The Finance Guy asks a simple, but important, question: “Is Being an Ideologue a Contributor to Stupidity?”
The simple, but important, answer is Yes. Being an ideologue is a contributor to stupidity — not to innate stupidity, but to chosen, voluntary, assumed stupidity.
The good news: Because it is not innate, this assumed stupidity can be shed, relatively easily. It is caused by a single choice and can be removed and corrected by a reversal of that same single choice. The blinders can be removed.
The bad news: Foremost among the things that ideological blinders keep one from seeing are the ideological blinders themselves. Or, in other words, the first consequence of willful stupidity is to be less aware that one is being willfully stupid.
Less aware, but never wholly unaware. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, self-deception involves too much agency to ever be wholly unconscious: “The self must at any rate deceive itself first. Its deception of others is partly an effort to convince itself against itself.”
How many rooms?
I’m sorry, what?
On this floor, how many rooms? Count them for me now.
Why?
Because it will change your life.
Five. One, two, three, four, five.
Six.
Six?
Look.
Look where?
Exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look. The corner of your eye. Look behind you.
Because it will change your life.
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