I imagine the reader skipping my manifesto of good judgement with that old feeling of «I know, I know!" that of course, to have a good judgement you have a good logic.

Well, not so! Whoever reduces good judgement to good logic did not understand a thing from what I am trying to do.   

Certainly, good logic - sound, coherent fact-based statements that follow and notions that make sense - are the very back-bone of Reason, of Rationality, that man-made tool which produces and maintains justified beliefs. This is the proven creed of our modern world and also the warrant of mental sanity we all accept; no need of particular wisdom for this, it is sufficient to be simply normal*. 

Beyond this prise of Rationality which goes without saying, what I understand by "good judgement" is quite different and particular in the object of judgement and the means used. The object of good judgement is the sphere of human interest, the real-life context of persons. It is practised with the actual psychological means of the human mind which we call "faute de mieux" common sense.

Good judgement is thus the use of the entirety of the mental functioning we all share, to reason about the world and people in human terms - when it is successful. The same rich functioning when failing is bad judgement or stupidity. 

Common sense is still less than studied, it was shunned by scientific research in the 20th Century; neglect which does not make it less real, vital and omnipresent. Looking down at "folk psychology" which is one of the major components of common sense will not eliminate it from our functioning as human beings. The first to rediscover common sense thinking are, recently, the creators of Artificial Intelligence; simply because they need to build machines that work, not dogmatically correct logical devices.

Judgement is wise when it applies the cluster of our live thought processes in awareness of the human life-world as rich as it actually is: flowing, fuzzy, contextual, socially interactive, guided by culture and directed by common sense. Good judgement achieves to take into account this complexity without reducing it and also succeeds to conclude in forms simple enough to make sense to people and to be useful for action.

This flow of reasoning, which we mainly access through our commonsense awareness that we think and of how we think, combines more than one (logical and verbal) mode. As much as I learned, this complicated, comprehensive movement of lived representation and thought was never described by research scientists. It is easier to deny its very existence and declare it to be “folk psychology", delusion or introspective rationalisation without solid measurable grounds.

If this is mere phenomenological belief, then let me dream and let you judge and understand otherwise. Inevitably, with your own conscious common sense. There is nothing else to rely on in our personal mind, ultimately, for all of us human knowers.

What "good judgement" does

It is the accounting of situation and opportunity, the nuance and of the human point of view and interest which make judgement eventually wise.

I understand good judgement as a thought activity of the living mind which accepts as significant and which achieves to integrate in its reasoning a large number of components vital for the real-life efficiency of practical judgement:

Good judgement involves and draws on the active presence of clusters of ideas readily received, of thought habits implied by language structure and grammar, of inborn and learned forms, entire memory and life-experience continuously present.  The more the thinker is aware of these sources and short-cuts, the higher the quality and freedom of the judgement.

Good judgement is situated by being of a thinker who has an identity and presence, about other people with identities that count, in specific situations and with an orientation towards specific human goals.

Good judgement requires awareness of our and other people’s inevitable trust in long chains of witnessing and mediated informing, the inclusion and consequential taking into account of values, feelings, beliefs unquestioned, incorrigible convictions, ignorances, diverging interests and interpersonal or group transactions. Good judgement has regard for biases and limits which need to be taken into account as facts.

All these - which I do not deplore but on the contrary account as unavoidable factors - are determining together the way judgement advances in our mind, to result in human-friendly predictions and wise practical conclusions.

The manner of such reasoning and its purposeful expression are thus significantly modified by complexity, imprecision and impermanence. Such complication –which additionally keeps changing - can only be considered intuitively, with the means of our common sense representation. This mode of judgement will appear imprecise and less than respectful of linear logical treatment of artificially isolated issues, quite different from the way a logical device or a trained logician would be able to "process" data.

Thanks heavens, we are still living, feeling selves, conscious and complicated to a degree of appearing unruly, unexpected, "free", able to start something new, our psyche is still not entirely reproducible by standard algorithms and micro-manageable by ultimate tyrannies.

Without including interpretations based on precedent, local knowledge and personal experience - culture and psychological functioning, given equal value and notice, good logic is no good in the real life of people and nations.

Good logic which, with a respectful bow, I can only admire and try to absorb into my common sense, is mandatory at the core of good thought and decision, particularly of justification of decisions, as a public watchdog of realism and consistency; but it cannot replace the seamless connection, the immersion of the thinker in the informality of actual human reality. 

Clean propositional logic cannot supplant the richness and finesse of judging with "good sense", nor its effectiveness. The internal core of (somewhat informal) proper logic so useful to educate, is surrounded, wrapped, assimilated, into awareness of the human side of our life-world, able to understand human reality as people live it or as they conceive to live it. Accordingly, people will tend to accept it as making sense to them.

Good judgement takes place in an internal language of our mind which we share with all other humans, because our body structure, sensory functioning and neural processes are the same, of the same species. Thus we have and can understand in other minds the progress of common sense representations, notions and readily available short-hand reasoning procedures, guided by prevalent acquired beliefs, validated by socialisation; when shared with other people, the exchange takes the form of communication people can understand, with content they can use. To counterbalance the imprecision of such short-hand and of such known bias “good” judgement requires some talent, intellectual competence and self-critical sense vital to continuous correction in order to advance from incessant approximations and some falsities towards sound conclusions; allowing intuitive judgement to unfold unchecked, would probably produce inept rubbish.

I claim that good judgement cannot be reduced to processing precise, clean, granted data, tested empirical knowledge and proven propositions; it becomes "good" by achieving to consider the practical and artificial references, landmarks and informal procedures people use to position themselves, adjust, think and take everyday decisions, then to follow them in practice. This complicated process takes place imprecisely and quickly, in real time, on one's feet, on incomplete information, but it works quite well, better for the time being than the clean logic driven response of the best artificial intelligence, at least today. This was understood by the IT engineers faster than by the psychologists; now artificial intelligence works to imitate our "sloppy" efficiency in poorly defined fields.

The priority for good judgement is to connect, on time, relevant fact and action needed with that which counts and makes sense for people.

There is a willed bias in good judgement to advise and help the specific interest of specific people, like yourself, each with preferred values at work. Truth is not a matter of choice but the ways chosen to advance are voluntary, intelligent choices.

Good judgement is not meant to serve precision, perfection or truth above the human interest of living safe and better. The values taking precedence are usefulness, success, goodness, survival, life, peace, flourishing and the like.  
   
What good judgement is definitely not is "pre-judgement", thought readily received or set in advance, to be forced upon local or new goals, circumstances and events. Reducing surprise to rigid past solutions, cutting down newness to the technically handy size and notions of dogma is contrary to good judgement. This is what all mechanization works to achieve; reduction to simple and cheap procedures, easy to deploy and control.

Forcing unruly, fuzzy reality-in-movement onto a Procustean bed of hard and slow thinking rules set in advance, can only be foolish, not wise. Generality imposed on the particular, dogma, utopias, are contrary to good judgement. They are usually absurd or stupid.  
​
Good judgement is people-minded reasoning that functions in the actual Umwelt, the life-space of knowing and acting accessible to the human being.  Judgement is good when it foresees usefully, without horses’ blinkers, a multiple choice of scenarios of that which may and will actually happen; it is good if it protects with prudence and it succeeds to help.   
Good judgement is proven when it becomes a successful navigator of the everyday and also of the unexpected, of the exceptional, of the yet unknown.

If needed, good judgement provides means to create something new; new ways around obstacles, new interpretation and new names propitious to master things and events, instead of being dominated by them. If we are to build or create new reality it is by good judgement, certainly not by emaciated un-human utopia.

Moreover, by leaping on a higher orbit of n±1 thought when the given is not favourable, good judgement reframes and invents; it proposes unexpected action, not respecting the given rules, building new things non-existent yet but possible. To quote again my favourite from G.B.Shaw: "People see things and ask why. I dream of things that never where and ask Why not?"

Good judgement is watchful with the garbage-in garbage-out vulnerability of the formal procedures and processes of judgement. The wise thinker feels what to discard. It does not help at all to be precise and correct in processing and deciding, based on reality incompletely and poorly perceived or cluttered, poorly understood and misnamed; even less on dogmatic decisions ignoring the local the inconvenient, the human factor.   

Good judgement starts with the quality of perception. It is false that all people perceive equally the same thing, that perception is passive; intelligent perception observes the relevant, the useful. The wise percievers attribute useful significance and propitious name to what they perceive. Wisdom of judgement starts at the entry point; interpreting one's own perception, mindful of the relevant at work, not reduced to habit, prejudice, to the politically correct or the scientifically correct pretence. 
 
The miraculous, creative entry point of good judgement is to observe, with the adequate "granularity" with an open mind, to sense what counts and to name it or rename it in felicitous ways.

The "wise one" will understand better than other people what things mean here and now and also in the long term and a much wider view. This frame is higher or deeper, N+-1, thus freer that standard, precise but frozen definitions and propositions. I would say that often good judgement starts well indeed with a moment when the thinker exclaims "Aha!" when he suddenly sees falling into one meaningful picture the components of a Gestalt, a configuration where a useful itinerary makes sense. Observation limited by definitions and available instruments, presents choices   often given to diminish choice or produced by disconnected stupidity.  

If you want to read more about this second pillar of wisdom...
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* Exception from this, for the wise one, is only when everybody around is taken   by madness. Then it is wise to adapt and survive.

   "Aut inveniam viam aut faciam" I shall either find a way or make one. 
​(Hannibal crossing the Alps)

​There is no absolute freedom, except in theories and dreams. You cannot disregard the given, the necessity of causes above, beyond, beneath and around your will.

In spite of this, quot Spinoza, even a stone thrust, would believe – if conscious – that it flies free [1]. Our will, particularly when we let it roam uncontrolled, has deeper roots in blind spots of the awareness. It appears that we want only what we are able to conceive. You want what you can want.

Even so, this is no reason for fatalism; in fact, smart initiative finds and creates amazing freedom, by its choices... so sad that this freedom remains unavailable to many who do not even know what they can want and what the choices are.



What is freedom, anyway?

Human freedom is not a notion of the infinite Universe, it has nothing to do with Physics and mathematics within which it does not exist; freedom is something that only makes sense when you speak about experiencing it and about its human size. Freedom is something phenomenal, experienced according to our human nature, within our environment. Or else it remains beautiful philosophy or hollow political bull. You cannot let other people measure and define criteria of how you are free or how free you are.

Practical freedom is - positively – to do something different or differently from what would happen without your choices, to act as you prefer, to do something new, to become who you want to be, to have what you desire.

Still, the freedom really yours, being your own master, is to master what you want by some criterion higher than whim. Like your values and plans, for an example. This gives manifold freedom which is indeed yours; higher liberty that doing whatever you fancy.
 
Negatively – and not less crucially - your freedom is not to have and suffer, not to do, to let happen, to abstain, not to become, not to be, what and who you do not want [2]. It is to have a protective space and time of safety around you.

Actually, earning how to avoid what you do not want, finds you more freedom that the triumphs by force.

