The triumph of stupidity

In a serious reflection on democracy, the question of the human being must arise, and it is important to be rigorous with the concepts. What is man? What are the symptoms of his frequent fall or derailment? The answers we offer will be of utmost importance to understand the decadence of a society and to explain the rise to power of undesirable politicians.

In the Greek world, philosophers considered man as a being constituted by reason, or noús. Within Judaism, the experience was that of a creature to whom God reveals his word, that is, a being of a pneumatic nature open to the divine logos. From a historical point of view, these first intuitions, which reveal the constitutive function of reason and the spirit for the human being, have not been surpassed. Ultimately, they are definitive discoveries about human nature.

The search for transcendence and human dignity

Thanks to this search for transcendence to which man throws himself, a search that he undertakes either through love which, in the philosophical experience, takes him beyond himself, elevating him to the divine, or through the loving encounter with the revealed word, the human being participates in God.

Since man participates in the divine and is capable of living transcendence, it is affirmed that he possesses a theomorphic condition, according to Greek terminology, or it is said that he is, from the pneumatic point of view, the image of God, imago Dei. Herein lies the foundation of the singular dignity of the human being: he is worthy because of his theomorphic condition, because he is the image of God. We cannot overlook the fact that forgetting these intuitions entails a loss of dignity, which begins to fade when there is a refusal to participate in the divine and a rejection of transcendence.

To the extent that participation in the transcendent and the theomorphic condition are constitutive for human beings, their loss determines their dehumanization.

Types of human beings

According to Aristotle, not all men are equal, and he quotes in Nicomachean Ethics to Hesiod to prove it, going back to the 7th century B.C. It is common sense that discovers that there is no equality among men.

At Jobs and days Hesiod distinguishes three kinds of human beings: the aristos bread (the best of all), who has his own criteria and is capable of reflecting and thinking carefully, open to the divine or transcendent foundation of being; the esthlos (also good), who listens to and follows what the best, the aristos bread; and finally, the acrei, (the futile human being), incapable both of reflecting and of listening to and heeding what the wise teach, and therefore can be a danger to society.

The terminologies of Hesiod and Aristotle are of little use to us, for both the futile man and the slave by nature belong to a certain social class, and experience shows us that these human types are not found exclusively in one of them, but in all of them, even in the highest, such as those formed by generals, industrialists, bishops, etc.

Stupidity as a social phenomenon

Those who have lost contact with reality and the ability to orient themselves adequately in the world, that is, those who forget their theomorphic condition and the need to respond to the demands of reason and the spirit, are irremissibly condemned to act in a stupid way.

Ancient cultures did not overlook the issue of stupidity. In Hebrew, the fool (nabal), is the one who does not believe in the revelation and because of it can provoke disorders in the society in which he lives. Plato also referred to the amates, to the irrational and ignorant man.

Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas spoke of the stultus, which in Latin means foolish, a term which includes the amathia platonic and nebala Hebrew. Stultus is the one who has lost touch with reality and acts from a deficient image of it, causing havoc, disorder and chaos.

Stupidity and social behavior according to Musil

The Austrian writer Robert Musil affirms that stupidity determines the impossibility of developing and executing an action that from a social prism anyone can carry out13. It implies, therefore, an inability to perform certain actions. To understand its scope, it is useful to know what behaviors are considered normal in a given social context, since what may be considered normal in one case may not be so in another.

At times when disorder and chaos reign, malice, duplicity or violence are indispensable to preserve one's own life. It is the vision of the homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man) of Plautus so widespread in our days in some environments. But in an orderly society, this way of acting and others like it, such as abusing the trust of others, would be harmful from a social point of view and, therefore, stupid. Just as there are situations in which morality is violated in a generalized way (vileness), there are situations of general stupidity, in which it is very difficult to act reasonably without suffering reprisals.

Moral degradation and democracy

The rise of the Nazis in the Weimar Republic can serve as a paradigmatic example of what we are talking about with regard to the dangers of moral degradation in democratic societies. Waldemar Besson, professor of political science at the University of Erlagen (Germany), dared to state bluntly the real problem, namely, how it was possible for a nation of more than seventy million people, Germany, then considered the most cultured nation in Europe, to allow itself to be deceived in 1933 by a “stupid.”.

The fact that Hitler had a very sharp intelligence, which he used to deceive everyone around him, does not prevent him from being stupid, considering that this word comes from Latin. stultus and has a very precise meaning, as we have seen. Hitler, although he displayed a significant degree of pragmatic intelligence in dealing with his adversaries, was, in the light of his existential principles and purposes, a fool, stultus. That Hitler was stupid is, from both an ethical and intellectual point of view, the most accurate thing that can be said, a more accurate assessment than the rest of the clichés that are often brought up.

It was in the heart of classical political theory that for the first time relevant intuitions were discovered and articulated when reflecting on the spiritual foundations of democracy. Man is consciously present in a society when, while living and performing actions in the course of immanent time, he orients his existence towards God. It is precisely this presence that gives meaning to the past and the future. Taking this perspective into account, overcoming or facing the present implies the possibility of situating immanent time under the judgment of the presence of God.