Stupidity

Stupidity

A

gainst stupidity, even the gods themselves struggle in vain,” said Aeschylus, a sentiment later voiced by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), who appears to have passed it off as his own (Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens). For Aeschylus, this verse is not just a condemnation of humanity, but also a sly thrust at the gods themselves. One has only to read Homer or the classical Greek dramatists to see how stupid even the gods can be. If even those who rule us are stupid, then what hope is there for us? Then I recall that we are actually lambs ruled by wolves – and wolves are cunning, not stupid. (Orwell described us as “rabbits ruled by stoats”, which comes to the same thing).

            In An Enemy of  the People, Ibsen says, “I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority the whole world over. But damn it, it should surely never be right that the stupid should rule over the clever” (Act 4). Ibsen comes close to the truth here. Fools are certainly in a majority, but it is generally not the stupid who rule over the clever, but the cunning and unscrupulous; wolves are not averse to having a fool as a figurehead pack leader.

            “Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities,” said Voltaire. One has only think of Marxism and Fascism to realise he was right.

            Confucius encountered a woman who had seen her three sons devoured by tigers. When he asked her why she did not leave this remote region, she told him that there, at least, she was safe from governmental misrule. Confucius then pointed out to his disciples that bad government was worse than a tiger. He could have added that, of all the forms of bad government, stupid government was one of the commonest and the worst.

            The Arabs say, “When Allah gave you a fool’s mind, luckily for you, he also gave you a fool’s face”. This is brilliantly insulting, for it implies that since people can tell you are feeble-minded simply by looking at you, nobody will expect you to act otherwise.

“When the Americans landed men on the moon, Brezhnev called in the Soviet astronauts and informed them that he was going to go one better and out them on the sun.

‘But Comrade Brezhnev, we shall be incinerated!’ they cried, aghast.

Brezhnev was angry. ‘Do you take me for a fool? Naturally, we shall land you there at night.’”

            During the latter years of the Soviet period, Soviet underground humour – the oral equivalent of samizdat literature – abounded in such jokes about the asinine stupidity of their leaders. This was a sure sign that the regime was withering. Nobody ever joked about Stalin and lived. Yet Stalin’s stupidities far exceeded Brezhnev’s. The enormity of the catastrophes that befell the USSR during Stalin’s rule, above all the catastrophe of the German invasion, can be laid directly at Stalin’s door. For instance, had Stalin not removed all of the thirty-mile deep Soviet border defences (the Stalin Line) as a preliminary to his own projected invasion of the Third Reich, scheduled for late July 1941, Hitler would probably never have dared to launch Operation Barbarossa in June that year. Stalin’s stupidity killed around twenty-seven million Soviet citizens and laid much of the country to waste.

            People did joke about Hitler’s stupidity, but only at the beginning of his reign. By 1939, there were no more jokes, for all those who had made them were either dead or in concentration camps. This is an effective of ensuring that everyone agrees you are intelligent, though it leads you to believe you are infallible. However, Hitler was not stupid, but ignorant, as shown by his vacuous table-talk.

            Intelligence tests given to the Nazi leaders on trail at Nuremberg revealed that all of them were well above average intelligence, with Hjalmar Schacht (Stanford-Binet 144) leading the field. This goes some way to proving my earlier point about our being ruled by wolves, not by fools. Schacht was intelligent enough never to have become too incriminatingly involved with the Nazis. As a result, he was acquitted.

            In spite of being given endless warnings and good advice, my wife’s elderly and pious aunt has spent her whole life throwing meat to her wolfish relatives, in the vain hope that they will leave her sled alone. Once a rich woman, she is now impoverished, but the wolves will not give up the chase until they have stripped the very flesh from her bones. This is real stupidity, disguised as ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘giving your cloak away as well as your jacket,’ as the New Testament advises. Christ was not stupid, however; he was simply advising his followers on the only feasible way to deal with their brutal Roman masters, hoping that they would avoid the terrible fate he foresaw for them and the whole Jewish people. Unfortunately, his sound counsel was misinterpreted as a general rule of behaviour. In fact, such conduct can only be justified in exceptional circumstances, like a Nazi or Roman occupation. Normally, it is suicidal. ‘An eye for an eye,’ is much wiser advice, as game-theory has conclusively demonstrated.

