951 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 951
Air Date: February 11, 2026

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.

Clip (Walt Disney – Chicken Little, 1943):

Fox: Quote. To influence the masses aim first at the least intelligent. Unquote. Now let’s see. Who looks nice and stupid? Chicken Little? He looks nice and stupid. Quote. If you tell him a lie don’t tell him a little one. Tell a big one.

This is the voice of doom speaking. Special bulletin. Flash. The sky is falling. A piece of it just hit you on the head. Now be calm. Don’t get panicky. Run for your life!

Chicken Little: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! A piece of it just hit me on the head! The sky is falling! Hurry! Hurry! Look everybody. The sky is falling. The sky. The sky is falling. There you are, you see? Just like I told you, hit me on the head.

Other chickens: Sure enough? Oh my goodness. What’ll we do? Oh, chicken little you got to help us.

Fox: Psst! Run to the cave.

Chicken Little / Others: Oh, oh yeah! Yeah, that’s it to the cave! To the cave! To the cave! Hurry! Hurry!

Fox: Dinner is served. Delicious.

Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, February the 11th, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right. Broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right wing. It’s just right.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Quick! Get your vaccines! Stop doing anything that creates carbon dioxide. Limit the First Amendment. Open your borders to hordes of stupid people. Attack an ice agent today. Wear a face mask. Social distance by staying six feet away from everybody.

The science is settled and everyone on the right is a fascist.

Quick! Quick! The sky is falling! All of these actually promoted ideas and suggestions fall under the category of just too stupid for words. And ironically, words are the very things that the too stupid fear the most.

Because words are the very weapon necessary to convey the presence of this stupidity in our midst and to warn against its dangers. How many times has the sky fallen? Just in the past five or six years.

And how many victims of stupidity do you suppose were claimed? The sky was falling with COVID. The sky was falling with climate change. The sky was falling with the fear of polarization. The sky was falling with the Trump derangement syndrome. The sky was falling with the fear of artificial intelligence and on and on it goes. And what makes all of this particularly fascinating is that the strategy of shouting that the sky is falling has been a principle understood since time immemorial.

Yet becoming aware of it is today being treated as some new modern revelation. Quoting from his psychology book, The Fox in our Walt Disney cartoon opener today tests the theory that to influence the masses, aim first at the least intelligent and then asks, let’s see who looks nice and stupid. And that’s exactly part of our mission today to see who looks nice and stupid.

But more importantly to suggest what intelligent people should and should not do about it. And that mission begins right after our reminder that you can always write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at justrightmedia.org where you can access all of our social media links, archive broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show.

Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.

Well, this is by no means our first journey into the universe of stupidity and is probably not going to be our last. So why, you might ask, are we so concerned about stupidity?

Just to pick a pejorative label to make fun of the left? Well, yeah, that’s something we could do for its own sake. But no, if you’ve heard any of our past broadcasts on this theme, you’ve probably already guessed that this is a far more serious consideration than it might seem on the surface.

The reason you really can’t make fun of the stupid by calling them that might be best summed up by a quote we cited on our own January 11, 2024 broadcast about stupidity, socialism’s moral defect. And I quote, when you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. The pain is felt by others.

The same thing happens when you’re stupid. End quote. And during that broadcast, we featured a 2023 audio bite by James Woods speaking about a Hitler era German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who argued that the tyranny that enveloped Germany during his era was not a consequence of malice, but of widespread stupidity. And similarly, on a more recent broadcast entitled Ice Storm, sliding down the slippery slope to insurrection, less than a month ago on January 21, we heard from philosopher Marina Karlova who explained that stupidity isn’t a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of freedom. Stupidity is an outcome bred by upbringing, normalization, and relentless repetition that trains you not to notice. And so far, it’s still my belief that the protesters, quote, end quote, who’ve been injured or killed by ICE agents have been the victims of their own stupidity, although the protesters have convinced themselves that the ICE agents are solely responsible. And questioning why anyone would possibly be so stupid as to attack police on duty is Johnny B. Good from his X post of January 21 on this side of our upcoming bumper while on the return side from a January 23rd blog post by Psyphos, P-S-Y-P-H-O-S, we hear yet another perspective and interpretation of the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer along with a revelation of how to liberate others from their own stupidity.

Clip: X Post – JohnnyBgood, January 21 2026 (Why do they do it?)

JohnnyBgood:
Would you attack the police until they shoot you in the face to protect scammers from Somalia? Well, she would, allegedly, but why? Why would anyone do that? And where do people like this come from?

Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent for interfering with their duties, allegedly. People who do crazy things like this, allegedly, only exist because when people are too comfortable for too long they get all fat and retarded. Human beings work really hard to create nice things and then the stupid ones start thinking the nice things are free because they’ve never done any work.

This is the cycle of collapse. And if you don’t do real work, you never grow up. And no one’s doing real work these days. And so more and more people are remaining in these childish, egotistical levels of development.

