In a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson, the controversial but rather impressive Andrew Tate suggested that the standard political distinction between Left and Right, liberal-progressivist and conservative, is not in itself the polarity that explains the culture wars we are undergoing or the social divide that is tearing apart our countries. The distinction, he argues, is between people who think and people who don’t, or as he put it, between “the thinkers and the repeaters.” It’s between those who endeavor to acknowledge reality — for example, that there are two and only two biological sexes or that Socialism, as defined by Thomas DiLorenzo in “The Problem with Socialism,” is “the biggest generator of poverty the world has ever known” — and those who merely repeat the ideological sedatives of the day or the tectonic lies that have become the trademark of the so-called legacy media. Tate should know. He is one of the prime victims of rampant and unscrupulous media disinformation.
But the schism goes even deeper than Tate’s antitheses. Quite bluntly, however problematic or elusive the definition of the concept may be, it has to do with the question of what we call “evil,” which has always resisted a definitive answer. In the moral structure of Judeo-Christian civilization, evil is theologically and philosophically understood as a rupture in the creation of the inhabited universe, the existence of groundless or unprovoked pain and suffering, or the handiwork of the Devil, as the early Christian Gnostics believed. Especially in the human world, evil is construed as the perennial tendency to lie or suppress observable truth, to cause harm for personal advantage, to inflict gratuitous suffering, and to bring misery and destruction upon whole societies in the interests of unworkable theory, unprovable assumptions, vaunting ambition, or what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, psychoanalyzing Shakespeare’s Iago, called “motiveless malignity.”
Admittedly, it is often hard to distinguish between perduring evil and “repeater” stupidity, between people who act with malice aforethought to deceive or injure others and those who clearly evince a deficiency of intelligence, doing harm unintentionally, going with the turbid flow, and embracing realistically implausible or absurd ideas and practices. Stupid is as stupid does.
“When stupid people are at work,” writes Carlo Cipolla in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, “the society as a whole is impoverished.” The damage is more than likely to be irreparable. “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person,” he concludes, though an evil person will give a stupid person a run for his money. We might better say that stupid people are the readily accessible prey of evil people. An infallible sign of a stupid person is the susceptibility to programming and propaganda — what Mike Adams calls an “obedience idiot.”
Indeed, average IQ appears to have steadily decreased over the last decade and especially since the COVID mandates came into force — assuming, of course, that IQ is a proximate indicator of general intelligence. But there can be little doubt that stupidity has gone “viral,” that it has become the major pandemic of our times. A U.S. Congressman who believes the island of Guam might tip over due to military freight and reinforced personnel may not be as exceptional as we might assume. The cult of Woke, for example, is an ocean full of capsizing islands.
As Einstein is reputed to have said, “there is a major difference between intelligence and stupidity; intelligence has its limits.” The problem is that stupid people, Tate’s “repeaters,” who are legion, will commit acts or endorse positions whose consequences we may call “evil,” creating situations that lead to needless distress and outright torment or anguish, which, in the words of Macbeth, will often “return to plague th’inventor.”
Socially, economically and politically, the majority of those who are either stupid or evil, or both, are obviously to be found mainly among the Left, although the conservative Right is by no means exempt. But the issue is one of preponderance, which leans decisively to the Left. Nonetheless, if a solution to the problem of stupidity or evil were even remotely conceivable, it would not be political. Stupidity is at least theoretically treatable in isolated cases via genuine education and informed conversation and debate. People have been known to change their minds or revise their core assumptions. But evil, as it were, a world of slaughter and agony, is baked into the natural Creation as the Gnostics believed — “this munching universe,” in the phrase of novelist Lawrence Durrell in “Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness.” And again, it is hardwired into the human soul with its tendency to sadism or plain viciousness, what the Talmudic sages called the yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and Saint Augustine in “City of God” called the mysterium iniquitatis.
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Between evil and stupidity falls the shadow of our dereliction. This does not mean that we should eschew political considerations. The political battle is ongoing and necessary. The Left must be fought tooth and nail, whether as a grand political ideology with its secular scriptures, as the carcinogen of feminist dogma, as the LGBTQ+ aberration with its endless alphabetical string denoting ever new chapters and branches, as the palpable madness of radical environmentalism and climate engineering, or massively braindead movements such as Wokeism. The Left represents on a global scale the paramount instance of the unholy alliance between evil and stupidity.
The conflict in which intelligent people are engaged, however, does mean that they are bound to a kind of Sisyphean Labor. What the struggle requires is a combination of courage and reflection, the determination to persist in unequal combat against personal inclinations and frailties as well as the unredeemed world in which, to paraphrase Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we are condemned to live, even if we strive, as best we can, to hold to the Ten Commandments and the Four Virtues.
The West is now caught in the vise between undisguised evil and vaulting stupidity, a wasting disease to be fought not only in the political arena but in the very corpuscles of an increasingly decadent civilization. I cannot say if the end times are already upon us. But without luck, grace, intelligence, and dedication, our future is a foregone conclusion.
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