Part 1

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 759 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

How to Conquer Stupidity

Leo Markun

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1927, Haldeman-Julius Company

CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 3

Learning How to Think 17

Some Common Forms of Stupidity 47

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

HOW TO CONQUER STUPIDITY

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps stupidity is a somewhat vague term. In general, we know what it is. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as the “Quality or state of being foolish; extreme dullness of understanding; crass foolishness.” Dr. L. Loewenfeld, in his thorough German treatise On Stupidity, points out that the word may be applied with regard to an individual or with regard to single acts of persons who are not considered stupid. The wisest person is capable of occasional foolish deeds.

I shall speak here of stupidity not only as weakness of understanding but also as improper response of any sort. I shall not, however, particularly concern myself with awkwardness of body. Moreover, I have considered certain aspects of mental inefficiency in How to Think Logically (No. 1063), Insanity and Other Mental Disorders (No. 1094), and several other Little Blue Books. I shall try not to repeat myself except where this appears necessary.

When we speak of a man as being stupid, we mean usually that he has less than average intelligence. But here we are again employing words which are without exactness. Intelligence cannot be measured as though it were a matter of weight or specific gravity. There are so-called Mentimeter tests, somewhat similar to the army intelligence tests with which some of my readers may be familiar; but they do not entirely live up to their name. They do afford a rough index to the possession of certain qualities. They should not be used without considerable caution, however. There have been a number of unwarranted attempts made to draw deductions from these tests as though their value had been conclusively demonstrated.

Dr. George A. Dorsey truly says, “I can test your capacity or intelligence or your will only as I can pick a winner at a horse race. I know at the end of the race.” The whole idea of testing and grading seems to be based upon an academic fallacy. Who was more intelligent, Socrates or Napoleon? Pasteur or Alexander the Great? Shakespeare or Goethe? If these men had been given Alpha or Mentimeter tests, should we be able better to answer these questions now? I think not.

Stupidity is a relative matter, just as intelligence is. In a primitive tribe, the man who has good muscles, good vision, and good hearing, with a certain amount of what we call savage cunning, is amply able to take care of himself. He may become chief and he is almost certain to be well supplied with food and wives. In a civilized community, if he is extraordinarily well supplied with the endowments mentioned, he may perhaps make a fortune as an athlete. In this case he will not lack for wives, either. But if he is intellectually of low grade, he may not be able to retain his large earnings. He is likely to spend them quickly for foolish luxuries and to dissipate them by gambling. Then, when middle age weakens his muscles, he is forced to adjust himself to inferior living conditions. Then he is called a fool--a term seldom applied to one actually in possession of considerable wealth.

What is stupidity in a college town may be ordinary intelligence in a mine or a sculptor’s studio or on the baseball field. It may even be genius. People who are extraordinarily developed in one direction may be underdeveloped in others. A man may be a great general or an industrial leader without having an ear for music. We are not justified in calling a scientist stupid because he absent-mindedly hands the conductor a button instead of his ticket. His act is one of stupidity, however, as I use the term here. If his absent-mindedness should manifest itself frequently while he is conducting important scientific experiments, it would be indicative of great stupidity, of unfitness for his work.

What we call folly or stupidity may amount to a lack of will power, an inability to concentrate upon the problems of life. Or it may be due to improper habit formations. Usually, but perhaps not always, it is connected with a lack of intellectual capacity in the narrow sense. The idea of stupidity is after all subjective. The martyr-masochist (we may take Jesus and Socrates as examples, although their lives as we have them seem to be masses of legends) is a hero to his follower, a “damned idiot” to the unsympathetic. But, from the point of view of their own development, they are not stupid. They do what it is within them to perform and to suffer. Here I pay no heed to the verdict of history, and rank the unsuccessful with the successful Christs. When Nathan Hale was hanged, he did not know that the Revolution was going to succeed. He did not know that the school books of his country would some day set him up as a patriotic example. If these states were still British colonies, we should probably think of Hale--if we thought of him at all--as a fool. We should probably think of George Washington and all the other rebel leaders in the same way.

John Brown’s scheme was absurd. The chance that his expedition should succeed was not one in a thousand. It failed, and yet his failure helped finally to bring about the abolition of slavery. Edmund Clarence Stedman was right when he wrote in 1859:

And Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, May trouble you more than ever when you’ve nailed his coffin down!

Would Brown have been more of a fool if the United States had been destined to retain Negro slavery? In other words, is failure positive proof of stupidity?

I suppose the answer depends in the final analysis upon our definition of failure. The man who has given up his life to disinterested service can hardly be blamed for not having earned a large fortune. Even if we are unable to sympathize with his motives, we must understand that he probably succeeded in realizing most of his own ambitions. Sometimes, indeed, people work hard in one direction to forget failure where success was most desired. The laurel wreath may then fall to ashes amid the applause of the unseeing crowd.

But in general we rate a man according to his seeming ability to adjust himself to his environment. We soon forget his petty stupidities if he is able to do some one thing better than his neighbors, provided only that his accomplishment is highly rated. At present the preacher who can send his hearers into convulsions of religious ecstasy is almost sure to get his name into Who’s Who in America and is fairly certain, if he possesses a certain flair for business, to amass a comfortable fortune. But the same man, born in an irreligious age might be simply a lazy good-for-nothing or even a patient in an insane asylum. What became of all the potential scientists who were born in the Middle Ages and accomplished nothing? Poor stupid fellows, most of them must have been called by their neighbors.

As a matter of fact, we know few people well enough to be justified in calling them stupid. Of course not all the feebleminded and demented men and women are removed from the world’s work. But it is better to keep the definitely diseased mentally out of our conception of stupidity. Since we are concerned with the conquest of folly and since the mental disorders are either incurable at present or curable only by medical treatment of one sort or another, we shall leave them out of account. What interests us primarily is the correction by the individual himself of his own minor stupidity.

We should understand, though, that mental capacity cannot be enlarged by any effort of the will. After an individual has reached his full growth, his mental capacity may be decreased by an accident or disease, but there is no known way by which he or others can increase it.

Still, mental attainment can be raised, for the reason that it is never equal to mental capacity. To elevate the level of mental attainment means (in the widest sense of the word) to educate. What we call stupidity may really be ignorance or lack of order. Moreover, lack of order, that is, an imperfect scientific method or logical system, is the most common cause of ignorance. The man who has learned how to study, not the one who has acquired a few random scraps of information, is on the way to becoming educated. The slow apprentice is sometimes undervalued when he is actually laying the proper foundations for his work.