MPEC. Stupidity. September 2025

The Moscow Philosophy English Club.
Part 1: German.
Chapter 4: Nietzsche.
Section 5: Stupidity (Dummheit)

1.
So far we have covered four topics: understanding, will, power and deception. I’ve been trying to integrate them into a richer conceptual framework, which I’ve been working on for almost two years and which is centered on the concept of Ubersprache. Meanwhile, I also reflected on the progress of the MPEC, adjusting my initial vision of it to reality. My main goal is still the same. I want to get 20-25 people who are interested in learning English (not teaching it or socializing through it) and have offline discussions once a month based on my lectures. Initially, I expected that this goal was achievable in half a year, but now I think it might take much longer. Examining the reaction (or the lack thereof) to my posts, it’s easy to predict that the level of engagement, at least in a couple of months, would remain quite low. I’m aware that it takes time (and effort) to keep up with my posts and follow through on everything I’m writing about here. I’m aware that time is a valuable resource, and that, by and large, no one has it. But you, my friends, also tell me every Saturday that you are interested in learning English and getting better at it; and since—pardon my arrogance—I’ve mastered it in speech and writing as well as in thinking to the degree that some of you haven’t ever dreamed of, it must be the case that these posts have value not just for me (every post increases the power of my English) but for you too. Whenever you say that you don’t have time to read my posts, it forces me to think that you must have no actual interest in learning English.

For the next week, we’re going to study the phenomenon of stupidity. This was A’s idea. Are “we” getting dumber? As usual, we’re going to talk about it on Friday at 4 pm.

2.
“Stupidity is the characteristic of someone who doesn’t understand what we understand and doesn’t know what we know.” Is that how the stupid think about stupidity? You can’t be stupid on your own—as Pisarev or Nietzsche suggested—in contrast to being smart according to the public opinion. Stupidity is an emergent property that arises in society when we compare two or more individuals to each other, putting them on the scale against great thinkers of all time. It seems that stupidity has a double root grounded in biology and linguistics. Applying the previously discussed concepts, a weak understanding and a powerful will combined in a single individual provide the most striking examples of stupidity worth studying. Once deceived by language and never finding the courage to recognize a fool in themselves, the stupid build their entire identity to protect this fool and in certain cases to idolize and worship him (or her?). However, deception is not the only thing that makes us stupid. Think about love, pride, hate or contempt, for example, directed towards others as well as towards ourselves. Each of these emotions might, under certain circumstances, gain so much power over our thoughts and actions that we’ll never be able to recover common sense and good judgment. When it comes to an incurable stupidity triggered by any malicious type of affection, philosophy is powerless. It’s also powerless against a biological or neurochemical stupidity for which it has less offensive names and, on average, a friendly or at least neutral attitude. Otherwise, it’s fair to say that stupidity is what philosophy has been fighting with since they both appeared on the world’s stage as two sides of the same coin. Whenever philosophy is in decline, stupidity must celebrate a brief (or long: “dark ages”) triumph and vice versa.

3.
Whenever we want to talk about stupidity, it’s always wise to do a little introspection. Why do we want to talk about stupidity? Do we look smarter in the eyes of others when we make a judgment that implicitly elevates us above those we judge? “People are stupid, and it gets worse.” –A generalization of this type implicitly contains the assertion: I’m smart. I’m not one of these stupid people.

So if we agree with someone who says, “People are stupid,” we divide the whole world into us (those who believe that people are stupid) and them (the stupid). If we disagree and try to make an argument that people are not stupid, it’s quite likely that the one we disagree with is going to label us as “them.” We must, therefore, be inclined to return the label and think about the one who believes that people are stupid in similar terms. When we have a dialogue where both sides believe that the other side is stupid, we’re probably not going to get anywhere. Since it’s almost impossible to change someone else’s mind when it comes down to its judgment and reasoning skills, we must resist the temptation to think about other people as stupid even if they think about us in this way. The fact that someone believes that we’re stupid doesn’t make us stupid. The fact that we believe that we might be stupid is a sign of intelligence. If we are truly stupid and we know it, our life has to be better than if we keep trying to prove to others and to ourselves that we’re smart contrary to all evidence.

A low IQ is not a verdict. After all, modern societies tend to show a lot of sympathy for stupid people since they are usually the ones who buy all sorts of useless stuff and are ready to sell themselves to big corporations, contributing to the growth of the economy and increasing GDP rates.

