The Stupid Take Over
Rule by the Incompetent i.e., the Catastrophic Kakistocracy
Leftist Frank Schaeffer, son of pro-democracy theologian heavyweight Francis Schaeffer, sorrowfully admits that he and his father’s vanguard anti-choice Evangelical positioning dovetailed into the very culture wars that catapulted President Trump into office as a would-be emperor. In his recent video, Frank Schaeffer lamented, whether it is Julius Caesar in the fall of Rome or Trump in the fall of America, that history does not look back kindly on these so-called “leaders;” instead, they come to be regarded as fools in a ‘New Theatre of Cruelty’ for having delusionally believed that they possessed god-like powers to trample the voice of the people.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is integral to narcissism, which “tracks” when one considers the cognitive distortion of grandiosity (inflated self-worth) and the “omniscience” of the narcissist.
Levying asinine tariffs, Trump is on course to bankrupt the United States well beyond his oft-repeated lamentation, “America is a debtor nation.” Tariffs are typically employed during wartime for a nation’s austerity, not during a time of record prosperity from Biden’s administration. There is no master plan that benefits ordinary Americans. He is not playing 5D chess with our finances, nor should Americans give pathological liar Trump the benefit of the doubt that this self-induced market correction owing to ill-advised tariffs is simply a short-term “transition” to greener pastures. Hopium is a deadly drug.
As a narcissist, Trump is unable to differentiate what is good for him from what is good for the public and the global economy. If the market tanks, then he and his oligarch friends can buy stocks for pennies on the dollar and make money bigly the way that the oligarchs did during the pandemic. Recessions benefit the wealthiest: buy low, sell high.
This “shrewd” calculation to “mastermind” a recession misses the forest for the trees, that it is on the backs of the people that the broligarchs are able to amass such fortunes. There is an indisputable interdependence with people absent from their equation.
Similarly, if the tech fascists get their way with their penchant for eugenics to cull the masses with the end goal of concentrating the world’s resources in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, AI (or AGI) will not close the gap on the value proposition of necessary human capital.
Just as narcissists suffer disturbing memory gaps that they compensate for by confabulating plausible narratives to fill out these lacunas, they also lack empathy, a crucial intuitive processing capacity to fill out otherwise stilted and robotic communications. Here is laid bare the mechanistic application of tech supremacist thinking, constricted to life in the present, absent history nor empathy to derive any learnings. Therefore, narcissists are stupid no matter their IQ, how small they can make you feel, or how they can contrive worshipful reverence.
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is sorely underestimated in tech supremacist thinking. The future looks dystopian in the hands of tech broligarchs precisely because it doesn’t value empathy as a societal cohesive glue.
Trump has devastated America’s friendships with its long-standing allies around the world because his theory of mind is that if he is transactional and fake, everyone else must be, too. Thus, the operating system of a narcissist is radically aberrant from normal people.
Lacking empathy, the narcissist is a poorly formed approximation of a human (uncanny valley). It is unnerving to be in the company of a narcissist because their operating systems are painfully obviously clunky or kludgey.
The narcissist’s interlocutor can be made to feel as though she might inadvertently drop off into the spaces-in-between in veritable ravines, as navigating any conversation is fraught with sinkholes such as subtle put-downs and an overriding sense that the narcissist is constantly bored by your presence. The conversation with a narcissist has as its chief mandate uncertainty, the leading progenitor of anxiety. As narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin has said, “Walking on eggshells is a circus act; it’s not a life.”
Even as magical and god-like as computing technologies have become (silicon narcissists), it makes no sense to revere these technologies as an all-encompassing fait accompli roadmap for the future. A strong argument could be made that technology is regressive; our current technologically based and narcissistic society is Exhibit A.
There is so much more to life than technology, making money, or amassing power. The tech bros have been on track to wrangle us normies into their narcissistic hellscape, devoid of empathy or love. This societal devolution noticeably started with seemingly innocuous selfies, social media, and narcissistic grievance culture. Now, it has America turning our backs on our long-term friends for transactional ephemeral “wins” in the fleeting present.