This woman was basically an overgrown baby and she didn’t know what she was doing, allegedly. So here’s the conservative thinking, my family and my country should come first. And then when he thinks about what the third world thinks that’s thinking about thinking, he understands that a lot of them are just not like us at all and also not very friendly. But the liberal, who is just in love with his own wonderfulness, he assumes that everybody in the world wants the same things he wants. And that’s not empathy, that’s a projection. That’s what happens when your empathy is developed to the level of a three-year-old because you’ve never had to do anything difficult in your pathetic life. At this low level of empathy, you’re going to assume that everybody has the same desires as you or they’re just a bad guy like Darth Vader.

And now you understand liberals and why they hate you for caring about your country. Women like Renee have been told that they are all tens all the time for so long that they can’t even conceptualize being wrong. They just make demands and wait for them. And if they don’t get their way, then they try to run over the cops.

These are the times we live in. About 48% of white women, usually the fat, ugly, insane ones, are actually using their political power to make sure that anyone in the world can walk into your country and steal from you. And it’s all because we let them become a bunch of spoiled brats and naive little children.

Clip: Psyphos, January 23 2026 (Bonhoeffer’s theory)

Psyphos:
You have probably noticed it by now. The smarter you get, the more alone you feel. You try to explain something that seems obvious to you, backed by facts, evidence, logic, and you watch people’s eyes glaze over. Or worse, they get angry.

Defensive. Like you have insulted them just by thinking clearly. And here’s the part that messes with your head. It’s not that they don’t understand what you’re saying. It’s that they can’t afford to understand it. Because understanding would force them to admit something about themselves. About the world.

About the lies they have been living inside. And instead of facing that discomfort, they choose something easier. They choose stupidity. Now, most people think stupidity is about being dumb. Low IQ. Bad education. But what if I told you that’s completely wrong? What if stupidity is not a lack of intelligence, but a surrender of it? And what if one man, a theologian executed by the Nazis just weeks before the war ended, figured out exactly how. This happens. Why it’s more dangerous than evil itself. And why you will never convince someone once they have crossed that line. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And this is the theory you were never meant to hear. December 1942.

Germany is at war. The Nazi regime is at its peak.

Millions are dying. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant theologian, a pastor, a double agent working inside German military intelligence, sits down to write a letter. Not to the public. Not to history. To three close friends. Fellow conspirators. Men who were risking their lives to kill Adolf Hitler.

It’s Christmas. And Bonhoeffer knows he might not survive. So he writes them a reflection, a confession, a warning.

He calls it after 10 years. And buried inside this letter is one of the most brutal psychological observations ever written. He’s watching his own country, educated, sophisticated, cultured Germany fall into madness. And he’s trying to answer one question.

How did this happen? Not to uneducated peasants. Not to people who did not know better.

To professors, doctors, engineers, people with advanced degrees. How do intelligent people become instruments of evil? And his answer is terrifying. Because he does not blame ignorance. He does not blame the cruelty. He blames something far more insidious. He calls it stupidity.

But not the kind you think. Listen to what Bonhoeffer actually wrote. He said this. Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.

Read that again. More dangerous than malice. Why? Because you can fight evil. You can expose it.

You can resist it. Evil makes people uncomfortable. It leaves a trace. A guilty conscience. A crack you can exploit. But stupidity? Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Bonhoeffer writes. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Why? Because the stupid person doesn’t care about your facts. You bring them evidence and they dismiss it. You show them contradictions in their beliefs and they get more entrenched. You prove them wrong with irrefutable data and they call it irrelevant. Bonhoeffer writes. Facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed.

And when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential. Sound familiar? Now here’s the twist. Bonhoeffer makes it clear. Stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. He writes. There are human beings who are a remarkably agile intellect yet stupid.

And others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. So what is it then? What’s the difference? Bonhoeffer’s answer is chilling. He says stupidity is not a lack of brain power.

It’s a surrender of independence. Under certain circumstances he writes. People are made stupid or they allow this to happen to them. Made stupid. Not born stupid.

Made stupid. And here’s the mechanism. When a powerful force rises, political, religious, social, it offers people something irresistible. Certainty. Belonging. Identity. Purpose. But there’s a cost.

To join you have to stop thinking for yourself. Bonhoeffer writes. Under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and more or less consciously give up establishing an autonomous position. They stop asking questions. They stop weighing evidence. They stop being individuals.

And here’s the scariest part. In conversation with him, Bonhoeffer says, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catch words, and the like that have taken possession of him. You’re not talking to them anymore. You’re talking to the ideology that’s colonized their brain. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

They can commit atrocities and feel righteous doing it. You think you’re talking to a person, but you’re actually talking to a system. A mental framework that filters out anything that threatens its stability.

Bonhoeffer explains it perfectly. The stupid person is often stubborn, but he is not independent. Stubbornness looks like strength, like conviction.

But it’s the opposite. It’s fragility disguised as certainty. Because deep down, they know. If they let one doubt in, the whole structure collapses. So they double down, they attack, they deflect.

Not because you’re wrong, but because you’re right. Now here’s where it gets even darker. Bonhoeffer noticed something crucial. Stupidity is a group phenomenon. The more you need to belong, the more vulnerable you are. It would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem, he writes.

