Well burrowed, old mole!

“[A] tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it. Slaves are always commanded by another slave. Here too, how could the concept of error account for this unity of stupidity and cruelty”

Stupidity is political. This is true in a two senses: first, certain populations are characterized through the attribution of stupidity, defined as a lack of intelligence understanding, or some other uniquely human mental characteristic; second, stultification practices arise which function to stupefy the population.  What both have in common is an element of misrecognition. Stupidity seems always to involve a semi-conscious misrecognition: a refusal to see the truth, one on the border of conscious intention, but never quite conscious or unconscious, never quite intentional or unintentional.

The market is a great tyrant in this sense.

“Stupidity is not animality. The animal is protected by specific forms which prevent if from being ‘stupid’ [betise]….[S]tupidity, finally, is the faculty for false problems; it is evidence of an inability to constitute comprehend or determine a problem as such”

Civilization has always relied upon a logic of domestication. It domesticates animals, breeding them for slaughter and servitude, homo sapiens is no exception, the ideal citizen is happy to serve in the military and does not gripe about extraction of surplus value when he comes home.  The reproduction of social hierarchy and domination require that a great deal of what one might call ‘animal insight’ or ‘animal materialism’ be transformed, redirected or suppressed in the population. It is not for nothing that our emotions, that our impulses tell us having to go to work is bullshit, that having to answer to a boss is not the best possible option, that it is better to be free than to be enslaved and so on. It is within this context that we can see the present state of philosophy and civilization–[Utah Phillips as a sort of anarchist Socrates] .

Overall, stupidity is the cultivation of false problems. The animal does not know the false problem.  It is naturally a materialist. It is absurd to imagine an idealist wolf or lion.  Stultification is thus an active process: it is not so much that inquiry is crippled, which it sometimes is, but that false problems are subsidized and elaborated.

We new Philosophers

Phillips’ poetry and stories ex-pose the false capitalist problems. He lived his thought etc etc. He is a true philosopher on the pre-socratic model that we must take heed of if philosophy is not to die. or something like that. His thought shows how philosophy ignores reality and we can get back to the real problems if we attend.

His sensibility: hobo-nomad revolutionary