Why Harness Stupidity?

© Dr. Wes Browning

Why harness stupidity?

Why not? There’s so much of it! There’s more stupidity in the world than any other single resource, including dirt.

I wouldn’t say I’ve been stupider than most. I’ve actually been credited with having some smarts from time to time. But I realized at an early age that there are no such things as smarts. There is no such fluid as intelligence. What we call intelligence is really the ability to function at a high level without the appearance of stupidity.

The stupidity is always there, lurking in the background. Being intelligent doesn’t mean getting rid of your stupidity, it means managing it, trimming it, and finding ways to conceal it.

But then, in 1991, it suddenly occurred to me that I could do more than just hide my stupidity. Like everyone I had a surplus of stupidity that, until then, I was only shoveling under the carpet. Why couldn’t I find uses for it?

The stupidity that I alone generate daily is comparable to the four pounds of garbage that the average American generates every day. Instead of just dumping it somewhere I should recycle it. I began to look for ways to take my own stupidity and turn it into the notional equivalents of such things as the doilies, masks, lamp-shades, and macaroni art that people make out of paper and excess foodstuffs.

I have also tried to look beyond frivolous uses of stupidity to possible means of exploiting stupidity for empowerment and enrichment. As I learn I hope to share my understanding with others.

In my earliest columns I often taught my readers how to write poetry while stupid. Many of my tips involved using the stupidity itself to advantage. As my columns have moved away from poetry I have not been explicitly teaching the methods I have learned but I hope my later columns serve as inspirations, as they show how stupidity can be used to write political commentary as well as bad poems.

Elsewhere on this website I hope to provide tips and insight into harnessing one's own stupidity in other endeavors as well as writing -- for example, in play, in art, and for making paltry sums of money. I will be providing such helps as I blunder onto them and as I have time.

I look forward to the day when everyone in the world makes the best of his or her stupidity rather than carelessly dumping it all on the curb for the rest of us to sweep up. Perhaps someday someone's stupidity will cure some really stupid disease, or put human beings on some stupid planet out in space, or invent some stupid invention like cell-phones. Only different, because cell-phones have already been invented.

But even if none of that happens, at least our precious stupidity will not have been utterly wasted, if it was only used to make stupid coasters and doorstops.

Read what other people have had to say in praise of stupidity:

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” – Harlan Ellison

“ Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.” -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

“ If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?” –Will Rogers

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.” -- Oscar Wilde

“ The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.” -- Voltaire

“ Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not” -- Frank Zappa