Post #3786342

2026-07-13 13:51 UTC

These are forms of intelligence trapped in frameworks so rigid that they produce outcomes that are worse than doing nothing. In the sky city of Laputa, brilliant mathematicians and accomplished musicians apply projective geometry in order to build with no right angles and chefs prepare meals based on geometric figures. These are abstractions of exquisite subtlety and power in mathematics that become helpless when directed at the wrong practical problems. William Gaddis in his The Recognitions presents a society of forgery, misattribution, and counterfeiting in which enormous ingenuity is expended in the service of inauthenticity. The protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, produces forged Flemish paintings that require more skill and knowledge than original compositions. His forgeries are technically masterful, art-historically impeccable, and completely fraudulent. Each of his many characters talk past one another in dialogues of escalating misrecognition,

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:53

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.

Open ##3786341