'Intellectually Uncomplicated' Versus Stupid: Know the Difference, Spot the Danger!

Editor’s Note: The post is about someone, or a lot of someones in fact. Hence I’m light on specifics, but those who know? You know who you are.

Most people close to me know I’m not a judgy or prejudicial person. I can see the good in most people. I’m an optimist, a lover, and someone who thinks we’re stronger together as a society when we’re all working toward a shared goal. I don’t really have any prejudices that I’m aware of but one.

I can’t stand stupid people.

All my life I had to fight … stupidity and the strain of anti-intellectualism that permeates almost every aspect of American society. From the lowest of the low to some of the highest offices in the land, I have often argued that stupidity — and its cousins “willful ignorance” and “gullibility” — are at the root of so many problems in our society. Get the whole team together and you have a recipe for national disaster. There’s a reason why the first things maliciously controlling people attack are books, schools, educators, and intellectuals — because one of them might slip up, make some sense, and convince people to open up their eyes and deal with reality.

CAN’T HAVE THAT!

Ignorant masses are easier to manipulate and control. Combine that with suppressing wages and fomenting cultural in-fighting, and you have a permanent, but bizarrely proud-of-it underclass.

This often goes beyond our usual dividers of race, age, class, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, and belief. Those dividers are real, but not insurmountable if we agree to respect the humanity of others. No, stupid people are not the domain of any one race, religion, or political party. Stupid people exist in every aspect of our Republic, on every level, and in every workplace, and are sometimes even inside your own home.

The Stupid™ is calling from inside the house, yo! Get out!

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But before I go deeper into my rant, there is a HUGE difference between a person who has chosen willful ignorance as a lifestyle and someone who is simply “intellectually uncomplicated.” The intellectually uncomplicated usually aren’t at risk of hurting anyone but occasionally themselves. They don’t brag about how they detest reading or struggle with learning. They don’t give those who know more a hard time. In fact, they usually want to work with those who know more in hopes of improving their own situations. They have instincts and “guts” that are excellent bullshit detectors. They’re curious about things. They make an effort, even if it is difficult at times. They can have ambition. They can achieve great things. They’re often kind, loving, productive members of society. And the last thing they’d ever do is discourage someone — especially their own children, family, or friends — from doing better for themselves. In fact, they champion it and are proud when those they love do well. Maybe they’re intellectually uncomplicated from lack of opportunity or poverty. Maybe they don’t have the rigor or interest for more academic pursuits, but they’re at peace with that and aren’t fearful of others who do.

They’re down-to-earth good people and we need people like this for our society to function.

So, if you are a poor-to-average student who lives a good, decent life — whether simple or not — but contributes positively to society in some way shape, or form, you are not who I have beef with. You understand what your limits are. You know being “not into nerd stuff” doesn’t mean you don’t have tremendous value. You don’t have to lie or embellish. You’re proud to be who you are and where you’re from, but you don’t have to chop others off at the knees to bring them “down to size” in order to feel superior. You don’t even want to feel superior.

You mostly just want to be left alone.

I respect you. I like you. You are my friend. I’m probably related to you, as my descendants were made up of hard-working people denied an education thanks to rampant discrimination, poverty, and Jim Crow, but made the best of their lives anyway. So yeah, you’re all cool.

Stupid people tho? Maliciously, aggressively stupid people who are in denial about their lack of intellectual acumen and use their narcissism and self-loathing to set the world on fire? They’re my enemy. They are my kryptonite. They’re the only people capable of making me irrationally angry with a blind, stammering madness rooted in how the real villains in almost every aspect of my life as a nerd were people who thought I read books and knew big words to “spite them,” therefore I needed to be destroyed.

I’ve tried to befriend the maliciously stupid and got burned over and over. I’ve even dated and fallen for a few aggressively dumb, awful people. (They can occasionally be charismatic and I have a bad habit of confusing confidence with arrogance.) Each time this happened I found myself in a parasitic relationship with essentially Cthulhu or some other destroyer of worlds. Or at least my world. And maybe a few others. And like Batman, I have rules and a code, but the wickedly stupid have no code, no boundaries. They’re basically the Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight but without his oddly meticulous planning skills or Heath Ledger’s fatal charm.

Some (stupid) people just want to watch the world burn.

Stupid people are always talking about how someone else needs to “know their place,” as if the place of The Stupid™ weren’t a garbage bin. And no shade to Oscar the Grouch, who is actually quite witty, The Stupid™ (who are unfortunately legion) are basically a bunch of bitter betties who rather than “do the work” or “make an effort,” prefer to sit in their dumpsters and shout at the people who do. (I.E. they are the folks who are filling your comment section with racism, sexism, various phobias, and typos. Pretty sure Doja Cat is rapping about these individuals on “Paint the Town Red.”) They value things with no value and celebrate schadenfreude. They are incapable of being happy for anyone who might have something they do not have. Everything is a competition and they’re losing, but rather than look within, they’re on social media actively ruining it for everyone else being the living embodiment of the Spider-Man pointing meme.

