“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

It Starts with the Mind

I’m writing three related posts: “Learn to Be Smart,” “The Psychology of Culture,” and “A.I. Defeats Consultants.” They all have to do with how we take or lose control.

What comes first: controlling or having something to control? Regaining control after you’ve lost it, or losing control when you previously had it? Historically, losing control comes first. As Joni Mitchell sang, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” So too, realizing you have something must happen before you can apply it or recover it.

We start by reacting, then learn by experience, and finally gain insight. Realizing our potential is like turning swords into plowshares; shifting from being defensive to productive. We should consider our abilities and find ways to apply them. Our basic human ability is being “smart.”

We often regret our decisions, feeling like we misjudged the situation or missed an opportunity. “Bringing a knife to a gunfight” may be an unnecessarily aggressive metaphor but I have resolved to be more assertive. The expression refers to situations you’re either underestimating or not taking seriously. Perhaps “showing up drunk for your drivers test” might be a better metaphor for how we approach self-awareness.

I’m tired of people who are indifferent to acting intelligently, which I call being stupid, and I’ve become more inclined to point it out. I want to call out bad thinking before it leads to bad conclusions. People normally disguise poor thinking with some plausible rationale, so if you get the whiff of bad thinking, you’re probably seeing through the disguise.

I made a pitch to speak with a podcaster interested in ecological conservation. I suggested we talk about why people are not more engaged with the environment. He responded, “My podcast is quite tightly focused on ecology, conservation, and human-wildlife interactions, and I don’t think your angle would be a strong fit for my audience.”

I told him he was being small minded and missing the real issue, which is not conservation. The real issue is the failure of people to be aware of their responsibility and to be stewards of the environment. I’m sure he’ll be offended, but offending people has become my litmus test: if I’m not offending anyone, then I’m not trying hard enough.

Another example is family partnerships that break up because one person is frustrated, doesn’t know how to change, and doesn’t know how to engage. From my experience as a counselor, the inability to problem solve lies at the root of most relationship struggles. It is more due to a lack of self-awareness and commitment than to the difficulty of the problem. I consider this being intentionally stupid. It’s also been called functional stupidity.

“Functional stupidity is the absence of reflection on the purpose or the wider context of a job. You do the job correctly, focusing on the technical details but stop searching for questions about the work. Three aspects characterize functional stupidity:

• Lack of reflexivity: You don’t think about your assumptions.• Lack of justification: You don’t ask why you’re doing something.• Lack of substantive reasoning: You don’t consider the consequences or wider meaning of your actions.

Wishful thinking, following leaders without scrutiny, unreasoning zeal for fads and fashions, senseless imitation of others and the use of clichés in place of careful analysis are examples of functional stupidity.” — David Wagner (2024), from The Stupidity Paradox

Smartness is Part of One’s Personality

Smartness is not an aptitude, it’s a choice. Each person certainly has aptitudes, but a lack of aptitude does not excuse a person’s bad decisions. You continue to be responsible for your decisions regardless of your ability. You’re obliged to know what you’re capable of.

I used to think that any person could be smart, and that they could develop themselves in any way. I used to think that the ranking of students was exploitative, and anyone could achieve what they set their mind to accomplishing. I felt that you should not tell people what or how to learn and instead you should support each person’s unique abilities on their path of growth.

I still believe that to some extent, but I’ve also come to believe that most people, while capable on an everyday level, lack the personal responsibility and priorities to be smart; not just act smart but think smart. Their primary obstacles are a lack of courage, commitment, and honesty. This is not the usual definition of smart, which focuses on what you can do. Instead, it’s a redefinition of “smart” in terms of what a person intends to do. It has more to do with integrity than ability.

When I was young I used to listen to myself talk to myself. I felt like my self-talk was being recorded on a slightly delayed tape loop. Now that I know more about self-awareness, hypnosis, and trance states I believe we are hypnotized by our own voice. A hypnotherapist can use their outside voice to put ideas into your head, but our self-talk does the same thing.

We believe what we say, and the more we say it, the more we believe it. This is intentional because it strengthens our emotional connection with our intellectual ideas, but it is not intelligent. Our voice echoes in our heads to inculcate us by repetition, similar to writing something on the blackboard one hundred times.

