Ignorance Is the Selfish Portion of Stupidity

The battle against Covid — I prefer to use the same title case that we use for proper nouns; Covid has earned it — has really made me wonder whether the problem is ignorance or stupidity. Seriously. It’s hard to figure out which it is, and really presses us to understand what those terms mean and how they explain the behavior we’re witnessing.

Of course, we assumed the greater enemy — the ultimate enemy — was Mother Nature. But then came the big surprise: we knocked out The Great M.N. in the second round with a TKO called an mRNA vaccine. Apparently it took 30 years of training, never mind the collective 5,000 years of technology that ran up to it, to put mRNA in our corner, but we won that little skirmish. Take that Ma.

Now, don’t get me wrong, The Great One put up a real fight and still is only technically out of it; she’s still standing and zapping a thousand maskitos a day in the US alone. (Update December 19, 2021: she’s come back with the omicron variant, which dresses itself as a sheep, but in a wolf that travels many times faster than before. Genius.) In fact this little germy thing she’s got going is nothing less than a living nightmare. By comparison, I recall reading an espionage novel where they had micro-miniature drones like helicopters, that could monitor and attack unseen. Of course in the book it seemed wildly unrealistic. Well, MN has had that for half a billion years… her first effort, in fact, in “chemical perpetuation” (aka ‘life’). We now call that first creation Virus. Just a little double-zipper protein that figured out a xeroxing trick that is the basis of all life, whether on this or any of the other Goldilocks planets sprayed throughout the cosmos.

Her latest is, I think, 2 microns tip to tail, probably lighter than air so it floats on the wind, and — again probably — only needs a team of a few hundred to set up camp in a new host. That’s called the ‘minimum infectious dose’ or some such jargon. And speaking of living nightmares, let us all pray that in her next bout she doesn’t bring out another one of those little bastards that this time has the contagiousness of Covid but the sickening virulence of a hemorrhagic fever that she deployed in Ebola. Read the book the Hot Zone for the truly horrifying description of ones’ guts going inside out. What a work of art.

But lately MN has met her match, short-term that is. She’ll always win in the end. Our stupidity (or is it ignorance?) has turned out to be so much more than anyone could have imagined. We made the vaccine. And despite some avaricious morons, we manufactured and distributed it. And, quite predictably to me at least, in about six months (from December, 2020 to May, 2021) the supply of vaccine went from famine to feast. It was predictable because the single dominant force in every matter concerning Mankind is >>>technology<<<. And there was never any question that our technological manufacturing capacity would overwhelm our meager capacity for ‘boots on the ground’ logistics… the ability to put medicine in arms. I expected stupid and lots of it, the anti-vaxxer idiocy. But I don’t believe I predicted the staggering extent of it. Not sayin’ I did.

Which brings me to my question. Are all these people really that stupid? Or do they have mental capacity and somehow just aren’t using it? Stupidity sounds pretty straightforward: one either has or doesn’t have enough brain cells in the right arrangement to cross a busy road, or conduct a conversation, or successfully cheat on an algebra test. But ‘ignorance’ is much harder. It starts with the willful, active notion of ignoring something… avoiding something… disregarding (?) something. Here’s what they’re ignoring:

• Billions of people have gotten the vaccine and didn’t burst into flames.
• All of the world’s sensible scientists and doctors have gotten vaccinated, and want all their family members to get it. And those scientists are pretty sure we won’t all grow a third arm or turn into gummy bears in a few years.
• The technology is neither completely new or untested.
• It is not new for governments to insist on vaccinations. Most of the objectors have personally been vaccinated under such mandates, faux patriotism and bravado arguments notwithstanding.

You’ve heard all of this logic. And somehow you’ve done different math than the stupid or ignorant. Go figger. The latest anti-vaxxer is now a poster child, or better yet, a model subject for examining the stupidity-ignorance conundrum: US professional football quarterback, Aaron Rodgers. (By the way, and sorry for the petty sports tangent, but I’m a huge A.R. fan. To me he was the runaway winner of the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award in the 2017 Philadelphia Eagles’ — my hometown team — championship that year. And he did so while not even being on the team; instead, he did so by being injured, so that we didn’t have to beat him and his Green Bay Packers to win the SuperBowl.) Rogers has significant enough brain power that he actually hosted the TV show Jeopardy, yet is stupid enough not to get vaccinated. Actually it’s worse. He’s touting his position — as many of the objectors do — as one of proud individualism, independent thinking, standing on principle, yada yada yada. So this in turn brings up the question of how smart one has to be to host Jeopardy. Hmmm. I guess it’s just reading questions after all, and some other TV skills which I won’t even offer sarcasm about. But he’s probably not stupid, right? Yes, he’s got to be. No, maybe not. Yes, he’s got to be and that’s my final decision.

