Idiots increase in direct proportion to our ceasing to be such

 I agree with you entirely. An idiot is morally responsible for being an idiot. Anyway, idiots are always the instigators of conflict. Of course the idiocy is all theirs, four-square. But you would be wrong to imagine that this is of the slightest importance. Once an idiot has entered your life, the time for lamentation is past. The fault may well be his or hers, if you really insist on knowing, but the life in question is yours. So train your mind ONLY on the situation as it concerns you, and use it to work out your margin for manoeuvre and to pick the strategy with greatest effect. Do you see? The event cropped up in your life and now it is addressed to you. I grant you, it is a surprise, to say the least (a regrettable one as well as comical), that the Greatest Challenge of your existence has taken on the shape and voice of a human worm, and I understand that your greatest wish is to squash it underfoot. But don’t you know that heroes always have to slay foulmouthed monsters? Stop complaining about it being not fair just to persuade yourself there’s been a mistake. Abandon the notion that the jerk has no place in your life, since the opposite is true. He or she is talking to you, yes, to you sir or madam, and now it’s time to show your valour.

These considerations require you to redefine both your own position and the operating range you have at your disposal. Destroying the idiot is no longer an issue. He or she existed prior to your noticing, and will no doubt persist in some environment or other in time to come. Your only aim is to stop the lout from doing any harm. But you do grasp that your present task is to determine precisely which board you are playing on, because that is where you will have to find a way of moving the pieces into a new configuration – including in situations where for reasons of social hierarchy you are not in a position to tear strips off your opponent.

So while the idiot is presumably ruining the atmosphere and trampling on what you believe to be important, he or she is also, and by the same token, offering you a golden opportunity to show your own worth. You can now make a display of your own intelligence and tactfulness: these qualities have no better use, they become significant only in relation to an idiot and by means of the idiocy of some other. Human worth would simply have no meaning without these occasional unfortunate encounters where it can be deployed.

Because of the evaluative ambivalence of any event and the reciprocal involvement of subject and object, the occurrence of an idiot in the course of daily life should be seen straight off as a favourable, necessary and welcome opportunity for your own moral development. It’s superbly well suited to you and to no one else, since it is happening to you. That’s why I now conclude that an idiot is a stroke of luck, and I therefore insist:

Be the first to make peace

(...)

WHY IDIOTS ALWAYS WIN

Stupidity is one of the attributes that human beings always want to assign to their own kind; but even on that point they are on the wrong track.

It’s easy to test this out. A pebble in your shoe doesn’t need to be endowed with intentionality to piss you off.

In which a method will be proposed for interacting with knaves and fools, based on a specific conception of their world, your world and your respective personalities.

It’s possible you got the impression that the last chapter treated stupidity as a mere phenomenon of representation, as if it were just an illusion. Maybe you are hoping you’re well on the way to a conclusion where, in a state of purely philosophical ecstasy, you and I will overcome stupidity together and see reconciliation spread over the world at long last. Allow me to adjust the focus. On the one hand, I do indeed maintain that the impression that idiots are on the increase, whether or not that impression fits real historical determinations, will never stop, even if in actual fact the number of idiots goes down. Why so? The real reason is that idiots do not increase in terms of any historical chronology. As we grow older, the number of idiots rises in proportion to our progressive loss of illusions about the unity of the human phenomenon and the possibility of sharing our own norms with others. So as the idiot in you starts to wilt, thousands of others rise up from the ground like weeds on the lawn. In that sense, we can say that idiots increase in direct proportion to our ceasing to be such.

However, losing our naivety doesn’t stop our brains from finding other balls to chain to our ankles. As your life experience grows longer, so, in successive steps, social change, urban renewal and technological advance destroy the framework of your memories. When you look at the current state of the street where you grew up, when you learn (from hearsay, of course) about how young people hook up and copulate nowadays, and so forth, you are overcome with nostalgia. I know how you feel, dear reader! Individual nostalgia, created by the strangeness of the new, can’t be denied or repressed without endangering our entire society, for it reveals a fundamental principle which demonstrates the main force of idiots, which is inertia.

