A Call For Idiots
As a kid, I spent a generous portion of my days playing with my cousins at my grandparents' place. When not amicably wrestling with the boys in the living room's carpet floor, we'd find ourselves at the dining room table eating pastries and engaging in all sorts of metaphysical debates: Why is a chair called a chair? Why can’t we call a stool a chair? If I sit on top of the coffee table can I call it a chair?
Sometimes, in the midst of such inquiries, my grandma would interrupt the person speaking: 'You're such an idiot, aren't you?' The rest of us, silent.
No, this is not a story about verbal child abuse. For my grandma, idiot signified one who entertains original ideas. For us, being called an idiot was the best compliment she could give us.
Fast forward to now, as I read the book Psychopolitics by the philosopher Byung Chulan Han, I found myself revisiting these lost memories. It seems that Han and my grandma are in sync. In one of the short book's chapters, Han draws attention to the vital role of the idiot in our society.
Han defines idiot in the original sense of the term as a “private person” who stands in the margins of the mainstream; someone who is not entirely integrated into the fabric of society; someone who's able to critically digest the information circulating in the public sphere and point alternative paths forward.
Why are idiots pertinent today? For Han, because they’re an endangered species!
He argues that neoliberalism has become so prevalent that even folks who seek self-improvement do so, not to become better—more actualized—idiots, but to become more marketable entrepreneurial projects of one.
According to such logic, personal development (and tools such as mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, etc,) is put at the service of gaining a competitive advantage in the neoliberal game. The ultimate motivation is to generate enough capital to retire early, or to finally be in control of one’s time, or to become one’s own boss.*
The blind spot of this line of thought is that one can never really win the game. Capital becomes one’s new invisible boss—one’s almighty god. After all, more capital equals more commitment, more responsibilities, less freedom.
At the same time, Han draws attention to the endless amounts of data and content being generated on a daily basis—think Instagram pics, Twitter updates, health apps, and the like—leading to a culture of “transparency”, “democratic communication” and “self-expression” that, to him, look more like a culture of surveillance and self-monitoring.
Han worries that such culture further promotes the extinction of idiots—an extinction accelerated by the attention economy that governs the social media landscape (as portrayed in the documentary The Social Dilemma and the book Digital Minimalism).
“Today, it seems, the type of the outsider - the idiot, the fool - has all but vanished from society. Throughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms.”
So, confronted with today’s reality, what would an idiot do? Probably, an idiot would simply return to the innocent question of why—Why work for more and more money if that money does not equate to increased levels of well-being or social change? Why engage in infinite scrolling? Why contribute to the proliferation of distraction?
Han provocatively proceeds to define intelligence as the ability to choose-between. His point is that “intelligent” folks still operate within a pre-defined logic or framework. Their thinking is not free; it's context-limited. Hence, the idiot—excluded from such logic—is above intelligence, above an unquestioned logic.
"Intelligence means choosing-between (inter-legere). It is not entirely free in so far as it is caught in a between which depends on the system in operation. Intelligence has no access to outside, because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords… Accordingly, intelligence has no access to what is wholly Other. It inhabits a horizontal plane. In contrast the idiot has contact with the vertical dimension inasmuch as he takes leave of the prevailing system – that is, abandons intelligence.
Though I found some of Han’s arguments somewhat exaggerated, his overall reasoning is relevant. Now, the ultimate question is: if you were sitting at my grandmother's table in today's neoliberal culture of distraction and perpetual self-optimization, would you be one more intelligent cousin in the room, or would you be my grandmother's elected idiot?
Warmly,
Carlota
*For more on this, check Slavoj Zizek, Herbert Marcuse, and Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness.
Listen
In this spirit of idiotism, for this month's podcast episode, I conversed with Mariana Henriques Martins – an idiot with an academic background in History and a fiction writer who more recently transitioned into corporate consulting in London.
As we keep exploring the question of how we might live into the maturity more wisely, one of the themes that is, in my opinion, central to such exploration is the one of professional choices.
Mariana is a deep thinker who published her first book, The Voices—an existential journey across the multitudes contained in our internal worlds—at the age of twenty-four.
I interviewed Mariana to learn more about the thought process that led her to idiotically immerse herself in the alien reality of corporate life to form a more first-person opinion of our contemporary reality, a move aligned with Fernando Pessoa's piece, The Anarchist Banker.
Youth Shoutout
Before you go, I'm excited to introduce Waking Youth's most recent rubric highlighting the extraordinary voices of the youth across the globe. This month, the shoutout goes to the idiots Tristan Harry and Aza Raskin, who timely shared a presentation on the ethical and existential challenges AI poses to our species.
Standing on the shoulders of their previous documentary, The Social Dilemma, they return to the public sphere to not only inform the public about the dangers of AI but, more importantly, to inspire us to take action to steer it in the right direction, which in this case looks more like standing still.