ROBERT J. Sternberg, the editor of the new book “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid,” says stupidity is not the opposite of smartness. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Sternberg says “many of the singularly idiotic acts that come to public attention are the work of people who are, in fact, highly intelligent.” Why? Because “it sometimes takes a smart person to do something truly stupid.” Smart people commit stupidities because they think they’re too smart to make mistakes. Stupid people commit stupidities because, well, they’re stupid. As the main character in Albert Camus’s “The Fall” would put it, “the certainty…of being more intelligent than everyone else….is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it.” The Socratic admission that, in the end, one knows close to nothing is, incidentally, the first sign of wisdom—which Sternberg believes to be the opposite of stupidity.
However, nothing in the past, not even facts and reality, had prevented smart people and other experts to inflict their smartness and expertise on us. There will always be smart people like Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton who will commit idiotic acts, and there will always be experts like Aristotle who once said that Viagra’s end result could also be achieved through eating parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns bruised to powder and drank in scallion, sea shell fish, etc. Aristotle also believed that eels came from mud and moist earth, and that women have fewer teeth than men.
In Jan. 1996, North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge said there was no need to fund abortions for rape victims because “people who are raped—who are truly raped—the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work, and they don’t get pregnant.” This probably explains Sen. Jesse Helms’s amazing electoral successes in North Carolina.
Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” believed that coition causes gout. CEOs of major tobacco companies, for their part, insist that nicotine is not addictive.
If Pacific islanders would only listen to Rush Limbaugh, they would stop worrying about global warming. “Even if polar ice caps melted,” he said, “there would be no rise in ocean levels…. After all, if you have a glass of water with ice cubes in it, as the ice melts, it simply turns to liquid and water level in the glass remains the same.” Of course in the real world, most of the ice is on land, in Antarctica, so if that ice cap melted, according to a University of Texas geophysicist, “sea level around the world would rise about 200 feet,” causing the disappearance from the map of several small islands in the Pacific.
In 1925, a British educator and supporter of the Prohibition said that “in a generation, those who are now children will have lost their taste for alcohol.”
Eight years later, the U.S. secretary of state told Time magazine that “the maltreatment of Jews in Germany has virtually been eliminated.”
In Feb. 1969, the New York Times correspondent in Vietnam reported that “the enemy has lost the war militarily—the signs of deterioration are plain.”
As early as 1948, a U.S. delegate to the United Nations had already come up with a proposal for peace in the Middle East, and that is for the Arabs and the Jews to “settle this problem in a true Christian fashion.”
In 1916, a man called Charlie Chaplin predicted that movies are “little more than a fad.”
Universal Pictures executives wouldn’t hire Burt Reynolds because, they told him, “You have no talent.” Clint Eastwood didn’t fare better. “You have a chip on your tooth, your Adam’s apple sticks out too far and you talk too slow.” In 1964, United Artists refused to hire Ronald Reagan for “The Best Man” because Ron “doesn’t have the presidential look.”
Decca didn’t want to sign up the Beatles in 1962 because “groups of guitars are on their way out.” Eight years earlier, a singer named Elvis Presley was fired by the manager of a night club after one performance. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere…son,” he told Elvis. “You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”
As Vice President Dan Quayle brilliantly put it in a 1989 speech, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind. How true that is.”
