Gregorius Fentzel:* The Three Orders of the Human Race
Alternate Title:
The Combination of Church and State to Govern the People
Series/Book Title: The Triumph of the Four Cardinal Virtues
(17th century)
*[Gregorius Fentzel was a German copperplate engraver active in Nuremberg during the mid-17th century. Few details of his life are known, and his works are primarily based on the designs of other artists, most notably the Flemish painter Maerten de Vos.]

"…acknowledging just how first-order stupid even the brightest of us can seem."

These times exhaust me. Previously, I recall reassurance as a nearly constant reminder that civilization was not crumbling around us. However, nobody needs to go to all the trouble to become a pessimist to experience a continual sense of doom stalking them now. Some insist that this sense comes from a dramatic increase in the sheer number of stupid people. Where we used to produce people capable of brilliance, we now churn out vast numbers for whom even a basic level of competence seems unattainable. Authorities cite increasingly poor performance on standardized tests as prima facie evidence of the cause of our downfall, but I disagree with these questionable authorities, for they seem to suffer from the same disease as their studies' subjects. They exhibit second-order symptoms. In this instance, they exhibit abiding ignorance about their own ignorance. The lens through which they pass judgements seems cloudy beyond their personal embarrassment, rendering them decidedly worse than merely clueless about their condition, but SecondOrderStupid.

The SecondOrderStupid cannot conceive of their own more than obvious-to-everyone-else stupidity. They swallow innuendo as if it were an obvious fact. They base their conclusions upon utterly baseless evidence. They trust those with obvious conflicts of interest. They don't assess anything skeptically, with the possible exception of facts that might undermine their a priori conceptions. They engage in inquiry to prove their preconceptions rather than to upset them. In fact, they consider any information that contradicts their own convictions to be self-evidently erroneous. They do not believe that they believe in conspiracy theories, but rather in self-evident facts that elites refuse to acknowledge.

Over time, the SecondOrderStupid might well extinguish themselves. Between vaccine denial and the profligate use of herbal remedies, they might well ultimately bring themselves to their knees. Unfortunately, though, such evolutionary remedies work only on time scales requiring generations to accomplish their inevitable ends. It's no consolation, then, to understand the ultimately self-destructive nature of SecondOrderStupidity because it works far too slowly to affect what seems to ail so very many of us today. Nor will there be any talking anyone out of this proclivity because their SecondOrderStupidity precludes them from meaningfully intervening in their self-interests. They seemingly must self-destruct, even though they ensure significant collateral damage in the process. This will take a long while. Keep your distance.

I am told that some believe our incumbent continually exhibits brilliance. This must be a form of intelligence I never learned to perceive because to me he simply seems SecondOrderStupid, working hard to invent a ThirdOrder superior in every way to the SecondOrder variety, vacuity my meager mind cannot even remotely conceive of understanding. We were once a society separated from our mother country, England, by a common language; now, we're shockingly similar. Their SecondOrderStupidity gifted themselves with Brexit. Ours encourages us to exit the world stage to squabble over policies that couldn't achieve a positive impact if iterated forever. The evidence seems self-evident unless, of course, you've been blessed with the increasingly requisite SecondOrderStupidity necessary to sanguinely support civilization's undermining.

It might be true that a society's destruction can only ever come via invitation. No hostile takeover could ever succeed like an invitation to a Tea Party might. The idle chatter over bone china cups ultimately proves undermining. The austerity insisted upon could only ever be the absolute blood enemy of prosperity, except for those for whom prosperity no longer matters. The very wealthy complain of taxes as if a tax had ever once threatened their competitive advantage. They complain so others can relate to them. Those who can't quite make it from paycheck to paycheck blame their situation on the taxes their uncaring government loads upon them, just like the billionaires do. In this way, they hope someone will do what nobody could ever deliver to anyone else. They each seek enough. The billionaires: because they genuinely cannot imagine enough, never having experienced it. The paupers, because they've never once experienced that magical state, either. Each seems SecondOrderStupid, tenaciously unaware of just how stupid they surely behave. Enough can never come from accumulation. Enough begins by accepting the way things are, by acknowledging just how first-order stupid even the brightest of us can seem.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz