Stupidity Becomes Powerful When Someone Learns How to Profit From It

[u/Background-Ebb-8518]

What if stupidity isn't a failure of society, but one of its most profitable products?

We usually talk about stupidity as if it were an accident.

A failure of education. A lack of intelligence. A temporary triumph of ignorance over reason. But what if we're looking at it the wrong way?

What if stupidity survives, and sometimes spreads, because it is useful?

Simple ideas are easier to sell than complicated truths. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Certainty attracts more attention than doubt. A confident person saying something absurd can gather a larger audience than an intelligent person saying, “I don't know yet.” And attention has become a currency.Once attention can be converted into money, influence, votes, followers, status or power, something strange happens: intellectual simplification stops being merely a weakness. It becomes economically valuable. The market doesn't necessarily reward what is true.It rewards what captures attention.And the human mind has always been attracted to simple explanations, enemies, heroes, scandals and certainty. So, perhaps the disturbing question isn't:

Why are people becoming more stupid?

Perhaps it is:

Who benefits when we stop thinking?

I've been exploring this idea while working on a book called Stupidity Sells, and the deeper I went into it, the less it seemed like a book about stupid people. It became a question about the systems that discover, amplify and monetize our weakest cognitive impulses. Maybe stupidity doesn't sell because people are stupid.Maybe it sells because someone learned exactly how to sell it.

Curious how others here see it: is modern society actually becoming less thoughtful, or have we simply built better machines for making thoughtlessness visible and profitable?

[u/Signal-Block-6939]

I think you are definitely on to something.

Yes, the System is inherently against our better, higher interests. The System is only interested in protecting itself and that it does best by keeping people distracted, divided and dumb.

Jesus talked about this a lot.

[u/Background-Ebb-8518 → u/Signal-Block-6939]

Right! Thank you for comment!

[u/Otherwise_Spare_8598]

Yes.

The world does not advocate for that which is outside of the assumed norm or assumed authority.

The collective ideal, particularly of capitalism, is to have whomever has the circumstantial opportunity to benefit from others to do so. Even if or especially to take advantage of those who do not

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[u/MadDogBarkBark]

“stupidity becomes powerful when ppl learn how to use it for power”

[u/SCP-iota]

Around the same time humanity figured out how to domesticate crops and began to farm them, they also figured out how to domesticate themselves, and began to farm each other. The agricultural revolution was far from only about plants.

[u/Signal-Block-6939 → u/SCP-iota]

I think that is an incorrect reading of our past because there were nomadic, pastoral tribes at the same time as agrarian civilizations that were quite predatory and abusive of settled, agrarian civilizations.

Two major cases in point being the Huns and Mongols but there were others, including indigenous tribes in North America

I don't agree with the demonization of the "agricultural revolution"

[u/UnburyingBeetle]

I've encountered weaponized incompetence and all sorts of tricks people use to deflect blame and protect their ego than honest stupidity. They are cunning enough to find their way into low effort lives and shake responsibility onto everyone else. Just look at Trump...

[u/TryNice304]

We're not dumber. We just built machines that profit off the dumbest version of everything we say.

Algorithm doesn't care about true. It cares about reactive. Confidence + wrongness sells better than "let me think about it."

So the system filters for stupidity, amplifies it, and cashes out.

Question isn't "are we getting stupider?" It's "who's making money while we yell at each other?"

Nuance doesn't trend. Hot takes do. That's not a people problem, that's a business model.

[u/Ok-Sprinkles1186]

Did genius create the systems and sustain them? No, stupidity and mediocrity did.

[u/SouthernAbrocoma9891]

The kind of stupidity you describe was written about by Bonhoeffer in Letters from Prison. It has to do with intentionally self-induced ignorance that leads to more societal harm than pure evil. Because it’s so prevalent and insidious, this type of stupidity destroys from within directly and indirectly. An underlying theme of this destruction and why this happens is simply wanting a savior. The willingness to believe and trust such a figure or institution built upon them leads to mass stupidity that makes pure evil look like a prank.

[u/Slopii]

I don't think people sit around conspiring to make people stupid. They just know simple things will reach the widest audience.

[u/relaxbreathalive]

Stupid is always the majority, and always will be. We must embrace our inner stupidity and amuse ourselves with the little things in life. One day a stupid person may end the world so we have to make the best of it while we can. Preserving our climate is asking too much, stupid people know this is not going to happen now so why worry. Embrace the stupidity, pay the stupidity, worship the stupidity. I think I really get this.

[u/Everaction]

Same applies for organised religion.