselves but to slowly build capacities in our brains to think proactively and not passively. Especially in the age of social media, where just a click can wreak havoc around the globe, we should practice ‘Intellectual Humility.’ Going back to that quote of Aristotle, “The greatest wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing,” intellectual humility is acknowledging the reality that our knowledge is incomplete and can be wrong. That creates the capacity to edify ourselves further regarding the matter under consideration.
At the Individual level
We should undergo Intellectual friction—that is, to seek information that contradicts our beliefs.
Productive Ignorance— that is, to prefer humble uncertainty over confident idiocy.
Slowdown sharing —that means to pause, think, verify from neutral third parties, and then share the information.
If every individual in a society practices this drill, it can slowly build up the structure based on truth and trust around us, impeding the efforts of the powerful to lead us into the abyss of stupidity.
At the Societal Level
Social Media must incorporate robust checks and balances to avoid biased algorithms and promote and reward platforms for independent, unprejudiced thinking.
Public media literacy campaigns must be held to make people vigilant and curious enough to evaluate sources.
Economic policies must be redesigned on the pattern of public welfare and not public fear, to avoid stress and create space in the lives of people, where the search for truth is not relegated to a matter of minimal importance.
Conclusion
Bonhoeffer was hanged on the 19th of July 1945, purportedly for the alleged assassination attempt of Hitler. Two weeks later, Germany surrendered. Bonhoeffer sacrificed himself not only for political struggle but also for the greater benefit of humanity. He dared to see and think in a society where blind following meant survival. He defied the control of the powerful over his mind and showed that true wisdom lies in thinking proactively. In the era where the powerful create conditions to restrict our reasoning, deliberation becomes defiance. Thinking carefully rather than reacting quickly is the only way to reclaim our ingenuity.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
The writer is a doctor with immense interest in domestic and global affairs.