When I say stupidity, I’m not talking about the court jester, nor about ill or uneducated people. Nor am I talking about the eccentric who acts differently from the mass; on the contrary. The stupidity that interests me concerns the rule rather than the exception. I am referring to the stupidity that is characteristic of people in general, a stupidity that is even necessary to attain civilisation.

In my view, stupidity is not a deficiency, nor a lack of intelligence, but an independent property with a logic entirely of its own. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence; stupidity is the opposite of non-stupidity, and intelligence is the opposite of non-intelligence. Fatal is the combination of stupidity ánd intelligence.

Take the case of the woodcutter who saws off the branch he is sitting on.
Intelligence is a question of choosing. The man has chosen a sensible task: to separate the branch from the tree. And the tool is exactly right: his saw is sharp. So the task is successfully completed, but the woodcutter breaks his neck.
Without intelligence, his stupidity would not have had such a disastrous effect.
Fools are dangerous precisely because they are intelligent, because they succeed in their enterprises. And the more intelligent they are, the more catastrophic the consequences of their stupidity become.

Stupidity is seldom or never where we expect to find it, as can be seen from a newspaper article from a few years ago: a man climbed up a bent tree to saw off the branch that had broken the roof tiles of his house. He did not make the classic mistake, but actually sat on the side of the trunk. But as soon as the tree was released of the heavy branch, the trunk recoiled upwards and threw the man in the air, like a catapult. Again, his intelligence was fatal to the idiot.

Allegories
Stupidity is a quality of its own. That view is confirmed by a host of allegories found in medieval and Renaissance prints, in which Stupidity (Stultitia) is assigned a special place among all the other qualities.
* Here we see a woman with bared breasts, a chaplet of narcissi woven in her hair, leaning against a goat that is chewing some sea holly (eryngo). The narcissi refer to the Greek word narkè, meaning numbness (think of narcosis). According to Pliny, goats refused to be budged after they had chewed eryngo. The bare breasts indicate shamelessness. In this allegory three aspects of stupidity are succinctly addressed: dullness, obstinacy and shamelessness.
* Another print forms a pendant to the above work. We see a woman with eagle’s wings and an owl’s head. Fool’s bells dangle from her dress and she is holding a ‘slapstick’, a fool’s sceptre with a small bag of peas for use when thumping. In many parts of Western Europe, the owl is a symbol of stupidity, because it is blind and helpless during the day. In this print, stupidity is not characterized by dullness but by rash behaviour. Wisdom, by contrast, hastens slowly.
In short, stupidity is associated with extremes: she is either too sluggish or too quick. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the emphasis has increasingly been shifted to the kind of stupidity that is associated with mediocrity.
* Stupidity has got her own coat of arms: a shield emblazoned with a pair of bellows (the English word ‘fool’ means bellows), supported by a peacock (i.e. vanity) and an ass (i.e.stubbornness). A parrot nests in the crown (parroting).
* It was no accident that in the eighteenth century stupidity was also discovered by phrenologists and craniometrists, who maintained that you could measure intelligence by rule and compass. With paranoid zeal they considered even the most ordinary outward appearance as an expression of a distorted psyche.
* Their research assumed grotesque forms. Thus they claimed that a fool could be identified even at dusk by his silhouette . . . provided only that he was bald. The classifications of this science look suspiciously like satirical caricature.
* One step further is the classification of horses based on outward signs of stupidity and intelligence.

The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity begins at the point where the science of stupidity can no longer be distinguished from the stupidity of science.

Consider the dumb blonde, Marilyn Monroe in the movie Niagara.
The waterfall illustrates the overwhelming natural force no man can resist.
What is the relation between stupidity, fair hair and sex? The classical answer is that blondness is a sign of natural innocence. The blonde has not eaten form the apple of knowledge of good and evil. She can indulge in sex without shame, guilt or remorse.
But all the famous blonds of the white screen where brunettes that had treated their hair with peroxyde. So their air of naturalness was the product of artificial means. They were just acting stupid; and as long as they play the game, whe can play it as well, and indulge in sex without shame.
Is it smart to act dumb? Is it smart to act smart? Compare the real blondes, the cold ones from the Hitchcock-movies; they suggest great knowledge by keeping their mouth shut in a mysterious way.
The male variety of the dumb blonde is the ridiculous macho.
The question is: how to satirize a world in which the caricature cannot longer be distinguished from the ideal, a world in which Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone are role-models.

To illustrate the essential stupidity of our constitutional monarchy, I'd like to remind you of one of Aesop's fables. Once upon a time, the frogs living in a swamp were driven mad by each other's croaking; they petitioned Jupiter to let them have a king who would put an end to the lax morals that prevailed there. With a smile, the father of the gods flung a log into the morass. When they had recovered from the shock, the frogs approached their king, and on examining him took to mocking him. The frogs then asked Jupiter for a proper king, whereupon he threw a water snake into the marsh, which swallowed them all up.
Democracy can degenerate into anarchy, while monarchy can end in dictatorship. Anarchy and dictatorship are the extremes of our society, between which it is up to us to find the happy medium. Aesop’s fable illustrates that democracy exists by the grace of a king, provided only that he is no more active than a log. A president will do too.

Every country in the world knows, within and without its own boundaries, of towns and provinces that are proverbial bastions of stupidity. The Dutch locate the stupidity primarily in the city of Kampen.
* Four villagers of Kampen carry the horse over the field to prevent it from trampling the grain.
* To keep the glass from wearing out, the students in Kampen are not allowed to look out the window.
* To the Kampen city-council an architect proposed building a new bridge over the River IJssel. It would be good for posterity. The council turned down the recommendation. After all, what has posterity ever done for us?
* When traveling from Kampen to the city of Deventer, the citizens of Kampen stop to wait for the river to roll by.

The most remarkable thing is that, for centuries, these same acts of stupidity have been told all over the world about completely different cities! In India, for example, there is a variation on the story about carrying the horse across the field in which an elephant is lugged around by 20 men.
So, even in their stupidity, these cities lack all originality!

Chelm One and Chelm Two
For the Polish Jews the city Chelm is where the fools live. And one of its most famous residents is named Schlemiel.
Schlemiel went on foot from Chelm to Warsaw to broaden his mind. When he went to sleep during his journey, he placed his boots beside him with the toes pointing to Warsaw and the heels pointing to Chelm so as not to lose his way. A mischievous passer-by, a trickster turned the boots round.
When Schlemiel continued on his journey, everything looked strangely familiar: the streets, the houses, the people. When he asked a passer-by the name of the place, he was told that it was Chelm. So there had to be two Chelms.
He found a house that looked like his own house. When he entered it he found a woman who looked the spitting image of his own wife and immediately began to shout at him, but Schlemiel denied that he was her husband. 'I'm Schlemiel from Chelm 1, and this is Chelm 2'.
They took him to the Council of Wise Men who wondered whether there could really be two Chelms? Why not three, four, or a hundred Chelms? And will each of them have a Schlemiel whose experiences are exactly the same as those of the Schlemiel from this Chelm? And - worse still – will they all have a Council of Wise Men?
'Don't let him go', the woman cried out in despair. 'This must be a different Chelm', Schlemiel concluded, 'because my own wife always kicked me out of the house'.
It was decided that for five coins he would take the place of her husband who had left the town on the day that Schlemiel arrived there. Schlemiel was bound to conclude: Chelm 2 is better than Chelm 1.

See how a tiny difference can create a world of difference, how an apparently trivial act like turning round a pair of boots can suddenly place the world in a completely different light. It liberates the schlemiels, a category to which we all belong, from the miserable banality of their lives. And, at the same time, it divests the wise, which includes all of us as well, of their sense of being unique.
Unknowingly and unintentionally, Schlemiel found the answer to what Chesterton saw as the principal challenge of philosophy. "How can we see to it that we continue to be amazed by this world, while at the same time feeling at home in it?" But what is stupidity, anyway?

