Why Are People So Stupid?

By Gordon A. Long

Social Commentary with a wry twist.
Biting analysis of:
The Stock Market,
Committees,
Corporate Cowboys,
Bureaucracy,
Communism,
Capitalism,
Bullies,
and that idiot driving in front of you who
slams on his brakes for no reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon A. Long
• Release date: Oct 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9780968883563

Gordon A. Long

Brought up in a logging camp with no electricity, Gordon Long learned his storytelling in the traditional way: at his father's knee. He now spends his time editing, publishing, travelling, blogging and writing fantasy and social commentary, although sometimes the boundaries blur. Gordon lives in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, with his wife, Linda. When he is not writing and publishing, he works on projects with the Surrey Seniors' Planning Table, and is a staff writer for Indies Unlimited

Book preview

Let’s take a sharp look at the messed-up elements of our society and question what makes us stupid enough to allow travesties such as these:

1. Humanity can develop weapons of mass destruction to wipe life off the face of the planet, but can't stop schoolyard bullying. Do we really want to? Evidence suggests not.

2. The stock market takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich. Its instability decimates business, destroys economies, ruins countries, and increases human misery. Is this the sort of life we prefer? It seems so.

3. Large numbers of people would rather worry about the predictions of primitive shamans than deal with their 21st century lives. Are we afraid to grow up?

What causes such stupidity? Human nature does. Taken all round, sometimes the human race isn't so smart.

But we could be…

Why Are People

So Stupid?

Gordon A. Long

Published by Airborn Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Gordon A. Long

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form without the express written permission of the author.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ebook ISBN 978-0-9688835-6-3

Discover other titles by Gordon A. Long at Smashwords

A Sword Called…Kitten? http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24310

Contents

1 Every Kid Knows That

2 Imaginary Entities

3 Who Benefits?

4 The Art of Science

5 Cognitive Disasters

6 I Know Better

7 Criminally Stupid

8 Slanted Norm

9 Bullies at All Levels

10 Cowboys and Queen Bees

11 The Justice System

12 Natural Selection

13 Bureaucracy

14 Free Enterprise Myths

15 The Competition Myth

16 Trickle-Down Myth

17 The 51% Election Myth

18 The Stock Market

19 Conclusion

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all the famous thinkers whose opinions I have quoted. Their thoughts encourage me to realize that I am not alone in my analysis of the mental capacity of the human race and of the inane ways in which that talent is often used.

As always, I want to recognize the invaluable assistance of my production team: editors, Cas Peace and Elizabeth Wilson, proof-reader Deanna Vowles, and graphic designer Dusty Hagerud.

Yes, I left an extra comma or two in the above paragraph, because I know they’re the only ones who are going to read this part, and it will drive them absolutely wild.

(Revenge is explained in Chapter 11, The Justice System.)

Preface

Okay, I’m smart enough, but no candidate for Mensa. I tried their entrance exam once, and there was a bunch of it I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

But there was one thing I was always good at. Since I was a little kid, I have watched people and tried to figure them out. Most of the time it was pretty obvious to me why they were doing what they did. And most of the time, that wasn’t why they said they did it. Fascinating.

I learned very quickly that it’s not a good idea to point out this sort of detail to someone. It’s better for your personal well-being to stick to generalities, to look at groups of people instead of individuals. So I took a few university degrees in areas like the theatre and political science, where I got to be critical without attracting so much personal attention.

If you watch people doing things that are illogical, stupid and just plain crazy, things that cause others a lot of suffering, you can have two possible reactions. First, you can get really bitter and twisted and hate everyone. Which doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Second, you can find the maturity to laugh it off and forgive. Human nature being what it is, people are going to do what they’re going to do. If we have to put up with them, there’s no harm in getting a little entertainment out of it.

Oh, yeah, I suppose there’s a third reaction. You could jump right in and take advantage of them. From such temptation does evil grow.

So I’ve spent 55 years honing my skills and making my observations, and this book is the result. I hope that you enjoy it. Maybe it will even cause you to think a little.

