When idiots stand in your way Moral worth comes into play

 To be completely sincere, I don’t really give a damn about what idiots are, where they come from, or what unpleasant methods they use to reproduce. All I want is for them to let me live in peace. And yet it is here, precisely, in a tender heart that yearns only to love, that there is a snag, a problem as sharp and nasty as a rusty nail: idiots do not leave us in peace, and they afflict in particular those who would most like to live far away from them. And so, the second axiom of my book is: idiots are all around and all over us.

That is indeed a great mystery. How does stupidity make its way in the world, how does it slither and slide and insert its insidious self inside a theoretically intelligent subject? To answer this question, we have to start from the point where intelligence stops. And that, dear reader, is why I have already given you three observations that a smarter but less sincere author would have held back until the conclusion. Namely: every one of us is an idiot in someone else’s eyes; stupidity has an infinite number of forms; and the main idiot is the one we harbour inside ourselves. These three points are all perfectly correct, but as far as I am concerned, they are of no use at all. What I want from philosophy are precise conceptual techniques that allow me to overcome the weakness in my understanding and the shortfall in benevolence that I experience every time I go past a particular door in my own home and find myself face to face with human idiocy.

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Idiots crop up without warning, just when you were least expecting them. You weren’t ready. You just wanted to get on with whatever you were doing, taking a trip, looking at the scenery, doing your work or enjoying your life – let’s say, you just wanted to carry on in your own sweet way. But human idiocy reared its head. Now it doesn’t matter whether you were in a good mood or not. Idiocy has riled you up and got you down. If I may be a little more dramatic and precise, it has offended you. Even if your pride makes you want to rise above it all, stupidity always offends you. And the very fact that you are offended by it upsets you; this only increases the offence and makes it worse.

Let’s not be squeamish. Let’s look at the wound close up. In thousands of instances that arise in the world – a driver cutting in on your lane, a walker giving his dog a kick, or a passer-by dropping litter on the pavement – jerks are people who lack respect for others, who disregard even a common-sense rule, who basically undermine the conditions of life in society. Of course, it has to be said that many of these behaviours are symptoms of deeper problems that don’t just depend on the people concerned: difficult and unstable working conditions, leisure and consumption industries unleashed to anxiety-inducing excess, the dismantling of frameworks that regulate person-to-person relations … To grasp the situation in its entirety, we have to take into account a process whereby not only do idiots destroy the conditions of life in society, but also through which a sick society produces idiots. But the fact that human phenomena arise from specific conditions in no way precludes the real existence of idiots and jerks.

So we have an initial consideration of some importance. A behaviour that we judge to be insufficient marks jerks and idiots as individuals that we can identify, if only fleetingly, as occupying a lower rung on the scale of morality by which we aspire to become fully accomplished human beings (without presupposing that we are anywhere near the top of the scale ourselves).

Before we pursue this any further, we must first quickly answer an objection. Since each of us is always a jerk or an idiot in the eyes of someone (see above), do we really have the right to call anyone else an idiot? In all probability, that blockhead thinks we are the idiot. And anyway, who would dare to try to define a ‘fully accomplished human being’? If we followed this line of argument to its end, stupidity would exist only in relative terms, and would be entirely dependent on any one person’s point of view: it would be a reflection of personal preferences that are valid for a given individual but not for anybody else. But I can live with that! Relativism of this kind does not scare me. I willingly grant you that each of us is someone else’s jerk; and yet that does not mean that all idiots are the same. Quite the opposite, in fact: if everybody has his or her own evaluation of idiocy, when such evaluations are compared and contrasted it will necessarily result in a range of agreements and disagreements. So in the sort of urgent, local situation that we are trying to analyse, the idiot is the person who is identified as such by the greatest number of others (allowing for variations). That means that objective stupidity is not something existing in absolute terms and which precedes subjective evaluations, but is produced by the combination of these evaluations, such that you can say that objectivity is located at the intersection of all subjectivities and is what they have in common with each other. So the fact that stupidity is relative does not prevent it having a truth value; on the contrary, it expresses precisely the truth of those relativities. So I conclude once again that we can maintain that idiots really exist, they are people who, even if only in local and fleeting circumstances, are less successful than the rest of us in our joint effort to become human. And I reckon that we can all agree that this is so, although each of us may have a different take on the details.

