A few examples at hand: if you’ve ever decided that there was “no more insolence” between the miners and the demonstrators in University Square; if you once decided that Korney’s battle was not worth paying attention to “because she spoke indistinctly”, and Dinescu was a kind and funny boy, even if he held Iliescu in his arms and spoke to him in “Bre”; if, having reached today, between Putin and Zelensky, you morally choose the former, saying that the latter “is a clown” who persecutes the Romanian minority in Ukraine; if you try to convince me that the Americans trade with the Ukrainians in weapons and nothing else – all this will throw you into the garbage and drown you in stupidity.

Mentally uncoordinated and pure intellects – Mentally unclear, stammering thoughts, sometimes hidden behind fluent speech, dilemmas with timetables – those who at first seem intelligent, offering puzzles and fireworks that for a while hide their innate flaw. How many brought to the surface the hermeneutics of the pandemic, in which the germs of stupidity gathered, like a culture of microbes – fighting Brownian, going crazy in all directions! Then there comes a time when these fools settle forever in the splendor of stupidity, and if you begin to watch them carefully, you see stupidity like a rocky thought growing up along the way. They talk, they talk more and more furiously in public, and their nonsense seems endless.

And then you miss it pure intellects, those who have never been wrong before, those for whom reason becomes a grace and a form of nobility. You can say about them, as you say, “pure in heart”, that they have a “pure mind”, that they are “pure in soul”.

But do such people really exist, those who seem never to reach the plains again? A few names come to mind completely at random: Montaigne, Kant, Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Conrad Lorenz, Jean-Francois Revel, Friedrich Hayek, Alain Besançon, Pierre Manan, Roger Scruton, Vargas Llosa, Kundera. .

Every time my eyes fall on one of their pages, my mind articulates (I feel it like a wonderfully tense muscle) and my soul becomes calm. Whereas nonsense annoys me, angers me and increases tension. And how many times I lost people whom I valued at the end of fierce internal strife! Is there anything more devastating than a “smart fight” with a loved one?

Freezing and proving the project – Two phrases suggest how stupidity enters the world and how it can be avoided: hang in the project (a phrase with which I tried to look at communism from a distance and analytically in 1990) and fine tuning (taken by Horia Patapievich from physics and applied to human sciences). Both that and the other can be sufficiently illustrated by what is happening to us in the modern world. We are frozen in mental projects (for example, religious fundamentalisms or the famous “political correctness”) and are not capable of fine-tuning between extremes in public life. We move in the dialectic of “hais-cea,” as the professor of logic liked to say, lamenting the passionate structure of the human mind, unable to achieve the wisdom of moderation in thought. The charm of the attitude in the extreme, the vice of truth, obtained through excess, which emphasizes fanaticism as a prerequisite for stupidity!

Stupidity and intelligence – The simplest definition of stupidity: stupidity is a logical fallacy that you assume enduring as the truth; a mistake you inexorably assume, “stupidly”. This explains the fact that stupidity is universal, that no one is free from “keeping it close” in one direction, at least once in his life to be stupid. In fact, we are all stupid hundreds and hundreds of times. But it does not follow that all those who talk nonsense are stupid. These are natural and opportunistic follies that belong to the imperfection and picturesqueness of the human mind.

But terrible in their harmfulness (since they a priori use the presumption of reason) nonsense of extremely intelligent people, taken in hand without pity and without any harm. retraction later, a lifetime. The “classic” example remains the communist ideal, the most terrible freezing of the project in the history of mankind. Once thrown into the world in the garb of false righteousness, it becomes inevitable. I once called the communist idea “the bite of the viper of thought.” Eugene Ionesco called it “the biggest fraud of the last century”. The communist ideal is an incurable scab of our minds that will accompany us as long as the human race exists, and that will eventually cause it to disappear. Because there is nothing more absurd than the “egalitarian passion” that spawned and will endlessly spawn communism (Thierry Walton). Why does he need another more than me