And then he drops the bombshell. Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It’s almost a law of nature. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

Think about that. Every authoritarian regime, every cult, every mass movement, they don’t succeed because people are dumb. They succeed because people surrender their intelligence in exchange for certainty and belonging. And once that trade is made, you can’t reason them out of it because they didn’t reason themselves into it.

So what’s the solution? Bonhoeffer is brutally honest. Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. You can’t teach someone out of it. You can’t debate them out of it. They have to be freed from it. And here’s the tragic part. In most cases, a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.

Meaning what? The external power structure has to collapse first. The regime has to fall. The leader has to die. The movement has to crumble. Then, and only then, can people wake up. Until that happens, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. It’s not cynicism. It’s survival.

Bob Metz:
So, I guess you could say, stupidity happens. But from my own previous investigations into this topic, I found it more than a little coincidental that Bonhoeffer’s letter was directed not to the public, but to three close friends. I say this in light of the fact that another writer, Willem Reich, in his own notes on the same topic of stupidity written in 1946, also did so for his own purposes of reflection and not for public consumption. Now, I gathered that the reason for their reluctance to go public pertains to some of the advice we’ll be hearing shortly from other investigators into the phenomenon of stupidity.

Since so many in the public were the object of their criticisms, I imagine it would have been best not to provoke them into any more stupidity. Willem Reich, who lived from 1897 to 1957, was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst who authored several influential books, including The Impulsive Character, The Function of the Orgasm, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. It was in that latter book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, that he coined the term The Emotional Plague, which was in every way a parallel analysis of what Dr. Matthias Desmet called Mass Formation. And both of these were also covered in detail on some of our own past broadcasts. But Willem Reich’s notes on stupidity were later released in a 1947 booklet entitled Listen, Little Man, which I suppose in light of today’s broader theme could have been called Listen, Chicken, Little Man.

Funny how both terms are, you know, belittling. But nevertheless, check out these chilling passages from his notes, and I quote, I’m afraid of you, little man, very much afraid. I haven’t always been so. I myself was a little man, among millions of little men. Then I became a scientist and a psychiatrist. I learned to see how very sick you are, and how dangerous in your sickness. You’d have overcome the tyrants long ago if you had been inwardly alive and sound. In the past, your oppressors sprang from the upper classes of society, but today they spring from your own ranks.

They are even littler than you, little man. You are unaware that men and women exist who are inherently incapable of oppressing and exploiting you. Men and women who want you to be free, really and truly free. You dislike such men and women because they are alien to your nature. They are simple and forthright. They value the truth as much as you value trickery. But the great man loves you as he would love any other animal as a living creature. You drive truly great men to despise you, to hide their heads in sorrow at you and your smallness, to avoid you, and worst of all, to pity you. No, you never ask yourself whether you’re thinking is right or wrong.

You ask yourself what your neighbor might say about it, or whether, if you do right, it will cost you money. But a great man doesn’t forget. He doesn’t plot revenge, but tries to understand why you behave so miserably. Little man, you’re always on the side of the persecutors. All great men have been solitary. It’s hard to think in your company, little man.

One can only think about you or for your benefit, but not with you. Wow, bitter or what? The thing to realize about the concept of the little man, or even a chicken little, for that matter, is not that these classifications of either people or chickens are somehow predestined in some way to be little, but that they choose to be so, which is what makes them objects of pity. All great men have been solitary, notes right, and echoing the earlier observation that you may have noticed that the smarter you get, the more alone you feel.

And there’s a simple reason for that. Thinking is a function of the individual and never of a group or collective. So what are some of the basic observations about stupidity that we’ve touched on so far? Well, stupidity is a moral defect. Stupidity isn’t a lack of intelligence.

It’s a lack of freedom. Stupidity is caused by never having had to seriously work at anything. Stupidity is a surrender of independence. People are made stupid, not born stupid, and then the first hand of how a particular stupidity is eventually defeated, which is only when external liberation preceded it.

The regime or leader or movement had to crumble. But there’s still a lot more to consider, and speaking on a single philosopher and his ideas, are two new voices to our show. On this side of our upcoming bumper, from the January 3rd podcast by Philio Nautica, and on the return side from the January 22nd podcast of The Psyche. And the single philosopher each of them is talking about is Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher known for his 1818 work, The World as Will and Representation.

Clip: Philo Nautica, January 3 2026, on Schopenhauer

Philo Nautica:
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended. And if you speak with stupid people they will probably do what Mark Twain warned us about. Never argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. We are already seeing this more than ever now. Especially in America.

But the question remains, how should intelligent people deal with stupid ones? Arthur Schopenhauer is known for his deep pessimism about human nature and society. Schopenhauer believed the world was driven by a blind will, an irrational force underlying all existence. Human reason in his view was not a stable guide, but a fragile illusion layered on top of this will. Because of this, he considered stupidity to be the natural condition of most people, while intelligence was a rare and often painful exception. This outlook is captured in his sharp but dark humor. He once remarked that the doctor sees all the weakness of mankind, the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

The joke reveals something serious. Every profession encounters humanity at its worst. And from the philosopher’s perspective, foolishness is everywhere. When a foolish person is challenged, the resistance is rarely about evidence or truth. It is about pride. To lose an argument feels like humiliation, and so reason is rejected in favor of stubbornness.