However, there is a curious anomaly in all this. In the situation we have just described, people who think of themselves as witnesses of stupidity, as it were, should be in a position of superiority. For if a person is identified (if only for an instant) as being by virtue of some behaviour on a lower rung of the moral scale that measures our striving towards perfection as human beings, then that should signify that others are on some higher rung. So when an individual behaves in an abusive, counter-productive or dangerous way, we should put our superior status to some use, and take action to remedy the situation and, without recourse to anger, prevent the jerk or the idiot from doing harm. But that is not what happens. Why not? Because weakness and moral inferiority do not say everything about idiocy. We must note a second, important determinant: idiocy is not just weakness, it is also ugliness. It can be defined as the repulsive face of human weakness.

That is where the knottiness of the real problem is to be found. Astounded all of a sudden by judging someone as an inferior being (with greater or lesser reason, but never without any reason), we are just as flummoxed by the awareness that we are experiencing a kind of withdrawal, scorn or disgust. This catches us out. We know and we feel that we are better than the swine who doesn’t flush the toilet, better than the grand lady who thinks she can get away with anything because she has money; and yet our own worthiness does not allow us to overcome or vanquish idiocy. No sir! It’s the other way round! The more they exasperate us and the more we yearn to stop them in their tracks or to wipe them off the face of the earth, the more we identify them as jerks and idiots: as beings who cause the waters of our benevolence and love to ebb as fast as the tide at Southend. Boorishness and stupidity may be grounded on formal moral judgements, but they provoke at the very same instant an affective relation – in other words, an emotion – that is by definition negative, an instinctive feeling, a burst of impatience that makes us hunger to renounce our common humanity. It may be a healthy reaction or it may be suicidal, but in the instant we don’t really care to know which it is. No matter what you do, you simply can’t stand jerks and idiots: stultitia delenda est.

That’s when a strange mechanism springs into action. I’m going to describe it several times over using different images so as to avoid various pitfalls. Let’s go back to where we were, gathered around the twit or boor who poisoned our lives, and in agreement that we should rank him or her on a lower rung than the one we cling to … But at the very moment an idiot appears repugnant to us, we in our turn start to lose a capacity for empathy. It’s true! The more you realise that the idiot is an idiot and the jerk a jerk, the more you depart from your own human ideal, and the more you become – in lockstep – a hostile being, that’s to say, a jerk or an idiot (the proof of it being that you turn into the idiot’s idiot). That blot on the landscape does nothing but offend you and makes you want to eliminate it from your field of vision, if only to feel less uncomfortable. That idiot is getting on your nerves, making you sick – but the more you withdraw, the more he insults you. So you retreat further, wading ever deeper into the quagmire of your own contempt. How can you not detest the other person, since it is entirely their fault? And the more you hate, the deeper you sink.

These quicksands exemplify a process that tells us, as a conclusion to this first chapter, why it is so difficult to make any progress when faced with idiots and assholes. In fact, the impressions we receive from the sight of human imperfection instantly constitute a posture that lowers and diminishes not only the being we observe as an object, from the outside, but also the observing subject, the supposed spectator of human stupidity. What that means is that it is structurally impossible simply to witness an instance of doltish or brainless behaviour. It is a contradiction in terms, in effect, to be a neutral observer of stupidity. The value judgement that allows you to identify someone as a boor or a thickhead has already predisposed you against them. Moreover, this absence of neutrality does not leave you untainted – far from it. Your judgement itself is an instant signal of the lessening of the love and benevolence you are capable of displaying, in the here and now, towards the dickhead in front of you. So the reason why idiots are such a calamity is that they constitute a dynamic problem which, at the very moment it arises as a problem, destroys the conditions necessary for its solution. From which I deduce the first of the sentences that I shall call take-aways because they have been specially shaped for youngsters to go paint them on walls when in urgent need – and which you can also pin to the inside of your eyelids so as to never forget them:

