Prompt: ‘The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’ – attributed to Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell was generally considered an extremely intelligent guy and I don’t think that he was ‘full of doubt’, in fact he seems to have been very confident in his opinions, if not ‘cocksure’. So, to me, his argument fails at the first hurdle.
As for stupid people, there’s a lot of them going around and not all of them are cocky. From my experience stupid people exhibit a wide variety of attitudes and behaviours.
The problem is that no one likes to think of themselves as stupid, so, in denial, stupid people pursue all sorts of vocations and, occasionally, armed with little more than ignorance and ambition, they are able to attain positions of power and influence, that everyone, regardless of their IQ, finds disconcerting.
Copyright: text Jim Piotrowski; photos Wix & Wiki.
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