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Man's Stupidity

Although the solution is, for us, the only part of any significance, a brief survey of the cause is necessary. It is when we understand the cause fully, that we can grasp the solution in its totality. The cause: 'man is utterly stupid', is one way of not mincing matters and it is true besides. Everybody is infected with stupidity to some degree. We are trained in it from so young. Wells, in his 'Short History of the World', triumphantly notes the ousting of the clumsy Roman numerals, and the Arabic figures, in use to this day. It is on page 148, chapter XLIV, and the book is undated except for MCMXXXIII. We know e.g. that in Germany, 30 % of the forests are dead or dying. We know also that the brunt of this comes on the fir trees, a 90 % of them. And what do we see at X-mas (1983, -84, -85) ? Exactly ...! The stupid people buy healthy trees, killed by the chainsaw, in order to have less than a fortnight cheap fun indoors. A tree-expensive superstition indeed, a deadly one too.
... man, who will leave nothing undisturbed from the ocean bottom to the stratosphere, and who bids fair to extinguish himself in the process. Wells, Outlook.
While Europe sends food to Africa's deforested drought areas, there is an overabundance in beef, corn, butter, a milk-lake and the like in the EEC , the storage of which has become so costly that the farmers must pay a fine for their production. When harvest comes in, the prices get so low (through sheer abundance) that the governments pay a subsidy, and then, having become owners (!), destroy this excellent food. I myself have seen large pits in the ground in which apples, pears, plums, etc. were dumped, sprayed with poison in order to discourage thieving. This is the bestiality of economics. The poor peoples of Africa need wood in order to cook their meals, therefore they de-forestate, yet, inestimable quantities of fuel in all shapes are burnt up in our hothouses in order to grow ... flowers, in the civilized (?) part of the world. These hothouses are themselves not made so as to retain every stitch of warmth, to use costly fuel optimally, by treble glazing or five-fold glass, but they are thermally little better than an open chicken run of wire mesh. Every year, at the tourist season, thousands of acres of forest in southern France, Spain, the whole Mediterranean, are set on fire, and thus, become lost to the (news) paper industry (!). All these fires are caused by stupidity and most of them deliberate. It is a great touristy attraction to watch the immense operations at work, the intricate organization complete with heavy four-engined bombers that load and bomb water. Is this sanity then? In Turkish, as in many languages, there are two words for the main two different ideas behind 'letter', (Spanish: letra-carta, German: Buchstabe-Brief, Dutch: letter-brief, etc.). In fact, the extraordinary qualities for complex thought and communication of English is caused, in part, just by this rich scala of different meanings (ideas) behind one word. Important as the translation of 'letter' in a different language might be, however, I have a concise Oxford Turkish v. v. English dictionary in which the word cannot be translated into Turkish namely: narf-mektup. Do we call it stupidity or not? Precious cooking-fuel, the garbage of gardens and orchards, are burned as waste. Nay, we burn our household garbage, complete with our stupid disposables, whole mountains of plastic (the malignant growth of economics), we even burn our dead while we could simply re-circulate these bodies by digging them in the soil, or dump them at sea. All continents on the planet need desperately a thorough re-forestation, but then in large tracts, in climate significant tracts of say 10 x 10 degrees (38). The water for this cannot be carried by hand, yet, all daily traffic of say Manchester, when the engines are taken out and coupled to water pumps, would suffice to pump that water from the rivers, while we could easily go about on foot, or by bicycle. (We should not ride dogcarts or horses, but have all animals as our friends, not as slaves.) (The days for that need are over, slavery to machines, animals free.) (Is not, according to human dignity, a man who sits on a horse, the most ridiculous sight, him thinking to sit on a motorbike?) The problem of starvation in Africa is of course dependent on numbers and food availability. Yet, only a very few scientists can be heard to warn that, seeing the rate of reproduction, a 10 year old saved now, will increase the same problem 3 or 4 fold in ten years time, when there will be the same drought. Malthus' theorem, shared by say, Spencer and other scientists, still holds. It says that when one hands out food, first, people get less interested in producing it for themselves, and second, population will increase. This, naturally must not lead to the conclusion that we should let people starve, which is inhumane, but it should be understood that food delivery can only take place when it is conditioned that no more children are produced. This, as is obvious, makes problem and solution one of a mondial ethics. (What right have we to reproduce freely, (Wells' breeding storm) and demand of other peoples to check offspring?) Stupidity made