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    How to Deal With Idiots: (and stop being one yourself)
    How to Deal With Idiots: (and stop being one yourself)
    How to Deal With Idiots: (and stop being one yourself)
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    How to Deal With Idiots: (and stop being one yourself)

    By Maxime Rovere and David Bellos

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    • Human Behavior

    • Philosophy

    • Idiots

    • Idiocy & Stupidity

    • Conflict & Resolution

    • Fool

    • Idiot Plot

    • Wise Mentor

    • Inner Struggle

    • Unwitting Pawn

    • Hero's Journey

    • Self-Discovery

    • Mentorship

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Moral Dilemma

    • Authority

    • Ethics

    • Morality

    • Stupidity & Idiocy

    • Power Dynamics

    About this ebook

    Idiocy is all around us, whether it's the uncle spouting conspiracy theories, the colleagues who repeat your point but louder, or the commuters who still don't know how to use an escalator. But what is the answer to this perpetual scourge?

    Here, philosopher Maxime Rovere turns his attention to the murkiest of intellectual corners. With warmth, wit and wisdom, he illuminates a new understanding of idiots, one which examines our relations to others and our own ego, offers tools and strategies to dismantle the most desperate of idiotic situations, and even reveals how to stop being the idiots ourselves (because we're always someone else's idiot).

    Expertly translated by David Bellos, this is an erudite, enjoyable and much-needed solution to a most familiar vexation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherProfile Books
    Release dateAug 12, 2021
    ISBN9781782838081
    How to Deal With Idiots: (and stop being one yourself)
    Author

    Maxime Rovere

    Maxime Rovere is a philosopher who has dedicated his life to studying the ways we interact, through both the history of philosophy (Spinoza and others in the Early Enlightenment) as well as in contemporary ethics, and now in turning his attention to the scourge of all ages: idiots. Associate Researcher at the École Normale Supérieure (Lyon), he lectures regularly at the universities of Buenos Aires and Montreal and was Council of Humanities Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 2019.

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      Book preview

      How to Deal With Idiots - Maxime Rovere

      THREE CONCLUSIONS BEFORE WE EVEN START

      ‘Oi, you, stop shoving!’

      ‘Move down the carriage then!’

      ‘Move? In that crush?’

      ‘Well, you stop shoving then!’

      ‘Then you move!’

      ‘Then don’t shove!’

      ‘Gimme a break!’

      ‘Can’t you just move down a bit?’

      ‘But I told you already …’

      Stupidity is in the eye of the beholder; stupidity can appear in an infinite number of guises; the biggest idiot of all is the one in the mirror. Now that’s been said, we can start to think.

      When you picked up this book, you had in mind your own experience of fools and boors. A face and a name may have come to mind … Your painful experience, which may have involved matters as serious as injustice or suffering, makes you want to get your own back on idiots, which means learning more about them, having a bit of a laugh at their expense, and feeling more intelligent than they are. I share your hope. But before I begin, allow me to draw your attention to a problem inside our problem, namely, a question of definition.

      Although it is possible to define stupidity in abstract terms, it is very difficult to say exactly what it is that makes an idiot an idiot. Two things are plain. First, it’s obvious that the term ‘idiot’ is relative to such a degree that there is always someone out there for whom you are the idiot – and that is surely why there is no serious study of the topic so far. Secondly, and reciprocally, it’s just as clear that we all have our own idiot – by which I mean that we all have a sense of a Being whose outlines may be as fuzzy as that of a ghost but whose existence is far more obvious to us than that of God. Like me, you too would like philosophy to provide a better grasp of a thing that appears in our lives in the shape of specific idiots and jerks.

      But here is something to puzzle over: from the perspective of a pure intelligence, idiots do not exist. The conceptual form of God sees no stupid people when he looks down upon the world. His infinite understanding instantly grasps the machinery of causes, the connections of factors and the dynamics of interactions that make humans act. With unending benevolence, He who is infinitely wise extends his loving acceptance to all rash inventions, rude gestures, silly remarks, low cunning, and so on. In his omnipotence, he knows that everything has its place in the world, and his confidence in the way the universe works allows him to remember this, even when contemplating ridiculous opinions and absurd human flaws. Idiots don’t slip under the radar of the Absolute: they just evaporate under its Perfect Gaze.

