Regarding Your Battle with the World’s Stupidity

Have you ever been beside yourself at how idiotic some action, service or product is, and wanted to take up arms against the stupidity of it all?

Like those customer (dis)service voice menus that take you on a ride to nowhere and then hang up on you.  Like those people who can’t manage to park their car between the lines. Like when people push leftovers to the back of the fridge where you can’t see them and they sprout unseemly science experiments. These are just examples of relatively small issues. I’m sure you can recall far worse.

And you can’t just let this stuff go as if everything is fine.

Let’s face it, practical intelligence does not rule our society, and the stupidity of it all can be infuriating. The question is, how do you respond? Organize? Ignore? Fume?

To be clear, the battle I’m talking about is not fought against people who have modest IQs or minimal education. They are not the enemy. Nor are the overeducated. Rather it’s the smallness of vision and failure to consider consequences that are the villains.

This failure to be more thoughtful and careful can push annoyance buttons for those of us who work very hard to predict and control the impact of all our actions, even to ten steps down the line.

Or at least that’s what we like to think. Too often our own predictions are also based on a very narrow vision, which not only takes us out of the present moment, but also ignores the emotional damage such insistence on control causes. Our own vision is not always as reasonable, effective or efficient as we’d like to think. We’ll come back to this.

Approaches to Stupidity

There are three approaches to dealing with stupidity if it bothers you:

Option 1: Take action: choose your battles and join with others to tackle one specific problem at a time.

Option 2: Let it go and focus on other things.

Option 3: Seethe and obsess.

Those who seethe and obsess usually go it alone, though now there are plenty of places online where you can seethe and obsess with like-minded company. But seething and obsessing isn’t reasonable or effective—whether you do it alone or in misery with others. While a small amount of venting and realizing that you are not alone in your fury at stupidity can be helpful, it will eventually get you stuck.

It’s as if you’re entitled to a world free of stupidity.

Sorry, you are not.

And it’s just as bad as pushing leftovers to the back of the fridge because your sense of grievance grows and rots.

In this post I will focus on Seethers and Obsessors and their battle with stupidity. Here are three main side effects of that battle:

1. Their emotional well-being suffers.
2. Their relationships suffer.
3. They lose sight of what’s most important to them.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

So What Did You Expect?

Expecting humans to behave well is understandable. After all it’s part of our social programming to expect people not to drop the wedding cake as it’s carried into the reception hall.  But we haven’t worked out the bugs of our social expectations yet, and sometimes they leave us extremely frustrated.

Human beings are one big evolutionary compromise, chock full of conflicts, and as such are quite vulnerable to making stupid and annoying mistakes. Like missing their flight because they had to clean the bathroom again before leaving, and now you have to stay up two hours later to pick them up from the airport because they caught a later flight.

On the other hand, expecting that humans will always behave stupidly can also bring us down. Your negativity bias is powerful enough as it is. You don’t need to encourage it.

I’m not sure which is worse, being surprised that people ever do stupid things, or expecting that people will always do stupid things. One is naïve, the other is cynical. Neither one will rescue you from the defectiveness of our world.

Seething and Obsessing with the Stupidity Police

Some people approach stupidity by joining the Stupidity Police. It’s a particular way of engaging in the war on deficient common sense. They feel a personal responsibility to oppose stupidity–even if only in their mind.

It’s a helpful metaphor, though these police don’t really work together. It’s a lonely battle because it just goes on in your own mind. A lone warrior facing down the immense army of stupidity.

Whether or not it’s effective to serve with the Stupidity Police doesn’t seem to be part of the calculation.

Seethers and Obsessors usually don’t actually say or do anything, but they feel a duty to serve as monitors—witnessing the horrors of spilled ice cream cones and cars run out of gas on the highway. They rehearse their remonstrations in their mind, and if they do express their displeasure, it’s usually by not doing what others want them to do. This is protest via passive aggressive behavior.  “Everyone is so stupid that I won’t get involved.”

