JoJo said:
I don't believe there are huge number of stupid people, rather there are many people who feel insecure about their own intelligence or uniqueness in the world and so dismiss others as stupid with the implication that they themselves aren't, that they're better than the average person. This is particularly common in politics where often the other side is always the side of ignorance who haven't seen the light yet.
^^^ This. Well spoken.
That said:
ImBigBob said:
Yes yes, obvious subject line designed to draw attention. Here's the real thing:
People complain about stupid people all the time. But I almost never meet someone that functionally retarded. I go to work in an office, do my job, come home, watch TV/play games/whatever. If there's a party or meetup going on that I'm interested in, I'll go. Simple as that.
The thing is, I never meet people that I really hate. I see so much complaining online about stupid facebook status updates and stupid conversations with friends, but I never find myself engaging with that type of person. I know that the recent election made a lot of people very confrontational, but not one facebook friend I had posted that kind of reaction. Nobody gloating, nobody complaining.
So why is it that I have some kind of anti-stupid field around me? Yeah, I've met stupid people, especially when I was working retail, but despite how common they are, they're practically a legend to me.
I've had this discussion with a friend who works a call center. He insists that stupid people are all over the place, and that it's simply our contained little lives that keep us from seeing them all the time. I mean, you work in an office (a nice job I'd assume, I mean a little office space, but nice none the less in that it's good pay for desk work), which is a job stupid people generally have a harder time gravitating towards, you play games and watch TV (which involves little to no outside human interaction), and then you hang out with friends. I live a very similar life only replace work with school, and I'd imagine it's the same for most escapists (hmm.. double meaning on that one... win). The fact is, the people we hang out with, we do so because we like them and they aren't idiots, and they're likely not to hang out with idiots either (at least not regularly, at a party having idiots around can be amusing). So, basically your life lacks any knowledge of idiots because you don't go out on the street talking to random people to find one.
Still, I've only met a few stupid people (though I will admit any time I leave my windows open while my neighbors are having a party about 4/5 conversations will sound retarded... but I blame that on the drank... Still... being drunk never stopped me from getting philosophic, but my friends have expressed on several occasions that they hang out with me because I'm always talking absurdly deep (or about hot girls... my brain shuts right off for even mildly cute girls, which makes talking to them a bit more difficult).
The thing is, I can easily imagine stupid people, I think we all can. I mean, the bible belt (poorest part of the country) does keep voting republican. So maybe they are out there in the massive, zombie-like hordes that we've heard of in legend... or maybe they're made up by the media to make us hate our fellow man, and it's also entirely likely that, as JoJo put it, the concept of 'stupid people' is something formed in the insecure mind of your average human.
Hard to say really, only one way to find out. Shame you're not an anthropologist friend, I'd suggest a field study.
