A short story of lovable, life-giving, foolish, idiotic and dangerous mental confusion concerning oneself in particular and the human species in general
Every
„Now please define what you mean by feeble-mindedness!“
The lecturer is taken aback. Helplessly he will proceed to find all kinds of synonyms for „feeble“, such as powerless, nonsensical, absurd, etc. But he gets himself even more in trouble when he tries to define the mind that is supposed to be so feeble, because centuries have labored in vain to find its true nature. In other words, an insufficiently trained lecturer is easily fooled because he has forgotten or perhaps does not even know that every definition is made of terms to be defined in their turn too so that he would engage in an endless undertaking, while the questioner has long ago taken to his seat laughing up his sleeve.
Wait and see!, a well-prepared speaker should have said to such a malicious interferer. Wait, how I use the term in my lecture, then you will see what it means.
So far as I am concerned, let me stick to this advice on the following pages. I simply throw out the term „feeble-mindedness“ assuming that every intelligent reader – that is all who are not affected by this disease – will conceive a sufficiently clear idea.
Of course, it is much easier to understand the opposite of feeble-mindedness, let us simply call it with due reverence full or strong-mindedness. Everyone knows that year after year the most accomplished specimens of Homo Sapiens are honored with the greatest awards by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. People in full possession of the strong-mindedness are, so to speak, the topmost specimens of our kind. That is why they are celebrated by a king in flesh and blood in front of the entire world.
All of us, you, dear reader, as well as I, are required to take these great men as examples. But, of course, I only need to point to these strong-minded few to make you understand that I certainly do not belong to them, nor do you – most probably. In other words, among our seven billion compatriots nearly all belong to the camp of the not quite full-minded, the camp of the unfortunate many whose brains only inadequately exhaust the full potential of evolutionary possibilities.
What do we have to conclude from this premise? I think there can only be a single reasonable answer. If we want to get a realistic picture of man as he really is, we must not turn to the few celebrities presented to us by the Nobel Committee, instead we should stick to people like you and me, that is to the average of all not quite full-minded. Then we will learn far more about our species than we would from studying the few elect who make up no more than a miserable dozen out of seven billion. Let me be clear about it right at the beginning: It is not the few full-minded who are representative of our kind, but the idiotic or all those simply feeble-minded.
And I will immediately add a second warning to the first one. The study of human inadequacy almost inevitably holds the temptation that we both agree to seek it exclusively among our neighbors and fellow creatures. Wherever you are – at a regular’s table, in a political meeting, even while chatting on the street – someone only has to start blaspheming about some Mr. X or Mrs. Ypsilon, and already they all purse their lips and ears and you will notice the comfort with which everyone is now making a common front against the defenseless absentees. It is so satisfying, it gives such a tremendous pleasure to get a feeling of superiority by looking for the mistakes and the stupidity of others, because then you put a comforting veil above your own.
The mere fact that I order another person into the courtroom of my brain provides immense satisfaction. After all, we feel somewhat inhibited as long as we face him in person. In this case, we have to reckon with hard answers, perhaps even hard blows, supposed we were to express our judgment too openly. However, as soon as we treat other people in absentia, they are helplessly at our mercy. We are free to utter any opinion about them without incurring any resistance.
Let us be honest, dear reader, such a temptation is hard to resist, after all both of us we are but human beings and therefore susceptible to feeble-mindedness, i.e. to the central theme of the present book. That makes it all the more important that we pull ourselves together! If we were really tempted to attack defenseless people possibly inflicting a terrible massacre on them, we would act like the countless idiots who, since the beginning of human history, were a disgrace to Homo Sapiens. For one of mankind’s greatest vices, possibly the greatest of all, lies precisely in this presumption. Once you or I quote a dead person or an absent person before our inner tribunal, we have, of course, the final word and the upper hand. This makes us believe that we must be somewhat wiser, better, superior and what you have. Just look around the pubs and see how Meier and Müller behave like God when ordering all the celebrities of the world before their Last Judgment condemning them at their will to the depth of hell, as soon as alcohol loosens their tongues. Nobody feels himself so small or so insignificant that he would not indulge in pronouncing with utter conviction his wretched little verdict even on the greatest of the great.
So, let me send this warning to myself and also to you, dear reader, right before we are embarking on our common way. We are not wiser simply because we pass our know-it-all judgment on other people – the dead and the defenseless absentees. Nay, we even have to reckon with the not so theoretical possibility that our report about imbecility will in the end only expose ourselves as those actually affected – meaning that in the
Accordingly, the author of this book about stupidity has to reckon with readers who are convinced that he belongs, so to speak, to the strong-minded few who judge with sufficient expertise and authority the spiritual ailments of other humans.
No, that’s just not the case! That would be the trap and the greatest error to which the subject could mislead us. We would climb the pedestal of presumption, only to be struck immediately by fatal dizziness so that with an outcry of horror we again plunge into the depth. No, human brains cannot cope with such a claim, not even the highly developed ones of the strong-minded few chosen by the Swedish Academy.
This road is closed, we must be content with dedicating ourselves to a much more modest but at the same time much more difficult task, where nobody is likely to doubt our competence: namely the investigation of our own imbecility – here at least nobody may dispute our authority. And what a broad and, as we shall see, nearly unlimited field stretches before our eyes! Only indirectly – since we are all human beings and thus belong to the same species – will we include in this our survey the rest of mankind as well, but in a casual way and at any time ready to apologize.
In other words, the author of this book assumes that everyone – he himself, but also you, the perhaps no longer so inclined reader – constitutes an inexhaustible source of idiocy and that no philosophy even deserves its name if it does not assign its due place to this chief human characteristic. The almighty Lord, nature, evolution, or whatever we want to call it, may have endowed each of us with a little bit of full-mindedness – how else would we otherwise be able to even talk about its opposite – but in lavish generosity we have above all been endowed with an inexhaustible supply of stupidity. Only because each of us dances his whole life on both weddings: on that of strong and of feeble-mindedness, may we assume the right to talk about both with some competence.
But perhaps even such modesty would not help us much in the eyes of the most merciless critics if we did not from the outset make still one more concession. No particular stupidity is ever the same as any other. To begin with, there is apocalyptic stupidity that not only leads mankind ever nearer to the abyss, but threatens to plunge it right into it. There will be plenty of talk about this, for these pages are not meant to be a place for intellectual sweet-talking. They are meant to open the eyes of the naive – and even of the feeble-minded – to all those dreadful dangers our time is bound to confront on a hitherto unprecedented scale. But to open our eyes to such elementary threats is perhaps not particularly difficult. We really need not to be philosophers to achieve such insight. Much more mental effort is required if we want to see the other side of the medal. Because, yes, there is this other side – although you did perhaps not discover it up to now. In the strange world that is our home, not only the most dreadful stupidity can be found, but the most amiable as well – and the latter is even so universally dispersed that we should perhaps see in it the fountainhead and original form of all feeble-mindedness. So, let’s make our start with amiable stupidity.
To be continued with very concrete, very unsettling examples