The Art of Being an Idiot

Communism shot itself in the foot the day it tried to annihilate the individual. It’s just a pity it was only the foot. Since ancient times, every idiot is rightfully entitled to his stupidity, and homogenizing a bunch of fools...

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Communism shot itself in the foot the day it tried to annihilate the individual. It’s just a pity it was only the foot. Since ancient times, every idiot is rightfully entitled to his stupidity, and homogenizing a bunch of fools only makes them stronger.

An overgrown twit, or what amounts to the same thing, a very tall idiot, a fool until three in the afternoon and then the rest of the day, is more dangerous than Joe Biden with access to a red button, which is no minor danger. And an idiot, genuine and free to roam, is something to be admired as a unique piece. In the face of a legion of fools, the talent of each individual dunce is scattered and lost, and that’s a shame. Keeping the bar of one’s own stupidity high is a complicated task that requires effort, tenacity, and daily attention. Rome did not fall in a day, and becoming a real dick is not something that can be improvised overnight either. (READ MORE: Could a Biden Debate Disaster Propel Newsom to the Nomination?)

There are people who constantly need to prove themselves right, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as they do it from the bottom of a pit full of poisonous snakes. There are as many talk shows as there are bars, and as many bars as there are kennels, and there are a lot of annoying gits holding up the banner of cooperative stupidity. And it’s not a good idea, because the nice thing is to be a solo idiot and have people point you out on the street and discover, firsthand, every gush from one’s infinite fountain of stupidity. There are no borders in the ambitious fountain of foolishness. The first conquest of multiculturalism that Michel Houellebecq has described with such acridity and precision is the globalization of stupidity.

In amongst the cloud of nocturnal alley cats that characterizes our time, a cretin can be distinguished at once by the tone of voice. The great Spanish writer Jardiel Poncela saw them coming: Anyone with nothing important to say speaks loudly. It is typical of postmodern manners to raise one’s voice over anything. People shout over a traffic argument, whine behind closed doors if things are going well and if they are doing poorly, and shout out in the open, in the streets, as if they were selling vegetables at a really incredible price. Nobody screams in operating rooms anymore, which is where they used to screech, quite rightly, but in the waiting rooms of any bureaucratic state building, accusing the civil servant of being an imbecile, when the mere fact of this discovery amounts to the first natural ability of the certified fool.

Nowadays drunks also scream as if they were being slaughtered and it is a pity, because there was a sort of radical romanticism in the drunks from black and white movies, when they would just fall into a placid and silent sleep. Those were the good drunks, and not like nowadays, when the kids howl when they’ve had a drop too much as if they needed to stun fellow man to prove their inebriation. It is perhaps a reflection of that primary instinct that leads the fool to constantly demonstrate to the world the dimensions of his idiocy. (READ MORE: U.S. Policy Lets Russia Dock in the Americas)

Fools demand respect because the decline of the 20th century convinced them that all nonsense deserves its share of freedom; the truth is that the nonsense of an enlightened person remains just that, with or without the approval of public opinion. At the end of the day, when that much-maligned thing of freedom of expression was born, its defenders were counting on the broadcaster to broadcast something really interesting. No one would have been killed for defending the free speech of an unequivocally stupid idea; among other reasons, because stupidity defends itself perfectly, as evidenced by the fact of its eternal youth. Today, to no one’s surprise, idiots continue to enjoy freedom of speech, but intelligent people who have something important to say are often canceled.

It is mistakenly believed that most stupid people are lumped together in the world of politics. Fortunately, stupidity is as widespread as COVID-19, and that is why today I am making the case for individual stupidity; because it knows no borders, no caste, no ideology, and cannot be grouped together.

Much has been written about the cure for stupidity, and rationalists believe that it is all a matter of reading. But a well-read fool is not an enlightened fool, but rather an illustrious fool — that is, one whom everyone knows by the glitter and ways of his or her vacuity. The worst kind of stupidity was allegedly defined by Chesterton with overwhelming subtlety: “Mediocrity, possibly, consists in standing before greatness and not realizing it.” I add to the greatness of the old master, the necessary nuance of beauty. To pass in front of the Venetian Basilica of St. Mark, to walk under the Sistine Chapel, or to cross the street with Maria Sharapova, without feeling the slightest rapture in the soul, is an unequivocal sign of dazed intellect and muted common sense. Especially in the case of Sharapova, and may Michelangelo Buonarroti forgive me.

Two deceased Spanish humorists, Jaime Campmany and Antonio Burgos, devoted long decades of columnism to analyzing and classifying stupidity in all its variants. In this way, they found many idiots that are very difficult to translate into English: the tontolaba (the fool who ends up the bean booby prize hidden in a Christmas cake), the tonto del carajo (the dick), the tonto de los cojones (bollock head), the tonto contemporaneo (the contemporary fool), or the tonto solmne (the solemn fool). Antonio Burgos rose to the greatness of Seville the day he found his most celebrated species of fool, a discovery later attributed a thousand times: the tonto con balcones a la calle (the fool with public balconies); talking, precisely, about the kind of fool who exposes him or herself joyful and proud to the universe. (READ MORE: From Solzhenitsyn to US Governors: No Lessons Learned)

In the end, despite the efforts of my two compatriots, after so many hours and so much effort, the Brazilian Paulo Coelho dares to classify fools in a single sentence, as if the whole cosmos of idiots were so simple, claiming that there are only two types of idiots: Those who stop doing something because they have received threats, and those who believe they are going to do something because they are threatening someone. But I guess we have to believe him on this matter because, after all, he’s an expert in the field.

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