And if we happen to notice each other doing something really…well, let’s say…illogical, let’s keep it to ourselves, shall we?

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

- Plato

1. Every Kid Knows That

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

- Albert Einstein

I was about ten years old when I figured out that even adults can be pretty stupid. It came from this kid’s book I was reading about the Canadian winter: snowshoeing, trapping and that sort of stuff. I was a northern boy, and it all seemed very true to life. However…

Minor Stupidity #1

In one episode a character suffered from frostbite, and the advice of the experienced woodsman – some of you older folks will have guessed – was to rub snow on it. I did the reader’s equivalent of a double take. I couldn’t believe anything so stupid. I was 10 years old, and even I knew that was wrong.

I was an avid reader, and once I was on the lookout for it, I discovered that all sorts of people – the ones everyone calls common knowledge – believed in this inanity. Napoleon’s surgeon general recommended the practice. Of course Napoleon lost 440,000 men on the way back from Moscow, most of them to hypothermia, so you’d think people would listen to his advice with a few reservations at least.

When I joined the Boy Scouts and started taking modern first aid, I was happy to learn that medical science had, indeed, caught up with my common sense. Putting the affected area in warm water had become the accepted treatment. But even then I wondered. How did such a stupid idea get to be so popular? How do the authorities come up with idiocy like this? That’s when I started asking myself, Why Are People So Stupid?

Minor Stupidity #2

Let’s look at another example; 90% of body heat is lost through the top of your head, they say. Or 70% or 80% or whatever. Nobody with any brains ever believed that, but experts and others have been quoting it for years. It serves to remind us that they really means anyone who says what I want to hear. More on that later in Chapter 5, Cognitive Disasters. If these guys had their way, we’d all be running around barefoot with our toques on. Where do these stupid ideas come from, and why do they become universally accepted? Why Are People So Stupid?

But, hey, humans can do much worse than that:

Major Stupidity: Bloodletting

All right. Those first examples were two Minor Stupidities that are more notable for the idiocy they demonstrate than for the harm they caused. Big deal.

Let’s look at bloodletting, another historical medical practice that was much more widespread and far more harmful.

The practice developed in ancient Greece, but became widespread from the Middle Ages onward. The Medieval theory was that the interior of the body was filled with four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, relating to the four Greek classical elements of earth, air, fire and water. Keeping the humours balanced kept the patient physically and mentally healthy. Doctors of the time believed that blood was the dominant humour and the one in most need of control. Probably because its regulation was more dramatic and less smelly than the others. In order to balance the humours, a physician would either remove excess blood from the patient or give him an emetic to induce vomiting, or a diuretic to induce urination. Heaven knows how they got rid of black bile, whatever that was.

This lunacy was in widespread use for about 2000 years that we know of. It was only in the nineteenth century, when medicine was developing its present scientific methodology and knowledge that the practice died out. It is interesting to note that even as late as 1923, the Father of Modern Medicine, William Osler, recommended bloodletting. Of course, Osler, besides his many talents and accomplishments, was well known as a practical joker. Makes you wonder.

One British medical text recommended bloodletting for acne, asthma, cancer, cholera, coma, convulsions, diabetes, epilepsy, gangrene, gout, herpes, indigestion, insanity, jaundice, leprosy, ophthalmia (I had to look that one up to be sure: inflammation of the eye), plague, pneumonia, scurvy, smallpox, stroke, tetanus, tuberculosis and for some one hundred other diseases.

You know, it must be nice to be a doctor. Sooner or later your patients are all going to die anyway. Who knows whether the treatment you prescribed killed them?

A glance at a typical medical treatment from 1824 ought to give you a good idea of how idiotic it got. This was recorded as typical treatment, mind you, not because it was anything special.

A French soldier was stabbed in the chest during single combat. At the scene of the accident, he fainted from loss of blood. When he arrived at the local hospital the doctors immediately bled half a litre (20 oz.) from him to prevent inflammation. During the night he was bled another half litre. Early the next morning, the chief surgeon bled the patient another 285ml (10 oz.) During that day, he was bled five more times. Medical attendants removed more than half of his normal blood supply, to cure a patient whose worst problem was the loss of so much blood already that he had passed out!

