Thursday 5 June 2008

The Importance Of Stupidity

Some time ago Justin and I were having some warped conversation (nothing new there) and the importance of stupidity was brought to light. For the record, Justin contributed significantly to this article.

In line with realist thought, life only ensues 2 main things - to survive and procreate. Accordingly, it is found that stupidity is what ensures that the status quos of these 2 main things are met.

Stupidity is the logical corollary to intelligence. As a species, it just so happens that, as a result of a huge reliance of brain utilisation, humans lose touch with instinct and ingrained primal intuition. Alot of what we do are then mentally processed outcomes from a stimulus of some sort. The remainder that's left to instinct are often boring stuff like breathing and, perhaps not so dully, split-second reactions. But essentially, most else is subjected to mental processing before execution. The neocortex ensures that we don't act purely on instinct.

So naturally, since brain usage isn't particularly a function of instinct, some people then start to suck at using their brains, creating a dichotomy between smart and stupid. To paint a clearer picture, if the disparity between intelligence levels were likened to that of a bird's instinctive ability to fly, many of us would have relatively similar intelligence levels. On the flipside, if the ability to fly were likened to that of our intelligence, you'd see a great deal of birds screw up and fly into trees and planes. But birds hardly ever mess up, and I think this relevantly shows how stupid we can be as humans in a comparative sense.

Once some potentially smart people start to realise that a great number of humans are crap at using their brains, they will improve themselves in order to exploit others.

In the modern world, consumption is a major function of survival. For the purposes of this narrow-minded article, and in applying Occam's razor, I'm excluding anything else that may determine survival as a prime factor (because many things seem to overlap with consumption anyway and I'm lazy). Stupid people are drivers of the economy. Do we really need 20 pairs of shoes? Do we really need a bigger car? Do we really need that Rolex watch? Quite clearly, nope, we don't. Economic utility of goods purchased, especially consumer goods, is only 'justified' inasmuch as the social value ascribed to these goods. Given that the normative social value we get from a good is determined by the producers of said good, it just says that, by applying Occam's razor once again, it's mere stupidity that determines consumption for economic goods, especially social goods.

And to top it all off, stupid people kinda fool themselves willingly in this sense.

Relevantly, marriage and babies for the procreation of our species are often primarily derivatives of stupidity and I don't think I have to explain that much. Just do a search on funny quotes about marriage. Not the serious ones; as they say to be wise you can't take life too seriously.

Hence, stupidity plays a vital role in life. If you're shit-stupid but know it, then you're already on the path to improvement, because sociologically and for current human development, intelligence disparity has its importance cause. Deductively then, people must either be extremely intelligent and capable or not intelligent at all. So sums up the importance of stupidity.




The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Audio Candy:
Taproot - I

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