I woke up this morning remembering vaguely having written something about Lady Gaga, and fearing I had gone a post too far. I read it this morning, and it isn’t too awful, even if sentimemental in the way people who have thoroughly “relaxed” get. Me, at any rate. I was going to delete it, but think I’ll just leave it.
I worked out my ex post facto rationalization, though, and thought it worth sharing.
Experience flows into all of us, all of our conscious, waking hours, which includes our dream time. On this base of experience, we inflict patterns. I say inflict, since reality is what it is, the waters flow according to gravity, and these processes need no commentary. What we need, though, are maps, to get from Point A to Point B, reliably, if possible.
Now, some patterns are simply wrong. Socialism as a means of raising the living conditions of the poor does not work. As a means of aggregating power, it does work. But that is not the stated goal, for most.
What we call stupidity is simply a persistent inability to develop accurate patterns–or to understand those granted by education or experience–to move reliably from A to B.
Yet, this word “stupidity” refers to an average, a persisting statistical tendency.
In Signal Theory, you have always some mixture of noise and signal. The only way to eliminate all noise is to eliminate all signal, and the only way to perceive all signals is to allow all noise.
To the point here, stupidity is a necessary element in proper perception. You have to be willing to be stupid at times in order to be intelligent. You have to take educated guesses, and be wrong sometimes, in order to learn at your maximal rate.
As I have pointed out several times, you can’t “be” intelligent. Nor can you “be” stupid. Not all the time, on all topics.
We see from time to time the word “paranoid”. In common usage, what does this mean? Wrong. It is stupidity combined with fear. Yet, as one studies human history, the patterns of oppression are ubiquitous. Patterns of the desire for oppression are, today, ubiquitous among those educating our children. This is simple fact.
Virtually no faculty member of any university in the country would feel shame among their colleagues announcing a sympathy for class warfare and the coerced “redistribution of wealth” (which of course in practice means “eviscerating our collective wealth production capability”), by any means necessary. I myself have seen a tenured professor announce openly that he was a Marxist. He was able to be confident that nobody would accuse him of being the Fascist that this sympathy plainly implies.
Few thoughts with my first cup of coffee.