This pathological mindset of short-termism doesn’t preclude systematized murder—cutting and/or dismantling government programs (USAID, EPA, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, NIH, CDC, NOAA, FAA, ED, VA, etc., etc.). There is no bottom to the depths of planned genocidal dysfunction and malevolence. Americans are dispensable non-player characters (NPCs) in Trumpsk’s addled narcissist brain.
“I think what we’re living through is what I call the ‘stupid coup.’ It’s clearly a coup intended to abolish the powers of Congress, to be lawless, accumulate all power in the administrative branch, but they’re idiots…They don't know what they’re doing…the fact that there are so many flip flops.” — Rebecca Solnit for The Ink
On narcissists’ stupidity, Prof. Sam Vaknin opines in his YouTube video Why Narcissist APPEARS So STUPID (Borderlines and Psychopaths, too, sometimes!), “These people are a sorry sight and intelligent as they may be, they are absolute unmitigated idiots; narcissists, borderlines, psychopaths — they’re invalids. They’re extremely disabled people.
And their disability reaches the point where it far outweighs any IQ they may have. The ability to solve mathematical equations is very nice, but how often do you need it in real life? The capacity to synthesize insights from various disciplines is astounding, but how often do you do that in a lifetime? And how do you cope with your wife, lovers, children, co-workers, bosses, the authorities, and the law? How do you survive life itself if you don’t know the first thing about being human?”
Below is an encapsulation from Prof. Sam Vaknin’s video, The Idiocracy Bible: Stupidity for a New Age (Compilation) edited for length and clarity:
“The stupid, dimly aware of their innate inferiority — because the stupid know they’re stupid, they’ve been told so many times on multiple occasions — so they’re dimly aware they’re stupid. There is the Dunning-Kruger effect — the stupid don’t know they’re stupid; they think they’re geniuses — but, still, there’s something nagging, gnawing in the background telling you that you’re not really a genius. They are aware of their inferiority, and so they become anti-expertise, anti-education, anti-knowledge, anti-elite, anti-intelligent, and anti-excellence.
They seek, with destructive envy and resentment, to destroy everything that is superior to them, everything elevated and aesthetic and beautiful and clever and wise. They seek to reduce everything to their swampish level, to the level of the protoplasm, amoeba-like existences that they lead. But while in the past, these people remained sequestered and isolated, they were granted no access to any lever of power or instrument, and their sentiments remained mere sentiments. Today, these people have become the majority. They have an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values and ideals that reflect their inherent limitations, and what limitations these are — beyond your wildest imagination.
Success in business and success, in general, requires equal measures of stupidity and mental health pathologies.
The vile truth is that stupidity, splitting (black and white thinking), misperceiving risk, impaired reality testing, magical thinking, conspiracism, all these, which used to be mental health pathologies, are today, in an increasingly narcissistic and psychopathic world, are all positive adaptations.
Stupid people admire other stupid people. The more stupid the idol, the more followers he or she has. Extremely stupid people are also extremely popular among the stupid masses. The dumb follow the dumbest; they admire and follow these people because stupid people hope to emulate the extremely stupid.
It’s as if they say to themselves, “There’s hope for me yet. If X, Y, Z have made it, even I can make it.” They can’t say this to themselves when they’re confronted with an intelligent person, a public intellectual, a scientist, an expert, or a medical doctor. They can’t. They can’t lie to themselves — there’s no extent of self-deception, not even Dunning-Kruger.
But when they’re confronted with really stupid people, the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin, and seriously stupid people, they admire them. They follow them. They idealize them. They aggrandize them. They say Elon Musk is a genius, and so is Donald Trump, and so on and so forth, because they are like Elon Musk. They resemble Donald Trump, and if these two idiots made it, so can they.
Democracy, participatory democracy of one-on-one, is a seriously flawed idea and leads to mob rule, ochlocracies, authoritarianism, and ultimately lethal, deadly totalitarianism. Adolf Hitler was popularly elected in fair and free elections in Germany several times.
Additionally, fantasy-based technologies encourage stupid people to believe that they are geniuses in a fantasy world and, at the same time, create opportunities for mass followership, mass admiration, mass adulation, and mass advertisement of exceedingly stupid people.
