08-11-2020, 04:39 PM
(08-11-2020, 08:44 AM)David Horn Wrote:(08-10-2020, 07:57 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: ... I mean how smart do you have to be to be viewed as the one of the best of the dumb people.
You might ask your wife.
People can be very smart and believe some incredibly-silly things. Think of all the intellectual effort poured into such folly as eugenics, "scientific" racism, young-earth creationism, Afrocentrism, postmodernism, Marxism-Leninism,creating 'new' religions, and Holocaust denial. One can put much intellectual effort into some completely-worthless effort such as creating an artificial language (Surprise! I could do that!)
Esperanto is sort-of-OK for what it promises. No, I am not speaking of commercial failures such as novels that could never sell. Writing, composing, and performing are low-input, high-reward activities as extreme gambles. Most screenplays are worthless.
As far as that goes, twelve-tone music is close to the category of useless efforts so far as I can tell. I can easily remember a fairly long phrase of music much longer than some twelve-tone row, but try getting me to remember that twelve-tone row.
Truth be told, more often we have hunger pangs and will settle for a hamburger... or we need to use a toilet. Or gasoline for the commute. It doesn't take much of a brain to herd cattle around, to butcher them in a slaughterhouse, to separate the meat from the bones and put it into packages, to ship it to a store or warehouse, or to take a patty and hamburger bun with perhaps some toppings, and hand the finished product to a customer. It doesn't take much effort or thought to clean a toilet. We might not like working at such a level of intellectual stupidity, but most industrial and commercial processes seem to operate on the principle "Keep it simple, stupid!"
Maybe people put huge amounts of effort into worthless efforts than being satisfied with modest pay at a job that requires that one do little thinking because someone else has already done that. That may explain cranks who pretend to be very bright yet fall far short of the standards appropriate for academia or the highly-refined level of accomplishment necessary for creative work. So people paint portraits with strange violations of the laws of of perspective. That is not an odd vision; that is incompetence.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.