Willpower and Stupidity

Is the ancient virtue of willpower still relevant in the modern age?

We eat, drink, smoke and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons and become addicted to heroin, cocaine and e-mail.

...In experiments beginning in the late 1960s, the psychologist Walter Mischel tormented preschoolers with the agonizing choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows 15 minutes from now. When he followed up decades later, he found that the 4-year-olds who waited for two marshmallows turned into adults who were better adjusted, were less likely to abuse drugs, had higher self-esteem, had better relationships, were better at handling stress, obtained higher degrees and earned more money. _NYT

A more scientific term for willpower is executive function (EF), coordinated in the prefrontal lobes of the brain. Together with intelligence (IQ), levels of EF powerfully determine life success over the years. EF can be improved by training in children, but such training should occur between the ages of 4 and 7 for maximum benefit.

The interaction of willpower and stupidity is more complex than most people understand. First, what do we mean by "stupidity?"

"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

"Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."

"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

"Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid." _Science20

Stupidity arises from multiple causes. Low intelligence, spite, ignorance, laziness (lack of willpower), miscalculation, and unavoidable constraint propagation (bad luck) are just a few of the many causes of stupidity and stupid people.

In the United States, stupidity has become concentrated near seats of power such as Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Government is one obvious host and purveyor of mass stupidity, along with all other institutions which are closely involved with government -- such as labour unions, news media, education, financial and economic institutions, law enforcement, the courts etc. Even the military -- which believe it or not is the most competent branch of government -- has been infiltrated by politically correct stupidity via social promotion of PC-favoured officers and the enforcement of politically correct policies.

Labour unions have become the seat of stupidity in a particular way recently, thanks to the union-friendly Obama regime. A violent storming, vandalism, and assault of a port in Washington state goes unpunished by government officials. While warming up a crowd for President Obama, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. tells Obama to "take out the son of a bitches," referring to Tea Party members and Republicans, and neither Hoffa nor the Obama White House will apologise for this rather blatant lapse of civility in the midst of an official Obama event. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka dictates to Obama what he needs to say in his jobs speech before a joint session of congress -- encouraging the president to "go to the mat" -- and is rewarded for his presumption by being seated next to Michelle Obama for the president's speech.

These are all examples of stupidity by labour union officials and thugs. But many more similar examples occur on a regular basis. If the general public were to become widely aware of this stupidity, the political fortunes of Mr. Obama and those close to him would deteriorate even more quickly than at present. But for now, the news media continues to overlook and cover up the mistakes of Obama and his friends.

Mr. Obama's stupidity is not only in his friends and hangers on, but is engrained in every policy that he has pursued since being inaugurated. His war against the private sector, his war against energy, his promotion of a bankrupting "green jobs agenda," his vilifying of national allies and his cozying up with national antagonists, his diverting of scarce national assets into the purses of political cronies, his irreversible expansion of government mandate and government debt, his unprecedentedly divisive effect on society -- all of these evidences of stupidity and more should be enough to portray Obama's administration as "the stupid regime."

It should be obvious that willpower is not a simple antidote to stupidity. In fact, stupid people often pursue their stupid agendas with the utmost will.

It is true that if the masses had exerted more willpower in their oversight of government and government officials, that this massive clusterfuck could have never grown so bad so quickly. But that was then, and this is now. What do we do now?

Can the example problem -- the rise of stupidity in US government and society -- be solved within the political and societal structure, or will entirely new structures and forms of organisation be necessary?

This question will be explored in future articles.

Cross-posted from Al Fin blog

Too Stupid to Know . . . .

. . . . when people are trying to kill you, part IV. Today's TSTK (too stupid to know) installment is inspired by the May-June 2006 message from Dan Simmons. The current message goes into more detail to clarify the April 2006 message from Simmons, which I posted on here. If you have not read the April message, be sure to do so before proceeding to the May-June message.

As I mentioned in TSTK part II, a lot of people reflexively reacted against the warning from Simmons' time traveler guest. Rather than thinking the issues through, they allowed their viscera to determine their instinctive response--probably without even reading the entire essay. This is typical of the denial response that one sees in people who have adopted a rigidly fixed view of the world based upon old notions learned "once upon a time." This type of person is generally not flexible enough in viewpoint to digest conflicting and contradictory information, nor can he integrate new information easily into his worldview that does not smoothly fit into pre-existing concepts.

For more open-minded individuals, Simmons' recent message is rich with references and supporting quotations:

Books commented on in this essay include—The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan, The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing edited by John Keegan, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbit, and Replay by Ken Grimwood

Go to Simmons' message, and carefully read through the logic. It is one thing to understand an argument and to possess a reasonable counter-argument. It is quite another--and very infantile--to simply stop reading in the middle and state categorically "this is bullshit", when you have not even read the entire piece, nor understood the foundations of the argument.

This is why the news media is such a poor guide to modern realities: most of the practitioners of media are incapable of incorporating real world level contradiction into a report. Journalists and columnists almost invariably simplify and dumb down their reports to match the world view and meet with the approval of their peers in the media club. The members of that club, as well as a large proportion of the public who take media club reports seriously, are too stupid to know . . . .

Too Stupid to Know . . .

. . . when people are trying to kill you, part III.

The recently released movie "United 93" highlights the difference between people who know their lives are being threatened, and people who cling to denial all the way to their deaths. The passengers of United 93 were no more intelligent or courageous than the passengers of the other three doomed flights. But because their flight was delayed a half hour waiting for takeoff clearance, the passengers on United 93 were able to learn about the earlier suicide flights into the two WTC towers and the Pentagon.

Even so, there were apparently passengers on United 93 that wanted to prevent the other passengers from taking action to try to stop the hijackers. Those were the passengers too stupid to know someone was trying to kill them. They remind me of a lot of people I know, who turn a blind eye to dangerous trends in society, focused only on their own minor, narrow, myopic concerns.

United 93 is one of the best films I have ever seen. A lot of people are too blase to see it. They may consider what happened on 9/11 to have been a freak of nature, less important or relevant than a tsunami or a hurricane. Past history to them, it apparently has no significance to their present or future in their eyes. You can even find people so deeply into denial who do not even believe 9/11 happened at all, but was instead a US government plot. In other words, they are too stupid to know . . .

Too Stupid to Know . . . . .

.....when people are trying to kill you, part II.

The best description of modern western society, other than incredibly affluent, free, and intellectually fertile, is . . . . fat, dumb, and happy. The two descriptions are not mutually exclusive. A most salient quantity of people in a society may indeed be fat, dumb, and happy--while a relatively invisible group of people works to perpetuate the freedom, affluence, and inventiveness of the society.

An affluent society may very well be on the verge of disaster and not realize it, if the most prominent voices in the society declines to inform the society of its precarious position.

Part one of this series was inspired by the motion picture "A History of Violence," starring Viggo Mortensen. Part two, this installment, is inspired by Dan Simmons' recent "April message." I posted a link to Simmons' message at the Al Fin website, then surfed the web to find out what was being said about the "message" generally.

What I found should not have surprised me. People automatically sorted the ideas in the message according to their pre-existing political viewpoints, rather than critically examining it as a useful provocation to thought. Even science fiction readers (and writers) who enjoyed Simmons' work would heap scorn on Simmons reflexively, if their pre-existing viewpoint (on the threat that Simmons' wrote about) was different than their perception of Simmons' message.

Contrast that ready disregard of a well-written although fictional warning, with the massive world-view changing impact of an event such as the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. It is easy to deny a threat if couched in fictional trappings. It was not so easy to deny the gaping hole in Manhattan's financial district, so it was necessary to invent massive conspiracy theories that were more absurd than the absurdest fiction. For the lumpenheads, the conspiracy theories took on all the aspects of reality, and became reality.

Regardless, the web reaction to Simmons' message suggested the reason why despite North American society being daily blasted with a (largely fictional) particular version of current events by the mainstream media (both news media and popular media), political opinions remain largely unchanged. Even the massive PC dominance of the universities for the past twenty years has failed to turn most graduates into the PC automatons that the professors so much had wished for, in imitation of themselves.

People subconsciously understand that the media worldview is fictional, just as students understand that a large part of the "officially sanctioned politically correct" viewpoints they are fed at university is likewise fictional. In a time of undeniable reality such as 9/11, it is as easy to shuck off such fictional viewpoints as it is to change jackets or slacks.

Of course, the really bright ones figured things out before 9/11, but that is a story for another time. The next big reality shaking event will knock even more people from the indoctrinated camp to the more thoughtful camp, but a lot of people decided not to wait, not to be too stupid to know . . . .