            The Taliban must surely go down as one of the stupidest ruling groups ever to have existed, stupider even than those puritans who ruled Calvin’s Geneva and Cromwell’s England, because more extreme and life-denying. To antagonize about eighty percent of the population one is oppressing, including all the women, is the height of idiocy. Notice that here, as always, stupidity allied itself closely with megalomania – Afghanistan was seen as invincible because protected by Allah – and cruelty.

            The new regime in Afghanistan recently announced (December 2001) that it would not rule with the cruelty shown by the Taliban. For example, those stoned to death for adultery would henceforth be pelted with smaller stones, while the bodies of executed criminals would be displayed in public for only fifteen minutes, not four days. This announcement surely disproves the saying that one should be grateful for small mercies. I expect the next decree will be that the starving who have their hands cut off for stealing bread, as prescribed by Sharia law, will only have to run ninety-five meters to a waiting doctor, not the usual one hundred.

            Pol Pot’s regime also combined stupidity with megalomania and cruelty. The central aim of the Khmer Rouge was to reduce Cambodia – renamed Kampuchea – to a Marxist state with a medieval, peasant economy. “We are a model for the whole world. Is there any other country that would have dared abolish money and markets as we have?” boasted one Khmer Rouge cadre. They succeeded, thus facilitating their own speedy overthrow by the modernizing Vietnamese.

            The megalomania of Pol Pot is well documented. His brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, said, “Pol Pot thought he was an incomparable genius in military and economic affairs, in hygiene, in song-writing, in music and dance, in cookery, in fashion, and in everything else, even in the art of lying….Pol Pot though that he was above everyone else on the planet. He was a god on earth." [1] Hitler, Stalin and Mao harboured much the same illusions about themselves.

            When the Khmer Rouge came to power on 17 April 1975 (‘a day that should live in infamy’), a Cambodian student of my acquaintance told me he was planning to return to Democratic Kampuchea immediately, along with his wife and two children, “to take part in the revolution”. Nothing I said could dissuade him from his insane plan, especially since no one else in the university seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. He dismissed all my warnings about the Khmer Rouge as “capitalist propaganda”. Year later, I learnt that he and his family had been sent to the Bung Tra Beck camp for “a study session” the day he arrived in Cambodia. None of them survived, thanks to this man’s idealistic stupidity.

            Of all the stupid actions of the Khmer Rouge, the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh was the stupidest. Out of a total city population of some three million, 41.9 percent perished. It was this evacuation that brought home the realities of the regime, and turned public opinion, world-wide, against it.

            The Khmer Rouge had a mystical belief in the power of rice, which they saw as almost sacred. Yet such was their incompetence, rice production fell so drastically that, only one year after their seizing power, people were rationed to four teaspoons of rice a day, if they could get it. By the time the regime fell, at least 700,000 had starved to death. This brings to mind the bitter Soviet joke: “What would happen if our government took over the Sahara? Nothing, for ten years. Then there’d be a shortage of sand.”

            Some academics in Western universities – notably in the USA, Britain and, of course, in France (the Khmer Rouge leaders had studied in Paris [2]) – were among the most vociferous supporters of the regime. I was not sure whether to place this item under ‘Academia’ or ‘Stupidity’, before deciding that it really did not make much difference either way. The Khmer Rouge take-over came just in time to revive the hopes of these ideological idiots for a real ‘people’s revolution’ for by 1975, after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, much of the glamour was beginning to wear off the Maoism they had so fervently embraced. Anyone who questioned their glowing praise of the regime was shouted down as a ‘fascist reactionary’. After all, they argued, as the Dean mentioned earlier remarked to me, “Mass killing is necessary sometimes." [3]

            This century, the crown and sceptre of the realm of stupidity among leaders must go to Mao, China’s ‘Great Helmsman’, who came close to destroying China, especially during the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some forty million people paid with their lives for this man’s cruelty and stupidity, even while a couple of billion others, in the West as well as in China, were stupidly extolling his genius.

