Here is the thing about intelligence. The first conclusion smart people reach when dealing pragmatically with clearly defined problems is that clear thinking is WORK. Even for smart people.
So many of the people walking the street today think that thinking is someone else’s problem. This makes those willing and able to do this work pure gold. Most rich people are rich mainly because, among much other hard work, they did the work of THINKING.
You are not truly stupid until you decide that it’s other people’s jobs to tell you what to do. Particularly if you reached this conclusion from a low starting IQ—meaning you are unwilling to do the work of self improvement—you can with justice be called an idiot. I don’t judge incapacity, but I do judge the habit of not even trying.
Edit: I’m lying. I do judge stupid people, as I see it, for being stupid. My kids get after me all the time for this, because in point of fact I AM sometimes stupid myself.
I try to take this into consideration, but often fail. The type of stupidity that drives me up the fucking wall is the one which doesn’t even realize it is stupid. The stupid people who think they are smart because they have misread life’s countless signs, and retained a farcically high self regard. I am in the very highest echelon of intelligence, and I CONTINUALLY inspect my self and my actions to see if I am inadvertently being stupid. Because often I am. It is the lack of that that irritates the hell out of me.