Far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones reportedly hosted a livestream on social media with "Assassinate Biden" in the title, causing the internet to erupt in calls for an investigation. Independent multimedia journalist David Leavitt flagged Jones' stream on X, which was formerly ...
  • Dasus@lemmy.world
    9·
    5 months ago

    I’m of the opinion that we defined it several thousand years ago, in some form at least.

    https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/

    Belangia helpfully adds: “A-gnoia means literally ‘not-knowing’; a-mathia means literally ‘not-learning.’ In addition to the type of amathia that is an inability to learn, there is another form that is an unwillingness to learn. … Robert Musii in an essay called On Stupidity, distinguished between two forms of stupidity, one he called ‘an honorable kind’ due to a lack of natural ability and another, much more sinister kind, that he called ‘intelligent stupidity.'”

    Belangia also quotes Glenn Hughes, from an essay entitled “Voegelin’s Use of Musil’s Concept of Intelligent Stupidity in Hitler and the Germans,” providing a further elucidation of the concept of amathia (italics in the original):

    “The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”

    • Machinist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      Willful ignorance is the greatest sin. I’ve been saying that for a while now, not that I believe in sin.

      COVID was a real eye opener for me. Seeing how far people would go to remain ignorant.

      Stupid can’t be helped and there is nothing wrong with it. Ignorance is different and not necessarily bad, if you see that you’re ignorant about something, you can choose to educate yourself.

      However, willful ignorance is a different thing. I believe that most of society’s ills are rooted in willful ignorance and its exploitation by the evil.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
        4·
        5 months ago

        However, willful ignorance is a different thing. I believe that most of society’s ills are rooted in willful ignorance and its exploitation by the evil.

        “Wisdom alone, is the good for man, ignorance the only evil” (Euthydemus 281d)

        “There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance” (in Diogenes Laertius, II.31)

        Personally I believe in the statement about “a spiritual disease needing a spiritual cure”, but I’m not going for some spiritual mumbojumbo. If we take the spiritual disease to be some sort of block in your empathic abilities, however conscious or unconscious, and then we look at some of the most recent studies on empathogens (MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that the “spiritual cure” might be something as simple as MDMA/psychedelic-assisted therapy.

        Maybe we could call looking into this something like "Project Pretty-obvious-when-you-think-about-it "

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 months ago

        not that I believe in sin

        It’s perfectly legitimate to have the concept of sin, even if you don’t believe in a deity. There’s a moral code, whether defined by religious precepts, societal convention, personal preference,or objective logic, and evil is a sin against that regardless.