Crazy? Evil? Stupid?

[LSLGuy]

@slicedalone

How are you ever going to know any of that, for certain? You’re not. But as a topic of discussion, this line of speculation is very interesting because we approach crazy people very differently from how we approach evil people, and both of them far differently than we approach very stupid people. Yet there are those who say “What difference?” I think there’s a big difference–it’s just hard to tell which ditch they’re standing in.

Now I understand where you’re coming from. Thank you.

As to crazy and evil, society has the same goal for both: remove them from power and / or remove them from public to an institutional setting. Whether that’s curative or punitive depends on your POV. The real point is to prevent them from harming others and, oh by the way, themselves.

Stupid is a different case, at least at first glance. We also ought here to explore the distinction between stupid and ignorant.

Ignorance in isolation can be corrected by more knowledge if the ignorant person is inclined to accept more knowledge as an inherently good thing. Which some few are but many more are not so inclined; not even a little bit. “Proudly ignorant” is a buzzphrase for a reason. It resonates with a common aspect of human nature.

Stupid is even worse than ignorant. It’s very impervious to improvement even if the owner of a stupid brain recognizes their plight and wishes they were instead a rocket surgeon.

My bottom line:
If I was placed in charge of e.g. MTG’s rehabilitation / neutralization I don’t know that I’d do anything different operationally if I magically knew her exact admixture of Evil, Crazy, Stupid, and Ignorant.

[madmonk28]

@slicedalone

Are they nuts, though? They’re nuttier than their predecessors, okay, but in the main they’re sane enough and smart enough to serve in Congress (admittedly a very low bar of sanity or smarts.)

They are actually nuts. Look at what serving in Congress means to them: MTG had been stripped of her committees for a time and basically wandered around Congress trolling people. She has said and done very strange things.

I don’t know why you struggle to accept this.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-david-hogg-video/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/05/14/marjorie-taylor-greene-since-deleted-video-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-newday-vpx.cnn

[Horatius]

@slicedalone

we approach crazy people very differently from how we approach evil people, and both of them far differently than we approach very stupid people. Yet there are those who say “What difference?” I think there’s a big difference–it’s just hard to tell which ditch they’re standing in.

Well, that depends on what you mean when you talk about “approaching” them. Am I their doctor, trying to treat their mental issues? Am I their teacher, trying to educate them? Am I their family, trying to live with them?

No, we’re not any of that. We’re people stuck living in the same society, but with no direct influence over them. The best we can do is explain why their ideas are nonsense, and hope that enough other voters get the message, and they lose the election. And in this case, how we approach them is the exact same. It doesn’t matter why they believe their bullshit, when I’m just explaining that it is bullshit.

[slicedalone]

@Horatius

what you mean when you talk about “approaching” them.

In this case, I mean literally “us,” we Dopers discussing them online. We often make the error of assuming someone is stupid when they’re actually intelligent but evil etc. so get into muddled conversations.

[slicedalone]

As far as “what they say behind closed doors,” I think if Biden had any one-on-one talks with McCarthy this past week, they would have been a lot more honest with each other than either one is being in his public accounts of such meetings. “Look, Joe/Kevin, I get it that you want x but we both know you can’t make that fly with your party, so we’re going to say y and end up doing z, ok?” “All right, Kevin/Joe, but how about we conclude on q instead? Also, you accuse me of wanting m but I’ll deny it, ok?” “OK.”

[Measure_for_Measure]

Map of human dysfunction

I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the Biden-McCarthy talks. Biden’s admin has been shockingly leak-free, so it’s difficult to understand what happened, other than to say that Biden is a very skilled political negotiator.

While persuasion remains a mystery, negotiation and diplomacy are well understood (though not by me). I think it’s unlikely that discussion was as candid and informal as, “Also, you accuse me of wanting m but I’ll deny it, ok?” That sort of stuff is implicit, even when working with a mediocrity like McCarthy. If you want an example of how such an agreement would be expressed within negotiation, refer to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US was ok with removing missiles from Turkey, but they absolutely would not allow that to be linked to the Soviet’s removal of missiles.

Read Kissinger. Skilled diplomats sometimes deal with crazies, but their goal is always to drive parties away from the crazy. So they reside on the immoral - stupid axis. Immoral because they are not candid. Stupid, because stupidity and human error are forces of nature.

