Thinking�out Stupidity In Our Scholars

The stupidity in our scholars, like stupidity and arrogance everywhere, follows a model. The model presented here was developed by Anticommerical University Professor William Mason. It applies in general to stupidity at any level of intensity. It has 5 stages.

1. Mimetic Arrogance
One party identifies themselves as an authority on a subject and other parties imitate that arrogance. Examples of things scholars and professors are arrogant about: science, literature, art, sociology, psychology, philosophy. Whatever the culture tells us is a difficult subject, that's what scholars decide is worth being arrogant about.

2. Mimetic Use of the Word Mimetic
Now the parties begin competing for the object of arrogance: jargon. Whatever big, fancy words emerge, others copy them. Since they all use the same words in different ways, any hope of finding concrete definitions of them vanishes. To win, you only need to get more exclusivity of words such as 'exclusivity.' If the word becomes ubiquitous, then you make up even more complex words that have simple meanings, such as 'ubiquitous.' If this doesn't work, then you must resort to using neojargon or pseudojargon or neopseudojargon or neopseudoneojargon. Examples of these forms of jargon are the prefixes 'neo' and 'pseudo.'

3. Graikos
Graikos is a Greek word that means "Greek." It's the root of much stupidity found in scholarly discursions. In the rivalry for respect, if one side finds an inferior usage of jargon, they are caught in the temptation of Graikos and feel compelled to retaliate by literally speaking a whole new language. Thus begins a "jargon" war, fought on the battlefield of the dictionary. Graikos is what makes it so hard to read their professional journals, so hard to feel like you have any grasp whatsoever on vocabulary. It's so easy to feel intellectually inferior to such unjustified usage of language. The gap between scholar and layman escalates.

4. Intimidation
Eventually one side crosses some arbitrary threshold of concern where the supervising authorities feel compelled to intervene. It's essentially random which side is considered the "supervising authority" since they both consider the other as worthless scum, but often it's the faction with more college degrees, which uses more venomous attacks to maintain parity. Whichever side is considered the "supervising authority" becomes the intimidator of the layman and the others who kept their ego below threshold are victims, doomed to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness.

5. Authorized, Sanctioned and Sacred Stupidity
To appease the scholars, the authorities determine guilt and visit sanctions and punishment on the intimidated. This escalates the stupidity to the next higher level of authority in our culture.

The 5-stage pattern repeats at all the levels of power and for arrogance and stupidity. The most virulent monopolies that scholars enjoy are over respect, attention, money, power, land, or ideology. Scholarly conflicts and school "honor societies" follow this model.

In the Ivy League, centuries of low-grade knowledge conflicts bubble along until one side gets enough power to visit depredations on another. Thus we see buildings named in the honor of the scholars, and a fixed tuition so that all students are forced to pay the scholars' wages even when the scholars don't bestow onto the students their promised intelligence. At every point in academia, the dynamic is somewhere in the 5-stage model, which repeats endlessly.

The only way to stop the stupidity is to adopt the conscious goal of de-escalation and run the model backwards. Giving up sentence fragments that have no meaning, such as this one, despite the scholars' own inability to write, giving up arrogant egos, avoiding the temptation of Graikos, avoiding intimidation, avoiding authorized and sanctioned stupidity.

Right now professors are visiting authorized and sanctioned stupidity against their students. Thus professors are running the scholarly stupidity model forward toward more future scholarly stupidity. In universities, the mimetic arrogance is the right to use state-sanctioned stupidity to maintain the social order desired by those in power. In primary schools, the unique kids are the outcasts being shunned by the teachers. In secondary schools, the outcasts are the smart "nerdy" students, shunned by the "jocks" and "debs." Littleton is only a symptom of the rage resultant from this pecking order imposed by the scholars.

A common type of intimidation is thrust upon a person who bears witness and speaks the truth to power. Powerful figures in human history were martyred for bearing witness to brutality and oppression, and the scholars resent these unique people who seem to make a difference despite the scholars' desperate attempts to pigeonhole them.

In Littleton, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold bore witness to the pervasive and horrific culture of the scholarly pecking order that makes respected gentlemen out of jocks, and cloned images of ties and suits out of the "cool" kids who spat on them and kicked them around all their lives.

Treating those boys as if they were "scum of the earth" was an expected reaction, one which has occurred repeatedly throughout history (a subject that the scholars also consider their territory, in the hopes that no one will learn the real truth about what has happened to their world). Two of the most notable occurances of such degradation of the unique are the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy Era.

We need to think our way out of stupidity by mindfully running the model backward, de-escalating stupidity and moving toward not repeating sentences needlessly, like I have done with this one, simply to drive an emotional point to an unsuspecting reader.

At every stage of the model, we need to be mindful of the stupidity we're caught up in, and consciously elect to rebel against their contrived attempts to pigeonhole the universe with their pathetic "models." Until now, the great scholars and professors presented this as tenets of their ridiculous institutions and universities, or as a way of controlling an explosion of laymen who just want to live their lives without thinking that they're walking scum.

With Mason's Technical Systems Theoretical Pseudo-Extended Model(tm) of the ridiculous structure of giving unnecessary models Really Long Names, we can discover the optimal strategy to drive the stupidity in reverse toward creativity and true knowledge. All of the scholars arrive at the same stupid solutions as those proposed by other scholars, and tend to have the nerve to compare their theories to people who are truly creative and unique (they too being spat upon by their respective societies for being different), such as Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, King, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Dear, and thousands of other rational thinkers who thought deeply about the tendency of their societies to use their arrogance to cause problems of violence, oppression, and injustice.

It's pure science, pure reason, and, when it comes right down to it, pure stupidity. These methods of thought all reach the same, failing solution, and the scholars refuse to admit that they were wrong so they then commit their careers to fixing all the new problems they've created in the hopes that no one reveals their blundering.

It's time we learned it so that we can discontinue the mindless practice of arrogance. It's time we learned, reviewed, reflected, and meditated on this model of the stupidity of models. You can do that in the context of your own learning, or in the context of a quiet exploration of the world as seen from your own perspective, instead of letting the scholars do your thinking for you. It's the same, beautiful, love for learning, the same fascination with the mystery of the universe and the awe found in the curiosity of our place in it, but without all the unnessesary arrogance which causes a confined view of the world as a stiff "this or that," and, in the end, causes us all to be miserable victims of an educational system we hate but feel compelled to support.

Parody of: Barry Kort, Ph.D. and Nancy Williams, M.S: Thinking About Violence in Our Schools. http://www.musenet.org/orenda/violence.html