                                                                                *

For a living person, for you and me, the word “freedom” means nothing “in general” but only related to the variable richness and nature of actual choices one can conceive and practice. To mean something, freedom must always have a definite domain and object. Many objects being possible, in the many fields of our lives, there are many dissimilar freedoms we enjoy. We gain to size-up each instead of confusing them all.

Your freedom can be evaluated– aim by aim and field by field - by the variety and latitude of meaningful choices which you are able to conceive and make, in your mind, and in your life.

                                                                                   *

Multiply then the choices you consider, learn to chose to have more freedom. First in your mind, then in whatever you set to do. Use your power to create choices for other people to free them too...

If you want to read more...

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[1] Spinoza, LETTRE XXIX. (O.P. : LXII ; C.A. : LVIII) p.59-60, in SPINOZA LETTRES, TRADUIT PAR E. SAISSET (Ed. 1842), http://www.spinozaetnous.org :
"Une pierre soumise à l’impulsion d’une cause extérieure en reçoit une certaine quantité de mouvement, en vertu de laquelle elle continue de se mouvoir … Concevez maintenant, je vous prie, que cette pierre, tandis qu’elle continue de se mouvoir, soit capable de penser, et de savoir qu’elle s’efforce, autant qu’elle peut, de continuer de se mouvoir. Il est clair qu’ayant ainsi conscience de son effort, et n’étant nullement indifférente au mouvement, elle se croira parfaitement libre et sera convaincue qu’il n’y a pas d’autre cause que sa volonté propre qui la fasse persévérer dans le mouvement. Voilà cette liberté humaine dont tous les hommes sont si fiers. Au fond, elle consiste en ce qu’ils connaissent leur appétit par la conscience, et ne connaissent pas les causes extérieures qui les déterminent. C’est ainsi que l’enfant s’imagine qu’il désire librement le lait qui le nourrit; s’il s’irrite, il se croit libre de chercher la vengeance ; s’il a peur, libre de s’enfuir. C’est encore ainsi que l’homme ivre est persuadé qu’il prononce en pleine liberté d’esprit ces mêmes paroles qu’il voudrait bien retirer ensuite quand il est redevenu lui-même; que l’homme en délire, le bavard, l’enfant et autres personnes de cette sorte sont convaincus qu’ils parlent d’après une libre décision de leur esprit, et non par un aveugle emportement." pp 59-60

[2] To understand negative and positive freedom, a good reference is Berlin, I. (1958) “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Isaiah Berlin Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1969. Note that Berlin - the philosopher who made the original notions of positive and negative liberty known - defines these two liberties differently, not as they appear in this text; for him positive freedom is the "freedom to" be one's own master, one's own instrument, a doer, at least one who takes part in governing his life; negative freedom is for Berlin to have an unobstructed space of "freedom from"  obstacles, coercion, from others, so that one can act.

Many years ago, when I used to be a young television producer, I collected a great many of documentary film sequences having in common that they travelled into the extremes of the very small or outwards, into the immensity of cosmic Space.
 
On a spellbinding musical background of Chopin’s Valses interpreted by Dinu Lipatti, I edited many such sequences into a flow – a fifteen-minute zoom, from the huge far-away of the cosmic space into the infinitesimal close-up of microscopy - which I entitled “From the big infinity, to the small infinity”.

A mere 15 minutes of comparing the Universe and the utterly small, made short to fit the attention span of television spectators who would not suffer more. If I remember well, I made no comment along the sequence. 
 
In my intention, the quiet subliminal shock was to be caused to see that -  for our human eye – the remote galaxies on telescope, enlarged to meet the eye, were in no way different-looking from the small infinity of, say, a living cell, presented under an electronic microscope. With this, I wanted to communicate my intuition that the blurring of difference – the indifference of the eye – is reflecting some deep truth worth understanding.

What is huge relative to us and what is infinitesimal compared with our human size, both lose any visual meaning for our mind. Ultimately, eyes cut the Universe to our size.

All we can do beyond the span of our senses is to have faith in theories and call that knowledge.
 
At the time I was ignorant of Hannah Arendt’s work written some ten years earlier, of her disquieting statement I quote from “The Human Condition”:
 
“...it will be difficult to ward off the suspicion that this mathematically preconceived world may be a dream world where every dreamed vision man himself produces has the character of reality only as long as the dream lasts. And his suspicions will be enforced when he must discover that the events and occurrences in the infinitely small, the atom, follow the same laws and regularities as in the infinitely large, the planetary systems... In any event, wherever we try to transcend appearance beyond all sensual experience, even instrument-aided, in order to catch the ultimate secrets of Being, which according to our physical world view is so secretive that it never appears and still so tremendously powerful that it produces all appearance, we find that the same patterns rule the macrocosm and the microcosm alike, that we receive the same instrument readings. Here again, we may for a moment rejoice in a refound unity of the universe, only to fall prey to the suspicion that what we have found may have nothing to do with either the macrocosmos or the microcosmos, that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experiment—prescribed its laws to nature, in Kant's phrase — in which case it is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that wherever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.” [1]
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*     Actinophrys sol CC 3.o NEON_ja 2009 
 ** Galaxy NGC_0026_GALEX NASA PD 
 
[1] Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 (p. 286-287) First published The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1958 by The University of Chicago 1958-98 ed. p 286-287

 

 
Too many educated people believe that “communication” stands for giving speeches and writing communiqués “to pass the message”; or filling empty heads with nagging, brain-washing, “news”.

Other savants, abstract mechanic boxes and arrows to broadcast bits and pieces of “information” transmitted from A to B and injected through imaginary piping, funnels and needles of “media”. As if the receivers were blanc slates, not people who judge and who actively seek knowledge.

Add to this some arrogant ignoramuses at the top of faceless organisations, confusing communication between humans who take part in it with power-point diagrams and “timelined” wordy “plans” resulting in “correct messages” parroted downwards upon increasingly cynical “audiences” of “targets”. This is the fig-leaf of post-industrial tyranny.

On their side, the “simple people like you and me” figure communication as being a right to speak up, to express freely, to ask questions and have made public “those things they do not tell us”. Innocent indeed.

                                                                                                                 *

If you aspire instead to gain mastery of communication with people, go beyond all this nonsense. Such naive and mechanical beliefs put the communicating mind to sleep. They prevent  communication - which is the communion-creating movement of meaning, to come alive, to create social reality and so, have the amazing impact of “doing things with words” [1].

                                                                                                                 *

To help people who care to go past dead communication “strategies” and “plans” and clumsily formulated “messages”, I would represent communication in a few incomplete, humble but essential, aphorisms:
 

 
Communication takes place when:

-    you have something to make known and understood, an idea, some substance of interest to other people, or, when other people have something to witness, of interest to you

-    you discern the radical difference between expressing what you long to get off your chest and conveying something with a purpose to make things happen, to affect peoples’ hearts and minds

-    you understand that who you are and represent, your actions, that which can be seen and felt of you, speaks irresistibly, louder than any possible words

-    you know - following the millennia-old recipe of the Philosopher - that you only make a difference when you are recognised as credible, competent and well intended, when you additionally look around and observe the occasion and “where people’s mind is” (to start from there) before you try to change their mind with limpid ideas leading to action

-    when what you are about to say and do, makes sense to your public and the way you decide, your interests, your aims, appear transparent (or opaque, that is telling too)

-    when you understand that, like tango, communication needs an available partner, ideally a dialogue; half of what you communicate comes from those receiving it, from their understanding

-    when you use words, gesture, symbols and image crafted to fit the people here and now, with arguments acceptable locally, leading to mind-size conclusions which people can own, and feasible action they can start “next thing”

-    when you are able to show, point, cause to be tasted and experienced, instead of just “speaking about”

-    when, before you speak, write, report or debate, you do your homework: study, inform yourself and find out, in order to be knowledgeable – that is the less visible but core part of “communication”

-    when you think - to decide each time before you address people - if and why you will talk, to whom, in what way, with what purpose

-    if you look or don’t look into people’s eyes when you speak to them or when they speak to you (because you are aware of cultural differences)

-    when you listen actively, mindful to find something out or to learn...or you don’t (both are powerful signals)

-    you understand and practice  the power and the skill of timing, keeping silent, saying nothing, for a moment or for good

-   you leave space and invite occasion for other people to speak, do not censor them, aware that this is an important undertaking, a living process, worth to be given time

-    you hear and understand what is said (without which communication is wasted, noise), or if you don't, ask for clarification

-   you participate truly, walk the mile in the shoes of one who addresses you

-   you observe that many things are “telling” – on purpose or unawares - more than with words uttered, you consider what is said, but also what is not said, loudly missing

-   you build trust and grant trust and encourage people to open up and share what is on their mind and what they know – to create a climate of communication instead of hypocrisy and over-prudence

-    you create environments, rituals of interaction and  regular occasions for people to share experiences,  agree on meanings, where people learn to talk to each other and reason in concert

-    when your interactions result in situations where people go past words: when they feel, agree, believe, hope, belong and achieve

In sum: competent communication is when you knowingly create occasions and encounters and do meaningful things, to share and let share meaningful things, in ways that make people belong to communities of knowing, feeling and action. Communication is a state of relationship in movement.

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[1] How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, 1962 (eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962

 

 
 

 

 
Before this inquiry, I used to let myself flow with the usual trend: I deplored them, those dangerous troglodytes; confused, irrational and primitive saboteurs of intelligence, reason and competence.

“Stupidity” hates me when we meet and I hate it in return.

This instinctive attitude is weakness; it hindered my ability to imagine how the enemy mind works.

I must think better to understand. I must look at what it actually is.

What is this thing we call stupidity?

I read and thought and observed. I searched for ways to explain it usefully. I gave up the quest for an ideal infuse substance called "stupidity". Along my quest I grew more practical and that made me much more tolerant.

I separated two kinds of stupidity - the low-end of doing things poorly for lack of normal intelligence and the high end of failing them in spite of normal intelligence. I chose to separate and postpone my concern with stupid-stupidity easy to describe as mental disability from a higher order "intelligent-stupidity" which we all share, potentially.

I also changed my mind from theory to observables and chose to consider, not individuals seen as "stupid people" but manifestations, instances of stupidity as a dysfunction which I imagine to be inherent to human mind, to human nature.

Stupid is thus not something we are but something we commit or indulge -  in thought, speech or conduct: failing common sense and not being reasonable, going against our own best interest. Probably, stupid is being foolish in our conduct, lacking vital wisdom or being unable to apply it and use it, to live by it.

It occurs to me that we do not act stupid only alone but often as groups, small or huge, even - irresistibly - as an entire species getting out of touch with the other species of Life and with the Globe, our house. Isn't going astray from our own best interest, the inability to learn from the past mistakes and to plan sustainable future a clear proof of stupidity?

To understand stupidity I look at things we do or accept - stupid judgements, stupid words and stupid deeds. We are involved personally or collectively in stupid fashions, stupid mobs and movements, stupid ideologies, stupid institutions...

