Stupidity has No Limits

‘Destruction is the Point’

The great French dramatist Alexandre Dumas, fils, said:

le génie humain a des limites, quand la bêtise humaine n’en a pas [human genius has its limits, while human stupidity does not].

A man of great humility, Dumas had the insight to know that stupidity has no awareness unto itself. A century later, we have a better term for that: “mental unfitness” (or mental incapacity by reason of severe mental illness, intellectual disability, neurological disorder—or, at times, prolonged deprivation of education or lack of access to information).

I have only now come read an article someone forwarded to me by David Brooks, titled, “The Six Principles of Stupidity”—but the timing is perennial, as the current administration continues to spew out stupid policies, such as trade tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China that may sink the global economy, and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which may cause millions of preventable deaths worldwide. Unfitness does not only have flagrant displays but can flagrate the world—without limit.

The article is worth quoting in large portion, with commentary:

This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.

Brooks is entirely correct—but what we call “unfitness” is not only descriptive but possible to evaluate, quantify, and prevent. This is why mental health experts tried to warn, before the predictable happened, in our 2017 public-service book: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

We all know high-IQ people who behave in a way that’s as dumb as rocks…. As the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

Precisely. Unfitness can be seen as a quality that makes one incapable of using the gifts one has, including intelligence.

I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?... I’d like to focus on … the attempt to freeze federal spending on assistance programs, and Trump’s subsequent decision to reverse course and undo the freeze.

Those who have read our fitness evaluation during the first Trump presidency will recognize that one of the questions we ask in assessing fitness is: is one able to consider the consequences of one’s actions? The then-president was not. Another question we ask when assessing fitness is: is the person able to make stable decisions, without immediately going back on them? The then-president was not. Nor did he pass any other criterion of mental fitness, which makes him unfit to hold any job, let alone president.

A prudent administration would have picked the programs it opposed and focused on cutting those, [but] the Trump administration decided to impose a vague, half-baked freeze on what it claimed amounted to more than $3 trillion in federal spending. Suddenly, patients in cancer trials at the National Institutes of Health didn’t know if they could continue their treatments, Head Start administrators didn’t know if they could draw federal funds, cities and states across America didn’t know if they would have money for police forces, schools, nutrition programs, highway repair and other basic services. This Trump policy was like trying to cure acne with decapitation. Nobody seems to have asked the question: If we freeze all grant spending, what will happen next?

One of the very definitions of unfitness is that the stated reasons are not the true ones. This requires rationality, and unfitness means the absence of rational decision making.

And this is my big prediction for this administration: It will churn out a steady stream of stupid policies, and when the consequences of those policies begin to hit Trump’s approval rating, he will flip-flop, diminish or abandon those policies.

This is not where things will end. When there is a growing consensus among the rational and reality-based that he is unfit, he will double down as a form of denial, find scapegoats to deflect and distract from criticisms against him, and ultimately persecute those he most disdains: the powerless and the innocent, as targets for the “projection” of his unwanted qualities.

I’ve distilled what I’ve learned so far into six main principles:

Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement….

Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals…. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “… The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest….

Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions….

Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose, [because] stupid actions do not make sense….

Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality.

I can explain as follows: (1) Unfitness befuddles because it is irrational, and pathology, with the drive of emotional compulsion behind it, all the more so. (2) Unfitness grows to encompass whole institutions and whole nations, when the symptoms are not contained but allowed to spread. (3) Unfitness is more dangerous than malice because of irrationality, but also exponentially more dangerous when combined with malice. (4) When one is unfit, awareness of one’s unfitness is the first thing to go. (5) Unfitness is by definition irrationality.

As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations [assaulting] a large swath of this country…. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself—and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.

This is why I have said that, for pathology, destruction is the point. While I commend Brooks for perceiving all the right points, the Dunning-Kruger effect is working in him, too: he does not recognize that this is an issue that requires expert knowledge because, where mental health is concerned, everyone is an expert now (we have the American Psychiatric Association to thank for this devastating cultural bias). Our self-destructiveness in not obtaining the right help, no matter the degree of seriousness of the problem—and deeming it mere stupidity—is also part of the irrationality that may be our downfall.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is holding weekly live sessions on:

“A Curriculum on One World or None”

The next session will be this Friday, February 14, 2025, at 12 noon EST/9 a.m. PST on Zoom. A paid subscription is required to receive a link the morning before. Thank you!

Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that emphasized the importance of fit leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” She published another book on fit leadership (now privately expanded), in addition to a volume on how unfitness in a leader spreads and two critical statements on fit leadership. Dr. Lee warned that journalists and intellectuals are the first to be suppressed in times of unfit leadership, and it is happening here; she continues, however, to be interviewed or covered abroad, such as in France, Germany, Norway, and Brazil. Dr. Lee authored the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; and 17 scholarly books and journal special issues, in addition to over 300 opinion editorials. She is currently developing a new curriculum of public education on “One World or None.”