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 

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.

(...)

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