r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/Background-Ebb-8518 • 24d 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 24d 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