Few people take seriously their obligation to be creative problem solvers. They lack the humility to explore their ignorance, and the self-confidence to fail while retaining their sense of purpose. I partly blame poor role models and a poor learning environment. That means indifferent parents, teachers, managers, friends, and politicians. The people from whom you’ll learn the most are those who share your struggles, risks, and rewards. They will gain when you gain, and lose when you fail to understand.

Most people could achieve success if they took their responsibility to grow, support, and contribute seriously, but they don’t understand their lack of ability. They don’t see or own the skills they lack, and have become insensitive to problems of their own creation.

For more ideas on how to regain intelligence, mostly yours but maybe others, book a free call on my calendar at:

Taking Responsibility

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”— Mark Twain

Here are three experiences that taught me to take responsibility for my situation. First, I took classical guitar lessons for ten years, from the ages of 10 to 20. What I learned was that I don’t have the interest to devote myself to the level that’s necessary to be a musician, so I stopped. I didn’t stop because I lacked the ability, I stopped because I lacked the drive. I might have the drive to produce some kind of music, but not that kind.

The second was high-risk outdoor activities. Mountaineering was a perfect situation for learning: if you didn’t take the situation and your role in it seriously, then someone could easily die. I climbed with quite a few irresponsible people. This taught me that both I had to be responsible and I had to demand responsibility from others. Skill is separate from responsibility; they are separate forces. A person must be clear and responsible in both regards.

The third experience is childhood. As a therapist, I experience other people’s childhoods as a showcase of failures. The lesson of childhood is that it is not until you take responsibility for yourself that you start to gain insight into other people’s thoughts and how things get done. Until you can see the importance of understanding things before you act, you cannot see how poorly other people understand and how badly they behave.

The lessons I’m referring to are partly emotional and associative, where associative refers to thinking broadly and creatively. There is a skill to this kind of thinking just as much as there’s a skill to thinking intellectually. Thinking of any kind starts with taking the situation seriously, and this applies to both problems and opportunities.

People feel they don’t understand poetry, art, music, science, or history because they feel unskilled in these areas. Consequently, they don’t value, explore, or learn from them. These areas are made exclusive because their similarities are overlooked. They are less appreciated, have less effect on culture, and “normal” awareness shrinks to either exclude them, or include them in trivial forms.

The Blindness of Being Clever

Sidney Colman was a Harvard physics professor who was great at explaining things but didn’t like mentoring students. He was likened to a combination of Einstein and Woody Allen because of his depth and wit. He was more conventional than Einstein, less of a comedian than Allen, and better at explaining things than either of them. He was illuminating and funny in his own way.

I wasn’t Coleman’s student, though I watched his lectures on videotape. I was able to spend an hour speaking with him before I entered a graduate program. A measure of one’s expertise is their ability to explain things to someone who knows none of the details and, at the time, I knew none of the details.

I asked Coleman why he was interested in physics and what I might gain from it. I remember he expressed great remorse regarding having so much expertise in the conventional understanding of so many fields and that he was not more imaginative. He said that if he had applied what he knew to black holes then he would have discovered that they could evaporate. Instead Stephen Hawking first had the idea and Sidney was left to explain it.

Sidney needed to do what I often tell my clients to do: be creative without judgment. Find situations where you can think expansively without fear or expectation. I’ll tell my clients who are financial executives to find something at which they can play, to do something in which failure is an option because there is no measure of success. This is what I learned from the classical guitar: there is something deeper than music, performance, or appreciation, and until you find it in any field you have not found the heart of it.

One of my most intellectually able mentors was a physics Nobel laureate, but he could not be a friend and had no sense of personal value. Despite his great contributions to the field I think his intelligence was limited.

Smartness is an Aspect of Virtue

We’ve been led to believe intelligence and moral values are separate qualities. We’ve been taught that being smart and being good are separate things, the development of each requiring separate efforts. We’ve been falsely taught that virtue is about human goodness when it’s really about insight into the condition of things regardless of their social impact. This is one of the many falsehoods we’ve learned from school which endeavors to separate one’s performance from one’s character.

In reality, an insightful mind makes good decisions regardless of the subject. A person who ranks high on technical performance but has little sense of value is a disregulated and manipulated person. Government schooling trains us to accept a perversion of human nature in which people learn to follow the reward system without developing a sense of what’s good.