It can’t be their fault for their lot in life! It just can’t! It was their mother, father, teachers, government, employers, landlords, former friends, exes, the bus driver, Meghan Markle, Megan Thee Stallion, and Meegan, the smartest girl in their 8th grade geometry class’ fault.

And this would all be fine! I could accept them if it weren’t for the fact that they’re often both dumb and dangerous. They’re the people who hurt people over minor infractions — real and imagined. They stand for nothing while falling for everything. They shoot women for mocking them. They prefer to torch everything rather than live in a Democratic society where someone, sometimes might have something they don’t have, like a brain.

And don’t get it twisted, the malignantly stupid are not “dumb.” Not all of them anyway. Some of them have read a book! Some even used their parents’ last names to get into Ivy League schools and then, with tutors and sometimes straight-up cheating managed to barely graduate. Then, armed with their papers and pedigree, they go around saying the dumbest shit ever but insisting you have to listen to them because THEY WENT TO HAAARRRRVAAAARD and they never shut up about this! The Stupid™ know the tricks of the trade. They know that for many people appearances and how things seem equals what they are in the eyes of those easy to manipulate. If I rock Gucci does that mean I am rich and therefore can afford it? God no. It only means I blew a lot of money on a bag. Or that it’s fake. Or that the tags are still on it and I’m hoping to return it to Neiman Marcus. Or that I got it from some version of Rent-the-Runway.

It’s all window dressing. It’s all the Great and Powerful Oz until you pull back that dressing and see a small, pathetic con man.

A degree from Harvard is great. But if you’re a legacy who just had it all handed to you and you put forth minimal effort just to be in rooms your wealth and family name already put you in? Wack.

Saying things are a “meritocracy” when you just married well and your wife’s dad hired you to run his company? Wack.

Nepo babies who pretend like they weren’t born on third base, but actually hit a triple? Wack.

Saying you’re a self-made billionaire when daddy wrote a multi-million dollar check to get you started and you’re still not actually a billionaire, just mid-tier rich? Like, you’re the Applebee’s of rich people? So wack.

Either way, THE LIES!

But don’t let me stop with the rich and famous morons. We brokies have our own idiot crabs-in-a-bucket situation going on where some people on the bottom “don’t want you to have shit” and “want you to be broke and miserable just like them,” as my Granny used to say.

My Granny, a fiery and fashionable woman who rarely minced her words, worked hard to get her family out of a cycle of poverty that had them trapped for generations. All with an 8th grade education.

But not everyone in her life was “pleased” that she had gotten out of sharecropping and moved on to be a homeowner alongside her husband. But my Granny did see her haters as motivators. It wasn’t like she was gonna move out of her house to be “down.” Who does that? Instead, she and my Grandpa dressed to the nines when they went to church and were proud of their family and us grandkids, and all we’d accomplished.

She felt like if you didn’t like her, looked down on her nine kids, or wanted to accuse her of thinking she was “better” than others, cool.

Better to be not on a plantation than on one.

There’s an easy test to identify if you are among the malignantly stupid — mainly you will be offended, easily, by everything just written here because you know you live in a glass house built on a pile of shit. Rather than be introspective and make amends to those lives you’ve ruined, or just ignore this and pay it dust, you will try to destroy me with your illogic and irrationality. It won’t work. (You think you’re the first dummy to try to keep me down??? I am from Missouri and went to college in Southern Illinois, sir! I went to the integrated school with some of the “finest” future Klan members.) But hey, you can try! I’ll never knock the “try” even if it’s pointless and you’d be better served taking some reading comprehension courses.

Long story short, I always feel sorry for the nice nerd in the bad situation. Things like being the only “House” intellectual on Bravo Housewives and such. Here you are, a medical doctor in Miami or a four-degreed doctorate in Maryland, being thrown insults about shit that, quite frankly, does not matter. You’re trying to educate future generations and help save lives. Does it really matter if you have the latest Louboutins-on-loan, a Botox-ed to-hell-and-back face, a sugar daddy, or are the queen bee in a hive of nonsense? Not really. But these aren’t BAD things in and of themselves! I have no problem with looking good, feeling good, and buzzing over your queendom while making your paper by whatever legal means you choose to make it. It’s only bad when you’re surrounded by people for whom these are the only things that matter, and do you know the places where what only matters are the superficial and skin deep?

In high school and Hollywood, my friend.

Well, I’m not professionally pretty, so I probably won’t make it in Hollywood very far. And while I graduated from high school, I’m very much like my father who said to himself when he looked at his childhood bedroom that he shared with his two brothers for the last time: “I ain’t never coming back here.”

So props to all the brainy folks in dumb situations. I came from the land of stupid and I ain’t never going back. But to those who choose to or can’t leave? Thoughts and prayers, girl. Thoughts and prayers.

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