Stupidity in Power
"STUPIDITÀ" -- STUPIDITY -- according to the Italian dictionary TRECCANI, means "a state of torpor, insensitivity, and stupor," or more commonly, "Scarcity or lack of intelligence," or "Unintelligent behavior, action, or speech…"
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Gustave Flaubert, a fleshy, epileptic, pissed-off Norman, was a literary genius. When he turned fifty years old, a cry exploded from within him, "We are sacrificing ourselves to the stupid!" He then decided to make stupidity (as understood in all three nuances mentioned in the Treccani dictionary) his number one enemy.
He got prepared to write a novel, which he entitled with the last names of his two main characters: Bouvard and Pécuchet.
"I'm thinking of writing a book..." Flaubert wrote, "... in which I will spew out all my bile." He worked on it with absolute dedication and declared: "I feel overwhelmed by the wave of stupidity that covers France, by the flood of cretinism under which it disappears. And I feel the same terror Noah's contemporaries did when they saw the sea continue to rise (...) I sense floods of hatred for the stupidity of my period, and I'm drowning in them. Shit keeps rising to my mouth, as in strangulated hernias. But I want to keep that shit, fix it, harden it; I want to make it into a paste with which I'd smear the 19th century, in the same way that they decorate Indian pagodas with cow dung. (...) Oh, for God's sake! We must toughen up and spread shit on the humanity that is throwing shit upon us! Oh! I'll get revenge! Of course, I'll get revenge! This will be a great modern novel..."
He wanted to leave behind a disturbing book, a crazy book, a monument to stupidity for posterity. He thought about the book for most of his life. When he was just 10 years old, he wrote: "There is a lady who often comes to visit us and always tells us a bunch of nonsense. I want to transcribe it all."
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He worked on this novel for eight years and died without finishing it. But he did not give up; he did not listen to Schiller's warning: "Against stupidity, the gods themselves labor in vain."
Many nights, he would forget to go to sleep because he had to perfect a sentence, writing, and rewriting. The words never sounded good enough to him; the construction was never perfect enough. He worked at the light of a lantern like a miner with his pickaxe, hunting for gems he was not sure to find. His shiny hair covered his immense forehead. The window of his room was wide open. Outside, it would be below zero, but he would be in shirt sleeves dripping with sweat. Reading and writing ruined his sight. To make his novel, he collected, studied, and took notes on thousands of volumes. Wikipedia did not exist yet, but even if it had, it wouldn't have been enough.
Flaubert was convinced that, in his time, he was witnessing the death of intelligence, true knowledge, beauty, and everything great. In his eyes, everything seemed to end up in a rampant quagmire of preconceived ideas, false opinions, false news, false truths, opinions ranted by people unable to have opinions, and so on, heading towards a gigantic generator of nonsense that dominates everyone, making them into morons.
Rereading this book today is a terrible experience. In the great French novelist's desperate attempt to portray the stupidity of the world around him, he brings to light our condition as astonished spectators of the rampant, infesting ignorance made into the method and system of contemporary communication.
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The book has been called "a pretension of an upside-down Divine Comedy." An unfinished masterpiece, a legend. For some - who do not want to see that way - it is "out-of-tune madness."
The fact is that this writer, over 140 years ago, sent us a terrified message, a literary scream: everything, absolutely everything, is sinking into stupidity.
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The historian Harari, our contemporary, believes that "In a world flooded with irrelevant information, lucidity is power." I humbly reply that the flood is not that of irrelevant ideas (useless and harmless) but of false and toxic ideas dressed in truth (productive and evil). I would add that lucidity does not give power, and above all, alas, lucidity is not in power. Power is sitting on the throne of communication that is increasingly less lucid and beneficial. It is armed with the bombs of Ignorance and Falsehood, pillars of stupidity.
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The two ordinary men who are protagonists of Flaubert's novel enthusiastically embark on endless journeys in search of the true and the right, everywhere, in all fields of science and life. These adventures are resolved in confusion, disappointment, and total discouragement: the sought truth and what is found is not truth but is a stupid masquerade, the failure of truth. The two anti-heroes are likable models of stupidity. They are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of modern times.
A revolutionary novel. "I have to finish it before I croak or while I'm waiting to croak!" Flaubert declared. He did not make it in time.
He had been tried for immorality for Madame Bovary. "Now..." he said amused, "... for this book, I will be expelled from France and Europe".
Flaubert managed a literary heroic feat. He transformed a repulsive book -- in the proper sense of repelling: throwing back, throwing out, and vomiting -- into an elaborate work of art. He purposefully confessed: "Mine is a poor life, all is flat and quiet where the sentences are an adventure”, and he added two corollaries: "I work to finish the sentence," and "The sentence never ends."
Due to his furious quest for style, Flaubert has been called the last classical writer, but since his work is immense, dizzy, neurotic, and provocative, he became the first writer of modernism.
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The protagonists of the novel, two likable idiots, wallow in the mire of fake news, false dogma, false communications, false theories, and all that has been offered to them as "the truth," which they eventually find out to be "lies."
Those two idiots are us!
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"In Bouvard and Pécuchet..." it has been said, "... the question of truth and objectivity reveals the abyss of questions about the arbitrariness of language and names to be given to things, the historicity of knowledge, the circulation of prejudices, realism, truths, and relativism. The work, unfinished and explosive, leaves all these questions open. It does not solve them".
And I believe it, how could it solve them?
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Flaubert said his time was "The time of the jackasses."
Regarding "jackasses" (not the poor quadruped beast of burden, but the meaning of jackasses in the symbolic sense of ignorance, loutishness, and stubbornness), the Italian philosopher and critic Benedetto Croce stated (soon after WW2): "The danger of the ignorant who theorize, judge, pronounce, unleash rivers of absurdities, circulate meaningless formulas, and believe in their ignorance to possess miraculous wisdom, is something we know very well because we have experienced it. It is called, in its most recent form, "fascism." I thought of denominating it in Greek: onagrocracy."
Exactly: "Jackasses in power."
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Today, "jackasses" have even more powerful and universal means of communication and influence than those that Flaubert fought against at his time or to which Benedetto Croce referred in his time. Thanks to the extraordinary ability of the violent greedy homo sapiens to develop technology, the "jackass" can spread false and toxic ideas that are dressed in truth and accepted as truth globally. Over fifty years ago, the writer Ennio Flaiano was already writing, "Stupidity has made tremendous progress. It is a sun so bright you can no longer gaze at it. Thanks to the media, stupidity is no longer even the same; it feeds on other myths, it sells itself well, it has ridiculed common sense, and it spreads terror all around itself." What would he say about today's media? Today, the "onagrocrats" have infinitely more sophisticated means to justify their peoples' wars, injustices, exterminations, famines, and destruction of the environment. They drag them (they drag us), like in a Bruegel painting (the blind leading the blind) towards an abyss, our future.