My reaction to Trump’s latest plunge with concerte blocks on his feet into the deep end of a pool of magical thinking about why he’s taking Hydroxychloroquine because, as he put it “I get a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy...What do you have to lose?” was that while there are lots of ways to describe him from his being a malignant narcissist to a pathological liar one stands out: he is utterly stupid when it comes to rational thinking in certain areas.
I decided to do something Trump never does, actually research something. Here’s some of what I found when I looked to experts to explain what stupidity is.
I started with a web search and a Wikipedia entry for stupidity which had portions which I thought described Donald Trump.
Playing stupid
Wilfred Bion considered that psychological projection created a barrier against learning anything new, and thus its own form of pseudo-stupidity.[8]
Intellectual stupidity
Otto Fenichel suggested 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."
In literature
The first book in English on stupidity was A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity by Walter B. Pitkin (1932):
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.[20]
In film
Stupidity was a 2003 movie directed by Albert Nerenberg.[22] 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.”
Then I came across the following:
Ross Pomeroy, in Real Clear Science, offers a good explanation of what stupidity is in the article with a similar name. He references the Dunning-Kruger effect which has become much more well known since Trump became president. In fact, I could make a case that Donald Trump has something akin to a Dunning-Kruger disease (in bold below):
One area of research where we perhaps can see stupidity on paper is the Dunning-Kruger effect. As many studies have revealed, it seems surprisingly (and unfortunately) universal that people who lack correct information about a certain issue tend to think they are actually informed about it. Often, they even overestimate their knowledge by such a degree that they are more confident than people who actually know the correct information. These people, the ones who know little but profess to know a lot, can be said to be truly stupid.
Can stupidity be avoided or is it hard-wired? Perhaps writing tongue-in-cheek, Cipolla expressed the opinion that stupidity is genetically predetermined, an "indiscriminate privilege of all human groups... uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion."
I'll take the opposite stance. I believe that education can root out stupidity like a garden weed. The answer is not to merely teach facts, as is still all too common, but to teach people how to attain facts and how to discern a good source of information from a bad one. One must also learn to nurture a healthy degree of self-doubt. Essentially, the antidote to stupidity is a scientific way of thinking.
What can be done to repair the epidemic of American stupidity promoted by Donald Trump?
Steven Nadler, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, is a professor of philosophy and the humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the coauthor of Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy, offers his prescription in this 2017 Time Magazine essay written well before Trump’s stupidity cost actual Americans to die from Covid-19. It was prompted by Trump’s refusal to recognize the science of climate change.
He begins:
When so many obviously intelligent and well-educated Americans claim that global warming is a “hoax”; when we seem obsessed with vilifying an entire, fourteen centuries-old religious tradition simply because of recent heinous actions of terrorists who profess to act in its name; when, nearly a century after the Scopes Trial, there is still significant public resistance to the theory of evolution, with one recent poll revealing that 34% of the population rejects evolution — over one third of the country! — and when voters elect a man so obviously unprepared and unfit to be president, I begin seriously to worry that we Americans are exhibiting greater and greater stupidity.
Let me be clear: By “stupidity” I do not mean a lack of knowledge, education, skill or savvy. Stupidity is not the same as ignorance or incompetence or folly (although it often leads to foolish behavior). I do not mean it as some immature, all-purpose playground insult. I want not to offend but to diagnose.
In that spirit, I offer a different, more philosophical definition: Stupidity is a kind of intellectual stubbornness. A stupid person has access to all the information necessary to make an appropriate judgment, to come up with a set of reasonable and justified beliefs and yet fails to do so. The evidence is staring them right in the face but it makes no difference whatsoever. They believe what they want to believe. Not only do they have no good reasons for thinking that what they believe is true — there are often good reasons for thinking that what they believe is false. They are not acting in a rational manner.
While the world hope for a vaccine to prevent Covid-19, and a cure for those who contract it, Nadler concludes with his own hope for curing a disease that is, in its own way, worse than Covid-19:
Changing people’s cognitive behavior will not be easy; it may even be a fool’s errand. By young adulthood, we naturally become stuck in our ways of forming and abandoning beliefs. I like to think that the key lies in more philosophy, and more of the humanities overall. Most people, if they study philosophy at all, do so only in college — typically to fulfill some distribution requirement. But what if we start exposing young people to philosophy well before they become undergraduates? There is no reason why high school students, even children in elementary school, cannot absorb the basic lessons of rationality and critical thinking that come from studying the great thinkers of the past and of today, and the problems in ethics, politics, epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics that they address. If there is a cure for stupidity, I am convinced that this is it. I hope I’m proven right.
I think that Nadler is right in theory. However with Trump fostering and presiding over an idiocracy which could be based on the Mike Judge film of that name. In it a American soldier takes part in a classified experiment, is frozen, and awaken 500 years later in a world where commercialism and anti-intellectualism has run rampant, intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, justice, and human rights have disappeared.
With Trumpidoits such as Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education in charge this drastically needed emphasis on nationwide teaching reform will not happen until the Democrats control the government.
Below is an article in the Journal of Intelligence which is a publication of NIH’s US National Library of Medicine. It is by Robert Sternberg, Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. It is long and detailed. It is the sort of article Barack Obama might read. What are the chances Trump would read it? Less than zero?
Abstract:
In this article, I argue that conventional views of intelligence and its measurement have contributed toward at least some of the societal problems of today. I suggest that to escape from a degenerative process, society needs to consider the importance not only of intelligence, as conventionally defined but also of successful intelligence, involving in addition to conventional analytical intelligence, common sense, creativity, and wisdom.
Conclusions:
The world is facing huge, pressing, and even frightening problems—terrorism, climate change, increasing income disparities, drug abuse, a divided society, and feelings of many of hopelessness, especially, in some cases, after people see the leaders their fellow citizens choose or tolerate. Successful intelligence, integrating creative, practical, and analytical aspects of intelligence as well as wisdom, provides the potential for solutions to serious world problems. Successful intelligence viewed broadly draws on creativity, conventional (analytical) intelligence, common sense, and wisdom because it often requires people to come up with novel solutions, to analyze whether the solutions are indeed good ones, to implement the solutions and persuade other people of their value and most of all, to ensure that the solutions help to achieve a common good. The world today needs more creativity and wisdom and less foolishness. Our schools need to teach for wisdom [65] and develop broadly adaptive, creative, street-smart, wise and ethical leaders, not just traditionally smart and politically savvy ones [66]. Many of our societies in the world today have created for their members a race but unfortunately, a race to Samarra. Successful intelligence, broadly defined to include wisdom, is a key to finding a different and better race for the societies of the world to run.
For the poll, consider what Krugman calls Trump’s c”ase of severe infabllitis.”
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