And yet it moves

Day 1,723, 15:56 • Published in USA USA • by Silas Soule


E pur si muove

The two main types of stupidity reflect the two extremes of stupidity.



The Idiot




At one pole is the (sometimes super-intelligent) person who just doesn't "get it". Like when an American asks you "How was your day?" or "How you doing?" or "How are you?" and you actually start telling them stuff like "Oh, I am horribly tired after my ordeal at the immigration office, etc., etc."

Mistaking such phrases for an actual question means people will look at you like a complete idiot. Because you are. An idiot does not understand the context. Such a kind of stupidity is precisely that of an idiot.

There are exemplary idiots of this type, both in RL and in literature. For example, I am sure we all remember Good Soldier Svejk, who ran into no-man's land between the soldiers advancing on each other from their trenches and shouted "Stop shooting!, there are people on the other side!" Or the naive child who exclaimed that the emperor had no clothes -- completely missing the point, like a true idiot, that we are all naked beneath our clothes.







The Moron




At the opposite end of stupidity sits the moron. This is the stupidity of those who are slaves to common sense. The moron identifies one hundred percent with the dominant social paradigm. He can't even imagine that anything could exist beyond the default symbolic order.

In classical literature, the moron is represented by a Greek Chorus, the prototype for today's "laugh track". In mystery stories, Holmes' Watson and Poirot's Hastings are the icons for moronity. Their role is precisely to accentuate the eccentric genius of the great detectives by only ever seeing everything exactly as it appears to be.








The Imbecile

But the opposition of idiot and moron fails to expose the entire field of stupidity. What do we say about someone like Franz Kafka, who had the unique ability to present idiocy as something entirely standard and ordinary?



In the simplistic and now abandoned rankings of "official" retardation, an imbecile had an IQ somewhere in between a moron (topping out at an IQ of 70) and an idiot (bottoming out at zero IQ). So not too ba😛 beneath a moron, but ahead of an idiot -- the situation is catastrophic, but not serious, as a certain Austrian imbecile would have put it.

The roots of this word are interesting. The Latin root may mean something like "without a stick". An imbecile takes a journey without the help of a staff. This makes some sense if we think of the "stick" as language, the symbolic order, as what Lacan called the Big Other.

The idiot is alone, outside of Big Other altogether. The moron is wholly subsumed within It, dwelling in language in a ridiculously naive way. While the imbecile is in-between -- aware of the need for the Big Other, but not relying on it, distrusting it.

This was perhaps best expressed by the Slovene punk band Laibach, who defined their relationship to God by means of referring to the words on the USA dollar bill, but adding a twist: "Like Americans, we believe in God, but unlike Americans, we don't trust him."

Measured against the imbecile, the moron appears brighter. He is too bright for his own good, as reactionary morons, but not imbeciles, like to say about intellectuals.

To be "not totally stupid", to be relatively stupid, is to be as stupid as all people and at the same time brings one into the realm of not-like-All. Some specific insights make us not entirely stupid. And for those with a great many insights (that are not stupid), what makes such folks not totally stupid is the very inconsistency of thier stupidity. The name of this stupidity which all people participate in is the Big Other.





Imagine, if you can, a monk holding an umbrella. The umbrella hints at a separation from heaven. Such a monk is subtracted from the dimension of the Big Other, the heavenly order which regulates the normal run of things. This is a paradox because the monk is still a monk, a person who is usually perceived as someone who, precisely, dedicates his life to heaven. So how can one be a monk subtracted from heaven?

Such "imbecility" is the core of the subjective point of view of a radical revolutionary (as well as of a psychologist).





In an episode from the fourth season of The X-Files, "E pur si muove" (And yet, it moves) replaced the usual "The truth is out there". In other words, even if their reality is denied by official science, alien monsters nonetheless move around out there. But more interestingly, it can also indicate that, even if there are no aliens out there, the fiction of an alien invasion can nonetheless engage us and move us.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of fiction.










I hope I have made myself clear. The relevance to eRepublik should be obvious to any imbecile.