Why are people so goddamned stupid? An enquiry concerning human misunderstanding
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Here we have an interesting, for certain perverse values of the word, entry into the booming literary field of right-wing men complaining in public that their potential romantic conquests are being unfairly rendered stillborn by their political beliefs. Don’t be a playa hater says Charles Robinson in the Columbus Dispatch:
I recently entered the online dating scene and have met nice women for Columbus-area lunches or dinners in the process. After I thanked one, I got a thanks back with an additional note:
“I never asked you about your political views. I have no problem with Republicans, but if you are a MAGA Republican, it would be difficult for us to develop a friendship.”
Wow. That comment threw me for a loop, but it made me reflect on the bitter divisions within the country. It is literally a civil war.
My wife calls this particular linguistic usage “Kim Kardashian literally,” as in “not literally.” But anyway . . .
For half a century, I have been a Goldwater Republican and later became a Reaganite. Peace through strength was the motto. I do want to “Make America Great Again” after its precipitous decline during the Biden presidency. I like much of what Trump 45 & 47 has done, dislike a few and scratch my head at others. He has brought pride back to America, especially in the heartland, but dismay and disdain among the coastal elite.
Case you pondering, our frustrated Lothario turns 79 today, so happy birthday Chuck, but man you are a total moron, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. If I were feeling all socratic and law professorish, I would ask questions such as what does national precipitous decline involve exactly? What evidence would you cite for this claim? What does it mean to “bring pride back to America?” What evidence do you have for the belief that this thing has happened? And how did you become the kind of person who spews Donald Trump’s mindless propaganda verbatim, without recognizing how meaningless such statements are?
Things don’t get better:
I guess I could ask a return question.
“I have no problem with Democrats, but would be difficult for me to develop a friendship with one who has blindly been to a No Kings rally, suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, uses the biased legacy media as their only source of ‘truth,’ wants Israel to be put in its place, requires unlimited immigration and voting without an ID, desperately aims to completely abolish ICE, allows biological males in women’s sports, and denigrates all MAGA as fascists or Nazis, without understanding the real meaning of those words.”
It goes on very much like that. Now what interests me and my preversions is, how do people get like this? Who is Charles Robinson you might ask, or at least I did:
Dr. Charles J. Robinson has brought tremendous skill, dedication, and vision to biomedical engineering and rehabilitation science, and also to a tremendous amount of important work for the IEEE.
A fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Robinson has held dozens of Institute positions, including Director, Society President, Editor, organizer of major conferences, and Chair of the Membership Development Committee. His remarkable achievements include inspiring renewed interest in membership development, founding the journal IEEE Transactions on Rehabilitation Engineering, and organizing the groundbreaking 1994 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence.
Recognized internationally for his research and leadership efforts in biomedical engineering and rehabilitation science, Dr. Robinson has more than 50 full publications, 100 abstracts, and 60 invited lectures to his name. He has also edited nine books, proceedings, or special editions.
Charles J. Robinson was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on 16 July 1947. He received a B.S. in Engineering Science from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 1969, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University in 1971, and a D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in 1979. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in Anesthesiology at Yale University. Dr. Robinson was a Member of the Technical Staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio, from 1969 to 1974, and has been a registered Professional Engineer since 1974.
In 1992, after close to a decade at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Center, he became Director at the joint Rehabilitative Neuroscience labs of the University of Pittsburgh and the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. He founded Pitt’s Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, and was its first Chair. In 1999, he earned the Watson Eminent Scholar Chair at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, where he is also Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science. The VA has also designated him the first Senior Rehabilitation Research Career Scientist.
Dr. Robinson is a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. The many honors he has received include the Czech Association of Medical Sciences’ Purkynje Medal, which is their highest medical scientific honor given a non-citizen.
OK I know what you’re thinking, or at least I think I can guess: Engineer.
But seriously . . .
Intelligence is multiple, we are told over and over again. It’s less appreciated that stupidity is as well. For example I possess what must be to the average person a terrifying verbal facility: I can and have written entire op-ed pieces for national newspapers in less than half an hour. On the other hand, I could no more successfully assemble a piece of Ikea furniture than I could construct a linear accelerator out of dryer lint. This is because I suffer from an inability to perceive and manipulate spatial relations that must seem almost incomprehensible to someone who is capable of the — to me literally unimaginable — mental feat of rebuilding a car engine.
First paragraph of the chapter “The Varieties of Stupid Experience,” from The Triumph of Stupidity #12 & 35