      But we are no God. It seems obvious that the problem we have with stupid people is that meeting them forces us to appreciate our own limitations. Idiots stand on that bourn beyond which we cannot extend our love or understanding. That leaves us with two alternatives. We could wallow in our own imperfection and be as pathetic as brainless twits who enjoy sniggering at the things they don’t understand. Or we could acknowledge the specific force of stupidity, which is to be found in the effect that it has on us as individuals, and resort instead to the opposing force of ideas to trample over stupid people, which is to say, we could try to be not only better than they are but also better than we actually are ourselves.

      The second path has a grave drawback: being better is not always entertaining, and on occasions it is frankly a bore. But fear not – I reckon it won’t take more than a few relatively jargon-free pages for us to study the existence of idiots as a complex phenomenon.

      Even before I begin, however, another problem looms. The sheer variety of forms that stupidity takes surely makes it impossible to study all idiots in one sweep. There are idiots who are so sure they are right that they will not countenance a moment’s self-doubt; then there are those who are sure of nothing and query even the simplest truth; then there’s a third lot who don’t give a damn for the other two groups, or for anything else, even for perfectly avoidable disasters. How can I possibly put all idiots in one basket?

      One imaginable solution would be to establish the types and species of stupid people and to group them into families, maybe even to draw a family tree. But in my view, such a typology would have the serious disadvantage of giving to fools and knaves the kind of consistency that they do not possess. If I were to list various different kinds of idiot along with a description of the distinguishing features of each, we would very probably agree about some of them, and jointly identify certain idiot-types or essences (as when sampling perfumes). Unfortunately, that would produce a result directly contrary to our aim: you would be inclined to over-project your own experience, that is to say, you would let yourself believe that you have had to cope with entities, not with situations. In other words, the more such a list allows you to recognise the jerks and twits in your own life, the more likely you are to believe that idiots exist in the same way that ostriches and copper beeches exist (which is not the case, as I will show you very soon). Such a belief would result in your moving further away from the perspective of pure intelligence and benevolence, so that the ultimate effect of this book, as of so many others, would be to have you wallow ever deeper in your own prejudices, instead of leading you (and me) towards a little more wisdom.

      So classifying idiots won’t help us understand them any better, nor will it help us manage the ways in which they intervene in our lives. It’s true that in many films, comedy acts and novels there is a typecast fool, a character whose total lack of imagination is designed to prompt others – as if by magic – to creative exploits. But that fact only supports my argument. Philosophy works with concepts, not with characters. So as to be fair to different cases, I’m planning brief interludes where I can make visible the kinds of experiences I have in mind while working with abstractions. But my aim is not to invent anything. My aim is to understand.

      In other words, and despite this being rather unusual in philosophical discourse, I am asking you not to try to define idiots too precisely. Let’s leave them to twinkle on in the night sky where each of us can pick out our own star idiots. Let me go even further. To be completely sincere, I don’t really give a damn about what idiots are, where they come from, or what unpleasant methods they use to reproduce. All I want is for them to let me live in peace. And yet it is here, precisely, in a tender heart that yearns only to love, that there is a snag, a problem as sharp and nasty as a rusty nail: idiots do not leave us in peace, and they afflict in particular those who would most like to live far away from them. And so, the second axiom of my book is: idiots are all around and all over us.

      That is indeed a great mystery. How does stupidity make its way in the world, how does it slither and slide and insert its insidious self inside a theoretically intelligent subject? To answer this question, we have to start from the point where intelligence stops. And that, dear reader, is why I have already given you three observations that a smarter but less sincere author would have held back until the conclusion. Namely: every one of us is an idiot in someone else’s eyes; stupidity has an infinite number of forms; and the main idiot is the one we harbour inside ourselves. These three points are all perfectly correct, but as far as I am concerned, they are of no use at all. What I want from philosophy are precise conceptual techniques that allow me to overcome the weakness in my understanding and the shortfall in benevolence that I experience every time I go past a particular door in my own home and find myself face to face with human idiocy.

      HOW IDIOTS TIE US IN KNOTS

      There are foolish men who don’t want to get into trouble with their wives, and stupid women who try to avoid trouble with their mates; idiots who prefer not to get in a tangle with their kids, and thickos who feel the same about their parents – or their neighbours or their colleagues or their students or their teachers or their bosses or the media or their customers or the police … and because of the desperate efforts they all make to avoid each other, as they retreat, so as to avoid getting into trouble, jerks and idiots bump blindly into each other all the

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