Fell down the Rabbit Hole of Stupidity after the blue eyed Viking Princess sent me a video to watch.
The 3 elements of stupidity, according to philosophy by Jonny Thomson
I all began when we were discussing a situation at work and I made a flippant remark
“they can’t help it, they are just stupid”
We quite often get to work together. The blue eyed Viking Princess is the Franna Operator and I am the Rigger. We always end up in philosophical debates or talking about interesting books we have read (more she has read).
Note: really struggle with watching videos and only got half way through this one. Now the blue eyed Viking Princess only sends philosophy in the written format. Much easier for my brain to process.
Element One - Outsourcing of Critical Thinking
Or to put it another way. The absence or lack of critical thinking.
The term critical comes from the Greek word kritikos meaning “able to judge or discern”. Therefore critical thinking is about making reliable judgements based on reliable information. Using logical inquiry and reasoning to construct well-founded beliefs.
Outsourcing is when your own judgment or critical thinking is surrendered to a third party:
- friends
- influencers
- group think
- echo chambers
- ideology
- political parties
- leaning to the left or leaning to the right
- ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek
At this point we will briefly introduce Ethos, pathos, and logos. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who introduced them as the three modes of persuasion in his work “Rhetoric”.
- Ethos appeals to credibility and character, where the third party establishes their authority, expertise, or trustworthiness
- Pathos appeals to emotions, where the third party evokes feelings such as sympathy, fear, or joy
- Logos appeals to logic and reason, where the third party uses facts, statistics, and structured arguments
Element Two - Wilful Ignorance
The active refusal to seek knowledge or resolve one’s own ignorance. This involves a deliberate choice to remain uninformed. The concept can be traced back to Aristotle’s idea of amathia. And Socrates’s thoughts on the wisdom of admitting what one does not know.
- Aristotle’s “Posterior Analytics” distinguished Amathia from simple ignorance (agnoia). It is a compound or sophisticated ignorance derived from defective reasoning and inference rather than a mere lack of knowledge
Element Three - Conformity and Indoctrination
This element refers to the pressure to align with a group’s beliefs at the expense of truth. Where loyalty to a tribe or institution (there’s that third party again) often supersedes independent thought and factual accuracy, leading to a collective "stupidity."
Jonny references Deitrich Bonhoeffer who observed this in his educated peers who joined the Nazi regime. Deitrich argues that “stupidity is worse than evil”. Especially when power is added to the mix. Evil is easily identified and “can be exposed, protested against,and prevented by force, stupidity leaves us defenseless because it is immune to reason, facts, and logic”.
Stupidity involves a lack of self-awareness making the stupid person a mindless tool capable of any evil while remaining incapable of seeing it as such, making them easier for tyrants to manipulate than consciously malicious actors.
A more modern example of what Deitrich observed, would be the “Covid Era”. But we will have to leave that example for later posts.
DISCLAIMER: I promise no AI was harmed or feelings hurt in the researching, editing and publishing of this. But lots of CO2 was produced, doing my bit to make planet earth green.
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