Will stupidity be the death of us? Could stupid people doing stupid things cripple or destroy civilization, maybe even cause our extinction? Is it possible? Likely? Inevitable? Suggesting that stupidity is an existential threat may seem ridiculous at first glance, but consider humankind’s current trajectory and ask yourself if this is sustainable. The combination of unrelenting stupidity with global threats and increasingly powerful new technologies may make a species-level catastrophe unavoidable.
Today’s greatest perils—nuclear war, climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, the possible rise of an artificial superintelligence—are all unnecessarily complicated and worsened by stupidity. Too many nations and corporations are led by people who haven’t bothered to understand these threats. Perhaps worse, some do understand them but choose to publicly ignore or deny them. Sadly, stupidity can be personally advantageous for some—at the world’s expense. Many news media owners, managers, and screen personalities promote objectively stupid positions on critical issues as a strategic business model to monetize, spread, and intensify mass stupidity. How long can this continue before humankind has a very bad day?
Apocalypse or not, stupidity is a constant drain and a danger of significant consequence. Fortunately, stupidity can be addressed and reduced, even if it may be impossible to eliminate. But first, what exactly is stupidity and why is it so common?
Once a medical term, “stupid” has been thoroughly popularized and weaponized in our everyday interactions. But this word is much more than a mere insult. Stupid does not mean uneducated or ignorant. Ignorance is an absence of knowledge, a condition remedied by learning. Stupidity, however, is a lack of desire and/or effort to acquire new and better information. Stupidity emerges from the stubborn resistance to learning and self-correction in light of new and better information.
Intelligence and education do not reliably protect us from stupidity. Gifted thinkers with advanced educational accomplishments can be profoundly stupid. Stupidity is not the inability to think. Stupidity is refusing to try.
Rejecting vaccines because you never learned the history of vaccines or how they work might be solved by a good book or the right conversation with the right person. Rejecting vaccines because you consciously chose to trust the rant of an unqualified podcaster over the evidence-based explanations of virologists and epidemiologists is an issue that simple education probably won’t solve.
Stupidity is unrestrained by national borders, economics, political philosophies, religions, ethnic categories, or anything else. It will not be solved by teaching lists of facts or giving everyone brain MRIs. Stupidity is best addressed as a problem of inspiration and motivation. Unfortunately, this means fixing stupid is an extremely difficult challenge. I taught enough science and history classes to know that explaining how the Apollo lunar landings happened or how Homo erectus made tools is easy. Lighting a fire in the mind of every student, keeping them curious and hungering for more, however, takes real effort.
We must confront a tough truth about the celebrated human brain. Stupidity is a normal and expected outcome. Our default settings make falling hard for misperceptions, mistakes, and lies routine. Stupid beliefs and behaviors flow naturally from the standard processes behind our daily perceptions and thoughts. The brain takes many error-prone shortcuts and constantly deceives us. We can’t justifiably condemn it for any of this because the brain evolved in prehistoric environments with survival as the overriding priority. But we can at least be somewhat aware of what’s going on in our own heads and decide to do our best to catch the more dangerous lies and delusions.
A crucial first step to reducing human stupidity is getting more people to understand that we all spend our lives inside a theater of the absurd, the carnival house of mirrors. Humility and caution are essential because the reality that we see, hear, feel, think about, and remember only vaguely resembles actual reality. When we look around, our brains create highly edited representations based on the input taken in by the eyes. Thinking clearly and rationally is never automatic or easy because our thoughts exist within a cloud of biases, emotions, and preexisting beliefs. We don’t remember our past exactly as we lived it. Instead, our brains tell us customized stories about the past. This is why critical thinking—the deliberate effort to evaluate evidence and carefully consider perceptions, thoughts, conclusions, and memories—is the nonnegotiable prerequisite to reducing mass stupidity.
As humans, we all suffer stupidity. The big question is how stupid we are willing to be collectively. Nobody promised existing would be easy. Extinction stalks every species. If we hope to continue sticking around, we must solve enormous problems in the coming years, decades, centuries, and millennia. Considering that our most serious challenges today are caused or exacerbated by stupidity, we had better start doing a better job of dealing with this issue. It starts with inspiring and motivating people—all people everywhere—to think well and think often.