And here lies the paradox. The intelligent person values truth and clarity, yet must interact with people whose pride makes rational discussion dangerous. Even when intelligence is on the side of truth, confronting ignorance can provoke resentment, envy, or outright hostility. But first let’s learn the nature of a fool through Schopenhauer’s eyes. Schopenhauer recounts an encounter with an 11-year-old boy in an asylum whom he judged not to be insane, but merely stupid. The boy could speak and reason at a basic level, yet he failed to grasp simple causality. He was endlessly fascinated by the reflection in Schopenhauer’s monocle, unable to understand that the image was only a reflection and not a separate reality. As Schopenhauer explains, stupidity, according to Schopenhauer, is a failure to understand causation, or in other words, why things are the case. Without the ability to connect cause and effect, even in simple situations, the child’s mind functioned much like an animal’s, reacting only to immediate stimuli and easily deceived by tricks or illusions.

This leads to an important distinction. A fool is not someone incapable of learning facts, but someone whose power of understanding is underdeveloped. As he writes, a stupid person has no insight into the connection of natural phenomena.

He readily believes in magic and miracles. He does not observe the concealed motives. Such a mind takes the world at face value, fails to see underlying structures, and is therefore easily misled by religion, politics, or manipulation that a sharper intellect would immediately detect. Intelligence allows one to imagine consequences and delay gratification.

Stupidity is satisfied with the present moment. Schopenhauer’s own attitude towards such people was distant rather than cruel. Schopenhauer emphasizes that everyone is, to some degree, subject to the will. Attachment, envy, hatred, and vanity distort reason in all of us. The difference is that the fool is ruled by these forces most of the time, with little corrective reasoning. The intelligent person, aware of this, understands that almost anyone can become unreasonable when threatened.

Even when logic fails them, people will cling to a bad argument simply to avoid appearing stupid. In this environment, the intelligent individual faces a dilemma. What appears obvious and rational to one mind may be incomprehensible or threatening to another. A well-intentioned correction can quickly turn into resentment. One may win intellectually, yet lose socially, creating hostility and tension that outweigh any victory of reason.

It is worth noting that this problem has long been recognized. Plato’s Socrates often pretends ignorance, Socratic irony, to guide discussions without provoking resistance. King Solomon uses riddles and indirect wisdom when confronting folly. Shakespeare’s King Lear gives us a fool who, beneath the mask of comedy, speaks truths wiser than those of the nobles.

These figures reflect the same insight Schopenhauer offers. When dealing with stupidity, wisdom often disguises itself. Understate your intelligence. Do not announce your superiority. Reveal insight only when necessary. Many successful scientists and thinkers avoid advertising expertise to prevent envy or rivalry. Literature illustrates this. Prospero in the Tempest guides events quietly, while Shakespeare’s verbose Polonius often undermines himself by over-explaining. In real life, a teacher or manager might correct errors gently, giving others room to save face. Intelligence should calm situations, not provoke resentment. Sometimes verbal concession is the smartest move. A response like, That’s an interesting perspective.

I see why you’d think that. Allows dialogue without conflict. Schopenhauer notes that even insincere praise can diffuse vanity and prevent escalation. Sun Tzu advises feigned weakness to neutralize opposition. By protecting the fool’s ego, you avoid needless battles. Let fools express themselves fully. They often exhaust their own misconceptions in the process. Then, guide the conversation gently with questions, anecdotes, or subtle examples.

This is not forceful correction, but careful navigation, leading rather than pushing. The goal is to open perspective without triggering defensiveness. Intelligence is a tool.

Knowing how to use it is part of strategy. WIT allows lessons to land without confrontation. Schopenhauer favored irony and subtle humor. A light, self-deprecating story or a playful anecdote illustrates truth indirectly, letting the fool recognize contradictions without embarrassment. Socratic irony operates on the same principle, appearing naive to reveal deeper insight. Across all tactics runs a single principle. Do not mirror the fool’s frenzy. Stay detached, calm, and deliberate. Reputation is external. Character is internal. By maintaining inner clarity, foolishness loses power.

Intelligence us used not to dominate but to stabilize.

Clip: ThePsyche, January 22 2026, on Schopenhauer

ThePsyche:
Imagine waking up every day knowing that a significant part of your frustration, exhaustion, and even self doubt does not come from your lack of intelligence but from constantly having to deal with people who so not think, reflect, or reason at the same level you do. Imagine realizing that many of your conflicts are not caused by malice, but by something far more dangerous. Stupidity combined with confidence.

Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most penetrating and pessimistic philosophers of human nature, did not believe stupidity was merely a lack of intelligence. For him, it was a force, a structural problem of the human condition. A force that intelligent people must learn to recognize, navigate, and above all survive.

Schopenhauer observed something that remains painfully relevant today. Intelligent people suffer more. Not because they are weak, but because they see more clearly. They perceive contradictions, hypocrisies, and absurdities that others pass by without noticing. While a shallow mind rests comfortably in simplistic explanations, the reflective mind wrestles with complexity. This awareness becomes a burden when intelligence is forced to coexist with stupidity that is loud, assertive, and socially validated. According to Schopenhauer, stupidity is not simply ignorance. Ignorance can be cured through learning. Stupidity, however, is resistant to correction. It is the inability or unwillingness to think critically, paired with an emotional attachment to one’s own opinions.

This is why arguing with stupid people feels so draining. They do not seek truth. They seek validation. And when their beliefs are threatened, they respond not with reason, but with aggression, mockery, or moral outrage.

Think about how often you have tried to explain something obvious, logical or well-supported, only to be met with hostility or ridicule. Yet Schopenhauer did not advocate arrogance or open contempt. On the contrary, he proposed a strategy rooted in realism. The intelligent person must learn discernment. Not every battle is worth fighting. Not every truth must be spoken. Wisdom lies not in proving others wrong, but in protecting one’s inner peace and intellectual integrity. We must first understand why stupidity affects us so deeply, and why it seems to multiply in modern society. The real problem begins when intelligent people assume that reason alone can bridge every gap.

Schopenhauer warned that this belief is not only naive, but dangerous. Intelligence naturally seeks coherence, logic, and dialogue. It assumes that if an idea is explained clearly enough, it will be understood and accepted. But this assumption collapses when confronted with stupidity.

Not because the explanation is flawed, but because the listener lacks the inner structure required to receive it. A stupid person is not incapable of understanding facts. He is unwilling to let facts disturb his sense of certainty or self-importance. This is why logic feels threatening to him.

It exposes limitations he refuses to acknowledge. This creates a psychological trap for intelligent people. They keep explaining, clarifying, justifying, believing that persistence will eventually lead to understanding.

Instead, they become exhausted, misunderstood, and sometimes even resented. Schopenhauer observed that when reason confronts stupidity, it rarely enlightens. More often, it provokes hostility. The stupid person feels attacked, even when no attack was intended. Have you ever noticed how calm explanations are sometimes met with anger? How polite disagreement escalates into personal offence?

This is not accidental. When a person lacks depth, disagreement feels like humiliation. Schopenhauer believed that one of the greatest mistakes of intelligent individuals is overestimating the rational capacity of others. This overestimation leads to disappointment. Disappointment turns into bitterness.

Bitterness slowly corrodes compassion. The tragedy is not that stupidity exists, but that intelligence suffers by expecting too much from it. Another crucial insight from Schopenhauer is that stupidity thrives in groups. Individually, a stupid person may seem manageable, but when stupidity is reinforced socially, it becomes aggressive and self-righteous.

In crowds, people borrow confidence from one another. Thought dissolves. Emotion dominates. But here is the subtle danger. When intelligent people constantly confront stupidity, they risk becoming contemptuous. They begin to see others not as different, but as inferior.

Schopenhauer cautioned against this internal shift. Contempt poisons the mind of the one who holds it. It ties your emotional state to the behavior of others.

It makes you reactive instead of sovereign. So what is the alternative? If arguing fails, if explaining drains you and if contempt corrupts you, what remains? Schopenhauer proposed something radical for his time, selective withdrawal.

Not isolation from humanity, but conscious distance from unnecessary conflict. The intelligent person must choose where to invest attention, energy, and speech. Schopenhauer believed that wisdom often consists in saying less, not more. Observing instead of correcting. Understanding instead of persuading. The goal of intelligence is not to correct the world, but to remain intact within it.

Many intelligent people exhaust themselves trying to elevate conversations, relationships, and environments that are fundamentally resistant to depth. This effort often comes from a hidden hope, that being understood will bring relief. Yet Schopenhauer saw that this hope, when misplaced, becomes a source of suffering. One of his most misunderstood ideas is emotional distance. Many assume this means becoming cold, indifferent, or detached from humanity. Schopenhauer meant the opposite. Emotional distance is not the absence of feeling, but the discipline of feeling wisely.

It is the ability to care without entangling your inner state with the limitations of others. Stupid people, as Schopenhauer described them, are often governed by impulses rather than reflection. They react rather than respond. When someone misunderstands you, mocks nuance or distorts your words what actually hurts.

Is it their opinion or your expectation that they should understand? Schopenhauer believed that suffering often arises not from reality itself, but from the gap between reality and our expectations of it. This insight changes everything. If you no longer expect depth from shallow minds, their behavior loses its power over you. You stop feeling personally attacked by what is impersonal. You stop trying to extract meaning from noise. This is not resignation, it is clarity.

The intelligent person does not need to announce his intelligence. It reveals itself through restraint. Schopenhauer believed that inner peace is the highest form of intelligence.

Not success, not recognition, not winning debates, but sovereignty over one’s own mind. The intelligent person must learn to recognize patterns. When you see that a conversation never evolves, when the same misunderstandings repeat, when logic is met with emotion again and again, that is not a challenge to overcome. It is a boundary to accept. Wisdom begins where futile effort ends. Schopenhauer did not romanticize humanity. He saw clearly that most people seek comfort, not truth.

They prefer beliefs that flatter them, not ideas that demand self-examination. Once you accept this, a profound shift occurs. You stop trying to awaken everyone. You stop feeling responsible for other people’s intellectual growth.

You stop mistaking your clarity for a duty. This does not make you cruel. In fact, it allows compassion to arise naturally. When you understand that many people act from limitation rather than malice, resentment loosens its grip. The most powerful realization is this. Stupidity cannot be defeated through confrontation, but it can be rendered harmless through non-participation.

When you stop feeding it attention, emotion, and energy, it loses its influence over you. Many conflicts survive only because intelligent people keep trying to resolve what was never meant to be resolved. Just as you would not pour clean water into a broken vessel, you should not pour clarity into a mind that cannot hold it. Doing so only depletes you. When you learn to detach from pointless disputes, your energy returns. You no longer see stupidity as an enemy. You see it as a condition, one that exists, one that persists, but one that no longer dictates your reactions. This shift is the true victory. Remember this. Intelligence is not proven by how much you explain, but by how little you need to.

Bob Metz:
You are listening to Just Right Broadcasting around the world and online. In my own attempts to grasp the wider philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, I read several detailed pages about him in my Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I really walked away from all of it rather unimpressed and somewhat confused. However, when I consulted my Universal World Reference Encyclopedia, I got a summary that certainly helped explain my reaction. The practical upshot of Schopenhauer’s system, which makes will, the one-soul reality, is intolerably melancholy, taking from man all that constitutes his greatness, his goodness, or his bliss. God, futurity, the soul, mere names, illusions, and the world of men is to him bad, hopelessly bad and made so. Strange, melancholy, and deterrent, the speculations of Schopenhauer are likely to remain a moment of dark genius, rather than a light of philosophy. They form no center of warmth and hope, but the funeral pyre on which faith and trust and aspiration emulate themselves. And of course, both of the previous speakers acknowledge that Schopenhauer is known for his deep pessimism about human nature and society.

But as a dark genius, rather than as a light of philosophy, Schopenhauer certainly arrived at valid observations and conclusions that he was not alone in making. And of course, he used the word stupid far less than he used the word fool. And in this respect, his definition of that term certainly coincided with that of the God of the machine’s author, Isabel Patterson, who said that the deficiency, which is indicated by the word fool, is the incapacity to understand categories and the relation of things and qualities. Similarly, as we heard earlier, the nature of a fool through Schopenhauer’s eyes consisted of stupidity as a failure to understand causation. So stupidity is the condition. The fool is the agent of stupidity. So to use either term interchangeably isn’t really a big deal in casual conversation.

But as we’ll see by the end of today’s show, there is a better term to use for both. Now, one comment that rather surprised and amused me was the observation that even sincere praise can diffuse vanity and prevent escalation. The art of war’s Sun Tzu advises feign weakness to neutralize opposition by protecting the fool’s ego you avoid needless battles. Now, who does that remind you of? But of course, Donald Trump. And even as many have been referring to Trump as a master of the art of war, people are still surprised and confused whenever they see Trump threaten and criticize some world leader or politician on one day and then on the next. Trump is saying how well he and whoever he threatened are getting along and what great friends they are. And I see so many people on the right interpret this tactic as some kind of betrayal on Trump’s part. Why is Trump being so cozy with so-and-so when he promised us he would oppose him?

Well, because that’s the art of the deal and the art of winning in politics. And finally, for all the talk about stupidity, the real message being delivered by Schopenhauer is of course being aimed at the intelligent, who would be the only audience capable of understanding what he’s talking about. Stupidity is not an enemy, he says, but a condition. The intelligent person must learn discernment. So the responsibility for correcting this all falls on those considered intelligent. Maybe we should be talking more about what creates intelligence than about what causes stupidity, because it’s a bit like trying to solve the problem of poverty by studying poverty instead of studying the creation of wealth. We’re always looking at the problems and less at the solutions.

Now, coming from a different perspective on the whole phenomenon of stupidity, our final two audio bites turn the conversation in a slightly different direction, with, on this side of our upcoming bumper, Professor Gad Saad’s conversation with Pod Force One’s Miranda Devine back in October of 2021, and on the return side of the bumper, Brett Weinstein, on the January 21st, 2026 podcast of Freedom Packed.

Clip: Pod Force One, October 14 2021, Miranda Devine, Gad Saad

Miranda Devine:
Welcome to the Pod Force One podcast. I’m Miranda Devine. Today we’re joined by Dr. Gad Saad, scholar of the Declaration of Independence Center in the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He’s author of the upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy. I wanted to ask you about your latest book, Suicidal Empathy, which seems to be really what ails the West at the moment. And so can you tell us just from the beginning how you came up with that concept?

Gad Saad:
I have to step back to one of my previous books to explain how I got to suicidal empathy. So in the parasitic mind, I was arguing that in the same way that a wide range of animals can be parasitized by actual brain worms.

So for example, a wood cricket abhors water, but when it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water, commit suicide, so that the hair worm could complete its reproductive cycle. And so that was my epiphany then. I said, okay, well, I’m going to use that neuroparasitological framework to argue that human beings can also be parasitized by ideological parasitic ideas. But in order for me to completely hijack your capacity to think, I need to parasitize two systems, your cognitive system, your thinking system, which is the parasitic mind, but also your emotional system, which is suicidal empathy. And so it’s a one-two punch. The parasitic mind dealt with my thought processes, suicidal empathy deals with my emotional system.

Miranda Devine:
That’s brilliant. So it’s heart and mind.

Gad Saad:
It’s heart and mind, exactly. Yeah.

Miranda Devine:
Trump derangement syndrome. Is that an example of, you know, suicidal empathy, parasitic mind, some sort of brain worm that’s got it? Because it doesn’t seem to be just a normal antipathy to a political figure. It really seems to be a derangement, a psychiatric ailment.

Gad Saad:
So TDS, you’re right in that it speaks not so much to suicidal empathy, but to a specific form of parasitic thinking, which I discuss in the parasitic mind. So going back to this dichotomy of thinking versus feeling. Now, Trump derangement syndrome arises from the misapplication of the wrong system in that particular context. When judging whether a political leader is one that I should vote for or not, you’d like to think that I am going to invoke my cognitive system, but I don’t.

Because whenever you speak about people who suffer from TDS, they always give you an affective based response. He disgusts me. He’s grotesque. He speaks like a contankerous, you know, eighth grade brawler, right? They never say I detest Donald Trump because I don’t respect his monetary and fiscal policy, right?

It’s always driven by what I call an aesthetic injury, right? Donald Trump comes along and he doesn’t exemplify those traits. So if he can ascend to the highest office in the world, this invalidates all of the effort that I have put into fabricating my own personhood as a progressive person.

Therefore, he is literally an existential threat to my personhood, to the beautiful facade that I have constructed. So yes, you are right. TDS is a psychiatric disorder due to emotional processing rather than cognitive processing.

Miranda Devine:
So suicidal empathy seems to be everywhere and not going away.

Gad Saad:
In order for me to succumb to suicidal empathy, you have to first lay the ground with all of these parasitic ideas that have been allowed to be spawned and then flourish first in academic university ecosystems, and then they make breakout into every nook and cranny of society.

They even become our former prime minister called Justin Trudeau, right? So cultural relativism basically removes the deontological possibility that there are absolute moral truths, right? So if there are no absolute moral truths, then that makes me impotent to take the ontological positions about what is right or what is wrong. So now you could see how once I have hammered you with enough indoctrination in universities about in this case cultural relativism, then it becomes very, very easy to allow the parasite, the emotional parasite of suicidal empathy to take place.

Miranda Devine:
So it’s almost like you have to be infected by some of these mind viruses to weaken your immune system or your cognitive emotional immune system, and that then opens you up to the suicidal empathy, the disease that will kill you.

Gad Saad:
Perfectly stated. That’s exactly right. Maybe you weren’t going to go there, but just to kind of apply it to the most outlandish case. One estimate is that there have been 117 billion humans that have existed in the totality of Homo sapiens as a separate species. Well, until 15 minutes ago, when we took progressive biology classes at Oberlin College, we used to be able to very clearly navigate through the very difficult conundrum of what constitutes male or female.

We never had any difficulty with that. But then now we need specialized physicians and researchers to explain to us how we’re going to assort who competes in the Olympics in female or male sports. Such a departure from reality could only come about if your mind and your emotional system have literally been parasitized by these mechanisms that I speak of.

Clip: Freedom Pact, January 21 2026, Bret Weinstein

Bret Weinstein:
The reason that evolution built humans the way it did, and we are very unique in this regard, the reason that we are constructed the way we are is for the purpose of child rearing. And that process of child rearing is not simple in humans.

It’s not straightforward the way it is in any other creature, frankly, because humans are uniquely software based creatures. That is to say, what you need to know in order to be an effective human being is not passed to you genetically. It is largely passed to you by parents who know something about their environment. And under normal circumstances, their environment would look an awful lot like the one that you were going to be an adult in. And so a passing of a coherent culture is the reason that human babies are so what we call altricial, meaning helpless when they’re born. They have to be helpless in order to have their software program loaded on and to get one loaded on that’s relevant to the problems that they’re going to face is really it is both the biggest vulnerability that humans have and it is the biggest asset we have because we can have our software program tailored to an environment that looks entirely different than one 10,000 miles away or 500 years in the past.

So we need those partnerships. Parents are not there to provide resources and you know, warmth and keep the rain off. Yes, that’s a prerequisite to raising a child. But the bulk of the job is in the conveying of wisdom about how to be a human being. And if men and women don’t like each other, that job does not get done well. So civilization is depending on us solving this problem. And we are doing quite the opposite.

Bob Metz:
I recall having asked Gad Saad when he appeared on the show, whether he regarded his parasitical narrative as a metaphor. And he most definitely said, yes, that’s what it was.

And he acknowledged that again in the audio bite we just heard. So we’re not talking about a literal parasite when applied to mass formation or mass stupidity. Yet he concluded in the conversation we just heard that, quote, such a departure from reality could only come about literally become parasitized by these mechanisms that I speak of.

And quote, and right away my red flag of contradiction is suddenly waving. Literal or metaphor? If what he is arguing is literal, then he’s saying that words and concepts are parasites. Even after acknowledging that victims of the so-called parasites have been hammered with indoctrination, which comes in the form of narratives consisting of words and concepts.

But it seems to me that while a metaphor can be immensely useful in helping people understand or conceptualize some abstract concept or other, it really doesn’t offer any further direction to pursue. I think that Brett Weinstein has come closest to pointing in the direction that we should be looking when he very correctly observed that humans are uniquely software based creatures. Knowledge is not passed on genetically. And when he referred to the helplessness of babies as being necessary to have their software programs loaded, he was referring to what philosophers call something we’ve talked about before, the concept of tabula rasa, the blank slate, which refers only to the content of the mind, the software, and not to the physical body or its functions, the hardware. And in noting that this is humanity’s greatest vulnerability and asset, he’s talking about what that mind is programmed with, which could be garbage in and garbage out. And you’ll recall at the beginning of today’s show, I mentioned that words are the very things that stupid people fear the most because words are the very weapon necessary to convey the presence of this stupidity in our midst and to warn against its dangers. What’s missing from all of the valid but incomplete analyses of stupidity is a major cause of that stupidity. And I think that’s the definitions of the words and concepts being used in the process of thinking.

And we’ve been down this path before. As we wrote in the blog post of Just Right 855 where we’re talking about thinking about thinking, missing from most of the discussions is the means by which people actually think through the use of concepts and language. Because the human mind is essentially programmable and because words and concepts are the software on which each mind functions, humans in the exercise of free will have the capacity and choice to think and behave either rationally or irrationally. An irrational concept is one that does not conform to reality or to reason.

And significantly, irrational concepts can be held by highly intelligent people. And that’s because thinking is not an automatic function. One must choose to think. Thinking requires both volitional effort and focused awareness.

The inability or refusal to think by a significant percentage of the population is the fundamental cause of the Western world’s slide into tyranny. And once again, we’ve said it before, it ain’t so much what people don’t know that gets them into trouble. It’s what they do know that just ain’t so. So where the whole virus metaphor falls apart for me is in the answering of this question. If the knowledge of things that are not so can be considered to be a virus of some sort, then wouldn’t it also follow that knowledge of the things that are so? The truth could also be compared to a metaphorical virus. I mean, we have to assume that so-called stupid people have been making up the bulk of humanity for time immemorial. And yet, despite all of that stupidity, in the past century or two, humanity made a quantum leap, not just in the technology that demonstrates it, but in the clarity of thinking that preceded it.

So what happened then that never happened before? Well, we can look to the rise of individualism, freedom, and capitalism, from the Enlightenment to its political manifestation. The fact that those who chose to think were a minority, even when a majority benefited from their thinking, should not be seen as an injustice, but merely as a consequence of forces subject to the laws of causality. But with all the talk of fools and of stupidity, in purely philosophical terms, the most correct word to use, I think, to describe these conditions, would be the word irrationality. Explains Ayn Rand, and I quote, Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival, and therefore a commitment to a course of blind destruction, that which is anti-mind is anti-life. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

And by the way, there’s your left and right polarity right there in a nutshell. Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse, but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions. Now, once restingly Rand’s comments on irrationality pretty much mirrored those of the previous voices we heard, who each, by the way, spoke from their own field of expertise and study. Put it all together, and you soon see that this is not a new problem to deal with, but a perpetual one that requires the eternal vigilance of those who choose to think. So if constantly being hammered with indoctrination is a demonstrable cause of stupidity, then wouldn’t it follow that constantly being hammered with truth, using accurate words and definitions, and illustrating the laws of causality might have some kind of impact for a cure? I sure hope so, because otherwise we might be wasting our time and yours when you join us again next week as we continue our journey in the right direction, and until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We’ll see you then.

Clip: George Carlin

George Carlin:
We don’t have cripples anymore. Turns out we never did. All this time they were physically challenged. It’s an attempt to make people feel better, physically challenged, and how’s this one? Differently abled. And if you insist on using differently abled, then you must include all of us. We’re all differently abled. Each of us can do things the other can’t. Differently abled.

The word cripple is not a dishonorable word. There’s no shame in it. Jesus healed the cripples. He didn’t engage in rehabilitative strategies for the physically disadvantaged. And we have then this continuing problem with the word fat. I use that term because they’re fat.

That’s why we call them fat people. They’re not large, they’re not stout, they’re not chunky, hefty, or plump, and they’re not big boned. Dinosaurs are big boned, and they’re not necessarily obese. Obese is a medical term, and they’re not overweight. Overweight implies there is some correct weight. There is no correct weight.

Heavy is also a misleading term, and aircraft carrier is heavy. It’s not fat. Only people are fat, and that’s what fat people are. They’re fat. They’re not gravitationally disadvantaged. It’s not intended as criticism or insult. It’s simply descriptive language.