I spot idiots instantly. I became a sociologist to be able to detect them in herds. I can smell them from hundreds of kilometers away. And as soon as I see them coming, I make sure to identify them: true idiots. It doesn’t matter whether from in front or from behind. Although, I do have an innate ability to detect the common fool from its profile. A person’s silhouette says almost everything about them, but it says it in a language only we senior researchers are able to decipher. If it has a beak, it’s a bird. If it has a tail, it’s a dog. If it has a trunk, it’s an elephant. For all these situations, there are exceptions. As I say, it is a complex science. Stupidity is a whole universe. When we think we’ve mastered it, it redoes itself, and comes back wearing a new suit.
Modernity is a breeding ground for idiots. In the past, you had to look for them. Today they are everywhere. Wherever a fashion emerges, a handful of them pop up, and they bask in it, and they expose themselves, and they can’t help it. They’re cute. In the same way that monkeys at the zoo are cute when you throw peanuts at them. What distinguishes them from animals is their ability to reinvent themselves and turn stupidity into a way of life. I have been working in this field for years and am on the verge of packing it in out of desperation. Stupidity, I suspect, is infinite.
They say that, in the past, the idiot was known for his lack of reading. Today they have become sophisticated and they read, and that’s the problem. They are very well prepared idiots. That is why their stupidity cannot be easily erased, because the trace of their foolishness runs deep and the road that leads to it is full of false decoys. They hide in fashion, in the kitchen, and in social networks. They go out of their way to be out of fashion, as if vintage were synonymous with victory, and as if anyone really knows what the words vintage, naïve, and mainstream actually mean.
Nor is the new stupidity cured by traveling. As if it were a mutation of a lethal virus, contemporary idiots absorb the foreign as part of their own identity, and travel far from home to observe all the avant-garde that they are unable to detect on their own block. By the way, our century’s common idiots tend to eat apples while walking the streets of the world’s major cities, with a cool and self-confidence that would make Adam and Eve look ridiculous. It is natural. It is healthy. It’s not fattening. And it makes me feel very independent. Do they eat apples on a luxurious avenue? No question, they’re professional idiots. They don’t eat apples on a fancy avenue? Then they’re just self-conscious idiots, buds about to burst into bloom.
During the ’90s, I don’t know if it was nihilism or ecstasy or cannabis, but the thing was to be skeptical. Skepticism expanded in such a way that the only certainty one could hold on to was that the bottom of one’s pants had to cover one’s leg as if there were 10 more meters of limb to go before reaching the ground. Today, skepticism is superfluous. I do not know what classical philosophers would say to this, but today idiots are skeptical about nothing, they regret nothing, and are convinced that their path is the right one, even if the whole world turns in the opposite direction, as everyone knows that the mass is always wrong and ordinary, although in this they are often right.
They know everything, they are interested in everything, except what is really interesting. The greatest quality of the new-fangled twit is an inordinate interest in culture, when their stereotype resides in appearances, and an appalling passion for ideology, whichever it may be. The politicization of idiots is one of the great philosophical unknowns with which I have been confronted in my extensive field study of the species. I am unable to guess whether the idiot becomes politicized because he is one, or whether he becomes an idiot by becoming overly politicized.
In any case, I can’t help but be annoyed that their independence or their good tastes in music turn to dust as soon as any political confrontation arises, and that their speeches to change the world — swollen veins and red face included — produce in the rest of the audience a strange sedative effect. Instead of getting rallied up and encouraged to conquer the cause, listeners fall asleep, leave, or simply die of boredom. Without wishing, finally, to wade into the waters that Mendoza, Montaner, and Vargas Llosa so aptly peddled in their Manual of the Perfect Idiot, no one is unaware that the most lethal weapon of the contemporary fool is their loquacity, the solidity and the warmth of their ideological sophistry. The ideologized idiot, the most widespread species today, looks like a new version of the common idiot developed by a freemium AI, one of those that only give you shitty solutions until you pay for the pro-plan.
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