Towards a Theory of Political Stupidity

Every time – literally every single time – I write a post about a stupid thing that our rulers have done, people appear in my comments to explain why our rulers have in fact not done any stupid things. In fact, these commenters tell me, our rulers are merely being super malicious, or hyperclever, or both super malicious and hyperclever at the same time. Their actions only appear to be stupid because they are a pretence for something else, or because I am simply too naive to understand their actual intent, or for some other reason.

I don’t claim that I have always been correct in calling stupidity, or that there can never be any other, more precise explanation for the idiocies of the modern nation-state. I make analytical mistakes like everyone else, and many things have gone wrong with our politics; stupidity is merely one of them. Nevertheless, stupidity is the one thesis that, in my experience, invariably provokes critique. A lot of people really, really don’t want to believe that their states can be stupid, and this despite overwhelming evidence –  accumulating for decades now – of their unceasing and escalating failure across many domains. Perhaps it is simply more comforting to believe that we are ruled by intelligent systems and intelligent people, even if they also happen to be malign enemies. Perhaps it also helps to believe that there is a plan, particularly in an era wherein the state seems to have lost almost all of its capacity for strategic action. Maybe that is why so many are so opposed to seeing the plain stupidity of our rulers for what it is.

In this and subsequent posts, I want to explore the burgeoning phenomenon of political stupidity more thoroughly, because I believe it is very important. Along the way I will rework and update some older posts that I wrote long ago, and I will write various new pieces to fill in the gaps and create a cohesive collection of miniature of studies on this problem. If readers like these posts, perhaps I will even fashion them into a booklet of some kind.

My thesis is simple: Political stupidity has become a very dangerous and potent force, and this relatively recently, in the past two or three decades. What is worse, this stupidity seems to be increasing in both depth and extent. Those areas of state action that were already stupid are getting even stupider, while other areas (such as local government) that seemed at first to have escaped the great stupid are now rapidly succumbing to the same general stupidity that is afflicting everything else.

This phenomenon has gone almost wholly unnoticed, and it inspires a wide range of questions for which we must urgently seek answers: What is causing the stupid and why does the stupid keep growing? Are its roots ideological or social? If political outsiders were to seize power and chase out our present elite, would they become stupid too, and if so how long would that take? Stupid individuals are generally easy to manipulate, and yet our political systems remain robust and determined in their stupidity. Why is that, and how does it work exactly? Is there a point at which the stupidity will stop advancing, or will it literally consume entire economies and societies before burning itself out? Dare we even hope that there is a cure for this stupidity?

I hope to address all of these questions and more. In this introductory post, I want to explain precisely what I mean by political stupidity, and delineate the Four Areas of Primary Stupid. This is the first step towards understanding where this terrible stupidity comes from and what it means.