The word police usually implies the control, regulation or enforcement of civil laws and community standards.  But whether the Stupidity Police are actually enforcing community standards remains to be seen. It may be their own private collection of grievances, rather than mutually accepted rules.

The Stupidity Police and Prevention

The Stupidity Police don’t just look for things that are bad, they also look for things that could possibly go bad. They also serve as Prevention Police, which is a very large beat to patrol.

If someone doesn’t use their turn signal it could cause an accident. If someone leaves a coffee cup on the desk it could get knocked over and permanently ruin the document that was going to save the world. And of course if they move that leftover to the back of the fridge we could, one might argue, all die of sepsis from a bacterial infection.

Part of the motivation for serving with the Prevention Police is to keep potentially stupid things from happening by keeping them in view. And they feel that that’s part of their job. They have a sense of responsibility, though their motivations are not always so pure. The real energy that keeps the Stupidity Police running is usually the burst of energy that comes from feeling wiser than others.

But aren’t there times when it does make sense to try to police others? Maybe even save them from their own stupidity?

Yes. But my concern is that for many people such critical surveillance of the world becomes a deeply engrained habit, a chronic condition and necessary part of their identity, rather than a tool they use purposefully and discriminately.

And it becomes self-reinforcing. After a while they become very unhappy and feel they must keep proving to themselves and to the world that they’re unhappy because the world is such a stupid place.

Lisa Patrols the World

Lisa had it out for stupidity big time. Determined to prove how absurd and senseless people usually were, she was like a sentinel guarding a village. No foolishness got past her. And that was part of the problem. She internalized it all.

She’d watch you planting grass in June and think to herself what a waste that was since the seed was just going to dry up. She’d tsh-tsh at the grocery when people bought things that everyone knew would go on sale next week. She’d seethe at how thoughtlessly people raised their kids and what it would cost all of us down the line.

So far it might seem that Lisa is an unsympathetic character. But let’s give her some credit. She always thought far enough ahead so that she never missed voting in an election, and she always researched the candidates thoroughly. She never failed to use her turn signals. And she devotedly kept a very tidy fridge.

She was rarely rude to others, but the policing in her mind was, in effect, rude to herself. And it was one of the reasons she was alone. But she felt she knew better than everyone else, and she was committed to keeping it that way. She’d die on the hill of perfect behavior if she needed to.

Unfortunately she never realized that her original motivation, living a life of integrity, had been hijacked by her insecurity and need to prove to herself that she was not as stupid as her parents said she was.

Morality and Stupidity

As I was working on this post I noticed how often I drifted over to the ways people attack deficient morality as the enemy rather than just focus on when people attack mere stupidity.

There’s a reason for that.

Conflating stupidity and morality makes sense if you think of thoughtlessness as being lazy or selfish, and therefore immoral.

It might appear that the Stupidity Police are only out to police stupidity, but there is often a moral undertone to their enforcement. It’s as if people choose to be stupid and so are therefore also guilty of being slothful, indulgent and morally deficient. And that brings a whole ‘nother level of disdain to their mission.

Occasionally I come across a bug in a piece of software or a website which seems patently idiotic to me, and I assume that someone didn’t bother doing their job. They were too busy faffing about on Instagram to pay attention to what they were supposed to be doing, I’m sure. I fume at how lazy they were. Don’t they ever test this stuff? That’s not just a failure to consider consequences, it’s failure to try hard enough.

Dump them into the brig! Not just for stupidity, but also for lack of principles!

Of course thing are rarely so simple and I need to get off my high horse. Why does it get to me so much?

As Carl Jung reputedly said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.” The understanding here is that perfection is too highly valued, that leisure is not valued enough, and that I haven’t accepted the limitations of the world.

There’s a lot of overlap between what we see as “stupidity” and moral deficiency. We don’t have to sort it out meticulously, but it can be informative for us to see what pushes our buttons.