I now believe that you cannot be righteous unless you are also smart, and I believe being smart exists in conjunction with one’s intelligence. In fact, virtue and intelligence must be understood as being connected. This is an intentional connection. You are responsible for making this connection.

The serial killer Edward Kemper had an IQ of 145, which is considered highly gifted, but a low degree of virtue by any measure. He was an extreme example of the dysfunction that results from separating intelligence and virtue. My most virtuous friend was an illiterate fisherman, who was content to remain a fisherman. He was so insightful that his community considered him a prophet.

My inspiration for seeing intelligence and virtue conjoined has been my two disappointing ex-wives who had a measure of both but could not wed the two together. These people have helped me see my own lack of discernment. I allowed myself to become entangled with these people because I believed their intelligence and their virtue were connected and would evolve together.

Fascination and Victimhood

Watch the public’s fascination with themes of instinct, insight, and exploration as these things are contrasted with exploitation, power, and domination. We see these themes in novels, movies, and TV, and in headlines describing corporate, artificial intelligence, and media control. These dramatic exaggerations help us see the differences. In reality, these issues are not black and white. They are not the fault of one actor; everyone is involved at some level or at some point.

I have been victimized and victimization offers important benefits. It reveals the full negative experience and shows it outside the context of what you’re responsible for. Without this you cannot see the depth or the origin of these attitudes. Victimization, properly appreciated, provides the deepest experience of the dysfunction in other peoples’ minds.

You may have played a role in your becoming a victim, but you rarely did so with clarity or intention. Being a victim can easily be turned into a source of power and should not be considered a personal failure, as difficult as that may be. A victim can learn; a perpetrator does not.

The Benefit of the Doubt

My attitude about other people’s irresponsibility results from giving people more respect than they deserved which was, in turn, a result of giving myself less respect than I deserved. This pessimism comes from listening to people and observing their actions.

Tolerance works against change. Not only must you reject things that are dysfunctional, you must call attention to them. It’s a question of getting your point across and dispelling false reasons.

Skills are unequally distributed, but being able to appreciate things has more to do with intention than aptitude. I may never be very good with music, but I have learned to appreciate it by being involved with and engaged in many aspects of it. You are likely unaware of how your focus, balance, awareness, and attention affects your thinking. These skills are more critical to your success in anything than the thoughts you use to justify your actions.

There are things I’m good at, like balance, rhythm, harmony, and visual memory. As I become more aware of these things in everyday life, I see the lack of these things in other people. These are not obvious differences, they emerge through the stories and presentations gifted to me as a therapist-counselor. They emerge like the little squeaks and rumbles that you hear in your car that tell you there exists some sort of tension.

I have recently resolved to require that any new clients engage in brain training. I used to encourage brain training by trying to explain it, but few people understood. My tolerance of what people do not understand contributes to their remaining stuck and society being stuck. Brain training is one of those things that can be best understood from experience, not explanation. It’s a critical skill, so I am no longer tolerating people’s ignorance of it or ambivalence to engage in doing it.

If we develop our awareness, then we can become more insightful, courageous, committed, and virtuous. The essential question is whether one can figure out how to learn, and enhance these skills with practice. I believe that most of us can learn to become more moral, humane, empathetic, intentional, and responsible. Is this a matter of taking responsibility and recognizing the need to grow, or simply grow up?

There is a majority who stop growing once they reach what’s average. They have not learned to be smart and don’t refine their aptitudes. This is a rather narrow bell-shaped curve, meaning that people tend to cluster around the norm, but there is not just one peak. There are some other peaks as well located in the areas of learning, growth, and creativity, but the numbers of people in these areas are a hundred times fewer. We call the group of people who advance themselves creative. We call the much larger group who stagnate normal.

You will not learn things you don’t know you can learn. To learn these things you must explore, experience, and develop personal insight. Don’t expect to succeed, rather recognize that success more likely reflects that you have failed to reach new territory.

Any success that is not preceded by multiple failures is probably a deception. You need to appreciate the benefits of trying new ideas that fail or go nowhere as greater than the comfortable security of having no new ideas at all. You cannot learn this from schools and teachers.

References

Wagner, David (2024 Apr 19). “The Stupidity Paradox.” thewagner.net. https://thewagner.net/blog/2024/04/19/the-stupidity-paradox/

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe