Few experiences are more defeating than when someone stupider passes judgement on the wiser but it is the stupid, not the wiser who are heard. After all, the stupid have strength of numbers and form an unshakable, mighty coalition. They form a council among themselves, a blind, gibbering jury, and preside over the entire fate of humankind.The greatest conflict of history is not a war of religions or struggle between classes or clash of races or battle between values and ideologies. It is the ordeal of the intelligent striving to survive oppression by the stupid.
The quasi-class war between the intelligent and the stupid is the true defining struggle of history. The intelligent are faced with a horrific choice: to be overwhelmed by the aggressive tide of the stupid, or to dominate and cynically manipulate them for their own benefit . Both aren’t true solutions, because the stupid, always, ruin everything and drag everything down to their level, and so even an intelligent person who manipulates a stupid person for their own gain is dependent on idiocy. Clearly, if stupid people didn’t exist, humanity would walk among the gods. Thus the primary problem of intelligent people becomes the stupid and how to manage and control them. So no matter what choice the intelligent person makes, their options are always limited by the stupid. The mass of stupidity is the true gravity of history.
The dull notions and shoddy whims of stupid people have a tendency to set the stage. The logic for this phenomenon is simple. Stupid people are more numerous than intelligent people, and stupid people are unable to recognize a smart, insightful point when it crosses them. Thus they are unresponsive to any developments or innovations of the intelligent though they may profit from them. They remain stolid and unchanged. Therefore, because there are more stupid people than very smart people, and stupid people by definition do not change their minds, the will of the stupid predominates.
But what makes someone stupid? An ignorant person is not necessarily stupid, although all stupid people are ignorant. An intelligent and stupid person, for instance, can both be equally ignorant of lies on the far side of the galaxy. What makes someone stupid is that they are uneducable. Their minds do not respond to the receipt of further information . Not only that, they persist in their error, often believing it to be knowledgable, and therefore foreclosing on any possibility of correcting their mistake. But the truly stupid is willfully ignorant; they embrace their ignorance and construe it as knowlege and seek to to implement their ignorance in the world as an inept architect would construct a faulty building, sowing chaos and folly everywhere and setting things up for failure.
Stupidity’s cancer is also self-replicating. It spreads far more quickly than intelligence again for the simple statistical fact that there are more nincompoops than geniuses, and a complex idea requires a rarer, complex mind to grasp it whereas simple piddling idea propagate rapidly in the inane minds of dullards
The vast power the stupid wield—always collectively, never individually, in direct contrast to the intelligent— is the deciding factor of all history. It decides most major events, in that it sets the baseline, poses the problem, suggests the issue in the first place. And it is the intelligent who defeat and over come it, thereby advancing the human species. Such is the fundamental dialectic of history.