4.
One of the arguments we can make to support the thesis that people are getting dumber is to point out a rapid increase in delegating all kinds of intellectual labor to machines or technologies. We don’t need to develop all our reasoning skills if machines can do all the thinking for us. The stupid buy into this logic, just as they buy into a well-dressed and good-looking fraud suggesting that learning new languages is a waste of time because LLMs can easily translate and even imitate our voice in any language whenever it’s necessary. They also can give us the answers to all questions whenever we need them. Why bother doing research, collecting and processing data, training yourself as a thinker if instead you can enjoy all the benefits of animal life by simply being a good person?

The argument about outsourcing our thinking to the tech is not new. Plato’s Socrates—the fictional character whose fame is the direct outcome of Plato’s lifelong training in writing—denounces writing by saying that it makes people stupid. See, writing was supposed to destroy our memory, and books were expected to cause considerable damage to our thinking and understanding 24 centuries ago. Now we hear the same argument amplified through various echo chambers.

There is certainly something attractive in this argument, some force that makes it appealing even to the philosopher, but it definitely lacks nuance. Just as certain books were dubbed “holy” and determined the evolution of specific languages for thousands of years, it might happen that a certain LLM that wins the internet race and for the first time in history acquires the status of ;bersprache on the planetary scale is also going to be dubbed “a holy LLM”—the only true LLM—and countless generations of thinkers are going to be forced to adapt its reasoning patterns. Whoever plays the modern Socrates, wearing the mask of a fool, must ask himself whether he takes into account a probability that his followers might one day permanently lose the sense of irony. After all, if the stupid are taking over the world and the sense of irony has never been their thing…

5.
There are roughly eight billion people on the planet. At best, one can be acquainted with 0.00001% of the earth’s population on a very superficial level and know more or less well 0.0000001%. The fact that many people around us are not interested in science or do nothing to improve their intelligence doesn’t say anything about “the people.” To measure stupidity by the IQ tests or by the students’ performance at exams across the planet is not going to help much. The statistical data is unreliable and can be twisted in one way or another, depending on what we’re trying to prove. On the other hand, building all the modern technologies, including LLMs, and having millions of people from all over the world actively engaged in online educational projects is a sure sign that we’re getting smarter.

Apart from this hype about social media and its impact on “us,” there is no evidence that we’re getting dumber. Again, there is no meaningful way to talk about “us” and “our intelligence or stupidity” outside of a specific linguistic framework. When we use English, “us” can’t mean anything beyond “the people who speak English.” Die Grenzen unserer Sprache sind die Grenzen unserer Welt. It might be the case that those who speak English are getting dumber while those who speak Chinese or German move in the opposite direction and vice versa.

One of the important distinctions that characterizes the stupid is their inability to understand the relationship between causes and effects. Whenever we try to explain to them that their thoughts and actions are determined by social, environmental, political, cultural, historical, biological, psychological and other factors, they dig up “an underground man,” make piano keys out of his bones, hit them over each other’s heads, producing terrible noise, throw their limbs purposelessly in all directions and call it “freedom.”

6.
Today, at 4 pm, we’re having a discussion about stupidity. I know that some of you are reluctant or even afraid to participate in our discussions because you haven’t studied the topic and/or haven’t read my posts about it. You might think that you won’t be able to say anything meaningful during the discussion, and I or someone else would think that you’re stupid. After all, what’s the point of talking about something you’re not interested in studying?

One thing is when your goal is “to practice English” and you know that nobody expects anything from you; you’re just going to have three or four short talks, spending half the time on the introduction and the other half on thought-unprovoking questions.

The other thing is when you’re pushed to study a specific topic (and you show how independent you are by refusing to do so) and a discussion takes up to two hours.

You think I’m going to tell you now that none of that is important, and it’s going to be awesome if you still join the discussion? Yes or no? Does it look like I’m trying to persuade you? Maybe making fun of you? Do I sound offensive? Provocative? Do you feel an urge to resist my spiteful rhetoric? Or nothing touches you? “Is this fool still posting his mumbo-jumbo while nobody gives a damn about it? That’s stupid! He keeps doing the same thing, expecting different results. What a moron!” – Is that what you think I think about the way you think? Or is it how I think about the way you think while you actually “think different”? Too much for the stupid to digest. Tired of talking to the stupid? Start talking to yourself, get smarter and join our philosophical discussions. Or just join the discussions, and we’re going to help you figure out that you’re stupid so that you would have a real reason to get smarter. Until you give up the belief that you’re already smart, there is no real reason to study anything.