Isolation and Purposelessness

I am also concerned that people who spend too much time with the Stupidity Police become isolated from others, and separated from their purpose in the world. They have something to say, a role to play, but they see the world as too broken and too stupid to listen to them.

I am reminded of lines from a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, A Film from the Sixties:

He has nothing in common with the world.

He feels like a handle broken off a jug,

But the jug doesn’t know it’s broken and keeps going to the well.

Szymborska concludes her poem thus:

God of humor, do something about him, OK?

God of humor, do something about him today.

I think about what it would be like to be the broken handle from a jug, and to only be able to watch as the jug goes to the well without me. Going to the well without me as the handle would be more difficult and awkward. It would be stupid, and my purpose in life would be lost.

“No one listens to me. I could make things so much easier if they did. They don’t even know I’m missing. And, yet, I take myself very seriously, perhaps because on some deep level I know that I’ve lost my sense of purpose. And criticism of others has taken its place.”

The problem is not just that you drive yourself crazy and isolate yourself by criticizing others. Your original motivation, a deeper, compelling urge to make life better, is lost on mere internal gossip.

Motivations: What Are You Seething For?

We also need to ask, what does serving in the Stupidity Police do for you? Is it part of your identity? Does it make you feel good about yourself? If you have a shadow side that you are uncomfortable with, a side that might not be so rational, it may be reassuring to feel that you are on the side of Reason.

Again, what can we learn from our irritation?

What motivates your Stupidity Police? It will help to explore what you had imagined, in the back of your mind, was going to be happen as a result of your serving with the Stupidity Police.

• Teach them a lesson?

• Make them suffer?

• Get that person to change?

• Feel relieved of your anger?

• Feel that you’ve done your duty?

• Feel better about yourself for not making such stupid mistakes?

Of course people usually don’t join the Stupidity Police with conscious intention, but it must serve a function for you if you keep doing it. What is the unmet need that that serves for you?

Is there something you want to protect by confronting stupidity in your mind? As with most obsessive-compulsive striving, the original intent was likely good, but the energy has been siphoned off to unproductive causes.

Out of Your Control

Yes, surely some people are not as enlightened as you and will put knives where the spoons should be, park inefficiently, and not bother to look at a map before a trip so they get lost when they’re out driving and they get in everyone else’s way on the highway.

But, as you might have noticed, they are out of your control. Perhaps you haven’t accepted that yet, and you’re hoping that derision, passive aggressive responses, or driving yourself crazy with obsessive fantasies of setting them right will help matters.

Sorry, it won’t.

Cultivating Acceptance and Flexibility

Here are some steps to take If you’d like to retire from the Stupidity Police.

• Recognize when you go into policing mode. What are the phrases you typically say to yourself? How does it feel in your body? Pleasant? Unpleasant?

• If policing mode feels good to you, try to identify what you like about it.

• Once you have familiarized yourself with the Stupidity Police in your head, decide whether this is something you want to continue.

• Ask if it’s worth the price of the distance from others and the negativity that goes with it. Is there another way to get the good part of that?

• If you don’t want to continue, embrace something else. Forgiveness? Self-forgiveness? Acceptance? Understanding? Compassion?

• Ideally, nurture the original seed, the original motivation that lead you notice when things weren’t being done well. As with most obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior, there is a seed of something positive in it. Find that seed and cultivate it.

But perhaps most importantly, one of the best strategies to help you retire from the Stupidity Police is to simply look in the mirror. It helps me to let up on other people just to recall my own stupidities—without lambasting myself for them.

I would be surprised if any of you said that you had never done anything stupid. If you haven’t, power to you. Just have some empathy for those of us who are human.

And may the God of Humor bestow some frivolity on all of us to help ease the transition.

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Has intelligence been part of your identity? If so, read my post about The Archetype of Fool, from whom we have much to learn.

And for a comprehensive approach to optimizing the obsessive-compulsive personality, read my book, The Healthy Compulsive: Healing Obsessive-Compulsive Personality and Taking the Wheel of the Driven Personality.