Post #3786341

2026-07-13 13:53 UTC

deploying considerable verbal intelligence to deepen general confusion. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow describes a vast bureaucratic and military apparatus of World War II that functions as a machine for converting rational planning into catastrophe. Pynchon’s cartels and rocket engineers are not unintelligent, quite the opposite, and their competence is the V-2 rocket, that threatens to annihilate the war-ravaged cities of the West. Pynchon describes a world in which institutional intelligence becomes a form of collective stupidity. A number of philosophers have sought to provide a framework for understanding this perverse phenomenon. Erasmus, in 1511, in The Praise of Folly, suggests that folly is the engine of human accomplishment. Without self-delusion and overconfidence, nothing would ever get attempted. The challenge for Erasmus was not whether a civilization produces stupidity, but whether it will produce the kind that can be survived.

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:54

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in 1943, suggests that stupidity is not a cognitive defect but an imposed sociological structure. People under the spell of power tend to surrender their capacity for independent judgment and become “stupid” instruments. And Carlo Cipolla, an Italian economic historian, in the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity published in 1976, defined a stupid person as someone who causes losses to others while deriving no gain, or even harm, for themselves. Cipolla was daring enough to propose that the proportion of stupid people is constant across all populations, from professors, plumbers, generals, and janitors. I would suggest, in line with the speculations of Swift and Musil, that it only gets worse with complication. If stupidity is costly to its practitioners why does natural or perhaps even cultural selection not eliminate it from populations of organisms? One obvious possibility is a change in the environment that renders a previous

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