The straw in other people's eye and the beam in my own

Certainly, there is a danger or arrogance in engaging human stupidity in such a grand way. As the proverb goes, when the whole world smells fish, you better go and wash your own nose. If my eyes and ears observe so much stupidity, it is urgent to start with checking my spectacles and even closer, look at myself with a critical eye. Therefore, I will observe myself, the observer... to understand my personal experience and connection with stupidity and to learn from it.
 
With this somewhat wiser and humbler mind, I seek causes and antidotes instead of  criticising with hostility. I consider a friendly critique to better cope with this often innocent enemy, be it in me or in other people.

                                                                                            *

Tacit tradition separates society unwittingly between the ones present, the ones who speak, “us” up here, competent, intelligent, reasonably educated and rational, familiar with our culture, versus “them”, the incompetent brainless morons, the barbarians low there at the bottom of the IQ scale. As for the obviously intelligent among us, doing stupid things, they are considered accidentally fallen, ill, mere exceptions.
 
I indulged in this arrogance of us, the well to do insiders, with a vague pinch of heart, being aware that there must be among "us" some much more intelligent, smarter and wiser than me, who looking down the same hierarchical pyramid slope would probably see me as quite stupid.

Additionally, I remembered that stupid people, and not so stupid people, would call me stupid when they failed to understand what I say and do, just because it did not fit the square hole of their expectations. I learned to discard their judgement trying not to fail giving due attention to it.

Who decides what is stupid counts. "They" are dumb, but it is still true that you appear as the one out of the picture, maybe because you were not able to understand and handle their stupidity. The real life definition of stupidity appears to be: “Stupid is the one considered stupid by the public.” It is intelligent not to look stupid without a good reason.

Moreover, I actually did scores of things which I recognized to be quite stupid. Not to speak about those annoying occasions for which I am not gifted at all. There are fields in which I am no good.

In time, I also learned from my readings that to keep criticising stupidity makes one bitter, exasperated with bad feelings. There is too much of it; as Einstein is quoted (mistakenly, in fact it was Flaubert), there are two infinite things, the Universe and human stupidity and of the first he was not even certain.

The blaming approach appears also unfair, like seeing the straw in other people’s eye and not the beam in our own.

Worse, despise is counterproductive; by means of prejudice, rejection precludes understanding. The more we bash, the less we can understand. Therefore, instead of deploring, we will gain to better cope with the inevitable; learn how to comprehend the instances of stupidity and relate to them usefully. For this, we may have to grow more tolerant with stupidity (this is easy to say), adapt to communicate with it, count with its various sorts and - when possible – avoid, prevent, cure or mitigate it.

Even disputing with people gone stupid (which the wise will avoid) is not an easy thing but complicated work for the intelligent. It requires lots of thinking, prudence and subtle tactics; (for an example, they are able to win by not understanding what you explain). As the saying goes: “One fool throws a stone into the pond and a hundred wise toil to retrieve it.”
 
In fact, with a positive attitude, stupidity can be an abundant and precious field for wise people. As an old consultant, I know one of the secrets of the profession: people do not request our costly assistance because of how bright they were and how competent they are. They need us for what they cannot do by themselves. Those of us who cannot stand stupidity and incompetence cannot be consultants, nor give advice of any sort.

                                                                                          *

When it comes to literature about this affliction of humanity I read many noble words of agreement that the useful investigation starts locally and even better, humbly, with us. This strengthened my resolve - in order to find what causes people to think and act stupid - to examine, before the stupidity of other people, that of myself.

The error to avoid in the personal study of stupidity is well known by psychology; when we face that we did something stupid it appears to our introspection as an explicable, unhappy accident, produced by an external cause or by a temporary impairment of mind, out of our control: constraint, fatigue, too much pressure, a jolt of temper, intoxication, inattention, being uninformed or misled, a lapse of memory, the empire of an irresistible drive or tragic passion like love, pride, greed, anger... On the other hand, when we meet other people's blunders, the cause is plain and undifferentiated; they are irrational, ignorant, wicked or guilty of imprudence.

We have obviously more empathy for ourselves, so, yes; this is where we should start, with ourselves. We cannot get protected from stupidity by segregating from us the stupid people; we are all too closely related to this problem.

In fact, I find - after some insistent effort of memory - that the cases when I missed the mark, lacked elementary common sense, failed to observe, misunderstood utterly, took useless, careless risk, hovered totally out of the picture or too clever by half, offer rich material to learn from.  

                                                                                       *

I had to work hard to unearth those examples. Try to examine your own past errors and you will see how annoying it is. I had to fight the urge to bury past blunders instead of learning from them. I spent a while recalling - with growing displeasure - some of the many stupid things I believed, said and did. I watched myself in the mirror and saw how I wasted the most important thing I owned – my years. It was difficult to introspect properly my own history of stupidity, probably because we protect ourselves, with oblivion of the shame and of the guilt. Moreover some seriously stupid actions seem smart when you look at them in isolation, before and when you do them, from close; to reveal how stupid they are you need a wider frame and a longer time perspective.

I asked old-time friends to remind me my biggest blunders; but they were charitable and forgetful. Or too cowardly to risk offending me. I even listened to my son explaining how inept I am about money.

Looking at my own stupidities was depressing but also fertile; as I am visibly more perceptive and sympathetic with me than with other people observed, I discovered more nuance. The episodes remembered helped me build, slowly, the point of view presented here with somewhat inconvenient sincerity whose style is homage to my role-model, Michel Montaigne. 
                                                                                        
                                                                                            *
 
I do not offer a detailed wailing confession of the many dumb and foolish things I have done; that litany for sleepless nights is nobody else's business. I also believe that I did not practice the complete list of human stupidity to be a perfect exemplar for exhaustive research. As it happens, the ones quoted are mainly from my youth, now distant. A false impression would be that for me young people are stupid and the old ones wise; this is not so, all ages have equal chances to be silly, ridiculously deluded and foolish, not only the inexperienced. Be assured I did not cease being stupid when I have a good occasion.

Note that there is a plethora of “I” in my text. The reader may want to appreciate that it is more diplomatic to speak for myself while I affirm so frankly the universal character of human stupidity.

My spiciest concrete memories of stupidity belong - as I said - to my private inner garden, I will not disclose them. “What you see here is all you get...” and – as Tina Turner once declared on stage “...what you don’t is better yet.” Instead of total disclosure I attempt a working summary for educational purpose of things learned from first person stupidness.

To make a long story short, here is a synthesis of typical stupid things I did and a few generators of stupidity which I found while reflecting to why I committed them:

                                                                                           *

Stupidity by simply not thinking

My richest cause of ridicule, poor choices, regrettable, infelicitous and foolish acts, was an absent mind: not looking, not observing, not thinking at all, not doing the necessary prudent things required by common sense and politeness. This cause of stupidity is plain and available to anyone.

I made big mistakes when I failed to pay sufficient attention to what happened around me, and forgot to ask, listen and consider what my good plans implied for other people, their occasions, interests and worries. Often, I did not hear because I was speaking.

Omission of attention and absence of judgement can be worse than poor judgement. The brightest lantern unlit gives no light.

In a number of instances, against my best interest, without intention, I missed the obvious, I hurt people, lost opportunities and took the wrong turn, inflamed animosity and useless conflict, offended or insulted people, some close to me.

The most frequent cause of such unhappy words, responses and actions unfit to situations and to people is then very simple, easy to understand; I did not think. It was not on my agenda to consider them. Obviousness camouflaged them. I was busy with something else, following my own plans without looking right or left.

All this damage of thoughtlessness was committed by means of that which was not done, impalpable “negatives” as I like to call them: inattention, ego-centrism or task-centeredness, laziness, distraction, superficiality or neglect. As a result I made things uselessly hard for myself and other people. Lack of attention amounted to lack of respect. No excuse that it was not done on purpose; as it was said so well, maybe by Oscar Wilde, a gentleman is one who would never offend someone... unintentionally. I was less than a gentleman.

People close to me observed that I see sharply what I look at with interest, even through “troubled water” but I am blind to what I do not watch or care for. I flatter myself that the main causes of the false conclusions I rushed and the inadequate things I have said and of some costly blunders I committed was innocent inattention, distraction and forgetfulness. I must own up though that inattention was not without some guilty lack of regard.

A very dangerous cause for not observing the obvious, worse than careless inattention, was for me that strange blindness, denial. I knew rationally that I should pay attention but I avoided to look close and blocked thinking of things I was unable to face. The most tormenting example that haunts me now was failing to see and understand the state of my old, declining Mother. In time, I feel what it is to grow old and to be alone.

                                                                                    *

Stupidity because of body and temper prevailing

On reflection, impulsiveness and impatience were my most visible soft spot. Some rivals played well with that. A perilous variant was to allow myself to be pressed into engaging conversation when surprised or under stress; today I know only too well that in such moments the most important thing to do is not to react immediately.

I remember an amazing number of silly little things done and said simply because I could not wait or control my face revealing what I felt.

When you feel impatient or surprised it is urgent to wait. Your physiology, your body hinders your judgement. Startled reactions are regularly wrong. Decisions and commitments negotiated under emotion and hurry are impaired and can be disastrously stupid.

Talking too much, too quickly and too well, instead of keeping silent was another favourite mine-field for my blunders. Using my speed of mind was such an evident advantage that I overused it. After years of this error I concluded that, while many people need some training to speak, the born speakers must do the opposite; as I like to repeat, when you have the gift of speech, what you need to learn is how to keep your mouth shut.

I was often gullible by emotional compassion, by softness and instinctive need to trust and to sympathize, easily deceived by smiling faces and credible looking packages and thus weakened in my otherwise vivid exercise of critical thinking. I would never give up this naive need to presume beauty and to trust; it keeps my life beautiful. My moderate solution to this was to learn, when I found out that I was being played, to go along with it pretending I did not observe, to study how it was done and at the right moment to act. In this way I obtained valuable experience.

And yes, often I did silly things for the opposite reason, because of my inborn critical spirit, cultivated indiscipline and autonomy; when you roam free, thinking with your own head, it is easy to exaggerate, to err and to get lost; blunders so frequent that I had to form a habit of redressing seamlessly, before I would be caught; or to concede error promptly. A mindset of conceding error promptly can repair stupidity in progress and stop the loss.

Emotion and mood impaired me at times, this happens to all of us. Our body is part of our mind.  

In my early youth I was, like most men, stupid with girls – whom I saw as aliens, from ignorance and lack of experience, not attitude of the heavier sexist kind. I skip the examples, mine are no different from many other people’s, but I retain the important common-place that sexual desire, shyness, lack of experience and intimidating situations make one notably dumb. When you fall in lust an even more when you fall in love know in advance that you will be sensibly less intelligent and definitely less wise that normally; put yourself under some protective control; avoid to sign; try to listen to family and friends!

With both sexes, lust does not increase cleverness, as you may know already. Easy to see that for many intelligent people, sex is a serious vector of mistaken decisions and actions of breath-taking stupidity. Our various drives of the body must be kept in mind as a constant source of stupid deeds notwithstanding our IQ. Do count on this!

Such is everyday stupidity to be prepared for; emotion impairs judgement. When shaken, elated or lost, do not declare, do not decide, do not commit; gain time.