1Do not try to educate idiots Change the situation, not the person

HOW TO RECOVER FROM STUPEFACTION

‘Excuse me, hi … Wonderful beach, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s incredible, all that space … it’s so huge …’

‘…’

‘I can see why you’ve brought your stereo. It’s nice to listen to music.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes, I like music too. I brought my headphones.

But … um … is the shadow of our parasol not going to bother you?’

‘Nah. Anyway, shadows move.’

‘But could you … well, maybe it would be more comfortable for everyone … if you could …’

‘If we what?’

In which will be shown the unconscious reasoning that makes you confuse suffering and evil; and why idiots are events like any others.

The circular problem I’ve called a quicksand comes from the fact that there is no charge sheet for idiocy: because of its highly contagious nature, idiots transmit idiocy almost immediately. Just identifying a person as an idiot sets you on track to become one soon after, since the identification causes you to lose your cool and your analytic abilities. So as you struggle to get free of assholes, you foster the emergence of yet another – the one inside you. It’s a nightmare that’s scarier than science fiction, but it explains and elucidates your panic reaction.

The effort to break the vicious circle has given rise to a number of observations in the realms of philosophy, religion, myth, literature, art and elsewhere. To sum them up very briefly: no human being has ever failed to notice that we tend to like people who are likeable and to smile at people who smile. Once again, we are caught in a circle – a virtuous one, on this occasion – where the phenomenon we call love (or benevolence, if you prefer) is capable of self-perpetuation solely from the interaction of its elements. But since jerks and idiots set off the opposite phenomenon and drag us into hostility by self-perpetuating responses, the solution must necessarily lie in a reversal of the affective dynamics.

The way out of the problem should then simply be a switch into reverse, as recommended in various places – to respond to hate with love, to forgive those that sin against us, to look at things from the other side, turn the other cheek, or, in brief, to smile at the obnoxious wretch who’s getting on your nerves. Only your own generosity can help you – not just the culprit, but you too – to recover a higher standard of humanity.

Unfortunately, this proposal, which I hereby dub switching, entails a difficulty which we all know only too well. Moral switching presupposes thwarting all the forces that tend towards conflict so as to break the chain of cause and effect; in other words, to overturn the natural order of things and put them into reverse. Now that seems very hard to do, and it is, in addition, logically absurd. Where, I ask you, will you find enough strength just to give a sympathetic wink to the jerk who despises you, or to smile at the thickhead who’s knowingly made a pig’s breakfast of your application form? Where is the reservoir of the strength you would need to face down a fucking idiot, seeing that we have defined idiocy by its capacity for expansion, that is to say, by the way it saps the moral energy of its adversary? The truth is that invoking moral switching presupposes what it is supposed to engender: it grants you the strength to do what you should do in theory – while granting simultaneously that you do not possess it in fact.

That’s why in every tradition or culture where it arises, moral switching pertains to the logic of sainthood and grace. It implies a strength that is beyond you, that is not entirely you and maybe not entirely human, which takes over just when you are found wanting. That being so, in order to accomplish moral switching, you have to channel a power that is more than mine, more than yours, and maybe more than human. Call it God, or the gods, or the spirits, or the Direction of History or whatever moral virtue, artistic inspiration or rational power you like. The additional energy that allows you to perform a moral switch has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere can only be elsewhere (that’s to say, not in you, not in me, and not remotely in idiots).

Many great-hearted men and women have written about this and I do not wish to linger on it. All I need do is draw your attention to what is for me the main point, specifically, the interesting, not to say brilliant, proposal contained within the idea of moral switching. For the latter does not just express a pious wish. It allows the mechanism of idiocy to be seen in a light that does not require forces to be thwarted for them to be inverted. Here’s how.