The Darwin Award
The Darwin Award is a prize that is awarded every year via the Internet to people who have made an inestimable contribution to evolution by killing themselves. The winners put Darwinism into practice by voluntarily removing their feeble genes from the process of reproduction.

And since the winners are always killed by the fatal accident, the prize is never actually awarded. Among the winners are the following:
* The 64-year-old throat cancer patient Abraham Mosley, who wanted to light a cigar in a hospital in Florida. His pyjamas and the bandage around his neck caught fire. He couldn't call for help because his vocal cords had been removed. He was burnt alive in bed.
* The bungee-jumper who gauged the length of his rope against the depth of the gorge but forgot that the rope was made of elastic.
* The leader of a Christian sect in Los Angeles, who made a daily attempt to follow in Christ’s footsteps and walk on water. He died suddenly on 24 Nov 1999 when he slipped on a bar of soap while practising in his bathtub.
* Three Palestinian terrorists who set off for Israel with explosives having set their watches for wintertime, which begins earlier in Israel than elsewhere because of morning prayers. The timebombs, however, were set for summertime, because Palestinians in the occupied territory refuse to live by what they call Zionist time. As a result the bombs went off earlier than intended and the terrorists were blown up.
* The shooting helmet designed by Albert B. Pratt of Lyndon (USA) is an old favourite. The helmet has an inbuilt revolver, and by tugging a short cord with his teeth, the wearer can fire a bullet from it. It is a mystery how the patent for this device was ever granted, seeing that the guinea pig must have had his neck broken on firing the first shot. The helmet is a patented aid to suicide.
* My personal favourite is the astrologer who had divined the date of his own death, and committed suicide on the day in question. Now that is what I call professional integrity.

The winners for 2003
* Three Brazilians who were flying in a twin-engine plane at low altitude and decided to "moon" an approaching plane, that is: to show their bare buttocks. While doing so they lost control over the plane and crashed. All three were found dead, facing backwards in their seats with their pants down around their ankles.
* First prize went to Everitt Sanchez, who tried to wash his own balls in the ball-washing machine at the local country club. He dropped his pants, sat down on top of the ball-washer and dangled his scrotum in the machine. A friend flipped the switch. When his skin became caught in the machinery, Sanchez fell and his scrotum tore. One ball was pulled into the machine, the other was crushed. In addition, when Sanchez fell, he broke a very expensive nine-iron.
Congratulations to all the winners! All of these cases illustrate in a grotesque way the stupidity that keeps our culture alive.

Stupidity as the foundation of our civilisation
What is stupidity? Stupidity is the ability to act against your own interests, with death as the ultimate consequence. This talent is typically human.
* For a start, human beings are the only species of animal that are so stupid as to scream when they are born, attracting the attention of wild animals.
* What is more, they are born into the world a purple colour, so that they cannot take advantage of a camouflage to disappear in the undergrowth.
* Human beings are also one of the few mammals that cannot walk at birth.

Worse still, unlike the animals that have an instinct for self-preservation, human beings are prepared to risk themselves and their kind for a whim. Some crazy idea about race, nation, sex or belief is enough to drive us to sacrifice ourselves and our fellow human beings.
On the one hand, stupidity is a threat to our civilisation, on the other hand stupidity forms the mystical foundation of our existence. Humans were forced to develop their intelligence so as not to be destroyed by their stupidity. All the strategies for the control of stupidity are what combine to form our civilisation. Culture is nothing but the product of a series of more or less failed attempts to gain some control over the self-destructive madness that is a feature of every country and age.

