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Otto English is the pen name used by Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London.
Stupidity is obviously not new. History is chock-full of idiotic people doing ridiculous things. I’m reminded of this every time I pass a graveyard in South East London, wherein lies Robert Cocking, an English watercolorist who in 1837, aged 61, decided he would demonstrate a parachute he’d invented, by jumping out of a hot-air balloon one mile above Greenwich.
Cocking had never been in a hot-air balloon before, knew nothing about flight or the design of parachutes and had not thought to test his contraption first — but he was so confident in his invention that he jumped anyway.
He didn’t paint any watercolors after that. But there’s no denying that Cocking was a man ahead of his time.
The great struggles of the 20th century were between communism and capitalism, monetarism and Keynesianism, democratic values and dictatorships. Our era’s defining battle is between the informed and the proudly ignorant. And lately, it’s been the latter who are winning.
Turn on any news channel. Switch on talk radio. Fire up your social media feed. Stupid has gone mainstream. It’s the new black — and this is shaping up to be its golden age. Who needs experimental hot-air balloons when you’ve got horse tranquilizers you think will cure COVID-19?
Cocking’s death was an early demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that causes people who know very little to believe they know very much.
“Incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious,” the social scientists David Dunning and Justin Kruger who identified the condition concluded. “Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.”
They were writing, fittingly, in 1999. Fitting, because in the 21st century, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere — and nowhere more so than in the 24-hour rolling news and entertainment cycle.
News is a hungry beast. It needs constant feeding, and when you don’t have the nutrients and vitamins of actual news, you are left to stave it off with carbohydrates of comment and the gristle of outrage.
Over the last 20 years, commentary has become a veritable growth industry — with whole phalanxes of social media blue ticks, former politicians and failed actors willing to step up to the microphone and give some ill-thought-through stupid point of view.
At its best (such as, ahem, the piece before you, dear reader) commentary shines much needed light on important subjects. At its worst — and it’s very often at its worst — the sheer volume of edgy, uninformed “hot takes” creates, as journalist Dave Holmes recently put it, a “kind of smart that is indistinguishable from stupid.”
Take, for example, Ben Shapiro, darling of the American conservative right.
Mr. Shapiro, 37, has been a political commentator since he was 17. The author of multiple books — including the pithily titled How to debate leftists and destroy them — he also presents a daily podcast, is editor emeritus of the Daily Wire and a writer for publications including Breitbart, where he was editor-at-large from 2012 to 2016.
In conservative quarters, Shapiro has been hailed as an intellectual and much is made of his degree from Harvard Law School and his impressive debate skills. Shapiro has 3.5 million Twitter followers. In 2017, the New York Times dubbed him “The cool kids’ philosopher.”
He also has opinions on literally everything, which means that quite frequently, the only person he ends up “destroying” (apparently his favorite word) is himself.
In 2019, during one of his regular campus tours, Shapiro told an audience that rising sea levels of five or 10 meters caused by climate change were not a problem because people by the coast will simply “sell their homes and move.” That same year, he claimed that there was no need for an apology for slavery as there had already been one and it was “called the Civil War.”
Most recently, he declared the Daily Wire will “defy” U.S. President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for companies with over 100 employees.
And yet, in our attention-first economy, Shapiro has yet to pay a price for his stupidity.
Fortunately, there’s hope that the stupidity wave has crested. Its peak, of course, will have been the 45th president of the United States. What Buddha is to Buddhism, what Marx is to Communism, Donald Trump is to the creed of stupidism.
During his four chaotic years in power, barely a day went by without Trump saying something witless. In 2018, he declared Hurricane Florence, “One of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” In 2019, he suggested that during the American Revolutionary War, Washington’s army had “taken over airports” — a full 128 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight. In a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee that same year, he argued that “the noise [from windmills] gives you cancer.”
It would have been a good act if only Trump hadn’t been the leader of the most powerful country on Earth — and responsible for the health of millions of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
Indeed, there’s something reassuring about stupidity. Entry level is easy. You don’t need to read a book — a Facebook post will suffice. Your instincts will be confirmed by groupthink, your biases by blue-ticked conspiracy theorists.
The end result, however, can be serious — potentially even deadly. It can come in the form of men storming the Capitol dressed in horns in Washington, or in mass demonstrations by anti-lockdown, anti-vax protesters in Central London who believe that the coronavirus is the fault of the BBC.
At the root of the cult of stupidity is the notion that the opinions of the ill-informed should bear as much weight as those of experts — that the anti-vaxers should be listened to as much as the virologists.
The only antidote to stupidity is humility. I know nothing about football — my opinions on the beautiful game should not be given the same value as Marcus Rashford’s or Gareth Southgate’s. And the same holds true for countless of other subjects.
To end the epidemic of stupidity, we must all acknowledge our shortcomings and agree together that we can’t — and shouldn’t — know everything.
We can either accept our ignorance, or be doomed by it.
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September 29, 2021 at 09:00AM
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Have we reached peak stupidity? - POLITICO Europe
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