I must mention here yet another strange source of stupidity which I consider as caused - at least in part - by our temperament - weakness of will.  Akrasia as it was named by Aristotle is strange because by weakness be do, accept, allow to happen, to be done to us distasteful damaging things and abuse thet seen by an observer can only qualified as very stupid. It is strange indeed; you know, you are aware that something is bad for you and damaging, ridiculous or totally inadequate and still do it or allow it to happen simply because you are lazy and weak.

In sum, allowing temper and character to prevail is a massive source of stupid conduct and attitude in spite of intelligence and known wisdom.


                                                                                     *

Stupidity by pride

This was in my beginning years at Television. At that time I used to be a public relations officer of the Foreign Relations department, a busy but cosy job. Additionally I was an interpreter and successful translator of films. This did not satisfy me; I wanted to be a TV producer. There was an opening for a junior editor job at the Youth Programmes department. I took advantage of the open door access I had with top management and went to one of the vice-presidents - a high placed political person. I told him that I would like to do some real life TV work. He smiled and observed: "You know; now you are appreciated and safe where you are. You have a roof above your head."  I answered smartly, I thought, that maybe it is time for me to meet a bit of rain. He looked at me attentively and said:

"All right, you have the job!"

Three month later there was a massive downsizing and I was fired; thrown out like a wet chicken. That taught me to speak smart with a Gorgon, even a sympathetic one. I found employment as an audio-visual expert in a media production centre of the Ministry of Tourism. This was far from the glitzy Olympus whence I was tumbling. My displeasure was clearly visible for everyone. I did not care to adapt. I decided to do the impossible and get back to Television. I started to do plenty of what I knew to do. Film-translation and subtitling, hand-made, were a rare craft at that time. I managed soon to sign about one series episode two times a week and one full feature film each week at prime time. Pros know this is crazy. But success was quite visible. My ex-colleague-clients liked to be safe with me and the public appreciated the quality. The effort was very tiring too. And my local direction disapproved. They exiled my job to another town, 150 kilometres away from the capital. I did not give an inch. I would take the train every morning at five and back every evening at four to run my work at the studios. On the road I wrote and corrected my texts, during the day I hijacked all the dactylographers of the office to type for me for extra gain. “One man start-up” I would say, very American. And I won. The effort was excessive though; my girlfriend told me later that what conquered her was that I would take her out for dinner and fall asleep while courting her. After six months, with a new reputation, I was called back to TV; I would cost them much less as an employee than as a contractor. At the same time I was being fired from the Tourism job by a ritual public gathering of the "working men and women", something normally equal with ending irreversibly all career perspectives, countrywide. To shorten the story: to be properly re-hired by Television, ten days after the official firing I went back to the personnel department and announced that I did not want to be dismissed any more, but wished to have my resignation accepted instead, retroactively. The young personnel chief looked at me with wide eyes and went to see the director. They accepted my request in 24 hours. However, being “resigned” was not good enough in the socialist culture; I was advised by the studios to move by transfer. Two more days later I requested from my bitter enemies that the resignation be turned into a "transfer in the interest of the office". Otherwise the fight would have to go on. The apparatchik almost fell off his chair but went to ask again. He came back in no time to tell me that it was all right to do as I want, whatever. Then he looked at me and hit me with unexpected honesty:

"Why did you do all this? If you have so much power, if even the director is afraid of you, why didn't you just do quietly all you wanted while waiting a little? You were on the list to be sent within six months to follow a skills-training course in Switzerland, the place you want to study for your Ph.D. Couldn't you wait six months?"

I did not know what to answer and did not care either. I was certainly proud of my victory, of going across my enemies like a tank. I deleted the episode from my memory and went ahead to an exciting TV career. It is after some 35 years that I looked back at this mess. Imprudence, exaggeration, pride, vanity, anger, obstinacy, all components of stupidness, were present. I wasted precious life-capital in the most stupid way. I lost by winning. I could have easily been crushed. I imagine that some big personages were watching me and decided to spare me, amused to see such a young beast growing.

All that, the wear and tear, the nights without sleep, the enemies made, the insecurity, the lost opportunities, the wasted years, all because of aggressive pride and short-term brilliance. I must add to this however that all the pain and the experiencing made me learn some wisdom I teach now to other people. I am who I am because of what I did. Maybe. What do I know...? I still feel anger sometimes... and pride.

Generally speaking I behaved much sillier than usual - by my own standards - whenever under influence of passions rightly called sins like pride, hate, lust, laziness, egoism or greed. Eagerness to show what I can do was powerful in my instances of youthful gaffes and still strikes now and then. However, I learned in time that I can cheat pride with elegance by becoming aware of it and “flirting with humility”; it is spectacularly effective when we are teased into stupid responses of vanity. But, for that flirting you need confidence accumulated from some experience of success.

                                                                                     *

Stupidity by narrowing of mind, blinkered with received ideas and exclusive “truth”

I was potentially stupid, while seeing myself creative and bright, when, imagining some actually better idea, I saw only one perspective - mine, blind to other points of view, wider or different; definitely, this is measurable stupidness - to have but one point of view and be satisfied that you understood something.  I was in such occasions highly taxed because I failed to consider other people's major interests and differing angles.

On this path I was judging poorly as often as I let myself be drawn – by rushed spirit of contradiction and un-philosophic reasoning – to oppose a no to a yes, a yes to a no or the other extreme to a silly, hateful one; this brought me into awkward error and disappointment. Extremes have minimal chance to be wise and maximal probability to be wrong. To oppose an extreme take the moderate, common-sense middle-way! Keep away from the other extreme!

There is worse in my memories; I also tasted knowing better what other people must believe. Try to imagine this grotesque situation: Me a small boy of seven, probably smallest in my class, on top of a seizably bigger lad, frightened by my fury, under a shower of blows, with me commanding him:

"Recognize that there is no God! God does not exist!"

Probably I remember this incident after so many years because it clashes radically with who I am now.
 
It was not my own stupidity, but a learned one, it came unwittingly from my parents imprudence; they had shared with me their own important conclusion that God was a silly improvable belief, and also the value that truth acquired must be fought for; the way I proceeded to spread the good news was an unintended consequence. Of course, they did tell me that believing or not was everyone's right, but omitted to explain that forcing people not to believe in what they do is exemplary stupidity much worse than believing an error.

For a small kid this is just a ridiculous anecdote but when adults do it, when crowds do it, it is tragic; fanaticism and total thinking was there in me, in a nutshell.  I see shades of such intolerance at work every day. The one firmly convinced, impermeable to argument, sees with clarity one truth only. A person firmly convinced will be stupid. Confusing your freedom of belief with a righteous privilege to know better what other people must believe “because this is the truth” opens the gates of Hell.

I retain firm, intransigent. close-minded professing of exclusive-truth as a neat factor and diagnostic symptom - even a cause - of stupidity, with possibly disastrous consequences. In time, fanaticism will always be proven stupid. The amazing thing is that people with high intelligence performance can become stupid zealots  at the same time. QI and knowledge are insufficient to save us from this blinker of the mind; only open-minded wisdom does.

Do I harbour unknowingly some other such basic, incorrigible beliefs to roll out upon people? Possibly. My optimistic impression is that I stopped over the years forcing beliefs in favour of debating or at most persuading. Nowadays, I believe in the right to be wrong and in agreeing to disagree. This preserves me of some stupidities.


The most deadly stupefying delusion from which I was forced to learn first-hand was the grand utopianism lived for a while by my parents - their temporary closing of mind (as it appeared to be later) ; I witnessed with them the drama of ulterior discovery of the error of placing faith and loyalty in an exclusive ideology and in its political movement. I observed their anguish of waking up, too late, to the grim reality of totalitarian “victory”. The good thing is that I also witnessed their ability to heal and regain critical spirit. Yes, it is possible to quit parties and sects!

My loved ones, those honest, righteous, nobly intended idealists, nourished with humanism and Erklärung, Ioan, Katy, Eric, joined Communism in the years before World War Two, when they were still teenagers. The black and white cut between good and evil, the abstraction of ideas, looked simple to them; because fascism, Hitler, were obviously evil, their opponent, communism, little Father Stalin had to be good and humane; and he smiled so fatherly from far away. For a start, they found justice in opposition, in protest; being against evil is easy and noble and it is in your own hands. So many things around them were obviously unjust and bad; exploitation, poverty, inequality, wicked violence, oppression, intolerance, racism! Anything radically opposed to radical evil witnessed had to be good; like  “the enemy of my enemy”. Reason, truth and justice would prevail in a new World-Order. They confused theory with life.
 
Those bright, humanistic, educated young rebels fell into the trap for fools, no questions asked as so many amateur revolutionaries did before them. They offered their life, to die for an idea. They took arms and joined resistance for the “universal high cause” of some minuscule underground in some Balkan country meant anyway to fall under the rule of one or other geopolitical empire.
 
Miraculously, the cannon fodder which they were survived. They “won”! The fascists were defeated. My parents became momentary heroes of the new regime. For a few years. Of course, nobody needed living heroes. It took them some ten or fifteen years of denial before they woke up to see what sinister company they ushered to win. Universal humanists fighting for tribal totalitarianism! It was certainly not their dream, nothing of their basic values; it was just the same beast in different garb; many of the fascist henchmen who tortured them and whom they defeated and arrested were in fact re-hired by the new regime. Some of those torturers became their "comrades" and managers.
 
How on earth could they be fooled like this?

Judging when waking up from trance, was much easier for me in the presence of the painful example and the witness of their horror. I saw their daily survival and their pain of dissonance. My Mother withdrew in illness. My father isolated himself for life in an ivory tower of books, theory and denial of reality. Erich, the realist, helped us all survive and survived among wolves; but he was assassinated later, being a dangerous witness.

How could intelligent people act so foolishly?

When I was grown enough to judge, I knew my Mother as a warm, intuitive, educated, fiercely critical spirit, rarely failing her first impression of people, art and ideas. My father was well read, sharp and conceptual, a logical thinker compulsively analysing the truth behind appearances. Eric was unparalleled in practical sense, smartness and ability to act.
 
How could these bright people believe and act so stupidly against their best interest? What understanding, what truth, what wisdom was missing? Mature experience? A larger view? The long-term perspective?
 
Did they ignore that elementary learning from Aristotle that extremes are vicious and only the golden moderate middle way offers virtue? Today I would say that they were deprived of meaningful learning from History; their teachers and books of history have been incapable to give them the perspective of the errors that humanity made repeatedly in the past. Ant they did not listen to their parents, believing that the future is different from the past.

I tasted that grey system for thirty years and paid the price of escaping it. For my lifetime, the lesson is learned by direct witnessing. Will my descendants remember and understand what I told them but they did not experience? Will they absorb my experience?
 
Stupidity-mongering  beasts will rise again and again, to cheat and poison later generations of intelligent people unarmed against being made stupid by the closing of their mind; new avatars of Utopia are born in every generation.

