Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, or wit, an inability to learn. It may be innate, assumed or reactive. The word stupid comes from the Latin word stupere. Stupid characters are often used for comedy in fictional stories. Walter B. Pitkin called stupidity "evil", but in a more Romantic spirit William Blake and Carl Jung believed stupidity can be the mother of wisdom.
The root word stupid, [1] which can serve as an adjective or noun, comes from the Latin verb stupere, for being numb or astonished, and is related to stupor . [2] In Roman culture, the stupidus was the professional fall guy in the theatrical mimes. [3]
According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the words "stupid" and "stupidity" entered the English language in 1541. Since then, stupidity has taken place along with "fool", "idiot", "dumb", "moron", and related concepts as a pejorative for misdeeds, whether purposeful or accidental, due to absence of mental capacity.
Stupidity is a quality or state of being stupid, or an act or idea that exhibits properties of being stupid. [4] In a character study of "The Stupid Man" attributed to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BC), stupidity was defined as "mental slowness in speech or action". The modern English word "stupid" has a broad range of application, from being slow of mind (indicating a lack of intelligence, care or reason), dullness of feeling or sensation (torpidity, senseless, insensitivity), or lacking interest or point (vexing, exasperating). It can either imply a congenital lack of capacity for reasoning, or a temporary state of daze, or slow-mindedness.
In Understanding Stupidity, James F. Welles defines stupidity this way: "The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed, deliberate and maladaptive." Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a forced act or accident. Lastly, it requires the activity to be maladaptive, in that it is in the worst interest of the actor, and specifically done to prevent adaption to new data or existing circumstances." [5]
There are various tests to measure Intelligence quotient, as well tests that measure aptitude, such as the Marine Corps’ required General Classification Test (GCT), and the Army General Classification Test.
Researchers Michael Klein and Matthew Cancian have reported a declining aptitude among college educated applicants to the Marine Corps over the past 34 years, although this effect was not observed in the general enlisted population. [6]
Researchers Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer, and Aaron Reuben report those born between 1951 and 1980 may have lost an average of 2.6 IQ points from exposure to leaded gasoline. [7]
Eric Berne described the game of "Stupid" as having "the thesis...'I laugh with you at my own clumsiness and stupidity.'" [8] He points out that the player has the advantage of lowering other people's expectations, and so evading responsibility and work; but that he or she may still come through under pressure, like the proverbially stupid younger son. [9]
Wilfred Bion considered that psychological projection created a barrier against learning anything new, and thus its own form of pseudo-stupidity. [10]
Otto Fenichel maintained that "quite a percentage of so-called feeble-mindedness turns out to be pseudo-debility, conditioned by inhibition ... Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it". [11] He suggests that "people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium." [12]
In rather different fashion, Doris Lessing argued that "there is no fool like an intellectual ... a kind of clever stupidity, bred out of a line of logic in the head, nothing to do with experience." [13]
In the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom, a valorisation of the irrational, the foolish, and the stupid emerged, as in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise"; [14] or Jung's belief that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity. Stupidity is the mother of the wise, but cleverness never." [15]
Similarly, Michel Foucault argued for the necessity of stupidity to re-connect with what our articulate categories exclude, to recapture the alterity of difference. [16]
In his book A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity (1932), Walter B. Pitkin warns about the impact of stupid people:
Stupidity can easily be proved the supreme Social Evil. Three factors combine to establish it as such. First and foremost, the number of stupid people is legion. Secondly, most of the power in business, finance, diplomacy and politics is in the hands of more or less stupid individuals. Finally, high abilities are often linked with serious stupidity. [17]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer indicated stupidity to be "a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil" because there is no defense: "Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved." [18] The great danger of stupidity manifests itself when it affects larger groups. In a larger group, "the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil". [18]
According to Carlo Cipolla the efforts of stupid people are counterproductive to their own and other's interest. He maintains that reasonable people cannot imagine or understand unreasonable behavior making stupid people dangerous and damaging, even potentially more dangerous than a "bandit" whose action at least has a rational goal, namely his benefit. [19]
The fool or buffoon has been a central character in much comedy. Alford and Alford found that humor based on stupidity was prevalent in "more complex" societies as compared to some other forms of humor. [20] Some analysis of Shakespeare's comedy has found that his characters tend to hold mutually contradictory positions; because this implies a lack of careful analysis it indicates stupidity on their part. [21]
Today there is a wide array of television shows that showcase stupidity such as The Simpsons . [22] Goofball comedy is a class of naive, zany humour typified by actor Leslie Nielsen. [23] [24]
Stupidity was a 2003 movie directed by Albert Nerenberg. [25] It depicted examples and analyses of stupidity in modern society and media, and sought "to explore the prospect that willful ignorance has increasingly become a strategy for success in the realms of politics and entertainment." [26]
Idiocracy , a Mike Judge film from 2006, explored a dystopian future America where a person of average IQ is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 500 years later to find that mankind, increasingly dependent on technology built by previous generations that it does not properly maintain or understand, has regressed in intelligence to the standards of current-era mental retardation, and that he has become the de facto smartest person on Earth. Americans have become so stupid that society faces famine and collapse, and according to Pete Vonder Haar of Film Threat , "...each laugh is tempered with the unsettling realization that [Judge's] vision of mankind's future might not be too far off the mark." [27]
An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardised tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests at University of Breslau he advocated in a 1912 book.
