Before we start, some definition: Stupidity is not intellectual disability. Stupidity is not (directly) a lack of education. Stupidity is a reluctance to accurately observe situations and attempt to sensibly engage with them. We shall also keep in mind Cipolla's Third Law of Human Stupidity "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
I'm starting to wonder if incompetency is less a reflection of a lack of education or general lack of skill but in face an attempt to claw back some autonomy, regain some creativity and make social protest in enacting one's 'inability' to succeed. One can emote in all kinds of ways, when one cannot succeed, even flail and cry. You get to have a good gossip about it and it is socially reinforced by the sympathy, buzz created and the attention drawn by training given and disciplinaries attended.
If the above is sufficiently true, it strikes me as unfortunate and as quite the stumbling block for a progressive society. I don't mean to insinuate that we'd all be better off as cobblers and seamstresses and simple country folk and the like. But if our attempts to progress to a less complex and more stable society that performs as expected in turn induces a sort of glazed-eye hysteria where inability is insisted to be inevitable, that don't seem too good.
So let me break down my argument. We have pretty much collectively decided to strive for efficiency and value for money in our services. Sometimes workers make mistakes so we streamline the processes. How to do A, the way we want B to be done, C needs this method. There are also lots and lots and lots of us competing to do similar things in aesthetically different ways so we also strive for recognisability. D must always happen this way, E must always look and taste that way and F is always easy to pick out in a sea of logos. So again, we streamline the way that the image of the thing we are working with is done and standardize it. We also like to be able to communicate easily and transfer information easily. So we tend to do things in similar ways and make sure our technology can interface relatively easily. I don't mean to spark some kind of 'Oh-ho, well, you should have seen the trouble I had getting that PDF file you emailed me to open on my outdated system' thought process. By doing things in similar ways I mean that we generally go to work at similar times, we've agreed to all sit in big rooms together, each with telephones, and we digitise our information storage so its super-transferable.
Broadly, within the world of work, F follows E follows D follows C follows B follows A. And, in theory, thats fine because ABCDEF makes sense, is usable, looks nice and everything should go smoothly and we should all get home in time for tea.
The problem in practice is that doing ABCDEF over and over and over is very boring.
ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF ABCDEF.
Stupidity and incompetence, on the other hand.... My goodness. The sheer number of ways you can do it too! We are all capable of being stupid, it's a level-playing field and there isn't a single thing that can't be failed at. You can be socially inappropriate, refuse to engage with computers or perhaps you prefer to get confused by maps. Maybe you're apathetic, maybe you're histrionic or maybe you're just so incredibly jaded. Stupidity has a massive catchment area with a high possibility for creativity.
When I started writing this I was leery of falling into a wide-eyed existential speculation on educative possibility. It's sort of happened anyway. I do think that most people aren't incurably stupid and I do think most people choose the way their lives pan out mostly. But if the frustrations of limited options, starkly banded by cultural expectations of achieving the being who you want to be - splinteringly refracted by a hyper-real awareness of the thingness of things, the potentiality of potential and the catalogue of entity that makes up a post-modern world - leads to an acting-out of incompetence and refusal to engage with possibility1, we aren't going to get too far.
In a nominally-socially-mobile meritocracy, the performance of stupidity has a certain elegance to it. It displays an attendance to the fundamental discrepancies between the theory and practice of the dominant cultural enactment of 'The world is your oyster if you just try hard enough'. You might come round here with your improved technology and your better ways of doing things, your assumptions that I both am part of and want to belong to your beautiful world of possibility and opportunity, your god-damned efficiency and your god-damned ideas but do you know what? I don't even understand it, I can't do it and I probably never will, so try that on for size.
1 (I was going to make a vague joke here about willingly engaging with broken photocopiers and the fixing possibility of their manuals but let's face it, those things are fucking impossible.)
