Actual Stupid Idiots are our anti-democratic dictators and leaders

Stupid Idiots is delightful romp through the ages. Man, it seems, has always labeled others as stupid, or idiots, or worst of all, as stupid idiots. This English translation of Lars Svendsen’s Norwegian original is ever entertaining while being ever more enlightening, the mark of a fine book. It even has an unexpected Big Finish to look forward to.

Svendsen is a philosopher, and he comes at this with intentional thoroughness and a keen observational eye. He calls this book a contribution to “virtue epistemology”, but thankfully, that’s as ethereal as it ever gets, and all readers will breeze right through it.

We are all stupid if only because we cannot possibly know everything about everything, yet speak about things authoritatively anyway. So we are often wrong. That’s just human. But where things get dicey is when people take action based on their ignorance. With this “poor use” of their power to think things through, they announce themselves as idiots, Svendsen says. The combination of these weaknesses is the stupid idiot, as destructive a force as has ever been when it goes unchecked.

Stupidity occurs anywhere and everywhere. Svendsen tells the story of Telenor in Oslo, which designed its new building to prevent the formation of habits. (Telenor asked him to write it up, 25 years ago.) Some idiot bought the idea that habits crush innovation, whereas, Svendsen says, “Without habits we’d be unable to do anything at all, let alone anything innovative.” And yet “Without stupidity the world would fall apart.”

There are all kinds of telltale signs. I think my favorite is the religious zealot who twists everything to fit his worldview, typical of a stupid idiot. Show him a rock, maybe with a 350 million year old fossil imprint, and he will tell you “God made the rock look much older” than it really is, because the Earth only goes back to 4004 BC.

This ties in with a chapter on conservatives and radicals. He says “The stupid ensure the world goes on as usual while idiots try to move it forward, and stupid idiots are convinced that they alone have the formula for a better world. “Not all conservatives are stupid,” he says, “but if you are stupid, it’s very likely you are conservative. Not all radicals are idiots but if you are an idiot, it’s very likely you are a radical.”

There could not possibly be such a book without mention of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. The two psychologists formalized what has been known for literally thousands of years: those whose stance is the most stubbornly firm have the least knowledge about the subject, and those who know nothing are the loudest proponents of their position. The less they know, the more obnoxiously they proclaim their certainty. The ancient Greeks said the same, 2500 years before Dunning-Kruger.

This hints nicely at where the book is heading for its Big Finish, but first, there is lots of great color.

One of the great things about Stupid Idiots is the huge number and variety of people who had something to say about it all. Stupidity is everyone’s business and everyone’s experience. So for example, he quotes the writer Saul Bellow claiming “The infallible sign of stupidity is the readiness to answer any question.” It clearly demonstrates “the complete lack of concept of your own limitations, which everyone must have.” Meanwhile, mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell said “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” Thinking independently is not commonly part of any curriculum. Nuclear Physicist Niels Bohr said an expert was someone who had already made all the possible mistakes in a narrow field. As opposed to the stupid idiot, who never acknowledges mistakes at all, and then doubles down when challenged.

Svendsen devotes an entire chapter to the utter stupidity of philosophers, his own co-professionals. Aristotle believed women must have fewer teeth than men (same for sheep, goats and pigs). American James Fetzer believed in every conspiracy theory that wafted by, including the moon landings being faked, along with all stories about the Holocaust. Descartes believed no animals except Man could possess consciousness. Schopenhauer believed in Mesmerism and magic. Even Cicero complained there was no belief absurd enough to prevent some philosopher from advocating for it.

In politics, Svendsen shows that dictators tend to be stupid idiots. Men like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao had their own “factual” beliefs and no one could talk them out of them with logic, proportion or common sense. Mao probably had the wackiest ideas, like planting seeds several feet deeper for bigger harvests, killing off all the sparrows because they ate grains and seeds that could feed the masses, and on and on. No one dared contradict him with facts. (But China was forced to import 250,000 sparrows to restart them after insect plagues caused massive damage nationwide.)

Svendsen has solutions, too. He says you can lessen the idiocy by talking with other people (not just to them, but with them). Widen the group; don’t just seek out carbon copies of yourself. Upgrade your knowledge, your understanding and your game.

Watch out for confirmation bias, whereby people pretend to fairly research a subject, but only take on evidence that supports their already fixed position. Along this line, here is Bertrand Russell again: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.”

Watch out for the false connection that correlation means causation. Unless you have proof, it does no such thing. And ”few things are more idiotic than racism,” the notion that the human race can be divided into intellectual capacity levels according to the shade of the skin. He says “an astoundingly large number of the most important philosophers” believed just that. For example, the otherwise respected Martin Heidegger was a full on, uniformed Nazi, master race, white, male, supremacist.

All this leads up to the final chapter, called The Stupid Idiot in the White House. Everything Svendsen has said so far contributes to a portrait of Donald Trump. In his own chapter, he never calls him a sociopath, a narcissist, or senile, but all the symptoms of both stupidity and idiocy combine in massive stupid idiocy in his case.

He starts with the simple position that “The most reliable indicator that a person is a stupid idiot is their insistence on being unquestionably right about every matter.” Trump even had baseball caps made saying “Trump was right about everything,” an unintentional self-own in Svendsen’s terms.

Stupid idiots “offer no opening for viewpoints other than their own to be considered, and in this sense they are inherently anti-democratic,” and “The stupid idiot is impervious to arguments.”

Just to be clear, Svendsen says “Few people deserve the label ‘stupid idiot’ more than Donald Trump.”

As an aside, something I hadn’t known about is the annual Darwin Awards, in which outlandish stupidity is recognized in a wide variety of situations, mostly by people who really should know better. They are good for a laugh at the stupid and their idiocy, and Svendsen rubs it in, declaring that it is no great surprise that 90% of the awards go to men.

Another great source (in my own library) is The Incomplete Book of Failures, where readers learn, among hundreds of other anecdotes, that the Indiana legislature considered a bill in 1905 that would set the value of pi at four in Indiana. This, it said, would make calculations far easier for all. Stupid idiocy abounds.

Ironically, there is much wisdom in Stupid Idiots.

David Wineberg

(Stupid Idiots, Lars Svendsen, June 2026)

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