You can see rising new fools ready to die for the right religion, the just justice, the final true truth, the supra-human human, for the sake of the planet, even for the stars in the sky; some are mere reckless, lost, empty heads but I am afraid that good, intelligent, educated people will join their folly exactly as it happened before...

                                                                                                                *

Stupidity by losing touch with context and common sense of daily life

I think now that I was chancing stupidity whenever I fired up into exotic abstraction, imagination and excess – in my judgements and in my actions, when I forgot to return to practical reality. For a while I made the error of treating people as abstractions, problem-solving, "movement of ideas" or "factors". Wise people tried to warn me that I was too intellectual. Learning to make things simple when landing back among people was a slow but life-changing apprenticeship for me. I am still learning. Newness is of the same kind. The difficulty to discern that which is too original for the unimaginative from that which is outright silly came for me from my experience: some bold, disruptive intricate ideas usually not understood, were extremely useful; but they still needed to be adapted to people, to start change from where people are and not from some distant abstract objective.

My imagination made me often appear to some and sometimes actually be ridiculously outlandish; the problem is that as a creative individual you never know when exactly that which you conceive as new and different is merely misunderstood by less imaginative people or actually inconvenient or damaging. I have no solution against this creative risk except to assume the peril, observe, listen and to persist… ready to correct the blunders.

                                                                                  *

I was "too intelligent by half" when I grew too “bright” or abstract to look at the practical side and the application of things in plain human terms. Replacing common sense with principle, Method and theory made me occasionally stupid and, I would say, inhuman. Strict application of method and procedure, strict plans made in advance for moving territory, made me fail several times. Rigid method has the tendency to select only what fits the “correct” assumptions and tools and to neglect or even deny essential practical reality. This brings me to guess that theorists and engineers  have their privileged, specific way of being gravely inane, missing some local reality check – because of their tools, measurements and procedures; likewise, marvellous ideas, pure creations of genius can be horribly harmful for humanity by neglect of human nature, unintended effect on the human condition and the human reality. Genius can be stupid.

                                                                                    *

I said and did many stupid things whenever I neglected the particular context, including  the things not present and not said but important, when I overlooked the meaning of the occasion, the objective beyond the actual task at hand or I did not pay enough attention to whom specifically I was talking. It is meaningful to observe that the stupid thing was not what I thought and said but the inadequate timing, the communication in insensitive ways at the wrong occasion and to people not prepared to accept.

Being disconnected is the essence of being stupid with people.

I was also foolish when I worried and intervened in things where I had no possible means to help. As Epictetus teaches, some things are of us and some not, I should have wisely left them be, to do instead the right things within my reach.

I also practiced at times the stupidity of the expert for whom - because he is an expert in hammers everything looks like a nail; as a young psychologist, everything looked like psychology to me (maybe it still does, with some disguise of common sense). It takes time for specialized discipline-orientation to count with interdisciplinary diversity at work. To consider and acknowledge that which you do not know is even harder. To concede ever present ignorance is painful for the anointed expert. Not to draw a clear frontier line around my competence was and is a fountain of stupid commitments.

A variant of expert stupidness I practiced sometimes – and which I witnessed thousands of times - was to know too well, from the first sight, what had to happen and what was the solution; the excellent competence of being very familiar with your domain can betray you ridiculously.  I did not ask because I thought that I knew already.

Young, I was often silly whenever I thought and exclaimed impatiently: “I know, I know!” Whenever I did this conceited mistake I also neglected to look closer, deeper or further and I missed the chance to listen, learn and rectify. Later, absorbing the Socratic legends helped me greatly, from the moment I understood the force and the value of saying often and wholeheartedly that I do not know much and never will; but I seek and I will do my best.

                                                                                                               *
Stupidity induced by purposefully awkward situations and manipulation

Some of the stupid responses I lived and observed were induced by idiotic institutions, situations, and instructions, genuinely senseless or intended to stupefy and take advantage of people.
​
I met, over the years and the meridians, numbers of selling schemes and scams exciting greed, lust, pride, to cloud judgment. I fell for some. Other settings were traps designed in bad faith to ensnare us, the targets, into rushed decisions, self-defeating angry response, fear, to cause oversight of key aspects by means of group and peer pressure, misleading example to imitate like sheep, diversions of attention and distractions or plainly to bully into exaggerated speed, no time to discuss, to ask, to think. Not to speak about time for examining truth and values. If you are interested to know what things make you stupid, detect these.

A means of making me stupid which worked against me for a long time was for skilful leaders to play on my generic perfectionist desire (maybe pride?). The trick was to make me ignore or forget what was the wider organizational or political design in which my local task was included and serving. I am sad to say that only few employees are aware and interested in the end results of their work and effort. I was ridiculously gullible when carried away by need of the thing well done, or simply by enthusiasm of the task given. I concentrated too much on improving and succeeding, at what I was doing, without reflecting deeper and wider, why, serving whom, and judging if that task was the right thing to do in the first place. Later I labelled that sort of stupid, manipulated conduct “doing the wrong thing right”.

Success made me stupid a few times; not only it tends to go to the head, not only it creates unexpected and useless enemies but it also develops a thrust with unhealthy inertia; it is difficult to slow down, change direction and even more to stop suddenly at sight of a changed situation. What was adequate and excellent becomes suddenly inadequate, bad taste and offbeat - stupid.

We need apprenticeship to survive success; it is one of the dangerous circumstances of life. On the opposite, learning to lose some, made me wiser.

I met situations when I was forced, required by role, loyalty or rules, to do knowingly stupid things, against my common sense and values, because doing otherwise was inconsistent with duty or serioussly dangerous.

You can pay dearly having eyesight in a land of the blind.  And saying what you see may be outright imprudent and stupid.

At times it appeared obvious even in my youth that playing stupid was the only prudent thing to do. I can imagine what can be done by spreading of such wisdom to whole nations.

Dictators and totalitarians are inevitably stupiditarian; they enforce the rule of stupidity as a way of life. Do you want your whole nation to become stupid? Vote for a charismatic dictator.

                                                                                 *

I retain from this work of biographic memory the experience of a few instances of stupidness I lived* as a normal person:

Stupidity by simply not thinking
Stupidity because of body and temper prevailing
Stupidity by pride (and other “sins”)
Stupidity by narrowing of mind, blinkered with received ideas and exclusive-truth
Stupidity by losing touch with context (by means of fantasy, abstraction, or method)
Stupidity induced by purposefully awkward situations and manipulation

In short, this is what I found:

You can be intelligent and very stupid at the same time. You can know the right thing and still act stupid.

Intelligence in itself is no protection against stupidity. Quite the opposite: brainpower and good education can be amplifiers of the stupidity which creeps-in by the paths mentioned in my partial list.

                                                                                 *

In spite of so many stupid things I lived, I still feel that they are of me but not me, I acknowledge but disown them. I was intelligent and stupid at the same time but it would have been possible to do better. And it is now. I also flatter myself with falling back on my four feet like a cat as we all should; I had - without merit - an ease to take distance, understand and recognize quickly that I was stupid in this or that. I was less stupid than other people only when I was quicker than them to concede and fix the faults or to recover seamlessly.

The more I was aware of my stupid acts the less stupid I was.


                                                                                    *

Sadly, even now as I write these lines I still practice number of slips, disconnects and weaknesses already familiar to me. Nor do I do wisely what I know I must do. Much of this deficiency is for the sake of comfortable life or because of weary lack of energy. I am growing old, soft and silly.

                                                                                     *

Thinking of my own stupidity was and is very painful in a deeper way; beyond shame for my past blunders, I feel deeper intellectual despair, as I am forced to understand and face how endlessly limited I am and we all are.

By sheer commonsense reasoning I learn that I can never be more than partially right, wise only if aware of being many times more ignorant than knowing. I am imprisoned for life in the nested Gödelian Russian dolls of “certainties” that remain always to be proven by something else, wider, external. By human nature, I am confused with the bias of fleeting words and turns of mind, common places, misplaced trust in shallow authority and pre-judged opinion, blinkered with reverberations of tunnel-visions, wishful thinking, blind spots and dead angles. Mine is a minuscule life, soon to end and be forgotten, mostly consumed in apprenticeship and dissipation, while I keep living forwards and understanding backwards.
                                                               
Stupidity observed everywhere, is, as it seems, a corollary of the human condition struggling between an animal body and a rational mind. Recently we add to this the race with the very "intelligent" machines we created with our own mind and hands. New horisons for human stupidity.

This awareness is more tragic than looking down with irritation to some idiots and ignorants.

I am human, therefore I am stupid. Homo sum, stupidus sum. To understand this vulnerability is wise; Socrates knew very well why he declared so often to be totally ignorant. Other sceptics, like Montaigne, did as well.

                                                                                                              *

In fact the many stupid things I committed proved very useful; recapitulating them in my secret garden as if telling my beads, makes me aware that they are an important source of whatever wisdom I possess today. Perhaps this was the price to pay to glimpse and understand what I shall not do and why and what I should dissuade other people from committing.

In sum I became convinced that stupidity is an inseparable companion of intelligence and of wisdom, so that becoming less stupid emerges as a major way to wisdom.

_________________________________________
*(among the many more I observed around me, not described here)

 

I used to have a non-commercial page on Internet -
with Thinkhost.com
whom I say my last thanks for the long years of kind hosting.

I shared there my personal contributions because I think that culture must be free; the freedom of thought - one of the human rights - starves when it is not nourished freely with shared ideas and knowledge.

Recently, the site was taken over by a new dollar-eyed company which I will not name. They saw that my legacy content was aged which equals "fit for the trashcan" and deleted it with no warning. Such good people know that the author is the product or the reader is the product or they are both nothing.

This is of course no news: The jackals of the electronic desert help us to forget; everything shall be scanned, stored in digital safes with paid looking-access, then periodically and successively destroyed like sand castles on a shore.

With this I end the burial ceremony for tenner.thinkhost.com Peace be upon it.

I will successively republish that material. Now you will find some of those disappeared pages at the Wayback Machine or here:

THIS REMINDS ME OF A STORY  a collection of my rendering of the Sufi stories of a wise fool called Nasreddin Hodja is at http://nasredin.blogspot.com/ and http://nasredin.blogspot.ch/

THE FASCINATION OF PARADOX - Learning from not understanding
is here on this page with the other "Articles"

THE CONSULTING DIFFERENCE - a primer I wrote years ago for the profession of the Consultant is waiting for light editing or radical re-writing

THE STRATEGY OF SURPRISE, is replaced with Strategy: Preparing for, against and the Surprise on this page http://wisdom.tenner.org/strategy-of-surprise.html

 

I need – and we all need - to understand stupidity better; we crash into it often enough to admit what a resourceful, deadly enemy it is - one who keeps winning and crippling humanity in the long term. Such a foe deserves adequate respect.

Strange! It seems easy and obvious to recognize this old acquaintance when we meet it but how elusive to define what it is!

Why is a thing so easy to point at with our good sense so difficult to pin down with our reason?  I would say that stupidity is from another realm than rational description and measurement; it is a lived subject of experiencing and comprehension in context.

