Keir Starmer

Source: Chris McAndrew

Human error, wrote Prof. James Reason in his book on that widespread phenomenon, is a large subject, and so is stupidity. To inform myself further on it, I recently bought in France a special edition of a magazine devoted to the psychology of stupidity—as if to suggest that there were something in stupidity that required special explanation.

Stupidity is like the eye: It does not see itself. It is therefore one of those qualities that is easier to observe in others than in oneself. In addition, it gives us pleasure to do so, for it reassures us of our own wisdom and superiority. Moreover, we should find a world without stupidity very dull. Good sense is admirable, but not interesting.

But what, exactly, is stupidity? Does it consist mainly of self-evidently absurd ideas that prevent us from achieving our aims? Or can our aims themselves be stupid? We see old films of people jumping off the Eiffel Tower with wings attached to their arms in the hope thereby to fly, and who drop like a stone to the ground; we laugh and think, “How stupid!” But many a new idea has seemed stupid at first before it became an established truth or orthodoxy (not the same thing, of course).

“Before we declare someone’s conduct to be stupid, we should be clear about what it was intended to achieve.”

Before we declare someone’s conduct to be stupid, we should be clear about what it was intended to achieve. The motives of our fellow humans are often opaque to us, or unknown even to themselves, or unavowed by them because so disreputable, disgraceful, or forbidden. Much of our supposed knowledge of other people’s motives is not really knowledge at all, but speculation, supposition, or deduction. However, being the kind of creatures that we are, we cannot avoid making such speculations, suppositions, or deductions. Our life would be impossible without them.

In the first article I read in the edition of the magazine devoted to the psychology of stupidity, the author takes Mao’s Great Leap Forward as a historical example of the harm that stupidity can do. As the author rightly says, Mao’s policy resulted in a hecatomb, but that is not sufficient to prove its stupidity. After all, Mao was a man who once said that a hundred million deaths in a nuclear war might be a price worth paying for the defeat of imperialism. It is clear that the fate of the individual was not of the first importance to him, nor did he think that the value of a human life was infinite. If one replaces the supposition that he was concerned not so much to improve the standard of living of the Chinese peasantry as to exert control over it and to cow it into complete submission, in short to render himself all-powerful, the Great Leap Forward was by no means stupid. Stupidity is not the same as evil.

No doubt I was very slow to think about these things, but I first realized the disjunction between ostensible and real political ends in the impoverished African country of Tanzania. There, a hero of the Western progressive intelligentsia, Julius Nyerere, had more or less collectivized the land and driven the peasantry from their traditional abodes into collective villages, supposedly in an attempt to relieve their poverty, raise their standard of living, and provide them with services such as schools and health care. The whole system was kept afloat by foreign aid provided largely by the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, misled, deceived, or bamboozled by the fact that Nyerere, in effect a dictator, was personally rather modest and inoffensive.

His scheme, which endured for many years, resulted in further deep impoverishment. The results of his one-party system, combined with state monopoly, were all too predictable: a nomenklatura and a helot class. It was not as if the system had not been tried before, or as if anyone with a minimal knowledge of human nature could not have predicted the result. Only incompetence and the delightful character of the Tanzanian people prevented the system from being as nasty as many of the others of the same genre.

At first, I thought that the vast gap between the declared intention of the leader and the most obvious results of his leadership went unperceived by him because of ignorance or sheer stupidity. But if one disregarded the declared intention and replaced it by another, namely that of achieving and maintaining power, Nyerere’s scheme was brilliantly intelligent and successful. After all, while impoverishing his people, he maintained himself in absolute power for a quarter of a century, died in his bed, and was all but revered as a saint by people who did not look too carefully at what he had wrought. He is the first dictator of the modern world to be considered for canonization by the Catholic Church. It helped, of course, that he was not nearly as bad as some others; but not being as bad as some others is not the same as being good.

It is always of doubtful explanatory value to ascribe stupidity to politicians who are, from the point of view of achieving power, quite successful. When I look at the face and expressions of the present prime minister of Britain, Keir Starmer, I have to pinch myself to remind myself that he is not stupid, which is what he looks, but must be at the very least cunning; and insofar as he has any purpose other than the personal exercise of power, it is to make the world prosperous for the class of ambitious mediocrities of which he is so notable an exemplar, even, or especially, at the expense of everyone else. Insofar, also, as he has a talent, it is for rising in a hierarchy that in the modern world is, as theology was in medieval times, the Queen of the Sciences.

Everything he says, everything he does, should be interpreted in this light, and not as if his ostensible or declared ends were the true ones. Then what he says and does begins to make sense, and even seem intelligent, though in my heart I do not altogether rule out the hypothesis that he is too stupid to realize it.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).