Marx and Engels so vehemently attack Malthus, because he disturbed an absurd, stupid dream of a world without private property, without ethics. It was tried during the French revolution, and many times after, it always showed to be impossible, as Malthus knew. The fundamental ethics of handing out food did not escape a Malthus. He perceived that it gives one an (unwarranted) power (control) to discriminate, to rule, to enforce conditions, hence, a tyranny. Naturally it is a tyranny to condition not to have multiple reproduction, waves of children, but such a tyranny, when imposed on ALL mondial people, is far easier to endure. It then, is conceived as a necessity. (Dispensation dis-enforces the rule). But the reverend Malthus also advocated a premium on the turning up of new land. This, together with his professional superstition (the laws of gods, sperrits, etc.), must be skipped in his writings. After all, they are from the 18th century. Stupidity, also simply must result in a lack of all ethics. In an ethics of a dream, not reality-related. A proper world-government would see to it that every citizen has his rightly one-square-meal-a-day, but also the duty not to produce more than one child per couple. This, until the load is lifted from nature. That is, when stupidity is replaced by common sense. Everybody should agree that admitting nuclear power stations is sheer insanity, a stronger form of stupidity. We all know that things that can go wrong, will go wrong, some day (Spencer) and such risks thus, are not those of sane men. Protesting against nuclear weapons is just as stupid. The most primitive missiles, the V2 rockets of Hitler's Germany, that carried a ton of explosives, fired onto some power stations of say, Germany or France, could thereby destroy life on the Northern hemisphere. So, in fact, could the old-fashioned gases that were used in the trenches, on a future Fuehrer, when countries like Russia, France, etc. are permanently nuclear booby-trapped, through their power stations, only waiting to be triggered-off by stupidity, or by a most simple attack with conventional (!) weapons. Is it not sheer stupidity to let one man, or a small group of insane economists-diplomats, fanatic mediocrits, decide and take measures that can kill off thousands or millions of people? This, only for his applause, his gathering of votes (see Churchill vol 1, Shirer, Schwarzschild, etc.). Or a B.B.C. its world-service, that could have been a mondial integrative force, a blessing for mankind but is still braying its stupidity all over the globe. Is that sanity? Or these royal distinctions, pinned on macho-bucks, the pop bastards, that gather piles of money by mutilating millions of children and grown-ups, especially because of this dirty money? You are aware, of course, that your government willfully rewards the undesirable in man, the making of debts, and punishes the desirable, the saving for later. This through tax and tax subtraction. Do you know that the very tea you drink might have been on transport for two times the actual distance between your kettle and the harvesting soil? While at sea, the cargo is sold, the ship's course altered, the cargo sold again, course altered again, etc. And then, tea, like tobacco, coffee and the like, is a decided non-essential, only permitted when numbers of inhabitants are below the maximum, when there is ample food reserve stored on the pole-caps, and food is abundant for everybody. Until then, every stitch of good soil is to be used for essentials, for food or reforestation. Then, a child knows that Olympic games cannot but be held in Olympia. But what of the stupidity of transporting 'Olympian fire' halfway over the globe? A schoolboy knows that a flame consists of oxygen from the air, and gaseous atoms from the fuel. Even when you transport a piece of Olympian-grown wood that is burning over a few miles during its brief existence, you do not transport the necessary oxygen atoms. What clods they think we are to assume we believe that they take open fire in an aero plane! Of course, once inside, it will be extinguished and only re-lit after safe landing. If not, the pilots and air companies are greater clods than they think we are. Then, all the stupid political problems in Olympian gamestry, are unnecessary when we simply hold these games where they ought to be held. People, then, can take it or leave it, nobody would mind. Have you never heard of students that cannot attend lectures (taxpayers money) for three whole months because of the business of inauguration rituals for a students club keep them occupied? They know that belonging to that club, is a certain way to high office, high social position in later life. They ... help each other discriminatory, i.e. the right man does not get the right place, but the club member who, often, is certainly the wrong man. How long are we going to accept stupidity, and the insults of being taken as stupids by diplomats, civil servants, advertisers, show businessmen, scientists and university officials without protest? Do you realize that the junk and scrap on the sea-bottoms by the sinkings of World War 1 and World War 2 could provide Western like existence with regard to necessities (shovels, rakes, knives, scissors, etc.) for a century? That the powder used up in these wars (for killing and devastating) is ample for centuries of cooking in Ethiopia, that the hot baths Seneca wrote about, were luxuries destroying costly trees, that people who buy flowers are obstinately insulting so many hungry bellies, that your motor-yacht with its hundreds of h. p's (kilowatts) is sheer crime since it robs other, dying people, of h. p. 