Jail Break

Is it the political process that imposes stupidity upon the people, or is it the people that impose stupidity upon the political process? Is there any priority of one over the other? Is it possible to locate where stupidity begins? Does it radiate from a single point outward, or does it accrete everywhere at the same time––a mysterious  suffusion that does not obey any recognized aspect of systems theory and operates instantaneously, such that those who would think about the process and discern its truth have already succumbed to it?

Stupidity derives from the Latin root stupidere: to be stunned. And this sense of the word, perhaps lost to us, should be resurrected. Stupidity is not a permanent state or condition, nor is it a cognitive deficit in the usual sense of the term, nor does it necessarily indicate a low IQ. There is something peculiarly modern in all those definitions of stupidity, and the modern age is perhaps better suited to embody stupidity than to penetrate its mystery.

We are stunned. We are in a condition of frozen shut down, and every attempt to provoke us out of this state leads us to withdraw further from the active intellect. Each election, which might be regarded as an attempt to provoke the people toward understanding and choice, takes us elsewhere. Strange monsters and grotesques dance before us.

“It has always been thought… that it is the media which enveloped the masses. The secrete of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in this naïve logic of communication, that the masses are stronger medium that all the media, that it is the former which envelop and absorb the latter.”

Baudrillard, In the  Shadow of the Silent Majority

The will to stupidity may well constitute a deep decision to abandon the modern world to itself, to evacuate it, to hollow it out, to sever it from history and memory, to leave it as a parody of itself, while we follow some deeper escape, daring not utter what that escape is or even to allow ourselves to know it or anticipate it, because all that is preordained and pre-programmed in modernity, all of Burrough’s pre-recorded universe, all that proscribes an original event by anticipating it and rendering it as a series of duplicates before it is even born, would force the information from us and destroy it.