There exists the old adage that stupidity is everywhere. One might talk about some sort of stupidity at their job, in their classes, or just out in the world around them. One might then express the desire to change their job, classroom, or general habits to avoid those specific forms of stupidity. The answer will come down as if heralded by trumpets and streamers that it matters not where you go or what you do that stupidity in some form will be wherever they go, no matter what.

I have never understood why this is considered acceptable.

Granted, a good portion of these instances might just be bad luck or petty annoyances that have been psychologically inflated to mean more than they actually do. Everyone has bad days, or just bad moments, myself included. However, the general idea of these annoyances has stirred up a sort of stereotype, or at least an incredible generalization, that can rear its ugly head at a moment’s notice. It is not an uncommon occurrence to hear someone else say that they do not wish to deal with someone else because they are “stupid” or any similar descriptor one can invent.

For purposes of this post, let’s imagine that in a given scenario featuring ten people that eight of them would tend to agree that the other two would fall into the category of “stupid.” What exactly does this mean? In terms of completing projects, asking for assistance, or even being interacted with at all those two people would find themselves shuttered away from everyone else, either by ignorance or force (or both). The fact is: no one wants to deal with stupid.

But let’s take another look at this scenario. What if, instead of stupidity as the issue, it was one of trust. Yes, trust can waiver due to repeated moments of declared “stupid behavior”, but trust is still the overlying theme. You would rather do something yourself, or with less overall input from your group of peers, than open it up to everyone and take the chance of someone else’s stupidity either not helping or even hurting your progress toward a goal. This leads into another potential unit of measure – ease. The faster, or easier, one can get a job done  is all the better for the worker. Adding in unstable elements that could cause the amount of ease to vanish, or turn into even harder work, is a negative no one should or would want to deal with.

If you can not work with stupid, work around it.

You might think that the above is the absolute simplest answer to the problem of what to do when surrounded by perceived stupidity. But there is actually a much easier (but not necessarily better) way that people take all of the time when confronted with this problem. They simply do nothing at all. They see no reason to even bother trying to change what is around them and instead continue to float surrounded by what they feel is complete incompetence with no safe haven in sight. As I said, nothing about this is better, it’s just easier. Putting yourself in a position to fail (and possibly be made to look stupid yourself) is not a risk worth taking, especially in education and business matters.

The problem that flows out of all of this is the idea that confrontation is the worst thing you can do to deal with the perception of stupidity. No one wants to be the one that sits down with a classmate or fellow employee and tells them that you think they are stupid or worthless at their current position, be it as the member of a work team or a group project. Even still, no one wants to be the one to seek out help from above, be it a teacher or manager, lest unknown backlash be levied against them by other parties (perhaps the people who you have labeled, justly or unjustly, in the first place).

Giving someone that label is not always inaccurate, but it does not get any closer to changing the outcome you are trying to prevent. In some situations, the idea of doing nothing at all is not an option, though there are some that may shoehorn it into their list of choices just to give themselves an escape hatch. That said, there are times when that label is given not as an accurate description of someone else’s abilities, but as an excuse to take that easy way out of simply not doing anything at all. If that team of ten people are tasked with cleaning a specific area with brooms and ten hours to do so, that is fine. But if then eight of them are told to create something to help the other two clean faster (like, say, a vacuum…which may take an hour to build to take away two hours of overall work), the eight might scoff at making the job more difficult for the stupid people by giving them more advanced equipment that they may not know how to use properly. Remember, this is just a quick example.

The mentality is that while, yes, building the vacuum may take that single hour to build it could very well cause the two people forced to use it multiple hours of confusion, or at least enough for them to forget about it and go back to the broom. Thus, that is time wasted. Time that businesses can not afford to just have floating off into space. This mentality is really only partially plausible. While the prior scenario may be the one that plays out, with careful planning from the eight builders and a good use of time and training, they might not save the total of two hours, but they could still come out ahead in the long run (and if asked to clean an even larger area in a similar fashion they will already have the equipment necessary without having to rebuild it new from scratch). This psychological tug of war between work that needs to be done, work that is actually done, and work that is extraneous due to issues converting the needs into the haves is precisely what causes people to take the easy road of nothing far more than the path of actual labor. Now imagine if everyone did this all the time, and visions of economic (or at least capitalist and corporate) collapse will start filling your heads.

I will always agree (and state time and time again here and elsewhere) that work is hard, especially at first. But if no one would have decided to make that first vacuum, instead deciding that the consumers set to use it were too stupid to understand it, then we would still be wasting quite a lot of time with brooms in our hands rather than experiencing a much greater abundance of free time than innovation and (gasp) hard work as afforded us. We just can not let thoughts of stupidity keep us from continuing to do a little more work now en route to reaping benefits later.

Doing that would be, well, pretty darn stupid.

Class dismissed.