I sometimes ask people, just out of curiosity, if they think a particular political person they dislike is crazy or evil or stupid, which I think exhausts the possibilities. Rarely does someone respond “None of the above” but a frequent response is “All three.” Or sometimes “Stupid and crazy, but not evil” or some other mixture. But I see the choices as separate.
A crazy person has no control over what he/she thinks, but is totally sincere. A stupid person just needs those thoughts to be unrealistically simple, and is not inclined to move off an idea once it comes into her/his head. And an evil person understands that his/her thoughts are not in the best interests of people but they serve him/her well, and a limited subset of his/her friends.
Evil people often pretend to be crazy or stupid to save them from needing to fess up to being evil.
I don’t see much overlap between the three–each originates in a different place, and each needs to be argued against (or not) with different techniques. The choice is an interesting one to me because until we understand if someone is crazy or stupid or evil, we don’t know how to deal with them.
I have contemplated that concept and have no answer… I illustrate it with a question from a Wagner opera. One character asks another, “Are you malicious, or merely insane?” The best answer I have received is that is most safe to assume the person is evil.
What about the political person who honestly and sincerely represents the interests of a group whose interests are diametrically opposed to mine? I don’t necessarily consider them crazy, evil, or stupid. Heck, I even like some of them. Doesn’t stop me from organizing against them.
My point is just one needn’t think one’s political opponent is crazy, evil, or stupid. I’d go further to suggest that strategizing against them may be more effective if you don’t assume they are one or all of those, without evidence. I know what my opponent’s agenda is: to prosper at my expense. That likely stress from their perception of their self-interest, which may be crazy, evil, or stupid: but may not be. My boss wants me to work longer for less money; I want to work less for more money. We are both pursuing our self-interest, with equal claims to “truth, beauty, and justice,” and their mental health, morality, and IQ will be factors, but not the basis of our dispute.
So I think this is the key point. What most people mean by “crazy” when they describe a political figure is they have personality disorder (typically narcissistic personality disorder, which is arguably a prerequisite to a career in politics) this doesn’t mean they have no control over what they think.
I don’t know of any Political figure who actually had a fully fledged mental illness that means they had no control over their thoughts, even Hitler or Stalin. Maybe Idi Amin?
I was thinking of a voter rather than a pol. Pols are sane, for the most part. Cult members often have mental disorders of some sort, rarely the cult leaders.
Howzabout someone who h. & s. represents the interests of a group whose interests are diametrically opposed to themselves, but is unable to realize it?
Sorry sliced, I don’t think that you’ve got quite the right angle on this one.
Consider the debt ceiling crisis. For the sake of not hijacking this thread, I won’t say which party is which.
But one party is behaving incredibly cynically and recklessly, just to try to extract some political gain.
Extreme cynicism, hypocrisy…and recklessly threatening the fortunes of the whole country…how does that map to the C/E/S spectrum? You could argue it’s at least a little bit of all of those.
And secondly, we need to somehow get back to talking about policies and ideas. I think asking people this kind of question is bringing their focus back to the hate, which is very much what current politics is about in the US (well, on one side of the aisle. Again not mentioning names )
This seems to me simply evil. Few members of the party think a default will benefit people (which would be stupid) and few actually think risking an economic disaster is less dangerous than the political programs of their opponents will be (which is crazy) but simply view it as a ploy to gain power, which is evil.
For the sake of public relations, they must maintain that they really believe this nonsense (stupid) or that they’re genuinely terrified that the other side is demonic (crazy–and projecting) but at bottom, they’re just (as another thread title says) simply evil.
That’s not the only kind of stupidity available here though.
There are certainly people (ok screw it: Republicans. It’s Republicans that I’m talking about), who haven’t bothered to learn how the nation’s finances work, who e.g. regularly conflate deficit and debt in a way that doesn’t particularly help the talking point of the day, just simply betrays a lack of understanding.
To those people, they may well think default just means paying your credit card bill late. Not positive, but no biggie.
Of course, we can split hairs and say that this is laziness, incompetence and ignorance. But, in everyday life, that’s just stupid. In fact, someone who doesn’t understand X out of laziness and ignorance is arguably worse than someone who doesn’t have the mental horsepower to understand X well.
And of course, people like MTG are a lot of column A, lot of column B.
When it comes to the GOP, it is a violent, racist, and anti-democratic movement. It is also incredibly short sighted. Every Republican is some combination of evil and stupid, some are more stupid than evil, some are more evil than stupid and some are split right down the middle. It doesn’t really matter what the particular mix is.
It’s akin to asking whether members of al Qaeda are evil or crazy, ultimately what matters is that they keep blowing shit up.
Being evil is no guarantee of a high IQ, or of a clean bill of psychiatric health, of course, so there’s bound to be “a mixture of all three” in any diagnosis of “evil.” But much of what evil people profess is, in my view, a pretense to stupidity or craziness, because people know that selling “I am evil” doesn’t go over with anyone.
To take the example of MTG, do you really think she believes this “Jewish space lasers” garbage? I don’t. She knows it riles up the libs, appeals to her racist base, gets her air time, etc. but does she believe it? I say no. She may be (probably is) an anti-Semite, which is to say she gladly promotes the interest of like-minded Christians who think anyone who denies the divinity of Christ is their enemy, but I don’t think she actually believes that space lasers funded by Jews are a pressing danger at the moment. She doesn’t care much if these lasers exist, true, but they’re a form of shorthand for what she knows her followers think: Jews are a problem. It’s cynical and aimed at aggrandizing her political power: hence, evil.
I say yes.
Millions of Americans believe these conspiracies, what has led you to believe that she is less ignorant, and better discriminating than they are?
The Jewish / Italian space lasers is a bit of an extreme example, but even on that, I wouldn’t necessarily say she dis-believed it when she said it.
It was just a meme that struck a chord, with her, and with others, so she spread it without giving much thought to whether it was true. Only later when some ridicule came her way did she sorta kinda climb down.
I doubt that it was a 4D chess strategy where she knew it was false and evaluated that the ridicule was going to be worth it.
I’m not claiming she’s secretly a soooper-genyus who’s way too smart to accept the Jewish space lasers as plausible, I’m just saying she never spent two minutes figuring out how it all makes sense. She just went with it because she knows her supporters would buy it completely.
)