It's the Stupidity, Stupid
Stupidity in politics is not to be laughed at. It serves a dangerous political purpose
After Hurricane Helene created widespread havoc and destruction across the southeastern United States, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – known for being one of the more absurd members of Congress in amongst stiff competition –claimed that the natural disaster was the work of nefarious forces.
“Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
The accusation she was supposedly making was that the weather event was created for political purposes. Either as some way of shifting votes in the communities affected, or as retribution against people who don’t support President Joe Biden.
It is now incredibly common for such a rank stupidity to be thrust into our eyeballs. daily. We live in an era where making outrageous and farcical claims is a central component of the public discourse. While previously we could dismiss absurdity as the rantings of fringe loonies – something to laugh at or mock – there is actually something serious going on here. People are increasingly comfortable with being publicly stupid. And as irrational as it sounds, this stupidity serves a political purpose.
Outrageous statements have long been the tactics of autocrats. Their need to rouse people up through dark emotions has been central to their path to ascendency. The objective is to create an intense assault on people and institutions that operate within reality. To sow a permanent mistrust in anything other than the charismatic authority of the autocratic figure. Rules, norms, the law and constitutions all need to be subverted or destroyed in aid of something grander, more visceral and emotionally satisfying.
Part of this discrediting of reality is also tied to the relentless cynicism of authoritarian movements, and how those with authoritarian personality types often project their own approaches to politics onto others. Majorie Taylor Greene may believe Joe Biden is turning the weather on political opponents because this is exactly what she would do if she had such abilities. People who live permanently inside bad faith believe that everyone else operates solely via bad faith as well. Integrity and virtue are entirely foreign concepts.
But absurdity is also used as a loyalty test - if you can induce people to live inside lies, to recite obviously false claims, then that is an enormous power. Those willing to make a public fool of themselves for a cause or a political figure are demonstrating the ultimate form of submission. The more shameless and obviously false the statements the greater power the movement demonstrates.
Alongside this, is the sense of group identity that comes from people collectively believing things that are wild and fabricated. Conspiracy is a greater bonder of people than mundane reality. As Michael Caulfield from the University of Washington has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Yet what we are living through at the moment seems to also be something else. Rather than just the cynicism of power lust, we are seeing people who are desperate to be lied to. Desperate for dark fantasies to be true. As Peter Pomerantsev highlights, people are giving the “middle finger to reality”, and this speaks to something more fundamental happening within humanity at the moment, something deeper within the human psyche. And something that stretches far beyond the emotional turbulence of Donald Trump and his surrounding clownshow.
While we humans may have great rational faculties, we are also mystical beings. There’s a yearning within us for the fantastical. In the West at least, having mostly dispensed with the old religions hasn’t ushered in an era of greater rationality, it has instead led us to seek out new forms of mysticism. New ways to try and be more than the material reality before us.
However, unlike the old religions, this new mystical yearning is not refined and focused, but chaotic and dissonant. It hasn’t been honed over millennia, seeking to soothe rather than arouse, and aware of its role and limitations. It is also not making any compromises with the state. It wants to be political. It wants devotees, submission, and power. It wants countries to be governed by a new sweeping post-modernism – where these societies are reduced to an intense battle of competitive self-involvement. Where how one feels about something – no matter how absurd – is more important than verifiable reality. It wants this psychodrama to be policy.
In his much-misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama recognised that there was something innate in humanity that needed a struggle. That rationality would never be satisfying enough for us. The book wasn’t triumphalism, it was a warning – something that has clearly come to fruition:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
This need for struggle and the yearning for mysticism are incredibly difficult to counteract. They combine forcefully within our current era of performative excess to make stupidity incredibly enticing to many people. This may mean that stupidity in public life may never be eradicated. At best it can only be limited.
How we limit stupidity though is the dilemma. Doing so may start with the simple notion of treating people as adults, with the capabilities and responsibilities of adults. Where there are actual consequences for dishonesty, where we encourage people to think. Coddling people only exacerbates the environment where people expect to be lied to, and want to be lied to – an environment where clowns roam freely and bullshit is highly profitable. It is within the expectation of adulthood that maybe we can hope to overcome politics as a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novel.
Is there any possible realistic (or extant) way that people can be held accountable for their indirect predictions or lies? If political pundit John says on The News that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and this demonstrates how the current president's policies are causing people to struggle, then Jane comes on next week and describes how the statistic comes from a poorly worded survey question and really only 15% of people are struggling and it's less than it was, is there a way to have some consequence for John for being wrong? Apart from forcing every pundit to bet on their predictions if they want to go on TV, I can't think of one, but maybe you know of one?