I often hear this sentiment: Most people are stupid and dumb.
I’ve thought about it a lot lately. I don’t agree. I actually think most people are smart. (NO, I’m not being nice at all!)
But the current systems we have:
- Don’t teach us to communicate effectively.
- Don’t encourage us to think critically for ourselves. So when/if we learn to do so, often the hard way, we’ve already built suspicion and distrust.
- And that definitely communicates itself when we finally decide to speak up… so people are now called stupid and dumb.
Nick and I discuss this quiet often. How in school we were taught the concept of “critical thinking.”
Schools taught it but I never felt they really practiced it.
I grew up going to a Catholic highschool and I remember before my graduation, one of the big essay questions has something to do with divorce.
The question was something like: “Should divorce be legal or not? Why?”
(In the Philippines, divorce is not legal. Annulment is.)
So… we all know the “correct” answer to this, ofcourse. It was hammered to us throughout the class. Plus, this class is entitled something like “Marriage & Sacraments.”
But in my naivety— I felt very strongly in answering for myself. This is my chance to say how I feel.
So trusting (crucial part of all this) in my teacher’s judgment — I answer “Yes, I think it should be legal. Blah blah blah.”
It was the “wrong” answer.
But here’s the thing, if you will not accept any other answers, why put this into an exam, with an incentive of a good or bad grade? What exactly are we trying to do here?
At this moment, I slowly saw that a lot of institutions (not just schools) test and reward on obedience. Often, blind obedience. ( Because discussions and questions are usually not a priority of these systems.)
These systems doesn’t value thinking critically for yourself and communicating your thoughts. No.
So we don’t get to practice doing this as much, if at all.
What we do practice and are conditioned to do is take in information and give it back exactly the way we receive it. Or atleast give back where results are already predetermined for us.
No need to digest it! Or digest a little, but don’t digest too much!
Actually danger alert if you started fully digesting. Possibilities of bad grades, bad performance reviews, name-calling, etc.
So, what are we doing?
I feel, we’ve invalidated people’s brain and thought processes. And created people with digestion problems.
So when we say people are dumb and stupid and constipated — well, the systems we’ve built are making all of us like this.
Nature vs nurture?
So when can blind obedience work? Maybe when people/institutions who ask for them are trustworthy. Are they? Have they proven to be? ?
Most institutions (through impressive influencers, thought-leaders, big names) will feed us something and they would like us to feed them back the same exact thing so they can have a predictable result.
In the end, maybe it is a need for control or order.
What’s funny is that these are what machines are supposed to do. What we want machines to do.
This is what most people mean when they talk about “Artificial intelligence” right?
Predictable and controlled results. Sometimes predetermined. I want this machine to do this and only this. Over and over again.
But notice how it’s even labeled?
“Intelligence”
Really? Maybe it should be labeled Artificial Obedience.
And guess what our greatest fear is of “Artificial Intelligence?”
That these robots will start to think for themselves and thus turn on us (because duh, human made them workslaves) and thus kill all of us.
Maybe that is at the root of it. In some parts of humans’ brain, we feel that empowering every single person to “think critically for themselves” is evil and will cause us all to die and self-destruct.
Is it true? I don’t know. Something to think about.
Did you know that even when breeding dogs, a precious personality trait is “obedience?”
Started googling this, and if you google “good” dogs — “good” often means, “obedient and easily trained” dogs.
Hey, no judgement. I don’t have a pet so I don’t know what you’re all going through. But it is an interesting thing.
Humans seems to have an addiction to obedience. And maybe the other side to that, is an addiction to control and order.
Maybe we should also have an addiction to trustworthiness so it can be more of a complete picture, eh?
So, I think a lot of people are smart — often in their own way.
But we, collectively, do not want and do not value “smart” people. We, collectively, do not care for people who think for themselves. We, collectively, want people to be “stupid and dumb.”
Because the opposite is pretty scary, right? Let’s be real. Imagine people who actually think for themselves? Billions of them. Sounds overwhelming.
And maybe, kinda… amazing at the same time.
✌️
