![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ED and I went to see the documentary Stupidity last night. The basic premise is that, while all people are stupid, some are decidedly more so then others.
A few things stuck out for me. The first was the Arrogant Worms song, the chorus of which was:
History is made by stupid people.
Clever people wouldn't even try.
If you wanna place in the history books,
Then do something dumb before you die.
The second thing was a theory on stupidity and belief. It basically boils down to, since people know next to nothing about how and why the world really is, we make up theories for ourselves. People who cling so tightly to their chosen theory that they cannot see, much less learn, information that contradicts that theory, are stupid.
So:
Georgie W. isn't an idiot because he can't put a sentence together coherently (though there were some precious examples of that in the film), but because his born-again beliefs blind him to anything that doesn't suit them. Concepts of good and evil (his side = good, the others = evil) work very well, but complexity and gray-zones are not recognized.
Another thing that has stuck with me is the veneration with which we have come to treat stupidity. Like food and sex, our society treats stupidity with a complex mixture of disgust and worship. We laugh at stupidity, yet we pay highly to do so. Adam Sandler is getting rich by acting stupid.
To pull this in with something I've been reading about recently, there has been some talk amongst sociologists and other social commentators that there's a backlash against men in popular culture. One of the "proofs" they cite are the number of movies, commercials and TV shows that have stupid male characters.
There are two reasons I feel that this theory might be bunk. First, there seem to be just as many negative portrayals of women in popular culture as there are of men. Women may not be portrayed as stupid as often (though, with the number of cow-eyed women on the The Bachelor re-makes and imitations, I think that could be disputed too), but they are manipulative, shallow, scheming, naive, etc.
Second, if stupidity is rewarded in our society, is it "backlash" for men to be portrayed doing stupid things?
A final thing that has stuck with me since the movie: The goal of most forms of meditation is to empty the mind of all thoughts. Hmmm... deliberate stupidity? Is that necessarily a bad thing then?
A few things stuck out for me. The first was the Arrogant Worms song, the chorus of which was:
History is made by stupid people.
Clever people wouldn't even try.
If you wanna place in the history books,
Then do something dumb before you die.
The second thing was a theory on stupidity and belief. It basically boils down to, since people know next to nothing about how and why the world really is, we make up theories for ourselves. People who cling so tightly to their chosen theory that they cannot see, much less learn, information that contradicts that theory, are stupid.
So:
Georgie W. isn't an idiot because he can't put a sentence together coherently (though there were some precious examples of that in the film), but because his born-again beliefs blind him to anything that doesn't suit them. Concepts of good and evil (his side = good, the others = evil) work very well, but complexity and gray-zones are not recognized.
Another thing that has stuck with me is the veneration with which we have come to treat stupidity. Like food and sex, our society treats stupidity with a complex mixture of disgust and worship. We laugh at stupidity, yet we pay highly to do so. Adam Sandler is getting rich by acting stupid.
To pull this in with something I've been reading about recently, there has been some talk amongst sociologists and other social commentators that there's a backlash against men in popular culture. One of the "proofs" they cite are the number of movies, commercials and TV shows that have stupid male characters.
There are two reasons I feel that this theory might be bunk. First, there seem to be just as many negative portrayals of women in popular culture as there are of men. Women may not be portrayed as stupid as often (though, with the number of cow-eyed women on the The Bachelor re-makes and imitations, I think that could be disputed too), but they are manipulative, shallow, scheming, naive, etc.
Second, if stupidity is rewarded in our society, is it "backlash" for men to be portrayed doing stupid things?
A final thing that has stuck with me since the movie: The goal of most forms of meditation is to empty the mind of all thoughts. Hmmm... deliberate stupidity? Is that necessarily a bad thing then?