Is stupidity more than one thing? Arguably so. For some, it  is just one measurable deficit of something called "intelligence"; for others, a “father of errors” a flaw of functioning in our minds, hiding behind many dissimilar faces. Maybe we are we too interested in this phenomenon to see clear.
 
Probably, to understand, we must move - as usual - deeper or higher, away, or closer. We must observe the observer also, the one who experiences it and judges stupid as such; after all it is in the eyes of the beholder that stupidity takes form, the same way beauty does.

I will try to draw a practical view of stupidity, with tentative steps, one musing at a time.

                                                                                 *

It appears that there are plenty, too many sufficient signs of stupidity - when it happens - but the minimal necessary features to define and quantify stupidity as fact are not clear enough. The word is misleading and the measures imprecise; the scales float in the eyes of the witness.

The difference of genre is not made clear between two incommensurable sorts of stupidity:

One is the innocent, stupid-stupidity of , as Robert Musil* called it “rosy-cheeked” silly persons we call stupid at a glance - because their mind appears to lack the minimal horse-power of current, average intelligence. People are not all born equal in this and some are impaired by various pathologies. This is a subject of little promise, which I do not follow here. But there is another one, fascinating sort of stupidity: the intelligent one.

What is intelligent stupidity?

The other deeper sort of malfunction, the only which concerns me here, is the widely shared sort of normal, educated, intelligent-stupidity -which I would provisionally define as the manifest failing of expected common sense, good judgement, practical reason and adequate performance by people who could obviously do better.

As you can see, I use a phenomenal working definition for my hunt.

Stupidity is observed as the manifest rupture with the adequate common sense of given situation, place, group of people or task: in the way of perceiving, of understanding, of judging, of speaking, of responding, or in conduct.

I think that without understanding the stupidities committed and often persisted in by normally intelligent people, even very bright ones, geniuses not excepted, the intelligence and wisdom it ruins cannot be understood either. The study of wisdom must include understanding our own and other peoples' stupidity and learning to cope with it.
 
Whoever wants to understand and  increase wisdom must observe the causes of failing and of the collapse of common sense in people "like you and me", people whose mind seems to work perfectly well.
                                                                               *

As you see, I made some excluding choices from the beginning:

In this inquiry I set aside stupidity by deficient functioning of the brain. I omit considering the stupidness of "people being functionally stupid"; besides this pathetic helplessness of the feeble-minded which appeals to our charity, there is much worse in our world than sub-normal intelligence. The sadly real model of the mentally handicapped is moreover quite misleading for understanding normal human stupidity. Like a fig-leaf masking the really important issue.

I also hesitate concerning the collateral stupidity of ignorant and wicked people who seem to be proud of being and acting stupid. The obvious perils of stumbling upon barbarous,  hopelessly dull or dangerously callous, reckless and senseless people engaged in exclusion and violence and other mindless deeds is a huge subject by itself. Maybe another time...

​I will probably have to include in my inquiry on intelligent stupidity the attitude and state of obstinate narrowness, the blind fanaticism better called folly or madness, observable in otherwise intelligent people who appear stuck in dogma, militant creed, rigid excess, unable to consider other points of view or fact contrary to their conviction. I am aware that normal or even exceptional people become very stupid when fallen into such traps. Is this another corruption of human judgement?

I set aside the search for an abstract, logical essence of stupidity because such scholastic pursuit is as sterile as the one after absolute evil. Stupidity is practical, experiential, contextual, alive, not a deficient execution of algorithm.

Moreover, I let aside the vagueness of expressions like "being stupid" - as if it were a state of mind or "anti-faculty" seen as  a cause of what we do poorly.  I prefer instead to consider “committing stupidities”- the conduct, (the acts rather than the behaviours) deserving such a depreciative evaluation.

Stupid, is not something we are but something we do or let happen.

                                                                              *

My concern is that all of us humans appear to be afflicted by flaws or ebbs of mind which prevent sensible, sound-minded people to do things adequately or occasionally cause them to do foolish and silly things against their best interest.  Such eclipses deprive them, in spite of their manifest wisdom, from living the good life they seem capable of.
 
These are surprising dysfunctions, blind spots and mistakes– call them omissions, inattentions, biases, misinterpretations, misjudgements,  confusions, blunders, faux-pas, miscommunication  - widely observed, committed, said, written... Some of such "stupid" events become socially established, impersonal, turned into customs in all walks of life  and even institutions.

Stupidness is then practised by normal, even very intelligent, well informed people and equally by whole groups of people - group-thinkers or mass followers whom we cannot sweep out of the way by simply calling them impaired. But they are so: they are impaired by some false direction, so that their intelligence fails or misfires. That intelligent stupidity is the subject I wrestle with. Heavens help me!

                                                                                *

We must reclaim and re-define the word stupidity to cope with the intelligent sort of it.

One thing that makes stupidity hard to explain and fight is that - for good reason - people are often slow to anticipate it and tackle it before it is proven by some striking outcome.

We may be  reluctant to recognise the precursors and sometimes misjudge the cause of the failure; thus we often fail to provide our plans to be foolproof against stupidity or at least to grasp the enemy from the first signs, as we advance; this may be because we do not have some good practical definition nor a list of diagnostic signs or even an explanation of how it works.

To help detect stupidity we need some image of reference; as the philosopher said: "... would we not, like archers in possession of a target, better hit on what is needed? If this is so, then one must try to grasp, in outline at least, whatever it is and to which of the sciences it belongs."**

The word “stupidity” was hijacked, occupied, distorted and abused by bad faith usage, to a degree which prevents critical thinking. Nowadays it became a politically incorrect word to avoid. We must go back and start from the beginning, individually reclaim this word and redefine it. In lack of agreement, we must dare to build our own meaning. We need to rectify the word.

Rectifying the word stupidity to account for intelligent stupidity is worth the effort. The challenge of this orphan subject is to reveal an omnipresent public enemy hidden behind a smoke screen of denial and patronising derision - labelling a few handicapped (or different) people as idiots, imbeciles or morons - instead of looking into the mirror and into our world to see the grand foolishness and weaknesses in our lives and in society. Those poor creatures, the "stupid",  are like trees preventing us to see the luxuriant woods.
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Stupidity is an everyday folk-word which did not enjoy the honour of being defined in the treatises and dictionaries of philosophy, not even those of psychology or any other science. It must be badthink as Orwell would say.

The word as used, indicates that someone is passing intuitive judgement expressed in the vernacular of common sense: remarks tainted with emotion and negative judgement, punctuated with attention marks. This is a fleeting subject, bad for stiff research, not good for academic careers; moreover, what is smart in one place, proves stupid in another; one man's novel idea is judged stupid by multitudes. This is not good material for extracting regularities experimentally proven and theoretically consistent.

Its substance, being assumed by habit to be absence of something or deficit of something, like lack of knowing or lesser intelligence (imagine the academic difficulty of defining the presence of ignorance or, worse, its size!), stupidity does not seem to have a substance, to be a behaviour measurable distinctly. Thus, during the Twentieth Century, it did not appear worth studying; rational intelligence and knowledge – believed to be opposed to stupidity - are measured and analysed instead of it. That should be sufficient. Hmm!

Is it then proven that less intelligence means more stupidity? That more intelligence means less stupidity?

It also seems politically incorrect to even consider that such a degrading flaw exists as a born, nurture-resistant feature creating inequality. To see it widespread is certainly anathema; the many cannot be called stupid in a democracy. You need reckless kings to do that. And marketing experts or spin-doctors who will never say it openly, but massively count on it.

Medically seen, constant stupidity (in the traditional sense) seems to be some kind of steady-state or unchanging attribute of incapacity, dis-adaptive bias, low performance; an abnormality which you find in morons, idiots, cretins and other disadvantaged people (like the utterly uneducated ignorant) evaluated scientifically. 

For such reasons of hypocrisy and academic unattractiveness, the research on the vague subject – an elephant too big to really exist - is left to the story-tellers, preachers and occasional irritated thinkers, in their moments of despair.

                                                                                  *

In spite of all this unease, stupidity is too protuberant a subject to sweep under the carpet...

In lack of any conceptually substantial definition (same surprising situation as for the word "wisdom") the curious reader will find some helpful lexical, dictionary definitions of the word [1] - that is, descriptions of what the word means customarily, of how it is translated into various languages.

Unfortunately, the best dictionary definitions do not explain what something actually is or how it happens and how it works. You will find that the words “Stupidity” and “stupid” are mainly exemplified as being stupefied, incapable to perceive, to feel, to understand and reason properly. It is gross want of intelligence with a touch of stubbornness and foolishness; in short, the low end of humanity.

We receive an unexamined impression that stupidity is not normal among us; an insufficiency, emptiness, lack of intelligence, ignorance, to a near pathological degree.

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Such reduction and neglect of study is strange in the face of widespread lament and agreement that shared stupidity produced, produces and will produce major damage in our world, maybe even destroy it entirely.

The dominant account of stupidity as lack of intellectual performance or of proper knowledge and rationality, that is lack of information, logic and processing horsepower is elegant, partial and blind to reality; for the least, plenty of logically thinking, reasonable people prove frequently stupid in what they understand, think, speak and do and even in domains where they are educated and familiar.

Computers too are logical and as stupid for us as can be, when unable to solve simple but new, unexpected problems not chewed for them in advance. Observe also that we call them stupid when we project into them, our abstract theories and then we find their responses unfit to our commonsense practice.

                                                                                     *

No, stupidity is not lack of knowledge and logic, and, surprisingly, not even lack of intelligence; the blunders of the intelligent and the learned are proverbial. Certainly, stupidity it is not just ignorance, absence of information or of true knowledge; I have met plenty of ignorant people very smart and wise in their familiar environment and very stupid-acting specialized specialists or learned generalists, adorned with high schooling and doctor's degrees. Mine did not make me smarter in the occasions when I misjudged, spoke and acted stupid, neglecting the very psychology I knew.

Mystified by yet another apartheid of Humanity separating with a numerate geometry-based asses' bridge the quick and smart from the slow and bewildered, the educated from the uneducated, looms the disastrous kingdom of contagious, man-made stupidity  that impairs everybody, including the most excellent of us:

occasion-induced “inexplicable” delusion and impairment of judgement,
ignoring of conspicuous facts everybody knows except the (otherwise very intelligent) person concerned
the mishaps of the habit not to pay attention to mere people-issues and " local situations",
the unexamined everyday use of thought-preventing horse-blinkering words and expressions,
the mind-closing education of pre-judged dogma, taboos, received opinions, dispensed to entire generations
the spread, like recurrent pest, across the social body, of indefensible ideas of prey and hate,
the cultivated and complacent public slumber turning people desensitised in full view of violence, iniquity and danger
the sheep like imitation epidemics of fashion,
the inexorable persistence of harmful habits like smoking, bad eating, waste, pollution and the like
the Kafkaesque institutions we perpetuate,
the utopian laws, the stupid bosses and politicians we obey,
the mindless corporations eating up the world, incapable to consider end-results of short-term gain
and on top of everything
the enslaving creeds or ideologies, the "causes" we serve faithfully, for which so many fools are ready to kill and die

all the above banking on proven public lack of critical sense, state which can fairly described as stupid.

