For all the pejorative uses of this word whenever applied to a particular individual, in a more abstracted breakdown of the concept there are two relevant kinds of stupidity. And while both have similar outcomes in any given context, they have vastly divergent causes. The first kind, actual stupidity, occurs when a person acts against their own best interests or against those of any others implicated in the action. A person’s actual stupidity is willful, coinciding with that person’s full knowledge of the range of its potential negative consequences.
A concrete example would be that of a DUI repeat offender, who chooses to drive under the influence in successive instances even with the conscious, explicit knowledge of the possible negative consequences of this kind of behavior. And this is stupidity—actual stupidity, for that matter—because the driver is consciously acting against himself, his best interests, and the long and painful string of precedents for this behavior derived from his prior experience. The decision to drive again under this same set of conditions is a behavior that could be classified in retrospect as heedless.
Functional stupidity, the other kind of stupidity, has an outcome similar to that of actual stupidity: negative consequences that go against the best interests of the actor or those of any others implicated in the action. The same instance of driving under the influence could serve as an example: imagine for a moment that a small child has gotten into her parents’ liquor cabinet. She also happens to be something of a menace and has managed to sneak off to the garage with the car keys devilishly in hand. Placing the keys in the ignition and drinking away at the disgusting fire-in-a-bottle with a taste similar to the smell of gasoline whenever she accompanies her mom to the gas station, this child would be effectively driving under the influence from the moment she presses the gas pedal.
But while the potential negative consequences of this behavior are equivalent to those of the DUI repeat offender, the causes are entirely distinct. In the former case the driver is complicit in his own self-destruction and could be called heedless; in the latter, the child has only a vague notion of what she is doing, acting out of an ignorance of the potential negative consequences of her actions, which she lacks the cognitive infrastructure and maturity to be able to extrapolate from what is in appearance only a bit of initial chaos. So the DUI repeat offender is heedless and the child offender, ignorant. This difference between actual and functional stupidity also underlies the reason that children and adults are not treated the same in American courts of law.
With that said, society as a working system of laws and hierarchies could be said to rely on the ability of the normal adult to extrapolate any given instance of stupid behavior to its potential negative consequences, whatever those might be for the person in question, even in the absence of the painful precedents experienced by the DUI repeat offender. Through a process of explicit or intuitive self-reflection, adults are expected to understand what the DUI repeat offender has already understood from his own experience. For society to function at all, adults need to be able to intuit the potential consequences of any given action before they actually carry out that action: this is the final line of defense against chaos, buttressed by a legal system and the punitive measures that give it legitimacy.
In this case, avoiding stupidity is a matter of prior knowledge and reflection, whether that be conscious or unconscious. This is an effective way to avoid actual stupidity. And while the other kind of stupidity, functional stupidity, which derives from ignorance rather than heedlessness or a lack of self-reflection, can be just as deleterious as its counterpart, there is an important corollary to this notion of the ignorance of functional stupidity: whereas actual stupidity has a clear culprit, the guilt or innocence of the functionally stupid is less clear-cut.
This is one possible reason that asserting two kinds of stupidity (actual and functional) might seem controversial; while most people would agree that the first is stupidity, it would seem unjust to call the second stupidity when the functionally stupid are only acting out of ignorance. These people would be innocent in a court of law, or have sentences reducible in proportion to their own lack of awareness, malice, or premeditation. And yet because functional often has the same consequences as actual stupidity, it would be foolish to use ignorance as an excuse for stupidity. People do stupid things, whether they intend to or not; ignorance can give rise to the same conditions as heedlessness, and the consequences of both would have to be classifiable as stupid ex post facto.
So if the cause of functional stupidity is ignorance, and ignorance is a matter of a person’s knowing something pivotal before they carry out a given action, then the way to avoid functional stupidity would be to eliminate that ignorance altogether. But since ignorance is the private and internal business of the person who happens to be ignorant in a given matter, amenable only partially to the influence of outside forces such as those of education, knowledge, and experience, eliminating this ignorance by means of learning is a matter of time more than any other factor—the time required for the learning to take effect.
And while these outside forces acting on the mind will have different effects on different people according to a number of factors, such as their own intelligence, upbringing, wisdom, receptivity, or inner nature, the passage of time will only make learning from them more likely. Everyone starts out ignorant; that ignorance tends to decrease as a function of time; individual results may vary.
As a result, it should be recognized that while some people are less functionally stupid than others in any given comparison, less ignorant than their fellow humans in a given context, the harsher reality has to be confronted when it comes to a self-comparison: we are all at our most functionally stupid today—we will never be more stupid than today, right now, at this very moment. So while the tendency to look down on the younger demographics of our society might be very strong indeed—and it is not entirely incorrect, since people are likely to be ignorant in inverse proportion to their time on planet Earth—it is better to take a personal view of our human condition (in this matter as in many others).
In the words apparently captured by the title of a book written by Gordon Livingston, it is possible to conclude that we are too soon old and too late smart. This condition is a strange and befuddling lifetime sentence, but with the upshot that we have already hit rock bottom, at least in this area. There is nothing to do but careen along our comet’s tail of functional stupidity, caressed by the sound and self-generative awareness that we have nowhere to go but up.