On this board, we fight ignorance. So we reside near the crazy-immoral axis. Crazy because we fool ourselves into thinking eg our conversations matter in the slightest. Immoral because winning an argument is different than investigating a problem.

Christian paladins and Hollywood action heroes fight evil. That puts them on the stupid-crazy axis. Paladins trend towards Lawful Stupid. Action heroes behave in ways that require considerable suspension of disbelief insofar as pomposity and obvious rule breaking generally doesn’t work in real life. Crazy and stupid.

I think this framework has legs.

@Measure_for_Measure

Question: What’s near the middle of the Crazy-Stupid axis? As a joke I wrote, internet memes on twitter, but that’s not quite right. I mean there’s nothing stupid about dopamine addiction: it’s universal. There’s nothing crazy about using rules of thumb: that’s sensible. What is crazy and stupid but not especially immoral?

Fanaticism.

[Little_Nemo]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

But the interesting question, to my mind, is this: let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re right about Greene and those who vote for Greene; and let’s say, too, that Greene eventually leaves the House; and, while we’re at it, let’s also say you’re an amoral opportunist who now has a shot at that House seat.

You figure that what she was selling is what they were buying. You figure that you could pick up where she left off, saying significantly similar stuff to people who vote for someone who says such stuff. If, as you say, the “people like her really do believe the things they are saying”, then how do you — as an amoral opportunist, like I was just saying — present yourself to them?

A legitimate question. Personally I feel that Greene’s public craziness has probably harmed her career more than helped it. Greene says all her stupid things out loud. A smart politician would use dog whistles to appeal to the racist voters without alienating the non-racists.

[Horatius]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

You figure that what she was selling is what they were buying. You figure that you could pick up where she left off, saying significantly similar stuff to people who vote for someone who says such stuff. If, as you say, the “people like her really do believe the things they are saying”, then how do you — as an amoral opportunist, like I was just saying — present yourself to them?

I see where you’re going with this. Yes, of course, as an amoral opportunist, I would say and (largely) do the same crazy-appearing stuff as she is doing. So, on that basis, there’d be no way to determine if I was really crazy, or just acting crazy in order to elevate my own status.

But, with Greene, there’s more than just the Jewish Space Lasers type nonsense. We can also look at how she’d been acting in other ways.

And the most important of those ways is that she just didn’t care about being taken off every committee she was on because of her behavior.

For an amoral opportunist, those kinds of committee assignments are key. That’s where the real power, and real opportunities for graft and corruption, exist. Getting such assignments would be a big part of the reason I (as a hypothetical amoral opportunist) wanted to be elected in the first place.

Greene clearly doesn’t give a shit one way or the other. She’ll sit on committees now, because the GOP will let her do that while also allowing her to spout nonsense. But, we also know that, if she is forced to choose, she’ll choose the nonsense over the committee assignments.

[Dr.Drake]

I really like the framing, but I think it could be expanded in terms of problematic vices. The question waaay upthread that I never answered got me thinking about this.

I think the OP’s “stupid” is beatifully defined, but maybe better phrased as “simple.” The simpletons want simple solutions to complex problems; they want simple, easy-to-understand reality where such does not exist. This is a problem. But the employee who wants to do less work isn’t being simple: he’s being lazy. I think that’s a better macro-category, because “simple” (or the OP’s “stupid”) is lazy thinking. Short-term thinking at the expense of the long-term is also lazy.

The “crazy” is nicely defined

@slicedalone

A crazy person has no control over what he/she thinks, but is totally sincere.

and since “crazy” is no longer used for actual mental illness, I think it’s a good term to keep.

“Immoral” works, but I think “selfish” gets more to the heart of it, and means we don’t have to worry about the distinction between immoral and amoral.

So I’d go with

• Lazy
• Crazy
  &
• Selfish

Taylor-Greene is certainly intellectually lazy. She’s certainly at least performatively crazy. She’s probably selfish. Where I disagree with the OP is that I don’t think it’s useful to assign the problem to one pole in particular.

I don’t think there’s much to be done about crazy. In a society where shame worked, we could shame lazy & selfish. In the contemporary real world, though, I don’t know that we can.

Anyway, this is one of the more interesting threads in a while, and I want to thank everyone for their thoughts here.

[Measure_for_Measure]

I think slicedalone made a real tactical error back in post 16: MGT is a terrible example because she is stupider than most GOP pols, crazier than most GOP pols, and I’d argue more evil than most GOP pols.