Explosive mixture
Stupidity has forced human beings to develop their intelligence. But intelligence does not offer any guarantee of self-preservation, as we have just seen. In fact, intelligence can even make stupidity more stupid. The explosiveness of this combination is most spectacular in wars. Less conspicuously stupidity rises to surface in the daily smouldering civil war on the motorways, which costs more than 1,000 fatal victims every year in the Netherlands alone, not to mention the tens of thousands of seriously wounded. One can speak here of a chronic catastrophe, which makes less of an impression on us than incidental but spectacular accidents such as plane crashes.
* We can also detect the self-destructive stupidity in technological progress:
* Low-nicotine tobacco has doubled the consumption of cigarettes
* Air conditioning affects the ozone layer, and contributes to the greenhouse effect. The cooling of offices, in other words, leads to the heating of the atmosphere. There you have the vicious circle of stupidity.
* The development of an elastic jogging-shoe to ease the pressure on the knees of joggers has led to extra damage to the hips.
Elsewhere, too, we catch intelligent stupidity red-handed:
* The No. 5 tram, the so-called Amsterdam ‘Speed Line’, regularly drives straight past crowded tram stops. When passengers complained, the Public Transport Office explained that trams would not be able to keep to the timetable if they picked up passengers at every tram stop.
Life-threatening stupidity cannot be eradicated without eradicating mankind, which would be tantamount to stupidity to the nth degree. The only solution is to devise lasting new stratagems for thwarting stupidity. Seen in such a light, stupidity is the engine that drives our civilization.

Holland is almost finished
Stupidity also lies at the very heart of our identity. For what is a Dutchman? Those who identify themselves as Dutch set themselves apart from the Belgian, the Pole, the Englishman, etc. by virtue of their language, clothing, culinary customs and so on. The differences with other countries delineate a country's "being". National identity, in short, is guaranteed by an external border.
But the Netherlands also has an internal border. For who, in Holland, is truly Dutch? The queen? Rembrandt? Van Gogh? Erasmus? The man in the street?
The typical Dutchman is seen as Calvinistic, as a Royalist, a know-it-all. Someone who is characterized as a typical Dutchman, however, may possess one or more of these traits, but never all of them in equal measure. Furthermore, the definition of the true Dutchman varies according to time and location.
Who among the inhabitants of the Netherlands, therefore, perfectly answers to the description "Dutch"? Looked at strictly, no one. Every Dutch person has something un-Dutch about them. In this way, the state of being Dutch becomes an obstacle, an immanent border, an unattainable point that perpetually hinders the Dutch from achieving identity with themselves.
The Netherlands is not lacking in inhabitants, yet it lacks Dutch. The struggle to be Dutch keeps the Dutch from being Dutch. That is the self-destructive stupidity of the Netherlands.
But we must reverse our perspective. Stupidity is no obstacle to its own identity. The true Dutchman exists only in the series of colorful, but - by definition - fruitless attempts to prove himself Dutch. The Dutchman is typically Dutch in the tulips, wooden shoes and windmills, in the Polder Model, the Delta Plan, kroketten, hot gravy rolls and all the other monumental tokens of his inability to get a hold on the state of being Dutch.
Being Dutch, in sum, coincides fully with the failure to be Dutch. Stupidity defines our national identity.
And that which applies to Holland, applies to all of Europe. The European nations are one in their stupidity; stupidity is what we have in common, binds us, keeps us together. Our mutual differences comprise the original ways in which each people tries to come to terms with its own stupidity.

The moral
Stupidity is a taboo. It is not for nothing that we laugh at other people’s stupidity and do all we can to hide our own stupidity. How are you to live with your stupidity? How are we to avoid being the victims of our own stupidity any longer?
The battle against stupidity is pointless. The intelligence that attacks stupidity becomes entangled in its own web of thought patterns.
Prevention does not help. When you do something stupid, you always, by definition, find out too late. A stupid act cannot be prevented.
The most stupid solution is to be paralysed and dumb from fear of doing something stupid. Make your stupidity a personal, unique stupidity. If you fail, fail at the highest possible level. If you fall, fall with elegance and sing while you do it. Be as colourfully and versatilely stupid as you can. That way you avoid banality and stiffness, the two dangerous sides of stupidity. Do like me and turn stupidity into your strongest quality.