(BTW, my conversions out of metric and into the old Imperial system are only round numbers. Don’t get picky. If this bothers you, look for other examples in this book of lingering cultural traits whose time is long past.)

Bleedings continued over the next several days. When the wound became inflamed, the physician applied 32 leeches to the worst sections. Over the next three days, there were more bleedings and they stuck on 40 more leeches. The result? The guy actually recovered, although it took him 3 months. During the first month they removed more blood than the total amount originally in his body.

Why?

George Washington died of a throat infection, supposedly caused by weather exposure. Two-fifths of his blood was drawn out in an attempt to cure him. Doesn’t it make you wonder?

(They also tell us that you can’t really get a cold from exposure to cold weather. Should we believe this? We will talk about intuition later.)

When you look at the obvious evidence of what happens when you take blood out of people, and humanity’s millennia of experience with violent death, you have to be thinking, How could such a stupid idea even get started?

Let’s try the logical approach, to see if we can answer this question.

It has been suggested that this practice was influenced by observation of the menstrual cycle. It is easy to see how a bunch of ignorant people (most of them men) could be brought to believe that women were possessed of foul humours that increased at certain times of the month, and that after a spate of bleeding they were miraculously cured. What an aid to marital harmony to have that kind of solution on demand. You’re awfully grouchy today, my dear. Just a moment while I slip this needle…

In regard to the other humours, Doctors would have also observed that with stomach illnesses, regurgitation of bile would often bring relief. It would be natural to suspect that there was too much bile in the stomach. Of course, a lot of mothers were saying, That sounds pretty stupid; he ate something that didn’t agree with him, and now he’s getting rid of it, but who listens to mothers?

A more likely motivation for the bloodletting technique is that it is dramatic and impressive, and it makes it seem like the practitioner is doing something. Look at it from the doctor’s point of view; if you don’t do anything and the patient gets better on his own, you don’t get paid.

Whatever the reason for its beginning, the fact remains that bloodletting did happen. Just as did electric shock therapy for snakebites, trepanning for epilepsy, and the sale of the various snake oils and elixirs upon which modern Americans waste $27 billion annually, exceeding the amount spent on biomedical research.

How Does Such Stupidity Arise?

We have just seen three examples of situations in history where educated people with good intent perpetrated behaviours that any ten-year-old, even in their own time, could have told them were completely stupid. How come? Why weren’t they laughed out of the agora the first time they even mentioned bloodletting? Why didn’t that French soldier’s friends bring their sabres into the hospital and let some blood in their own way, in defence of their friend?

The first and most obvious answer is that everybody isn’t that bright. It helps to remind ourselves that half the people of the world are of below average intelligence. You might counter this bit of wisdom with the fact that the vast majority of people are within such a narrow range of mental ability as makes no nevermind. We might also expect doctors to rank above the average intellect. However, there is one other factor that amplifies the situation: the tendency for problems to compound themselves. Since there is no name for this syndrome, I have created one for your convenience.

Cumulative Stupidity

This is a phenomenon that occurs when an average person commits a normally stupid act, which we will call a Minor Stupidity (forgetting to use the car turn signal). No problem. They happen all the time. But then another person comes along, and not realizing that an error has been made, acts in a slightly stupid way as well, making the situation worse (forgetting to shoulder check before changing lanes). If, through bad luck or bad planning a third person (pedestrian texting while crossing the street) adds one more Minor Stupidity to the situation, then we are rapidly approaching a Major Stupidity and somebody gets killed.

Let’s see how cumulative stupidity might work on a larger scale.

When knowledgeable people (that’s knowledgeable, not smart,) are trying to give out advice to the general populace, they are caught in a cleft stick. They remember that 50% of their target audience is of below-average intelligence, and they have to try to predict how the dummies will react to their advice.

The cleft stick part is the quirk of human nature that people of all levels of intelligence have, as The Boxer suggests:

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.

