Host
Marion Garcia
Podcast Content
It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. In the early 20th century, Dr. Henry H. Goddard proposed a classification system for intellectual disability based on Binet and Simon's concept of intellectual age. An idiot is a person with a very deep mental disability, but not necessarily a mental illness.
Sterilization was used as a solution to mental deficiencies in the early 20th century to prevent mentally handicapped women from conceiving and to prevent them from reproducing. In response to the Mental Inability Act of 1913, which locked people with learning disabilities and other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia up because they were idiots, weak, mentally and morally flawed, idiots resurfaced. They were then able to take their first steps into the world of criminal justice and were led away.
It only takes a little empathy to understand that this little word is used so often to describe people with developmental and cognitive disabilities. The term has probably been misused in the past for members of this group, who are already marginalised in society and whose disabilities are often hidden. This word, so lightly used, is closely linked, but it exists and it does not only benefit the mentally ill.
People who are asked to go to a foreign city may be treated with contempt, and it hurts people to appear normal. Together we create a phantasm that hurts everyone, so that normality becomes possible. It does not matter if we learn to regard the people who are already around us as fools of nature, as long as we still do something that might seem a bit stupid to them.
How would you feel if no one called you an idiot or a fool, even though you have accepted it in your heart for a long time? If people did, the news would not be news, it would be confirmation that you and every other person in the world are nitrate heads. The effects of my formative years left a hole in my stomach when I saw insults pouring down on me that only humiliated me because I could not control something and so freely used it.
The first time I dropped a glass in a bar during work, my boss sighed and called me a "fool" and then called me to tell him. As a result, American idiots who believe every word of Donald Trump fervently follow his example. The country's biggest idiot, the idiot-in-chief, has responded to a brewing global pandemic by denying it, telling people to drink bleach, minimizing the severity of what we know today about the threat to the US economy from global warming and climate change, and then playing golf.
There are tons of people who don't wear masks, and they are all beaten to death by a bunch of morons wearing masks.
America still has a national Covid strategy, and Joe Biden is not really behaving like that. But America still does not, despite the fact that America still has a "national covids" strategy.
Last year, I would have said that education, income, childcare and pensions are the best vaccination a society can have against idiocy, which takes the path of stupidity, anger, resentment, mistrust, etc. Now we have vaccines against Covid, but still none against human stupidity. I say 'giving people the basics can provide some protection', but I am pretty sure that it has proved to be absolutely effective as a vaccine against idiocy.
No one, and, it seems, a large part of Swedish society, believes any more that educated people should know basic thoughts. Swedes are mightily offended by what I have written, whether because I am Swedish or because I am an idiot.
The pattern is the same in Sweden as in America: big idiots hold hands, laugh with joy, lead the little idiot over cliffs of ruins, jump off and lead him into the ruins.
The fact that Sweden was so successful last year in terms of self-improvement - caused by Covid failure - says something, because idiocy can strike anywhere, anytime.
How can it be that this year has proved that human stupidity is truly bottomless and literally unfathomable? I could go on and on saying that idiocy is the defining theme of this painful, terrible year, but there is no doubt that idiots have killed hundreds of thousands of people over the years, and for no good reason.
It is painfully obvious now, but we live in a society where most people are idiots, where they are idiots and they don't care if the rest of us live or die.