Stupidity is a Nasty Insult

An Understanding of the US Pandemic Response is Impolite

Calling other people stupid makes you look bad. Failure to confront your own stupidity jeopardizes your future. This essay confronts my nation’s bipartisan failure in the face of the pandemic.

The dumbest people I know are those who Know It All.

— Malcolm Forbes

What Stupidity Isn’t and Is

1. It’s not lack of intelligence. Intelligent people say and do stupid things. Einstein ruined his marriage to a wonderful woman. Newton misplaced his theory of gravity for years and would never have published it without Halley badgering him.
2. It’s not ignorance. Accurate knowledge quickly and easily cures ignorance. Stupidity resists accurate knowledge. It loudly denounces accurate knowledge.
3. It’s optional. It’s a choice like ignorance, not a limit like low intelligence. You can measure it in two ways — either the difference between the size of your knowledge and the size of your opinion, or the difference between what you must do to achieve your goals and what you actually do. These two are related.

Disagreement Over the Roots of American Stupidity

The goal of any sane country in the face of a pandemic is to minimize the death toll. Protecting the economy is also important. Pursuing these goals requires accurate data. Failure to achieve either goal obviously undermines the other. People on the left and right dispute the nature of our failure.

1. Americans on the Left interpret US actions resulting in over 150,000 covid-19 deaths as a stupid response to the virus. Smart countries like South Korea and Japan have reported fewer than ten covid-19 deaths per million population. Dumb countries have lost more than five hundred people per million. Savvy countries followed expert advice on testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. The people of the United States argue endlessly without reaching consensus about whether we should have done this better. We are too stupid even to learn from counting our dead.
2. Americans on the Right dispute this narrative. They believe that health care professionals, journalists, and deep state operatives have wildly exaggerated the number of American dead. Even though Republicans run the federal government, they have been powerless to stop these con artists from perpetrating this massive fraud. They have also failed to provide a credible alternative count. The United States is, therefore, too stupid even to count.

Obstinacy and vehemency… are the surest proof of stupidity. — Bernard Barton

How to Fix It

I’ll leave it to others to conclude whether a great nation might be incapable even of counting its dead, much less of learning from their loss. Both sides agree on our national deficit in smarts but not on how to address it. That depends on which side relies on better sources of information. Is compromise possible? Does tone matter?

1. Others may judge which sources are trustworthy. I won’t weigh in on it. One side accepts the National Academy of Sciences as a gold standard on topics such as pandemic response, immigrant violent crime rates, global warming, prejudice, and discrimination. The other side accepts the president. The president typically disagrees with the National Academy of Sciences. Who can say which is better? Not me.
2. To find the right answer, perhaps we should set aside partisanship and meet our opponents halfway. We could, for instance, flip a coin to settle each issue where the president disagrees with scientific experts. That would be fair and unbiased. We could also accept the equivalence between experts promoted by Breitbart and the vast majority of experts who hold the opposite view. Who can even identify the majority? The president or the academy? Either choice sounds reasonable to me.
3. Accusing political opponents of stupidity just makes you look ornery. Don’t do it. Political rants alienate your friends. Avoid such quarrelsome behavior. If stupidity diminishes your beloved nation — and literally kills tens of thousands of your fellow citizens — just be polite. Don’t raise a fuss. Ultimately, the loss of life must take its place in the larger context of good manners.

Satire aside, the ideology behind a movement which loses touch with reality deserves contempt. I love and respect many people who have fallen prey to this cultural disaster. It grieves me to see them wallow in it. I so wish for them to break free.

There are no stupid people, just stupid approaches to the challenges we face.