At first I thought that that ignorance was selfishness, plain and simple. But I think I’ve figured out the relationship. Ignorance is a portion, a subset, of stupidity. It is the selfish part, it’s where your mental faculty runs out of steam, where it runs headlong up against your regard — or rather, lack of it — for others and the world around you.

But what about those who are simply scared to death of getting vaccinated? And are all the believers in “body autonomy” — that’s it, that’s how Rogers’ explained that his hatred wasn’t for vaccines but being told he has to get it — are they ignorant or arrogant? Let’s take the fearful first.

I recall watching a TV show where one of the scientists who created the vaccine was on stage talking to a young adult who seemed to be in the scared-to-death camp. I don’t recall the circumstances but the specifics don’t matter; there do seem to be people who aren’t getting vaccinated because of fear. Fear of growing a third eye, fear of needles, fear of dying from the inoculation, fear of underfried French Fries. Just different flavors of fear. My explanation is that these are people who simply haven’t grown up. They’re afraid. What more can we say. Because they haven’t fully matured, their brain power can’t overcome the power of fear.

Next are the ignorers who aren’t arrogantly opposed to being told to get vaccinated, but still they resist. They have some other “logic”: it’s untested, there are too many side effects, Covid isn’t that bad, we need to develop resistance, there’s peanut butter in the jelly… those sort of advanced thinking constructs. Their intelligence has let them down (they’re not as intelligent as this particular algebra quiz requires), and selfishness has taken control. Selfishness has won. It has won because, like the fearful ones, they haven’t fully grown up. If they were fully mature they’d have the power to value their neighbors as they do their family — or at least carefully balance the difference.

And finally, the arrogant. My thinking is that they have fully matured, and they’ve turned out authoritarian. Not interested in society or acknowledging of shared resources unless force is involved, not too concerned being our brothers’ keepers, everything is a conspiracy to get them.

Afraid, selfish, arrogant. Those are the three ignorances of stupidity. Ignorance isn’t an attribute, it’s how the attribute of stupidity evidences itself when you’re afraid or selfish or an authoritarian. In fact, I can now sharpen my pencil one step further: stupidity is an attribute; but ignorance is behavior. Ignorance is the behavior — the result — that derives from stupidity when one’s lack of mental horsepower is layered with fear or selfishness or arrogance.

I have this theory, one of many as you have surmised by now, that all words have a native or natural form, a part of speech such as noun, or verb, or adjective that is the form in which it first arose. In other words, when a concept first becomes part of our collective mentality, and a word is made for it, some of those concepts are innately “things” and some are innately attributes or qualities. “Smart” and “stupid” are pretty naturally and obviously (I think?) attributes. Ignorance is trickier. I’ve been using the noun form a lot, but I’m pretty sure that the noun form is not the natural form and that’s the challenge. Ignorance is stupid behavior.

On second thought…

A great opinion piece in the New York Times on December 5th, 2021 by Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal presented an opposing point of view that made me wonder if I’m totally wrong. It’s premise was that the commonality between anti-vaxxers is social class… that, for the most part, if society has neglected or disadvantaged a whole lot of people, then those people can logically be expected, conversely, to neglect the rest of society when the tables are turned. Hmmm. Now, it wasn’t an entirely monolithic explanation based on willful grudges against “the haves.” There was some nuance in the flavors of objection: the ‘haves’ have genuinely eroded trust; the poor and disadvantaged genuinely have less time, money, and freedom to get vaccinated; and there are people for whom Covid simply is not the most imminent danger in their lives. All of these are valid explanations. We HAVE constantly eroded the social support systems of our society since the Reagan era. In fact, when I first read the Sreedhar article, I summarized it to others as “we’ve been setting up for anti-vaxxer behavior since the Reagan era started putting all power into the free market,” even though the word “Reagan” didn’t appear once in the article. And not coincidentally, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made that same connection the next day.

So how does my explanation of willful behavior from stupidity overlap, or not at all, with society has created an anti-society underclass? Difficult question, but let me try to think it out:

1. If you don’t easily have the means to get vaccinated, then “that’s on us, the ‘haves,’” and it doesn’t matter what your so-called reasons are. We need to solve that problem, undoing the last 40 years of becoming a more selfish society.
2. If you’re smart enough to know better, and have the means to get vaccinated but don’t, then you’re just arrogant and selfish.
3. If you’re stupid, and have the means to get vaccinated but don’t, refer to #1, above; the solution is the same, and mainly consists of the education portion of the social society.