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Life is easier when you understand these facts.
7 lesser-known facts about fools & stupidity
1. You can’t talk somebody out of stupidity.
As much as you would like to, as much as it seems reasonable to try (just this once), it doesn’t ever work. No attempt to reason will ever not go over their heads. Idiots by definition filter out the logic in everything they hear and choose to latch onto the nonsense. They hold to something, not because they think it’s right, but because it would take thought to change, they would have to consider, perhaps even learn stuff, they would have to go through the anguish of deep thought. Deep thought, calculation, analysis, all are anathema to the idiot.
No matter how obvious their stupidity is, the fool will hold to it because sooner or later, the person trying to talk them out of it will give up and go away and they won’t feel threatened any more. The comfort of having an actual opinion on something is more important to them than the rightness of that opinion.
2. The world is full of them
They are all over the fucking place. Your family, your work-place, the evening news, the people the next table over in IHOP, you can’t escape them. They talk loudly so as to identify themselves to one another, they insist on emailing you shit that some other idiot emailed to them. Humanity is infested. They hide behind religion and race, to get us to believe that those are the real problems. They camouflage their stupidity in order to survive, the same way some fish will change color to blend into their environment.
3. They don’t know that they are stupid
They are oblivious to the wrongness of their ideas and decisions. A fool will put a great deal of effort into justifying an action that is clearly wrong rather than admitting that it was wrong and moving on to something else. That proverb about “beating a dead horse”? That was about fools. Fools never ever admit being wrong about something, everything they have ever done was right, no matter the consequences. This goes back to the fool’s allergy to deep thought.
They are also fond of Umbrella Justification, which is using one detail to make everything else right. Example: If the leader of, say, a company, is a Christian, then his decisions are Christian, and therefore legitimate, if he uses sweat-shops that employ 3 year-old kids, then sweat-shops must be a good thing. If a band puts out a good album, then everything else they put out afterwards must also be good, and so on. This keeps the fool from having to reconsider or consider a bunch of details.
4. Politics is about using the stupids
The more I look at politics (especially the conservative and hardcore socialist kinds) the more practical it seems given that there are so many fools. Here is a school of thought that instead of trying to convert fools, has chosen to exploit them. Given that fool-conversion is impossible exploitation seems to be the most rational course. If you can get them to vote you in and stand slack-jawed while you your buddies line your pockets, why not pander to them? If you can manipulate them into giving you immense power by riling them into a jingoistic froth, then it would be foolish not to. By being gullible and refusing to think, foolish people have reduced themselves to being a resource, a commodity, free for the taking.
5. They don’t change/go away
Foolishness is immutable. People don’t get wise with age, they don’t suddenly get tired of being stupid and just change their ways. A lightbulb doesn’t just "come on" one day. If your town is populated by fools, move away. They are a species separate from humanity, creatures that we have been deceived into thinking are like us, but they are not. You don’t expect your dog to be come human, you shouldn’t expect a fool to become a non-fool.
6. Consequences mean nothing to them
Being able to form a link between personal actions and the consequences of those actions would take thought, and a will to reconsider. We have already gone over the fools’ allergy to these things. They can and do suffer, but the fault is somebody else’s always some other person of another race, from another state, some politician that they did not vote into office. Fools love their scapegoats.
7. Ignoring them causes trouble
If you go about pretending that they don’t exist, or that their numbers are small, then you basically you are ignoring mankind’s oldest menace. They are a cancer and bad shit happens when you ignore cancers. Besides that, they act up when you don’t pay attention to them, by “pay attention” I mean shamelessly use them for your own ends. Fools left up to their own devices are just people for your enemies to mobilize and use against you. You need to speak to them on their own wavelength, step down and pretend to be one of them. Fools like condescension.
7 lesser-known facts about fools & stupidity
1. You can’t talk somebody out of stupidity.
As much as you would like to, as much as it seems reasonable to try (just this once), it doesn’t ever work. No attempt to reason will ever not go over their heads. Idiots by definition filter out the logic in everything they hear and choose to latch onto the nonsense. They hold to something, not because they think it’s right, but because it would take thought to change, they would have to consider, perhaps even learn stuff, they would have to go through the anguish of deep thought. Deep thought, calculation, analysis, all are anathema to the idiot.
No matter how obvious their stupidity is, the fool will hold to it because sooner or later, the person trying to talk them out of it will give up and go away and they won’t feel threatened any more. The comfort of having an actual opinion on something is more important to them than the rightness of that opinion.
2. The world is full of them
They are all over the fucking place. Your family, your work-place, the evening news, the people the next table over in IHOP, you can’t escape them. They talk loudly so as to identify themselves to one another, they insist on emailing you shit that some other idiot emailed to them. Humanity is infested. They hide behind religion and race, to get us to believe that those are the real problems. They camouflage their stupidity in order to survive, the same way some fish will change color to blend into their environment.
3. They don’t know that they are stupid
They are oblivious to the wrongness of their ideas and decisions. A fool will put a great deal of effort into justifying an action that is clearly wrong rather than admitting that it was wrong and moving on to something else. That proverb about “beating a dead horse”? That was about fools. Fools never ever admit being wrong about something, everything they have ever done was right, no matter the consequences. This goes back to the fool’s allergy to deep thought.
They are also fond of Umbrella Justification, which is using one detail to make everything else right. Example: If the leader of, say, a company, is a Christian, then his decisions are Christian, and therefore legitimate, if he uses sweat-shops that employ 3 year-old kids, then sweat-shops must be a good thing. If a band puts out a good album, then everything else they put out afterwards must also be good, and so on. This keeps the fool from having to reconsider or consider a bunch of details.
4. Politics is about using the stupids
The more I look at politics (especially the conservative and hardcore socialist kinds) the more practical it seems given that there are so many fools. Here is a school of thought that instead of trying to convert fools, has chosen to exploit them. Given that fool-conversion is impossible exploitation seems to be the most rational course. If you can get them to vote you in and stand slack-jawed while you your buddies line your pockets, why not pander to them? If you can manipulate them into giving you immense power by riling them into a jingoistic froth, then it would be foolish not to. By being gullible and refusing to think, foolish people have reduced themselves to being a resource, a commodity, free for the taking.
5. They don’t change/go away
Foolishness is immutable. People don’t get wise with age, they don’t suddenly get tired of being stupid and just change their ways. A lightbulb doesn’t just "come on" one day. If your town is populated by fools, move away. They are a species separate from humanity, creatures that we have been deceived into thinking are like us, but they are not. You don’t expect your dog to be come human, you shouldn’t expect a fool to become a non-fool.
6. Consequences mean nothing to them
Being able to form a link between personal actions and the consequences of those actions would take thought, and a will to reconsider. We have already gone over the fools’ allergy to these things. They can and do suffer, but the fault is somebody else’s always some other person of another race, from another state, some politician that they did not vote into office. Fools love their scapegoats.
7. Ignoring them causes trouble
If you go about pretending that they don’t exist, or that their numbers are small, then you basically you are ignoring mankind’s oldest menace. They are a cancer and bad shit happens when you ignore cancers. Besides that, they act up when you don’t pay attention to them, by “pay attention” I mean shamelessly use them for your own ends. Fools left up to their own devices are just people for your enemies to mobilize and use against you. You need to speak to them on their own wavelength, step down and pretend to be one of them. Fools like condescension.
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