An idiot, in modern use, is a stupid or foolish person.
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learn, form concepts, understand, and apply logic and reason. Human intelligence is also thought to encompass our capacities to recognize patterns, plan, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate.
Deaf-mute is a term which was used historically to identify a person who was either deaf and used sign language or both deaf and could not speak. The term continues to be used to refer to deaf people who cannot speak an oral language or have some degree of speaking ability, but choose not to speak because of the negative or unwanted attention atypical voices sometimes attract. Such people communicate using sign language. Some consider it to be a derogatory term if used outside its historical context; the preferred term today is simply deaf.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
Dumbing down is the deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content in education, literature, cinema, news, video games, and culture. Originated in 1933, the term "dumbing down" was movie-business slang, used by screenplay writers, meaning: "[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence". Dumbing-down varies according to subject matter, and usually involves the diminishment of critical thought by undermining standard language and learning standards, thus trivializing academic standards, culture, and meaningful information, as in the case of popular culture.
Intellectualism is the mental perspective that emphasizes the use, development, and exercise of the intellect, and is identified with the life of the mind of the intellectual. In the field of philosophy, the term intellectualism indicates one of two ways of critically thinking about the character of the world: (i) rationalism, which is knowledge derived solely from reason; and (ii) empiricism, which is knowledge derived solely from sense experience. Each intellectual approach attempts to eliminate fallacies that ignore, mistake, or distort evidence about "what ought to be" instead of "what is" the character of the world.
Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, academic, and proponent of eugenics. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford School of Education. Terman is best known for his revision of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. As a prominent eugenicist, he was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Terman as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with G. Stanley Hall.
Densa has been used as the name of a number of fictional organizations parodying Mensa International, the organization for highly intelligent people. Densa is ostensibly an organization for people insufficiently intelligent to be members of Mensa. The name Densa has been said to be an acronym for "Diversely Educated Not Seriously Affected." The name Densa is a portmanteau of denser and Mensa.
Dysgenics is the decrease in prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or well adapted to their environment due to selective pressure disfavoring the reproduction of those traits.
Idiocracy is a 2006 American science fiction comedy film directed by Mike Judge and co-written by Judge and Etan Cohen. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Joe Bauers, who wakes up five hundred years in the future after a botched government hibernation experiment to find himself in a dystopian society run by corporations, where evolution has made humanity stupid because the benefits of technology made it unnecessary for people to be intelligent and physically fit to survive. The cast includes Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews, David Herman, Justin Long, Andrew Wilson, and Brad Jordan.
IQ classification is the practice of categorizing human intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, into categories such as "superior" or "average".
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability. The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term. It is similar to imbecile and idiot.
Credulity is a person's willingness or ability to believe that a statement is true, especially on minimal or uncertain evidence. Credulity is not necessarily a belief in something that may be false: the subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.
Ignorance Is Bliss is the ninth episode of the sixth season of the Fox television show House. It aired on November 23, 2009.
There are a variety of disabilities affecting cognitive ability. This is a broad concept encompassing various intellectual or cognitive deficits, including intellectual disability, deficits too mild to properly qualify as intellectual disability, various specific conditions, and problems acquired later in life through acquired brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.
Postponement of affect is a defence mechanism which may be used against a variety of feelings or emotions. Such a "temporal displacement, resulting simply in a later appearance of the affect reaction and in thus preventing the recognition of the motivating connection, is most frequently used against the affects of rage and grief".
"Our Fragile Intellect" is a 2012 article by American biochemist Gerald Crabtree, published in the journal Trends in Genetics. Crabtree's speculative and controversial thesis argues that human intelligence peaked sometime between 2,000 and 6,000 years ago and has been in steady decline since the advent of agriculture and increasing urbanization. Modern humans, according to Crabtree, have been losing their intellectual and emotional abilities due to accumulating gene mutations that are not being selected against as they once were in our hunter-gatherer past. This theory is sometimes referred to as the Idiocracy hypothesis.
Stupidity is a 2003 Canadian satirical documentary film directed by Albert Nerenberg and produced by Shannon Brown, as the first film commissioned by the Documentary Channel. Nerenberg was also the film's executive producer. The film proposes that willful ignorance has increasingly become a strategy for success in the realms of politics and entertainment, that is, the "stupid" things that seemingly smart people do every day. The film questions "why stupidity is such a slippery concept to grasp and why so few people are talking about it." The film features songs by The Arrogant Worms and original music by The Morons.
Leslie's huge heart and fierce intelligence defined goofball comedy and he was its undisputed master.[ permanent dead link ] – Paul Gross.
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