As I said, stupid behaviour does an injury that weakens us morally. However, despite our first impression, that does not mean that it robs us of our strength absolutely. To be sure, idiocy by definition is a hurt, and idiots most often hurt each other. But that does not mean that stupidity is absolutely evil: we should beware of letting things run away with us. For there is a great difference between causing injury and being evil. Up to now, in the panic we’ve been in, we’ve failed to make that distinction. Fools and knaves do things badly (that is the value judgement our intelligence allows us to produce) and by the same token they do bad to us (that is the affective determination, describing the relationship that holds between idiots and ourselves). But we cannot deduce from these two evident truths that jerks and nitwits embody a determination of absolute, universal evil. Nonetheless, that’s what you think … Go on, admit it! That is because evil as an abstract notion is a determination that pays no heed to relationships: it is by definition valid without reference to its context of emergence. Leaving aside the question of the solidity of the notion itself, you have to admit that your specific pain (arising from the fact that your ex is pestering you about the old vacuum cleaner, or that your colleague makes you repeat the same instructions over and over without ever doing what you tell him) has caused you to make a mental transition from a relational framework (the idiot’s specific action and your specific reaction to his or her existence) to an unconditional declaration: stultitia delenda est, universal stupidity must be destroyed absolutely, and in addition and if at all possible, this particular jerk must be wiped off the face of the earth. This kind of mental slip or slide is what is called an induction, because it goes from the particular to the general. But this induction is false. By means of this unconscious logical operation, the germ or virus of idiocy has infected you too. You are claiming universal validity for a truth that is only relative, and you are placing yourself (admittedly, without realising it) in the position of a Judge of the Universe. Well, taking your own opinion to be an absolute is one of the subjective definitions of the asshole, as it corresponds precisely to the self-image of such lamentable individuals.

Aha! You must now be ready to grant that despite your pain, you cannot absolutely deduce from it that the existence of an idiot is a manifestation of evil, or even that the idiocy exhibited by an imbecile is an evil (‘idiocy’ here refers to the mental condition, not to any crimes committed in its name). This point has one great merit, for it allows us to freeze or stabilise a situation that I described earlier as one of shifting sands. We have just discovered that it is caused less by interpersonal interaction than by the stupefaction that hits you the moment you are hurt (shocked, affronted) by some person’s behaviour and which puts your mind in a whirl by directing your attention to that hurt. In fact, the vicious circle that arises between you and the idiot is fostered and fed by another conflict within you, one that saps your energy as it drains away your good will. Because you felt bad, you reckoned the existence of the idiot was bad too, or if you prefer, that it was a mishap. That’s why I gave this chapter the heading ‘stupefaction’. The quicksand is an illusion created by panic that feeds on itself. Because you didn’t know how to escape from it, you reckoned you could not extricate yourself without destroying either the idiot or the idiocy. This train of thought is natural and necessary, but it has led your thinking into a dead end, because it is simply wrong.

The irreducible negativity of stupidity is rather an event which, like any other event, is not an evil in itself, although it is a pain. As we all know, any event is ambivalent: it can turn out for good or for ill; more or less well, or more or less badly; the outcome of an event is never pre-set, even though it is entwined in chains of causes and effects; in sum, an event is pure reality insofar as it emerges unwrapped, pliant, and susceptible to change. And when it takes the form of a loudmouth getting you down by telling tasteless jokes all day long, well, that idiot is obviously susceptible to change, he’s basically inviting it. Yes, he is summoning you – not to violence (that would shove you into the quicksand) nor to sainthood (mind you, if you’ve got it in you, don’t hold back) – but to a test. You should see your jerk as an opportunity to test the moral values to which you quite properly refer when you call the jerk a jerk and which in your striving to become human you seek to attribute to yourself. Whence I deduce:

When idiots stand in your way Moral worth comes into play

Maxime Rovere

How To Deal with Idiots