And who is ultimately to blame? Rousseau? Or Marx? Two brilliant hypocrites who, hiding behind their boundless love for man, unleashed the cruelest massacre in the history of mankind with their ideas. Because no one has sabotaged the human race more than Marx. Imitating the idea of ​​science (“scientific communism”), he diverted the human race to ideology and collective political passion precisely in the century in which it was preparing to enter through advanced science on the path to the final polishing of the collective intellect. Following Rousseau, through the crudest sophistry, Marx ultimately confused the natural equality of human rights by nature with the non-existent (and impossible) empirical equality between individuals. Because we are not born with the same abilities. A genius, a mediocre, and a moron can be born in one family. Every person has the right to life, work and happiness. But not necessarily to wealth. Equality in wealth cannot be declared either by nature or by state decree.*

Just as hunger on the globe has rapidly decreased in accordance with the development of the capitalist economic market (and only thanks to herwhen experimental and experienced communism starved billions of people), we can think today realistic that the growth of the world’s wealth, thanks to the creativity and giftedness of some samples of humanity (you see, we cannot escape inequality of giftedness at birth!), will be sufficient to create the mechanisms by which poverty (through the spontaneous redistribution of wealth and through huge “funds to fight against poverty”) can be eliminated organic and ultimately from society.

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In Platonic dialogues there is wit. IN language for Descartes, it follows a straight line. (The distance between musical intelligence and mechanical intelligence.)

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The biggest puzzle that neuroscience can’t solve is: How can geniuses be morons? A paradigmatic example: in Einstein’s speech on January 6, 1929 (“on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Lenin’s death”), the following words appear:

“I respect Lenin because he spent all his energy, completely sacrificing his personal life, to devote himself to the realization of socialist justice. I do not consider his methods adequate. But one thing can be said for sure: people like him are protectors and restorers of the consciousness of humanity.”

The result of Lenin’s “sacrifice of personal life” and “renewal of human consciousness”: several million lives.

Intelligence as a moral duty – “The moral obligation to be reasonable.” The phrase first appears in a 1915 essay by John Erskine, was later picked up by Lionel Trilling (considered the most important American cultural critic of the mid-century), is usually quoted by his name, and Erskine is ignored.

According to this sentence, the duty of any humanist intellectual to be reasonable follows from his very qualification. By educating him, society pays him not only for self-expression nomine proprio, but also on behalf of those who lack the words to say what they think, nor the cultivated insight to quickly distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil. In short, society pays intellectuals for intelligence. Most of them shut us down.

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The ability to detect stupidity, as well as its awareness, is necessarily part of the toolkit of thinking. The most succinct and effective example of identifying and realizing stupidity is Karaghiale’s response: “Dude, you’re an idiot!”.

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Stupidity with a moral source – This is determined by Horiya Patapievich in his interpretation of the novel pride and Prejudice Jane Austen: “the inadequacy of the mind of the situation and of the character to the moral requirements.” Because, unlike the “stupidity that is the result of a clinically bad mind, a case I propose to call cretinism,” this other stupidity, says Patapievichi, is “the inconvenience of a rational mind drawn into stupidity by the social functioning of a defective character.”

A few examples at hand: if you once decided that there was “no more insolence” between the miners and the demonstrators in University Square; if you once decided that Korney’s battle was not worth paying attention to “because she spoke indistinctly”, and Dinescu was a kind and funny boy, even if he held Iliescu in his arms and spoke to him in “Bre”; if, having reached today, between Putin and Zelensky, you morally choose the former, saying that the latter “is a clown” who persecutes the Romanian minority in Ukraine; if you try to convince me that the Americans trade weapons with the Ukrainians and nothing else – all this will throw you into the garbage and drown you in stupidity.

Stupidity and incompetence – Just as you cannot ask a fool to admit that he is stupid (because then he will become intelligent, according to the expression of Lucian Boy), and therefore, in order to remain stupid, he must constantly believe that he is intelligent, so you you cannot ask an impostor to admit he is an impostor (because then he would pass where he belongs), and therefore to remain an impostor he must strongly believe in his “competence”. What the majority of those who govern us in our country agree with. But I knew, I swear!, functionally illiterate ministers.

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The main sign of stupidity: the ability to manipulate.

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The difference between wrong and stupid; Aristotelian distinction between contingency and substance.

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Bovarian Folly: Noetic Mountaineering. Good soil: aphor. (Examples: aphorisms of Yorga or Blaga.) – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro