The evolutionary purpose of stupidity

 

I need to begin with a confession: what angers me most in this world is not cruelty, nor hypocrisy, nor greed — it is stupidity. Raw, unfiltered, unshakable stupidity. The kind that looks at consequence and does not see it. The kind that combines blindness with absolute certainty. The kind that kills by accident and then sues the manufacturer.

You’ve heard the urban legend, the old woman who put her wet cat (or dog, the story mutates) in a microwave to dry it, and then supposedly sued the company because the manual never said “do not place living animals inside.” The case is not real, there is no verified lawsuit. But its factual correctness doesn’t matter. What matters is that none of us instinctively dismiss it as impossible. That is the horror. Urban legends are never born from nothing. If millions of people look at that story and think “yeah, I can see that happening,” then something deeper is rotten.

And that is where I begin: with the unbearable fact that stupidity is not a malfunction, it is statistically normal. And worse, it persists not because the system failed to remove it, but because nature chose to keep it. This is the thought that burns most.

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PART I — DEFINING WHAT I’M ACTUALLY ANGRY AT

When I say “stupidity,” I do not mean ignorance. Ignorance by itself is innocent. Ignorance can be cured. I was ignorant about a million things yesterday. I am grateful for that, ignorance means the world can still grow.

No, I am speaking of a different beast entirely:

Stupidity = the inability to trace cause to consequence + high confidence that no further thinking is necessary.

It is not the absence of knowledge, it is the absence of the instinct to look for it.

It is not the humility of “I don’t know”, it is the defiance of “I already know enough.”

And that, that right there, is why stupidity enrages the intelligent: because it is not just absence of light, but an aggressive rejection of light.

It is a locked door.

And the painful part? They didn’t build that lock intentionally.

Nature did.

Which forces the real question:

Why did evolution build humans capable of stupidity at all? Why does it tolerate, even preserve, minds unable to see what is plainly there?

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PART II — THE DARK ANSWER: EVOLUTION DOESN’T CARE ABOUT TRUTH

This is where people get it wrong: evolution is not a contest of intelligence.

It is a contest of replication.

Nature does not care who understands reality. It cares who survives long enough to reproduce, and whose offspring do the same.

And now, the uncomfortable facts:

• Intelligence is metabolically expensive. Brains burn energy like a forest fire.
• Intelligence triggers doubt, hesitation, existential paralysis. It slows action.
• Intelligence correlates with lower reproduction (educated women statistically have fewer children).
• Intelligence questions authority, breaks tribal consensus, delays group cohesion.

In contrast:

• Stupidity is energetically cheap.
• Stupidity acts with certainty, even when wrong.
• Stupidity doesn’t think itself to death before reproducing.
• Stupidity follows orders, which is extremely useful for armies, for agriculture, for empire building.
• Stupidity reproduces relentlessly, because it is rarely burdened by hesitation, abstraction, or self-awareness.

And then the brutal equation reveals itself:

From nature’s perspective:

one intelligent human reproducing slowly is less valuable

than ten obedient idiots breeding without existential hesitation.

Nature is not cruel. Nature is not kind. Nature is not wise.

Nature is arithmetic.

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PART III — IT USED TO WORK (UNTIL WE ARMED IT)

In the year 1320, stupidity was not a catastrophe.

A stupid farmer might ruin his field. A stupid warrior might die first in battle.

The damage was local.

In fact, stupidity served an evolutionary role:

• Obedience formed large armies.
• Risk-blindness drove migration across dangerous terrain.
• Certainty rallied masses around religions, flags, wars — which, in an age of pure biology, meant survival through unity.

But in 2025, stupidity is no longer local. It is nuclear.

The same mind that once simply flooded a field now floods the planetary info-sphere with disinformation.

The same blind certainty now spreads like a virus through algorithmic amplification.

Technology did not just fail to suppress stupidity, it gave it wings.

We are now forced to face a terrifying asymmetry:

Intelligence builds systems too complex for stupidity to understand.

Stupidity destroys systems too fragile for intelligence to protect.

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PART IV — THE PARADOX THAT CANNOT BE RESOLVED

So here I stand, furious at stupidity, while also forced to admit: without stupidity, we might not even exist.

Because intelligence alone hesitates.

Intelligence alone self-limits.

Intelligence alone questions its own right to dominate.

If humanity had been purely intelligent, it might have gone extinct from overthinking — no war, no progress, no blind migration, no population mass to survive calamity. The species might have elegantly died out — softly, ethically, and beautifully.

It was stupidity, mass, blind, reproductive stupidity, that made the species indestructible.

And now, that same force may kill it.

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OUTRO — THE HORROR TRUTH

So here is the conclusion I cannot escape:

We are not malfunctioning.

We are working exactly as nature designed us.

Stupidity persists because evolution never asked for wisdom, only survival.

It stays because it works. Because it breeds. Because it obeys.

Because the genes of the cautious died in the caves, and the genes of the reckless crossed the mountains.

And I, who hate it, who burn at the sight of it, who want to scream every time I see the blind lead the blind, must acknowledge this final, bitter truth:

Maybe stupidity isn’t a bug in the system.

Maybe stupidity is the system.

Whether we can transcend it, or whether we were never meant to,

that is a question evolution will not answer.

Only history will.

And I fear we will not like the ending.