If we rise from individual to society, how to describe as other than stupid the predictable biased judgement and destructive barbarianism of large groups, the madness of entire nations, the fascination of voluntary servitude, the eternally returning, self-defeating poor judgement of Humanity all together?

Since we evolved so much why do we, "Humanity" blessed with so many bright minds and learned people still behave like a species instead of acting like a Reason, the reason we worship nowadays? Isn't that stupidity of the largest scale possible? But what do I know? The genius of immense stupidity may propose more that that, things I cannot grasp.

Why is it that there is no historic regress of human stupidity - always ready to strike anew in form of war, waste and self-destruction - so little learning from history, in spite of so much accumulation and progress in knowledge-knowing-all and technology-omnipotent in making things?

How then to define stupidity?

Let me try my hand at a longer description:

I retain that "stupid" is a practical interpretation from the domain of common-sense.
 
Words like "stupid" or "silly" or "dumb" “mindless”, “heedless” “inept”, “mad” or "foolish", indicate in everyday language an impression or intuition (often agreed among several persons) obtained from observed fact, completed with common-sense psychology inferences of what could have happened in the head of the authors before or during the act which is experienced as stupid; such verbal labels signal and expose apparent practical dysfunctions of understanding, of appreciation of a task or context, omission of prudent judgement or maladroit action which - for various causes - appear as manifestly inadequate and incompetent against the assumed intentions of the authors, the expectations and norms of competence in a practical occasion and a given context.

The advantage of such an interpretation of stupidity as manifest failing of good-sense and phrónēsis (prudence, to simplify) is to invite one to review and classify the varieties of observed blunders - stupid speech, acts and conduct - particularly the serious ones, to investigate their roots and immediate causes and conditions, often neglected. We are led to consider why and how one comes to commit such stupid things - thought, told or done - instead of raising our arms to the sky in despair. This may offer some direction to understand the afflictions of stupidness, to avoid them, to face them, to work in their presence or to defend against them.

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The imprecision of this notion denoting something “lived” and relative to a local context, repels the lovers of precision; the object signified by the subjective label is nevertheless heavy with meaning and consequences for our lives.

Some elements to define by description that which is named stupidity may be the following:

- It is the object of an evaluative social judgement, shared, consensual and comparative, regarding performance, a result, a product: a thing thought, said, written or done. The designation "stupid" is a sanction-label relevant in a given context and according to the local norms of comprehension, experience, knowledge available and competence expected. As I mentioned, the scales float in the eyes of the beholders; but many eyes see the same thing, repeatedly and multiple persons agree on them.

- Stupidity appears generally speaking as error and dysfunction but all errors are not deemed stupid; the errors known as stupid are those evaluated by common sense and local consensus as elementary, incongruous with the information available or readily accessible. Such errors are judged as normally avoidable by elementary prudence and attention; they are not to be expected from the person or group of that given qualification. The characteristic of the errors considered stupid is to be surprising, ridiculous and unjustifiable, against all normal expectation. It is with this cluster of intuitive appreciations that the label "stupid" is awarded.

- Our thoughts, discourse and practice are evaluated in their coherence and relational quality, supposed to connect us usefully and as purposeful agents to the surrounding reality of knowledge, things and people (or the world around us). One considers stupid that conduct which is perceived as flagrantly disconnected from expected common sense judgement, offbeat of normal expectations and context, counter-productive against the objectives at hand, occasion or participants. The list is long. To be dismissed as stupid, a performance appears utterly incompetent or inadequate: insufficient, ignorant, misunderstanding, insensible, tactless, inappropriate, untimely, inept, incongruous ... in short out of context and discordant with it. The act of stupidness appears as an external sign of inability to be adequate; by ignorance, distraction, awkwardness or poor judgement.

- Stupidity committed, appears to run against the own interest of the author and his overt purpose, against reputation, a move of "I lose and you lose" with boomerang effect and unexpected consequences.

- The implication, the deed, the discourse, seem most typically unintended or out of control, without being properly aware, while they appear obvious for other people, at least in retrospective. However we should consider the cases when we and other people do and persist in things we know to be stupid but still do them for various weakness related, defensive or opportunistic reasons.

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Not lack of intelligence as much as lack of good sense.

One thing to retain: something thought, believed, said or done is not stupid because it were uninformed, illogical, irrational or insufficiently rational (which may be often the case) not even because of being erroneous, grossly false, contrary to truth (which certainly is not so good) but because of being a flagrant deficit of commonsense and of its shared good judgement, this translation in terms of human practice and life of the similar scientific adequacy to reality.

I would say that to competence and to intelligence, intelligent stupidness is not the contrary but the eclipse, the fall, the Achilles’ heel, the bug, the malfunction. I am now convinced that the major causes of the worse stupidities in judgement, decision, communication and action are not born from weakness of mind but weaknesses of the way the good mind is used, maybe also because of weakness of character. Intelligent stupidity is con-substantial with intelligence, reason and logic, coexisting paradoxically even with the wisdom which should be its opposite.

We, civilized humans are able of an erroneous relation with our knowledge and a distorted usage of our intellect. It seems to me that this could be a fruitful domain of study and object of a sustained effort to control in us some stupefying bugs of human nature.

As for wisdom, maybe we grow to act wiser less by profound thoughts and high knowledge than by becoming aware and in control of our inherent human risk of dysfunction, our limits, and strings, more prudent to avoid being misled by our own abstractions and subtlety, more able to detect and redress promptly the stupidities committed, while we learn from them, more able not to reproduce them.

We grow wiser by becoming less stupid; or at least by better understanding and controlling our stupidity.


__________________________
* Musil, Robert, Über die Dummheit, 1937 (De la Bêtise, Allia, Paris 2009)
​
** Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics - A New Translation, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D.Collins, The University of Chicago press, Chicago, 2011, Book I ch II, 20-25

[1] For an example, the Oxford English Dictionary ed. 2009, one of the best, enumerates for stupidity "1. Numbness, incapacity for sensation" "2. The condition of being deprived of the use of faculties; a state of stupor.", "3. Incapacity for emotion; lack of feeling or interest, apathy, indifference..." "4. Dullness or slowness of apprehension; gross want of intelligence.. A stupid idea, action, etc." and finally "5. Obstinacy."  Stupidly also means foolishly.

Charmingly, the OED mentions "stupiditarian - One whose ruling principle is stupidity." a meaning unfortunately forgotten.

For the word "stupid" I retain "1. .. hyperbolically, stunned with surprise, grief, etc." "e. Emotionally or morally dull or insensible; apathetic, indifferent.", "2. As a characteristic of inanimate things: Destitute of sensation, consciousness, thought, or feeling." and of course "3. Wanting in or slow of mental perception; lacking ordinary activity of mind; slow-witted, dull." "5. Obstinate, stubborn."

"b. Of attributes, actions, ideas, etc.: Characterized by or indicating stupidity or dullness of comprehension." and "4. Void of interest, tiresome, boring, dull."

"c. Of the lower animals: Irrational. Also of an individual animal, its propensities, etc.: Lacking intelligence or animation, senseless, dull.."

 

What I like to call "The Method of Socrates"* is a road-opener of understanding, learning to learn and critical examination.

I simplify this subject, of course, to a tool you can wield in many occasions. The learned socratists will explain otherwise the subtleties of the elenchus refutations. My pick from the Socratic myth is a minimalist, impressionistic account of a style and attitude I found most valuable to use for the everyday.

I use the Socratic wand when I want to highlight and identify what is actually discussed in a relevant occasion, to verify what people understand and mean, what they say about important subjects, and when I want to cause or help people discover that they only think they know but they know almost nothing. I found that this is the case in almost every domain, exactly as Socrates observed in his time. You would use it with caution, when adequate, not like an apprentice sorcerer.

                                                                                 *

To imitate Socrates, you need to have the self-insurance to announce with bold, stressed out humility, particularly when you are known to be knowledgeable, the teacher or even the expert: "Excuse me, I don't know much about this thing you speak about, can you please explain what it is, what it means so that we talk usefully?" Such questioning causes people to become aware of their ignorance, sometime even exposes them. You bring out into the open  - do it if needed, tactfully if possible - that in fact we all know very little about the subject at hand, but we consider it obvious; after a few questions asking what and why (my favourite is to ask three times why), shared ignorance becomes obvious and puzzling; then, the door is unlocked for all to listen and to debate critically.

Without finding out that they speak most of the time without having acceptable definitions, people are complacent, sufficient, like cups full to the brim, incapable to absorb something different or new. You must help empty some of their their cup and make them feel that they "know nothing" [**]

Like Plato's legendary Socrates, you will make one learn - not by teaching lessons, not from received ideas and words - but being pulled from one puzzlement to the next, discovering more and more unexpected perspectives, feeling the uneasy borderline of what we do not know yet; learning advances not from tabula rasa to the right answer,  not even from some  certainty to more certainty but from question to question.

                                                                              *

Deeper than erroneous definitions, one of the killers of good judgement and of productive conversation is the supposition that "we know" and that the words mean, naturally, the same thing for all of us; the best way to misunderstanding is to ask the inept question: "Did you understand?" and to take the empty answer: "Yes." for a proof of success. Meaning-full communication is on the contrary to ask: "What did you understand?" or "How would you define or explain this? What do you think about ...?" or some similar polite version (like "Please tell me more" or "Please explain") for finding out what was meant and understood.

For this reason, reject the lazy convention that everybody knows, “of course we all know the subject” and propose, with or without irony that you personally don’t know, that in fact you feel totally ignorant and want to be explained.

When you ask the Socratic Quid question [1] “What is it?”, persist politely; repeat the question if needed, to have clarified what it is and what it is not, what is different from other things. Do not accept the replacement of definitions by that which is essential and unique with enumerations of obvious examples.

Amazingly, most people, particularly authorities and experts, prove unable to give a true definition of things they profess or practice every day, as the deeper understanding is obscured with plenty of words, precision, details and received opinions, while essence is left for later or for the philosophers. It is hard to pin down the nature of things. We mainly know how they look and how we use them.

In fact the basic, seemingly self-evident looking notions we use every day, are the most difficult to define. Probably, to be defined, they require a point of view "out of the system" and higher order rules. But this - exact, correct definition - is not the real aim of the Socratic attitude as I value it; the aim is learning to think and learning to learn, learning to navigate the immensity of our ignorance without panic and without trying to reduce it to our received knowledge.

                                                                             *

The second face of the Socratic myth as I retain it, is that method will not be found in in this or that question but in the questioning; it is not the trees, it is the Socratic forest. 

Socrates the emblematic critical thinker gives himself the unrestricted and perilous licence to ask questions to the face of habit, power and pretence. He felt that to be free, to have some power of action, you must first know yourself and own the words you use; that unexamined life is not worth living [2]. He took the common place exhortation from the front of the temple at Delphi "gnōthi seautón = "know thyself"" and turned it into a powerful rule. This knowledge only, makes us masters of ourselves, which is the precondition to rule other people. Without this effort of humbly knowing oneself  no one can imitate Socrates, no philosophically correct questions will suffice..