's necessary to pump water or cook food? Do you ever ask who's petrol it is that these stupid macho culls in their motor- and car- races and crosses, use up in huge, noisy, quantities, in order to arrive ... nowhere but where they began, yokels going in circles indeed? Or these vulgar vultures of society, rally drivers, who cross through hundreds of miles of barren African scenery, populated with the most utter poor people imaginable. People that would give anything for say, a plastic jerry can, for carrying their water, who stand there, watching the rich in money, poor in brains and morals pass by in huge clouds of dust, in tearing noises of mishandled engines. Do they give a single thought to poor people, to the rights of man, are they not the limit of stupidity? These bastards that shake good wine in order to spray it away. And do you know that practically all illnesses that you are docily suffering from, but wholly unnecessary and for life, (asthma, epilepsy, migraine, etc., etc.) were curable in a few afternoons, in 1920 (39) ? Knowing this, are you going to refuse to pay, or going to court, in order to get adequate help. Doctors, then, would be forced to study their business, books of Coué, Baudouin, Satow, Ambrose, etc., or the articles in the Lancet, Brit. Med. Journ. Are you aware of the piles of stupidities that are released daily, for you to read or hear? When you hear of Taiwanese fishermen being maltreated in Argentine, near the Falklands, do you then see the utter stupidity of going to fish over more than half the Earth's circumference distance away? When there is no fish in Taiwan, then one should go and plant crops. When one wants to fish in Argentine, one should go and live there. These stupid open fires in central heated houses, the architects that build an airfield office-building in the form of an aero plane, etc. What stupidity! Did you ever notice a street-planning that is worse-, instead of better than no planning, street naming that is worse than no naming, traffic rules that are worse than no rules, your food that is not good enough for other countries because you (have to) accept a level of radioactivity? Did you ever notice how all problems in your society, like crime, terrorism, labour problems, etc. are always attacked by all sorts of solutions except the only common sensical one?
Fundamental stupidity! DeBono.
DeBono says that, in order to understand rationality (or intelligence or whatever name we invent) it is well to study stupidology. Indeed, for a mind-scientist, this is a must. Besides, it is, as Democritus pointed out, real democratic fun. Stupidology is the first department of the study of man and his society, a large part of which is taken up by the study of superstition (Elaboration 40). It is as old as mankind! So one studies There are superstitions about the calendar, the legality of governments, the national flag or the anthem, about money and economy, about science, frontiers and custom houses with their blackmail, etc. Wells has it expressed as
the dirty side of nationalism.
In the neighborhood of Batavudurum (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), one can travel in all directions with a couple of bottles of whisky in his possession, except in one. Solely by going in the direction of the German border, a fancy line on the maps, a superstition, one has to be asked questions, even pay money, in, what Wells called, the blackmail of the frontiers. When a serious student of mind-science has filled a notebook with stupidology for some years, it makes a reading about our planetary population like the saying: If I had to invent a totally stupid population on a planet, I could never hit on such a one (41). Man's stupidity ... ? Unlimited! He has let science and technology run away with him, he has made it the killer of all life. He has made science and technology a plaything for applause, for stupidity, instead of a useful instrument to better living for all, in harmony with all other living nature. So has he taken the potential blessing of audio-visual instruments and turned it into the pus of cancerous society, superstition and mutilation. We might think that our society is based solely on copulation and money. In reality, these are only manifestations of the real drive, the drive for control of the individual i.e. applause, the stupid paradox of applause, of wanting to control one-self by one-self yet, wanting to be controlled by others, wanting to be like others. Spencer shows us how all education, all philosophy, all scientific work, is subjected and ruled by applause, by irrationality that has taken the place of usefulness, of decoration over usability, since man started living in larger groups than the family. As in Wyndham's 'Seeds of Time':
Science, the great anti-biotic.

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Next: Common Sense in Government Up: The World Solution for Previous: Common Sense
Ven 2007-09-11