This may be a short-term boon for society, if the dumb are failures who are unable to comprehend that the successful make and break their own rules to suit themselves. Verbalized ideals then may keep the disenfranchised in their places—exhorting them to work harder, toe the line, forgive, etc.—while the actual, functional means used to achieve specific, immediate ends are seldom acknowledged by the establishment. Unfortunately, some of the stupidest people may be the leaders, so graft and corruption in politics and subjectivity in science, for example, may have to be treated as exceptional (although self-serving behavior in government and biased attitudes in laboratories are as common as grass is to lawns). In order to protect the guilty, cultures usually reduce themselves to impracticality, so most are, at best, short-term successes which induce their own long-term demise.

Although the specific forms that contemporary stupidity assumes are our own and some of them newly minted, the general condition is part of our cultural heritage. It is the legacy of bygone eras which crushed the sensitive and favored the dull. We are the descendants of those who survived the drudgery and boredom of past working and living conditions. Our forefathers were the shirkers who left the fighting to the valiant and the brave. Our ancestors were just low enough on the ladder of cultural life not to succumb to the anxiety, stress, ulcers and high blood pressure of conscientious authority.

The person of limited sensitivity and modest ambitions finds happiness relatively easily. Having found it, he strives to maintain it and becomes the enemy of progress. Allied with the dull and happy are the powerful and successful, who often are not particularly happy but, nevertheless, want to retain their positions of influential unhappiness. Thus, both happiness and power are conservative forces acting to preserve the status quo by opposing objective evaluation of criticisms or suggestions which might improve the world but certainly would change it. Usually, the powerful will accept only those changes which increase their power—that is, changes which make significant change less likely.

Contributing greatly to the culture of stupidity is the willingness of people to submit to higher authorities in matters requiring intellectual effort. This willingness provides the psychological basis for the church and state, with the church providing beliefs for people who cannot understand and the state providing things for people who cannot do. In their self-serving ways, these institutions feed on the weaknesses of people, making them weaker and keeping them from learning and doing things they might comprehend and accomplish. As a state religion, Islam constitutes

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