Socrates (or maybe Plato) assumed that all the knowledge was already there [3], in the person, sleeping or gestating; the task of the master is, accordingly, the art of the midwife, to help people's own understanding to be born. At a most vulgar everyday level, in my teaching and my work with groups of people I found that indeed, if you ask and provide sufficient time and listen too, even the simplest audience will provide collectively some useful account of the issue at hand; sufficient sound material to facilitate the community to build up useful answers, deliberations, decisions and solutions which they accept and own, because they produced them. Certainly there is plenty of occasions for the skilled teacher or consultant or advisor, to contribute solid expertise and wisdom, with discretion but also decisively. Read the stone-soup story to see what I mean!

In fact, people know a lot

After that first step which was to make a learner or an audience understand that they did not understand (or too little) of things they believed to know well, this manner of Socrates, the maïeutic, the art of the midwife, demonstrates the contrary - that we know more that we think we know. Moreover, it makes us feel that we are not blank slates to be written on by other people, but instead we have the means to think with our own head. This is far of course from Plato's magnificent world of ideas waiting to be recalled; however the debased metaphor I draw is quite valuable for any teacher in our lowly real world.

With his manner of midwifery, after clarifying as much as possible "What it is? » Socrates leads the person, question after question, maybe less towards discovering truth than diminishing their mistaken beliefs: Maybe his "victims" learn less about the world, but certainly about themselves.What do I know? He often leaves them puzzled...in the company of ignorance. Learning to cope honestly with ignorance is itself precious learning.

I would add that after finding out what you believe and understand, your limits, where your mind is, (and only then) you can actually proceed to learn, and change.

                                                                  *

The deepest face of the "Method of Socrates" as I see it, the gift I feel I received from him, is the handing over of the "method" itself, that Socratic way of being helping us in learning how to learn; Socrates teaches by example an attitude to knowledge, he teaches questions not answers, a way to examine everything, his magic pointing finger.  An old Chinese story [4] illustrates best what I desire from Socrates:

An immortal hovering along a deserted road met a miserable half-starved beggar. In pity, the benevolent ghost touched a pebble with his finger and miraculously, the stone turned to gold. But the beggar did not look content. 

Amazed, the spirit chose a bigger stone, laid his finger and Lo! it became gold too. The mendicant was still not satisfied. 

Puzzled, the celestial being tapped a big rock into gold; the beggar grew visibly discontent. Exasperated, the immortal asked: 

"What more do you want?"

"Your finger!"


The method of Socrates is what he does, the example he gives.

________________

[*] The philosophers, expert in the study of Socratic thought, teach something else, much more abstract, which I am certainly not competent to debate. Theirs may be the true Platonic Socrates who actually was; I only care for one legendary tool from the ages-improved heritage as it trickles down to us, possibly myth, but a legend of value to my life and know-how.

[**] "I thought to myself, " I am wiser than this man ; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either."" Plato, Apology, in Plato I, Loeb CL, Harvard UP, Cambridge.., p.83  (Tr. Fowler)

[1] Plato, Meno (Tr. Guthrie) 71b, Bollingen ed., Princeton, 1989, p. 354: “..how can I know a property of something when I don’t even know what it is?”

[2] Plato, Apology, 38a

[3] Plato's Socrates seems to believe that knowledge comes from a divine realm of pure ideas and that it is pre-existent in man. I do not believe this, but there is always some pre-existent knowledge; I experienced many times the common-sense fact that when you meet real-life persons be it children or, even more, adults, they do contain rich previous experience and lore which must be considered and put to work, not denied or replaced. You cannot erase that reality and replace it with your teaching; you must build on it, from it. 

[4] Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Macmillan, NY, 1960, p. 330

There is the common fool and the big fool.

The ordinary fool is weak, mindless, clumsy and numerous, but the big fool is unique, gifted, intelligent, educated, creative...

The big fool works passionately to do good things – unfortunately, often without reflecting enough, without thinking through their deeper meaning and long-term consequence and without an examined sense of values or priorities.

 Big fool, big loss: 

Sharp intelligence, wounding blunder. 
High knowledge, deep stupidity.
Great wisdom, great sorrow.

                                                                    *

At a personal level, common sense (or is some of it uncommon?) recognises that I am a fool: 

if I ignore reality around me, by lack of attention or arrogance;

if I ignore people with lack of empathy, I do not listen, nor pay attention to who they are and what they care for, beyond my own needs; 

if I cannot apply the knowledge that how you do things, where, when, with whom, is as decisive as what you do;

if I do not know myself, so that other people know me better and take advantage of my blind spots;

if flattery works with me;

if I am impressed by the company of the powerful and when success, titles and power go to my head;

if I make my decisions moved by impatience, emotion and passions like envy, greed, lust (love is no better), hate, anger, cowardice, urge for power or renown;

if I cannot control my rushed emotional reactions or hold my tongue; 

if I let myself be carried with sway of public opinion and trends;

if  when looking back on what I did, it was imprudence and recklessness;

if I don’t use my strengths while knowing my limits, but engage in tasks beyond my capacities; 

if I show poor, superficial judgement, grounded on what comes to eye and ear and my desires, instead of seeking out the important and urgent; if on the contrary, my judgement remains abstract and unconnected to here and now.

if I cling attached to what is passing and worry excessively for that which does not depend on me;

if by compassion, I die for other people’s misfortunes;

if I do things, have smart ideas, work hard, fight with courage, but I don’t really know, nor examine why and what I really want - for what cause and with what intention I do all these things;

if I only think short-term, and practice a hand-to-mouth intelligence but delay endlessly the long-term so that I cannot answer: “what are the main things you want and follow in your life?”;

if I cannot consider and master the difference between what I have, what I give, what I do, what I act, who I am, how I live;

if  I learn and discover and know, and work just for the sake of it, unaware that these are means and that the end of all is the benefit of people, including me;

if I say the truth for the sake of the truth and do justice for the sake of justice, ignoring that truth and justice must serve higher values of good life, happiness, peace, dignity;

if I confuse how this world of ours really is, with nowhere lands of ideas;

if I confuse my limited life, with the past and the future of humanity, deluded by people who lie to me that I live in History;

if I am too weak to apply what I learned from other people’s errors and my own mistakes and so repeat them forever;

if I fall regularly into those well known weaknesses known as capital sins and degrading turpitude: miserliness, selfishness, cruelty, negligence, neglect, pride, anger wrath, envy...;

if I am arrogant in success but collapse in defeat; 

if I am stubborn, so as to persist making from one mistake several… 

if I lack courage to say: “I do not know”, “I cannot...”, “Sorry, I was wrong”, “You were right”, “Let me think”;

if I proved on occasion to be ignorant or credulous but still believe to know all; 

if I am wasting my irreversibly passing days, squandering my years, my talents and my opportunities...

Then my son, I am a big fool.

                                                                 *

As I write these lines I see that the litany will never end. It would keep growing until it devours all my past. And of course, there are much bigger fools than this and more dangerous too. We fools are creative indeed.  

The lack of personal wisdom - I would gather at this time - is mostly deficit of depth and vision in daily life, weakness and lack of control: rushed judgement, heedless action, and unexamined life. 

It is existence determined disproportionately from outside your deliberation, following unawares urges , fears and desires. It is responding too much instead of acting, bumping into dangers and constraints instead of preventing them early or going around them.

Unwise living persists unabashed in presence of fair understanding of what is wise. The Greeks called akrasia that feeble lack of self-control and of endurance that makes good people unable to do what they know to be good for them and for other people. Weakness, self-centred fleeting attention, forgetfulness and other flaws of character ruin good knowledge of wisdom and the desire to be wise. 

I pan and sieve my memories for the useful things I learned in my life. I am puzzled...

Many things I recall are quite normal and supporting of the way I supposed the world would be, good being good and bad - wrong - nothing special to learn there; but what to do about this:

Bad people helped me and good people did me harm.

Friends sold each-other in times of need while enemies joined for the sake of better causes.

Gentle people did evil things and evil ones good things.

Upright ones proved mad, as crazy ones spoke with good logic.

Respectful people were reeking prejudice, outcasts were open to truth.

Some who owed me forsook me and total strangers saved me from trouble, at their risk.

Honest people proved heartless, scoundrels with big hearts gave me with both hands.

Bright people acted like destructive fools while stupid ones were prudent and sensible.

Learned ones were obtuse know-alls and I saw the ignorant curious and improving.

Liars said the truth and honest men lied to crowds.

Kind people were stupid and silly people skillful masters of their trade.

Scrupulous believers proved hypocrites to their vows, cynical atheists died for moral justice.

Loving fathers were callous torturers, and whores, kind-hearted mothers.

Experienced people kept being dead wrong and beginners inexplicably right.

                                                                   *

What to do about all this mess? It is not poetry. It is life.

What to learn from this chaos where everything is possible and it’s contrary too - at the same time and from the same point of view? What will you do under the deluge of inconsistency? Give up? Be wise by doing what you are told? Conclude that everything goes?

What do you learn from it?

                                                                   *

What did I learn?

That things are complicated and must probably be suffered to remain so. We should not cheat ourselves or lie to other people that they are simple when they are not. 

I learned that I can keep being myself only if I make my own mind, that I must judge to my best, and that is enough... for a while.

I had to grow accustomed and unperturbed to juggle in my mind contradiction unresolved but not denied. Contradiction makes you dizzy only if you cannot make up with endless change.

I understood the saying of an Indian sage that "The enemies of today may be the friends of tomorrow and the friends of today the enemies of tomorrow." This is true in many fields.

I grew prone to agree to disagree, peacefully, as long as I am left in peace.

I learned that there is a time for doubting everything and another to be certain for a while, to judge and decide; there are also some moments to simply trust. 

I learned to trust myself “but make allowance for their doubting too.”

I learned how crippling can be persistence in one's strong honest beliefs in the face of fact and argument showing that it is the time to disbelieve.
 
I learned that in human matters, precision is far from truth but luring us into error. In such matters conscious trust is to me as useful as fact, provided I discern the difference.

I learned to make peace with the uncertainty that what I do not know and will never know is infinite; I lost the petty need to reduce that infinity to my little knowledge. This joyful, prideful humility - gives me balance and boldness in the middle of the flow.

I learned to ground my knowledge on the little I know, untroubled by the million reserves I always keep in mind.

I grew reluctant to judge people once for ever just because I must do it quickly from time to time.

I learned not to weigh people on what they were or what they are and do and have now, but on what I foresee them to become in time.

I learned to find out  or even decide who I am, what I like and what I dislike and hate, value or neglect, what I respect and what I despise in the private garden of my soul.

I learned to stick to my own compass and keep close to my own values, because I chose so, aware of changing winds and tides, accepting that “there is a time for everything.”

I learned that it is possible, necessary and advisable to see the good grain inside the bad and the bad seed inside the good fruit, like the contrary spots in yin and yang; this makes you much stronger, even when you fight against them.