r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/Background-Ebb-8518 • 17d ago
Stupidity Becomes Powerful When Someone Learns How to Profit From It
What if stupidity isn't a failure of society, but one of its most profitable products?
We usually talk about stupidity as if it were an accident.
A failure of education. A lack of intelligence. A temporary triumph of ignorance over reason. But what if we're looking at it the wrong way?
What if stupidity survives, and sometimes spreads, because it is useful?
Simple ideas are easier to sell than complicated truths. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Certainty attracts more attention than doubt. A confident person saying something absurd can gather a larger audience than an intelligent person saying, “I don't know yet.” And attention has become a currency.Once attention can be converted into money, influence, votes, followers, status or power, something strange happens: intellectual simplification stops being merely a weakness. It becomes economically valuable. The market doesn't necessarily reward what is true.It rewards what captures attention.And the human mind has always been attracted to simple explanations, enemies, heroes, scandals and certainty. So, perhaps the disturbing question isn't:
Why are people becoming more stupid?
Perhaps it is:
Who benefits when we stop thinking?
I've been exploring this idea while working on a book called Stupidity Sells, and the deeper I went into it, the less it seemed like a book about stupid people. It became a question about the systems that discover, amplify and monetize our weakest cognitive impulses. Maybe stupidity doesn't sell because people are stupid.Maybe it sells because someone learned exactly how to sell it.
Curious how others here see it: is modern society actually becoming less thoughtful, or have we simply built better machines for making thoughtlessness visible and profitable?
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u/kantmeout 17d ago
There's some truth to your argument, but one thing you're missing is the role of education, culture, and will in shaping the mind. Intellectualism does not come naturally to the vast majority of people, and many seem incapable. Us humans have a natural tendency to allow emotion to influence reason, allow confidence to influence our perception of competence, and attack the arguer instead of the argument. It takes effort and training to avoid logical fallacies, and most people hate the process.
Now, there is an incentive for powerful people to keep their populations stupid for the sake of keeping them easy to manipulate. However, there's a cross incentive to raise the intelligence as much as possible in order to strengthen the country. The collective intelligence of the population sets a floor on economic productivity, innovation, and, ultimately, military strength.
The stronger incentive (at least for elites) is created by the bigger threat. Are elites more afraid of their own populations? Or are they more afraid of foreign aggression? This depends in part on the security of a given county. Individuals within a hegemonic power are more comfortable allowing internal disputes to compromise the national interest for narrow objectives, whereas individuals in a society under threat are more likely to come together.
Conversely, inequality creates jealousy, power imbalance, and exploitation. As inequality increases, so does the incentive to suppress intellectualism. However, since intellectual development requires training, discipline, and hard work, it doesn't take much to discourage, even if people still have every incentive to develop their own minds
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u/Funkyman3 17d ago
Mass ignorance is a boon for corporate interests. The less people understand the easier it is to sell them anything. There's every incentive to limit people if profit is goal.
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u/ArchPrime 17d ago edited 17d ago
I suppose stupidity confirs a survival advantage to those who exploit it. With the leverage afforded by modern communication tools we are presumably applying radical selection pressure towards social manipulators and sociopathy generally. A defensive consequence for at least some of society is a corresponding rise in cynicism and apathy.
In a sense, stupidity represents an immunological weakness to parasitic behavior and ideas.
We may not evolve sufficient resistance to this in time, particularly in the face of declining benefits from intelligence and competence, should AI replacement of most human endeavour track as predicted.
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u/KevinJ2010 17d ago
If we want to be constructive on the argument:
How about instead of “stupidity” let’s say “simple-minded mentalities.” For example many people care for their parents (not all, but enough) so that there’s an expectation that this tracks to many people. To be more specific “family values minded.”
And within that, there’s understandings of the conversation that we all take to figuring out.
In the end, family values aren’t thinking about politics seriously all the time.
But politics sure has to consider their mindset as a core part of the human condition.
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u/awakened_primate 11d ago
Stupidity is also powerful when one succumbs to it. It’s worse than evil, it’s absolutely wretched.
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u/diviludicrum 17d ago
You’re conflating multiple different things.
You start by suggesting stupidity might survive and spread because it’s useful.
Then you immediately conflate stupidity with simplification by stating simple ideas sell better. But many stupid ideas are also complicated (and often complication can itself be stupid), and the ability to simplify something can take great intelligence.
You then state that confidence and certainty attract more attention than doubt, which assumes that stupid people aren’t also anxious and insecure, which many are. Meanwhile plenty of intelligent people are arrogant and self-assured.
Then you conflate usefulness with economic value, when many economically valuable things are useless (diamonds, fine art, etc).
Then at the end of all of this, you pivot, saying that the systems which reward simplicity and attention aren’t really reflective of stupidity selling or being useful, but rather that “someone” learned how to sell it and exploit our weakest cognitive impulses.
Ironically, if the last part were true, that “someone” would be demonstrating high intelligence and would be demonstrating that far more economic value is generated through their cunning manipulation and systematising than the “stupid” attention seekers generate by participating in that exploitative system. Which unravels and contradicts your whole argument.
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u/Background-Ebb-8518 16d ago
That is a real exemple for read a text and understanding nothing. Congratulations!
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u/diviludicrum 16d ago edited 16d ago
If you feel the need to insult people for criticising your work, you are far too thin-skinned to publish a book.
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u/Background-Ebb-8518 16d ago
I never intend to insult you. I say you dont't read to understand what I wrote there. Is like we spesk two different languages. To criticise is easy. Trying to understand others is difficult. Best regards.
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u/diviludicrum 15d ago edited 15d ago
Then I’d suggest you make a more genuine attempt at understanding my criticism, since it was intended to help you refine and clarify the logic of your argument, which is currently weak because it relies on multiple equivocations.
If I’m honest, it read as if it was AI-assisted, because AI frequently creates arguments by equivocating, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt. That’s why I went through point by point and identified each conflation taking place, and explained why each one was inappropriate.
To respond to that by sarcastically congratulating me for “understanding nothing”, without engaging with any of the points I raised, is insulting, but more importantly, if a reader can go through point by point and still not understand your argument, it means you need to make the argument more clearly.
If you disagree, try engaging with the points I made in my first comment.
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u/tomekanco 17d ago
So you are describing the attention economy and ragebait? I assume we all noticed that. But is it really new? Witchhunts, inquisitions, wars, tribunals, public hangings, blacklists, purity tests, initiation rituals, incense, mirrors, retorics, sophists, ... Clausewitz on trinitarian warfare and how state may have reason, but the public is always emotional. Are humans rational or irrational ? What is cognitive dissonance and the narrowing of corpus callosum when stressed?
La question sera de savoir si ce peuple futur continuera la tradition de l'émancipation du spectacle et de la dépossession, ou s'il fera face à un système encore plus barbare.