- Paul Simon

So the wrong people always take the advice that doesn’t apply to them, and the people who need the advice ignore it. We know, for example, that if we say, Our study shows that the problem with the…(insert your country’s name)…economy is that our workers are not working hard enough, then fascist bosses will use the quote as an excuse to thrash their workers even harder, the workaholics will think it applies to them and increase their self-destructive behaviour, and the lazy workers will lay back and say, I’m all right, Jack. They’re not talking about me.

If, on the other hand, we say, Our study shows that …(country name)…workers are working too hard and are overstressed, and this is causing error and injury in the workplace and strain in our social fabric, we know that all the lazy workers are going to use the comment as an excuse to lay back even further, the workaholics will disregard it, and the business community will deplore it as another example of the commie-pinko-leftwing ideas that are destroying our country.

The big danger is that someone will take our advice the wrong way, cause a Major Stupidity, and blame us because we told him to do it. We might even get sued for it.

Caught in this bind, the pundits often water down their advice to the point where it’s basically useless. In the worst case they come up with something completely bizarre. This usually happens when those making up the advice are formed as a committee.

How a Committee Functions (Or Not)

Take the frostbite thing. You can imagine the committee of doctors for the French Imperial Army, or whoever was creating the Manuel de Survie d’Hiver, discussing what to tell their soldiers about treating frostbite.

(To avoid even more misunderstanding, I have translated the conversation into English. Having different languages is a Stupidity of Biblical Proportions. Why doesn’t everybody speak…[insert your favourite language]…like me?)

We have a problem, some bright light suggests. These soldiers are pretty stupid. When they have frostbitten fingers, they want to put their hands in hot water. They have no feeling in their fingers, and they won’t know how hot the water is. They might scald themselves.

Sacré Bleu! (Sorry. If I translated that into English, I’d have to censor it. PC at all times. Can’t afford a lawsuit.) We mustn’t be giving out advice that might make people injure themselves, says the head of the committee, whose career might be affected by adverse publicity. What can we tell them that they can’t mess up?

Well, some genius on the committee suggests, Snow has insulating properties.

That’s right, opines another. And where there is frostbite, there is usually snow.

The accountant on the committee rubs his hands together. And it doesn’t cost anything.

You begin to see how the IQ of a committee varies inversely with the number of members involved. Cumulative stupidity.

The real joke comes centuries later, long after the stupid practice was debunked and thrown on the scrap heap of historical oddities. Researchers into hypothermia have discovered that, when bringing hypothermic patients back to normal temperature, it can be fatal to heat up the extremities quickly, because the rush of cool blood back into the bloodstream can cause a drop in core temperature, sometimes fatal.

Yep, the idiots had a grain of sense. They just didn’t know enough to apply it properly.

It’s the same with the 80% of body heat argument. I suspect that this idea was thought up by a committee with the best of intentions; they were trying to persuade people to cover up their heads in cold weather. Interpreted another way, it could be seen as correct. Possibly 80% of hypothermia problems are caused through insufficient head insulation.

However, that statistic couldn’t be used to persuade people to change their behaviour, because it applies to everybody else (80% of the population). People need a fact that applies to themselves specifically (80% of your heat loss).

Studies have shown* that, when presented with the statement, 90% of people perform …(insert your favourite stupid act)… on a regular basis, 83% of survey responders indicate that the statement does not apply to them. This demonstrates that either,

1. people who respond to surveys are smarter than everyone else, or,

2. somebody is lying.

*I did not actually look up any tests on this subject, because:

1. I’m confident that there are studies that prove my point,

2. you can get a study done to prove almost anything,

3. everyone knows people only quote the studies that prove their points,

4. people only listen to the studies that agree with their ideas, and,

5. because of all of the above, I want you to become very, very leery of studies.

Why Do Pundits Create Stupid Ideas?

1. Because they know people don't listen very well, so they try to second-guess the people, and they guess wrong.

Of course, because these theories were created by the medical science of their time, they soon became entrenched in the lore and thus unassailable.

And that brings up the second answer to the question of how these Stupidities propagate.

Fighting City Hall

For a whole host of reasons, most of them unintelligible to the outside observer,