            Were the butcher generals of the First World War really as stupid as they are often made out to be? I do not believe so, especially when one considers the German generals, though a case might be made out for Haig. They were merely completely indifferent to human life. “Every position must be held to the last man…” ordered Haig, in 1918, and then was driven back to his chateau, caviar and champagne.

            I long wanted to write a book about stupidity in history. However, I abandoned the project in my thirties, realising that I would have to devote the rest of my life to the subject, and even then would only have scratched the surface. I never even considered writing a book on cruelty in history. Even in my teens I knew that was a lifetime project for a large team of hard-working historians.

            Like the Kennedy assassination, the September 11 attack on the WTC and the Pentagon has left many questions unanswered. How was it, for example, that only one of the planes’ eight black boxes (two to each plane) were recovered, though they are so designed as to be virtually indestructible? Why was the tail of Flight 93 found eight miles away from the crash site, when the plane was supposed to have dived into the ground after a group of passengers diverted it from its target? No crash could fling a tail eight miles! How could a passport of one of the terrorists have miraculously survived the crash, to be found a couple of blocks away from the WTC? Why did Bush tell us he saw the first plane crash into the tower on TV, when there is no TV record of the impact? Why did Bush go on reading a story to primary school children for twenty minutes after he was informed of the attack? These and many other questions have never been answered. It is only the stupidity and apathy of the general public that permits the authorities to get away with an account that clearly bristles with serious anomalies.

            The quintessential bureaucrat is surely the legendary official who set up a placard on a Yorkshire moor, which read:

It is strictly forbidden to throw things at this Notice.

Penalty 20 pounds.

By order.

This is a work of bureaucratic genius, masquerading as stupidity. I like to imagine that it has been translated into 211 languages and bureaucrats now come from all over the world to admire it. There may even be talk of converting it into a shrine, under the little-known Council By-law 3196, section 14, subsection F, para. 3 (D). A cartload of stones, places beside the notice for the benefit of natural anarchists, was used up in a single Bank Holiday weekend last year, to the delight of the Council treasurer.

            The stupider people are, the more intelligent they believe themselves to be. The same applies to the ugly, the incompetent and the malicious. Most of them firmly believe they are the opposite of what they are in reality. Psychologists have verified this unpalatable truth. All of us should find this sobering.

            “I have no enemies,” a clever young student told me once. “I get on well with everyone”. In fact, James was heartily disliked – even hated – by most of his classmates for his arrogance, competitiveness and ostentatious brilliance. Few women of his age would ever have been naïve enough to believe they had no enemies. Even highly intelligent men are often fools where human relations are concerned.

            Stupidity is no bar to success, especially if one is a pop-star, a profession for which one needs only a modicum of talent, since most popular music is now composed and arranged by computers. George Harrison, whose recent death was treated like the demise of the Pope or an American president, only composed one memorable song [4] (Something) in his life. He appears to have been of subnormal intelligence, for he was not allowed to sit for his GCSE, having gained zero in all subjects in his preliminary examination, except for English in which his score was two per cent. Nevertheless, he was worth over 200 million dollars when he died.

When truth conflicts with intellectual fashion, truth loses. Fashion, not truth, rules the world and fashions are set by idiots, as George Crabbe (1754-1832) observed in The Library:

Fashion, though Folly’s child, and guide of fools,

Rules e’en the wisest, and in learning rules.

---

[1] Phnom Penh Post, 2/9/96, p.7. Quoted in S. Courtois et al. 1999. The Black Book of Communism, Cambridge Mass. And London, Harvard University Press, p.809.

[2] See Jerome Steinbach and Jocelyne Steinbach, 1976, Cambodge, l’autre sourire, Paris, Editions Sociales.

[3] The facts were readily available by 1978, even to those who did not read French, with the publication of Francois Ponchaud’s devastating expose, Cambodia: Year Zero, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

[4] My Sweet Lord, though deservedly praised, seems to have been derived, unconsciously or not, from another song, She’s So Fine. A court case resulted in Harrison’s having to pay costs and damages to the composers for plagiarism.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM