Stupidity Speaks

Before Reading:

We usually think of stupidity as the absence of intelligence. But what if intelligence itself can become an instrument of stupidity?

Do we truly examine our beliefs, or do we merely use them to examine everything else?

When an ideology gives us ready-made answers, does it help us understand the world, or relieve us of the burden of thinking?

And perhaps the more uncomfortable question:

We believe our ideas belong to us. But how often do we stop to ask whether we belong to our ideas?

The Original Writing

I am with you.

I have always been with you, and I always will be.

For at the very moment reason was bestowed upon you, I too was born. Who knows? Perhaps I, too, had some sacred origin…

I bring you the gift of ignorance, and I weave it so deeply into your pure nature that you come to regard knowledge as something unattainable, an impossibility.

I am Stupidity, and you are Humanity.

From the past into the future, we have shared the same home, for your frail, earthly body, with an indescribable willingness, has welcomed us as eternal guests.

There is no need to worry.

I speak.

You listen. And your filthy, insignificant body obeys. A fair transaction.

Together, we have created a great part of that history, which you proudly claim as your inheritance.

And together, we shall create much more.

Our creation, yours and mine, was never so ridiculous or insignificant that it could separate us.

I place my knowledge at your disposal, and you place your reason at mine.

There is no need to worry.

We gamble only with those things that this pleasure-house called the world has given us…

You know very well that even the creation of this world was not entirely free from my presence.

So there is little room for the puppet show of your thoughts.

Let me make another bargain with you.

Do you remember?

We have done this together thousands of times before.

Once, the matter was wood and stone.

I said:

Strike.

You listened carefully, and your insignificant earthly body struck.

Then the matter became the bowstring.

I said:

Release.

You listened, and your body released it.

Then came the trigger.

I say:

Pull.

You listen, and your filthy body pulls.

And one day, the matter becomes a switch.

I shall say:

Turn it.

You will listen.

And your earthly body will obey.

No… There is no need to worry.

The act remains the same.

Only now, through the knowledge and power of thought belonging to some of your fellow human beings, those with whom I have made fewer bargains, we give other human beings another opportunity to live.

Once, one person. Another time, ten. And another time, thousands…

But perhaps it is better not to entangle ourselves in this twisted skein of words. Better not to think about numbers at all.

What difference does it make?

I said think. Do not imagine that your ability to think is of no use to us.

Quite the contrary. We have played with the power of your thought many times, amusing ourselves with that ancient game:

Hide-and-seek.

We trade with one another as well. I sell you fanaticism and tyranny at a very low price. And you sell me your worthless reason. I give you ignorance. And in return, I take away your opportunity to think.

No… There is no need to worry.

Thinking is merely a time-consuming and useless process. It searches through life and existence for nothing and leaves you only confused.

Instead, I give you answers. I rescue you from the whirlpool of thought.

Do not forget that we have no real business in this world anyway.

You, Human, my beloved host, never forget that you owe me an ocean of your structured beliefs and manufactured ideas, those things you call ideologies and schools of thought.

I love you. And you worship me.

You think with ideology, but you do not think about ideology.

Through it, you eat. You drink. You live. You tear apart. You cut down. You kill.

And you destroy…

Indeed, you should be grateful to me with your entire being.

For through your ideology, your insignificant body and soul acquire meaning.

Were it otherwise, you would never have dragged behind you a history of such magnificent proportions.

And before I forget, there is something else I must tell you.

I do not like being called by any name other than Stupidity.

You, Human, throughout your glorious and miserable history, have called me by other names again and again.

You have called me God.

You have called me the Devil.

Of course, I cannot complain.

For you committed this deception with the full power of the ignorance that I myself gave you.

I taught you to believe. I taught you to remain unwavering in your convictions, things which, even after all these years, your thinkers have still not fully understood.

Human, you have misused me.

Everything you called glory came from me, and yet I myself remained hidden from your sight.

I asked you to understand reality. But instead, you tied my true nature to superstition, and from that, too, you created another hollow belief.

Human, even in understanding your own ignorance, you have been ignorant.

A Visual Echo of the Text

Reflection After More Than Three Decades

Reading this piece after more than three decades, I am struck first by its certainty.

The young writer does not hesitate. He puts Stupidity on the stage, gives it a voice, and allows it to accuse humanity of surrendering reason in exchange for certainty, ideology, fanaticism, obedience, and ready-made answers.

Today, I would be far more cautious.

Stupidity is too simple a word for something so deeply woven into human behaviour. Intelligent people can make foolish decisions. Educated societies can embrace destructive ideas. Knowledge can expand while wisdom remains painfully limited. Perhaps the real problem is not the absence of intelligence at all.

Perhaps it is our ability to use intelligence in the service of beliefs we have never seriously examined.

One sentence in the original writing interests me particularly today:

“You think with ideology, but you do not think about ideology.”

More than three decades later, I still find the distinction important.

Every human being needs frameworks through which to understand reality. We inherit language, culture, morality, religion, political ideas, traditions, scientific assumptions, and social expectations long before we are capable of examining them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. We cannot begin life intellectually from zero. The danger begins when the framework becomes invisible. When we stop seeing an idea as an idea and begin seeing it simply as reality, questioning it can feel like questioning reality itself. At that point, thinking becomes difficult because the boundaries of permissible thought have already been drawn.

The young writer called this stupidity. Today, I would probably call it something more complicated: intellectual complacency, dogmatism, confirmation bias, tribalism, ideological capture, or perhaps simply the human desire for certainty.

I am also interested in the progression from stone, to bow, to trigger, to switch.

At the time, I was clearly thinking about humanity’s increasing technological capacity to amplify the consequences of a simple human decision. The mechanism changes. The distance between decision and consequence grows. Yet the voice giving the command remains disturbingly simple:

Strike.

Release.

Pull.

Turn.

Looking at those lines today, after spending much of my adult life in technology, I find a question there that feels even more relevant now than when I wrote them:

Does technological progress necessarily imply human progress?

I no longer think the answer is obvious.

Technology amplifies capability. It does not automatically supply wisdom.

There are also parts of this writing that I would challenge today.

The treatment of ideology is too absolute. Belief is not inherently ignorance. Conviction is not necessarily stupidity. Religion, philosophy, political thought, science, and tradition cannot simply be placed into one category and dismissed as mechanisms of intellectual captivity.

The teenage writer wanted to demolish certainty.

The older writer has learned to be suspicious of the certainty required to demolish it.

That may be the greatest difference between us.

I would also phrase the references to God and the Devil very differently today. I do not read those lines now as theological claims. I see a young writer protesting humanity’s tendency to assign responsibility for its own actions to forces outside itself.

That question remains worth asking.

When human beings commit cruelty in the name of religion, ideology, nation, race, progress, revolution, security, or even reason itself, how much responsibility belongs to the idea, and how much belongs to the human being who chose to act?

I do not have the simple answer that the young writer believed he had.

And I think that is progress.

More than three decades later, I would not rewrite this piece. Its exaggerations, arrogance, anger, and certainty belong to the person who wrote it.

But I would leave him with one additional question.

He believed stupidity was whispering answers into humanity’s ear.

I would ask him:

What if the beginning of wisdom is not finding better answers, but becoming more willing to question the answers we desperately want to be true?

— Farshad