What is the source of this inertia – the kind you can guess lies behind fixed ideas, narrow minds, and the like? To understand it we have to begin with its opposite, adaptation. Adaptation is the product of a relatively long learning curve, starting with the privileged period of childhood, that supplies information that is imprinted on the least conscious levels of our being. It draws on a whole range of experiences that includes the space where you live, the nature of the sense impressions you most commonly have (sound, touch, and so on) and the interactions you have with other people (the language they speak, etc.) – in sum, everything that makes up what each of us calls the ‘real world’. Replicating some kinds of behaviour automatically, associating particular ideas, or valuing specific forms of speech depends directly on the ‘real world’ to which these behaviours and representations refer. In fact, people adopt or refine almost everything that defines them as individuals on the basis of the imperative of adaptation. It comes to what I shall now call a ‘personality’, in the sense of a singular disposition (that is neither entirely predictable nor entirely arbitrary) to react to events in a particular way. It’s a notion that incorporates so many social, genetic and symbolic determinants, alongside conscious and unconscious experiences laid down over time in complex and confusing ways, that nobody yet knows how to disentangle them from it.

Well, then: putting aside the question of where our personalities ultimately come from, we can say that the real world of experience is a major factor of constraint. As a result, human beings do not change their opinions, perspectives or behaviour unless they are constrained to modify their reference worlds by new experiences. Only updates to their ‘real worlds’ allow people to adjust their personalities: it’s quite impossible to change yourself just by saying so. (That is crushingly obvious, and I reckon everybody knows it to be true, even if only to forgive themselves for their own flaws. Pop-culture nostrums about the efficacy of ‘willpower’ are just ridiculous.) In short, if you inhabit a ‘world’ where a well-ordered argument is treated as a relevant contribution, then my reasoning may be enough to win you over. But if that is not the case, then an image might do the trick better, or else a video clip or an emoji or whatever else you treat as relevant contributions to your relationship to the real world.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy to change your reference world. A peculiar feedback loop means that a personality tends to defend the world to which it has first adapted. Thus comes into being a circle uniting the self and the world, such that you cannot change the personality without changing its world; reciprocally, moreover, the personality’s force of inertia protects its world from change. To put it in their words: an attack on the one is an attack on the other.

Consequently, you can’t change the representations of idiots unless you take account of the fact that their idiocy is in the first place the result of adaptation. In the last analysis, their inertia or blinkered state is the result of more or less successful adaptations to specific factors, however obsolete, mistaken or partial they may be. You need a lot of tact to change them (their opinions, behaviours, etc.) and you need to take advantage of the gaps and breaches in their reference worlds with the greatest delicacy and stop short of overturning their personalities. It’s a judgement call every time, there’s no all-purpose recipe, except that struggling against the inertia of idiots implies overall that you are seeking to enlighten them about changes that have already occurred in their ‘real worlds’ and can show them how necessary it is to take those changes into account in a way that is relevant to them – and you should use a cartoon or an advertising jingle to do that in preference to giving a demonstration in words.

But while you already feel prepared to teach lessons, please remember that the dynamic of integrating new elements into a ‘real world’ is reciprocal by definition. That means that the way the shithead or harridan you’re talking to integrates what you are saying to them depends in strict proportion on your capacity to take into account the mental worlds of idiots; you have to accept (if only on grounds of their existing) that they are de facto one part of the truth. Thus you cannot be certain that your own mental world is not entirely idiotic unless you – you in the first place – are able to acknowledge the reality of that world for which idiots are the evidence. For that world is the very proof of a gap or fissure in your own.

Overcoming stupidity thus necessarily implies modifying two worlds by reciprocal elision, grounded in the presence of fissures in both of them. Don’t worry, changing worlds is not just your responsibility alone. Taking the long view, you can leave History to change them by itself quite naturally; whatever ‘conservatives’ may say, History doesn’t just make itself. And it never goes into reverse. We have no choice but to participate in changes already under way by striving to steer historical evolution towards preferences that we must constantly revise and update.

Now we are at a crux. We’re playing for our future (or what we imagine as our future) and we must either win or lose. Hey ho! We are going to lose almost every match against boors and boneheads – but not quite every one. Why? Not because idiots are in the majority – that would be absurd. Since idiots are interactional entities, idiots simply cannot be tallied! On the other hand it is correct to say that the majority of people are necessarily stupid, since most human beings tend to follow the principle of the conservation of energy. That’s it. Nothing else. Just laziness, carelessness, incompetence and conformism. In the end all these terms come down to the same thing, to the good old principle of inertia. In this sense, idiots almost always win, thanks to Nature’s natural bent. You and I keep up the struggle to change things step by step, and to prompt our societies to adapt in constructive and subtle ways that have a low probability of taking place. But the bent of Nature will always reassert itself, a problem all the more intractable because Nature is the point of intersection of all real worlds, if only we could know where it was.

Maxine Rovere 

How To Deal With Idiots