These technologies have supplanted and replaced the technologies that were subject to gatekeeping. Technologies in the past were not made readily available to the masses. There were people whose role and job was to prevent access to specific technologies, such as book publishing or the news media.
Today, gatekeeping has vanished, all but vanished, and disintermediation has taken place. Everyone carries in his or her pocket an entire publishing and news industry and empire in the form of a smartphone. The empowerment of the stupid led to the elevation of the super stupid, the super dumb, and to the formation of what could easily be described as an idiocracy.
There are correlates between stupidity and narcissism. Narcissists never learn. They never learn because they believe that they already know everything, and they never learn because learning implies some kind of deficiency or lack.
They are, of course, perfect beings who don’t need to learn and don’t have a learning curve. Stupidity and narcissism are first cousins if you wish, and stupid people are less risk-averse than healthy, normal, intelligent people. Stupid people evaluate risk and appraise risk wrongly. They misperceive risk, and consequently, they assume risks. They take on risks much more than other people.
Stupid people are risk-takers. And because risk sometimes pays, stupid people sometimes become multi-billionaires or presidents of countries, or you name it. And finally, we live in a culture that rewards both narcissism and stupidity, a culture that glorifies and glamorizes the traits and the behaviors of narcissists, such as ambition, competition, ruthlessness, callousness, disempathy, and so on and so forth.
In a culture that also elevates dumbness and stupidity, ignorance is considered to be chic — learning and erudition are for nerds — and so in this kind of culture, stupid narcissists would rise to the top, of course, because they combine both traits that are perceived as positive, a positive adaptation, not a maladaptation.
We are gravitating towards a narcissistic, psychopathic civilization in which narcissists would define our values, assign roles, govern, and serve as role models to be emulated and imitated, for example, the likes of Andrew Tate in the field of “budding masculinity” among young men. Similarly, Donald Trump has an appeal among young uneducated men. And, of course, Elon Musk is considered to be a genius, although he’s probably one of the dumbest people I’ve ever witnessed. This is the world we live in: counterfactual, fantasy-based, catering to the dumb and to the narcissists.
Narcissists are shaping the world in their image. For example, the narcissist is fake, so he believes that everyone is fake; he’s creating a fake world. The narcissist is aggressive, so everyone is aggressive in his mind. The narcissist shapes this communal space of aggression to reflect himself; it’s an extension of himself.
Narcissists always regard other people and environments as extensions. Narcissists have only internal objects. They regard everyone as an extension. His thinking goes, “I’m fake, so everyone is fake. And if everyone is fake, I have to suspect everyone. I cannot believe anyone. I cannot believe the Encyclopedia Britannica. I cannot believe the university. I cannot believe professors. I cannot believe scientists. I cannot believe medical doctors. Because if I’m faking it, they’re faking it also. They’re also fake, and all this so-called science and so-called knowledge, this is also bullshit; this is all for money; this is all corrupt; this is all…” So they’re undermining the foundations of reality because they can thrive only in fantasy.
In a society that is essentially narcissistic, a society that values accomplishments, achievements, and ambition, a society that teaches you to be competitive, a society that underestimates empathy and regards emotions as weaknesses, in this kind of society, of course, the narcissist will thrive and succeed.
Every society rewards members who uphold, reify, and embody its values. If you have a society that values intelligence, then intellectuals would be the elite. Intellectuals would be successful. If you have a society that values money, rich people would be successful. And if you have a society like today’s society, which is an idiocracy, it’s a society ruled by and for very stupid people, dumb people.
In this kind of society, dumb people would be revered, elevated, admired, and so on. We have examples of people like Elon Musk, who is one of the stupidest, dumbest people I’ve ever come across. And yet he’s considered a genius because in a dumb society where the stupid took over, the more stupid you are, the more successful you are.
Stupid people are unable to gauge risk. They don’t evaluate risk appropriately. Stupid people take risks that other people who are more intelligent would never take, so their chances to succeed are much higher. And yet, the majority of stupid people are actually narcissists.
Narcissists are incapable of learning because they believe they know everything. Narcissists are incapable of evaluating other people appropriately because they don’t do emotions or empathy. So when we say a stupid person, we can also say narcissist in the majority of cases. And so, in this culture and civilization that we have now, the more stupid you are, the more risks you take, the more successful you become.
And we have the likes of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. These are seriously stupid people. And yet they are universally considered gods. Why? Because they embody and reify the values of our society. Our society elevates ignorance and stupidity. Today, if you’re an intellectual, a scientist, educated, or intelligent, then society rejects you.
Narcissists are succeeding because our civilization is based on fantasy, not on reality. Our current contemporary postmodern civilization is founded on the rejection of reality, the renouncing of reality, and the adoption and embrace of fantasy.
There are no bigger experts in the world in fantasy than narcissists. They’re the biggest experts in fantasy. So, in a civilization that makes fantasy its foundation, of course, narcissists would rise to the top because they are much more adept at constructing fantasies, introducing you to the fantasy, getting you addicted to the fantasy, and giving you rewards within the fantasy, positive reinforcements via the fantasy.
Narcissists are stupid. And stupid people are highly narcissistic. It’s a compensatory mechanism for stupidity. There’s nothing new about this. In every revolution in human history, intellectuals were assassinated. In the Russian Revolution, millions of intellectuals were murdered, doctors, you name it. There is always a cycle of the masses destroying the intellectual elites. It’s the masses versus the elite.
We live now in a period where the masses have taken over. The masses don’t know how to manage things. They don’t know how to accomplish results. It will end very badly. And when it ends badly, the masses retreat and the intellectuals take over to rebuild everything from zero.
We are all being dragged to the bottom by our elites. And our elites are being dragged to the bottom by us. It’s a race to the bottom, and it threatens the survival of the species. We have eradicated intellect. We scorn and mock intellectuals. We hate and despise experts and authorities. We would rather believe an anonymous YouTuber, our neighbor, our auntie, or some soothsayer with a tarot card deck. We would rather believe these people than medical doctors, professors of psychology, scientists, or other experts. It is the death of the age of expertise. Illiterate, conspiracy-minded, stupid people are the elite of today.
Experts have become laymen with degrees, and laymen have become experts without degrees. It’s very simple — it’s the path to hell and to our extinction.
The stupid, the trivial, the frivolous, they are everywhere. Among the working classes, of course, but increasingly you can find the stupid displacing the erstwhile elites, spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons — everyone knows who I have in mind — narcissistic media personalities, gullible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate bestselling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop singers, less than mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers, and even ignorant and semi-literate academics.
And the cacophony of these constituencies of intellectually challenged people, their cacophony drowns the few voices of wisdom, expertise, and experience, and the sheer number of the stupid overwhelms all systems of governance and all mechanisms of decision-making rather than fight back this tsunami, which is futile.
The well-educated, the erudite, and the intelligent choose to withdraw. They avoid the world. They seclude themselves in self-constructed schizoid ivy towers, and they draw all the bridges. Imbeciles, cretins, and morons are a menace to the continued existence not only of our civilization but also of our species.
We are surrounded by clods, harassed by the lame-brained, criticized, censored, and ordered by simpletons. Welcome to the new dark ages. Welcome to our end. The Covid virus did not threaten us as a species existentially. The stupid do.” — Prof. Sam Vaknin’s video, The Idiocracy Bible: Stupidity for a New Age (Compilation).
Conclusion
As history cycles, we, the people, are put in a position to wait for the stupid narcissistic majority to flame out under the weight of humbling self-destruction and humiliating implosion. Stand back for any debris; the shrapnel can be debilitating.
When I look over my life It seems that Narcissists have caused me as as much or more stress than anyone. I can usually spot them quickly and have learned to stay away. However a little over a year ago when I needed mechanical work while out of town. I let narcissist work on my van. Being that dealerships were busy and he was a minority race. I thought that i would give him a chance. sorry to say he was like the mechanic from hell. He caused me thousands of dollars in lost work, unnecessary rental car and wrecker fees.
He could have been Donald Trumps twin, if not for a different race. I hope I have learned my lesson,to run away from these kind of people.