But the framework is great. I’ll try to state it at its most accurate:

Proposition 1: If you work to avoid one vice, you tend to drive yourself towards another set of vices.

Interesting, but not especially insightful for modern politics. So:

Proposition 2: Crazy, stupid, and immoral are the 3 primary colors of public political dysfunction: all other vices are just combinations of the preceding.

Now that can’t be 100% accurate. Surely there are other important vices and a host of trivial ones. But it’s useful to think about the three axes. Not when trying to understand pols: they are called political representatives for a reason. But when understanding their base of support, which in a 2 party system will be highly varied. Once you secure this rough understanding maybe possibly you can work on messaging.

The center-left likes to eschew stupidity with clever arguments. The Democratic Party likes to eschew craziness with, “Common sense solutions”. Twitter leftists eschew immorality with their virtue signaling and (worse) gate keeping.

Those in the argumentative space need to recognize that their virtual world is necessarily dumbed down and that the real world involves tradeoffs. Read Kamil Galeev:

Kamil Galeev

Kamil Galeev

So be careful when avoiding stupidity.

Those who insist on appearing sensible should take a page from the GOP during the 1970s and 1980s who understood the necessity of tossing what they called red meat to their base during election season. The Democratic Party needs to study Oliver Willis (upthread link). So be careful when avoiding crazy.

Twitter leftists need to grasp that the first thing one should say to those who step off the Trump train should be, “Welcome.” The churlish purity tests can wait. Conservatives get this: purist liberals do not. So be careful when avoiding immorality.

Why? Because if you work to avoid one vice, you tend to drive yourself towards another set of vices.

[Little_Nemo]

@Measure_for_Measure

Why? Because if you work to avoid one vice, you tend to drive yourself towards another set of vices.

I disagree. I feel that the flaws of craziness, evil, and stupidity overlap and tend to reinforce each other. Focus on reducing any one of them in your character and, as a bonus, you’ll most likely also reduce the other two.

[Dr_Paprika]

This might be a “fun party game” sort of classification. But it also involves believing someone with a reasonable disagreement can’t be someone who is reasonable. This is not the case in every country.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Little_Nemo

I disagree. I feel that the flaws of craziness, evil, and stupidity overlap and tend to reinforce each other.

Probably true. (Dammit).

Focus on reducing any one of them in your character and, as a bonus, you’ll most likely also reduce the other two.

Also true (dangnamit).

mutatis mutandis aka take 2

Those who posture so as signal one virtue, tend to drive themselves to another set of vices.

Man, aphorisms aren’t my thing. Take 3:

We are social creatures, even introverts. People often define themselves (and, in the ancestral environment, promote themselves within their tribe) by what they are not. Those selling their intellect avoid stupid. Those selling their morality protest immorality, typically too much.¹ Calm decision makers and calm coalition builders evade the crazy: it’s a bad look for them. That’s all fine and well -specialization is good- but such signaling can come with blind spots.

My inaccuracy above was tying that to the pursuit of virtue and the avoidance of vice. I think Little Nemo is correct that an attitude of self improvement tends to raise the bar across all most virtues, roughly speaking.² Though tradeoffs (and exceptions) still remain, something to remain mindful about.

¹ TBH, a lot of moralistic denouncing is more of a dominance game than a signaling of virtue. Though there’s often some of the latter.

² Very roughly. Virtues and vices come in packages - Little Nemo’s point was that crazy-stupid-immoral tends to cluster so avoiding one helps you avoid others. That’s not universal: eg reading a good book on poetry or physics won’t immediately improve your cardiovascular fitness.

[LSLGuy]

@Measure_for_Measure

Virtues and vices come in packages - Little Nemo’s point was that crazy-stupid-immoral tends to cluster so avoiding one helps you avoid others. That’s not universal: eg reading a good book on poetry or physics won’t immediately improve your cardiovascular fitness.

Tis is sorta the contrapositive of Tolstoy’s famous comment:

@Leo Tolstoy

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

All political vices are similar / interconnected; political virtues are more diverse.

[dougrb]

This seemed like an appropriate thread.

Kansas City mother charged in death of 1-month-old after allegedly mistakenly...

[Thudlow_Boink]

Yikes! Is this an urban legend come true?

The Baby-Roast