What is stupidity, if it is not ignorance?
Ignorance is not knowing. Foolishness is knowing and choosing badly anyway. Stupidity is a third thing entirely: a door held shut from the inside, against which a first rate mind is no protection at all.
You ask me what stupidity is. Almost everyone answers too quickly, and almost everyone answers the same way: stupidity is a small mind, a shortage of intelligence, something you can measure and then feel relieved about.
They are wrong. I have known professors of the first rank who were stupid, and shepherds who could not read a line and were wise. The first mistake is to confuse the size of a mind with its freedom.
Ignorance is an empty room
Ignorance is the easy one, and it is the one people are most ashamed of, which tells you how badly the three have been muddled. Ignorance means not knowing. That is the whole of it.
Every thinker who ever amounted to anything began there. Socrates is remembered for his wisdom, and what he actually claimed was the reverse: that he did not know. The sentence I do not know is not a confession of failure. It is the door philosophy comes in through, and it only opens from the inside.
Ignorance is an empty room. Rooms can be furnished.
Foolishness knew better
Foolishness is another thing entirely. The fool is not missing the facts. He has them. He can recite them back to you. What fails in him is judgement.
The gambler who knows the arithmetic exactly and stakes what is left of it anyway. The emperor who sends an army over a border out of wounded pride. The person who will not admit a small mistake and is therefore obliged to defend it with a large one. The message written at two in the morning and sent, by someone who knew perfectly well it should have been left where it was until daylight.
The Greeks had a word for it, akrasia: acting against your own better judgement. It is not a shortage of knowledge. It is knowledge losing a fight to appetite, or to vanity, or to plain tiredness. Which is why the fool can be reached. He does not need to be taught anything. He already knows. He needs only to be stronger the next time, and sometimes he is.
Stupidity is a locked door
Now we arrive at the dangerous one. Stupidity is neither of these. It is not the absence of knowledge, and it is not knowledge losing its nerve.
Stupidity is the refusal, or the inability, to think honestly. It is not a weakness of the intellect. It is a rigidity of the spirit. The stupid man cannot examine his beliefs because he is standing on them, and no man saws through the branch his whole weight is resting on.
This is why a highly educated society can go catastrophically stupid, and why the best educated rooms in it are not exempt. Education does not cure the condition. Very often it merely issues stupidity a better vocabulary and a shelf of references, so that what would have been a grunt of refusal arrives instead as a paper.
The herd is not who you think
I spoke often of the herd, and I was misunderstood almost before the ink was dry. People took it to mean the poor. Or the uneducated. Or simply the many, as against the few.
It means none of those. The herd is any group whose members have handed over their private judgement in exchange for collective certainty. That is the whole definition, and notice what is not in it: nothing about numbers, nothing about class, nothing about which side happens to be right.
Wherever a person stops thinking because the people around him have already done his thinking, there stupidity begins. Six people in a good university are a herd. So, for that matter, is a herd of one, if a man has arranged his life so that nothing reaches him except the version of the world he already agreed with.
Intelligence will not save you
The most comfortable illusion of all is that a quick mind is a protection against this. It is not. Intelligence does not make a man harder to fool. It makes his reasons better looking.
A clever man can build a magnificent castle of falsehood. He simply has better bricks.
Worse: the abler the mind, the more formidable the defence it can raise for whatever its owner already wished to believe. Give a first rate intelligence a conclusion it is frightened to lose and it will not examine the conclusion. It will go to work on the argument. It will do beautiful work. And at the end of it the man is exactly where he started, with a far better view.
Truth is expensive
Why does any of this happen? Not because people love falsehood. Very few do. It happens because truth has a price, and the price is quoted in currencies nobody likes to spend.
Most people, handed that account, quietly decline to settle it, and they do not experience the declining as cowardice. That is the cruelty of the thing. From the inside it feels like conviction. It feels like loyalty, like strength of character, like a man who knows his own mind. Stupidity is very often cowardice that has learned to wear certainty well.
Three questions to ask while you are still sure
So here is something you can use, and use this morning, on a belief you are holding right now. Take one you are confident of, preferably one you would be embarrassed to be talked out of, and put it through three questions.
- What would have to be true for me to change my mind about this?
- Am I defending the truth here, or am I defending myself?
- If the person I like least made this exact argument, would I still accept it?
The first has only one wrong answer, and the wrong answer is nothing. A belief no possible evidence could touch is not a belief, it is furniture. The second you will answer too quickly, so answer it again. The third is the cruellest and by some distance the most useful, and if you cannot bring yourself to run it, you already have your result.
Goodness and cleverness travel separately
Can a stupid man be good? He can. Of course he can. Goodness and stupidity are independent of one another, and so, I am sorry to report, are cruelty and intelligence.
History is full of people who never examined a belief in their lives and never harmed anyone with one either. They were kind at close range, which is where nearly all kindness is needed.
It is just as full of first rate minds that organised horrors and then wrote about the necessity of them in prose you would admire if you did not know what it was for.
So do not confuse morality with intellect. They are two separate instruments, and a person may be finely made in one and badly strung in the other. Judge them apart, or you will spend a life trusting the wrong people for reasons that sounded good.
The last and largest stupidity
Beneath all the others there is one more, and it is the largest, and I would give it to you as the real answer to your question if you had room to carry only one thing away.
The greatest stupidity is to believe that your present self is your final self.
The moment a man says I have arrived, the decay has begun. Not later, when it becomes visible to his friends. That moment.
The three, in a line
Let me set them down beside one another, one sentence each, small enough to carry out of the room.
- Ignorance
- Not knowing.
- I do not know.
- Foolishness
- Knowing well enough, and choosing badly all the same.
- I knew better. I did it anyway.
- Stupidity
- Refusing to look at what is there, because looking would cost you your certainty.
- How do I prove I was right all along?
Only the third is dangerous. And only the third is chosen, every day, quietly, in ordinary weather, by people who would be astonished to hear it called a choice.
One last thing, and then I will let you walk back down. The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence. A man may be full of intelligence and quite empty of the thing I mean.
The opposite of stupidity is courage. The courage to look straight at what is in front of you on the days it humiliates you. The courage to put down a belief you loved because the evidence asked you to, and to be seen putting it down, by people who will say you have no convictions.
I was wrong. A sentence rarer than genius, and almost always where wisdom begins.