It should go without saying that smart people do stupid things with alarming frequency (Bill Gates once ruined a $40,000 car by not changing the engine oil). Then again, I'd better say it anyway to make sure you get it. Stupid behavior is caused less by low I.Q. than it is caused by individuals entering situations that they are not prepared to deal with intelligently. These situations may lie outside of the area of expertise that the individual has specialized in, or they might elicit a response based on prejudice or bad habits. The obvious is overlooked out of self-interest, cowardice, expedience, habit, and of course, ignorance.
None of us is as stupid as all of us. Committees of experts make decisions that an individual layman never would unless he was rushed, distracted, high, and/or brain damaged. Mob psychology is more primitive than the behavior of many animals. Hence the proverbial futility of trying to reason with a mob. Just as increasing the size and complexity of a machine will decrease it's efficiency and increase the likelihood of malfunction, so collectivizing and centralizing decision making leads to less intelligent action. The effective I.Q. of a large group of people can be expected to be somewhat below the average I.Q. of each group member, the difference being directly proportional to the size of the group. Thus, as more authority is granted to bigger groups, such as the federal government and very large corporations, more stupid decisions are made.
Albert Einstein once said that you cannot make peace by preparing for war, implying that you can make peace otherwise. Of course, that's not what a historian would say, but Einstein is far from the only scientific genius with a reputation for political naivete. Keeping this in mind might help us to remember how stupid we are about similar matters. As federal legislation is passed that concerns what were once totally non-political matters, voters are asked to make decisions that would require more of them to be better informed in more disparate areas than is possible. Most people are not botanists or experts on erosion, nor should they be. When statutes are proposed that concern these matters, those of us who don't know anything about them and are not particularly concerned, should not feel obligated to form opinions on the proposed statutes. The majority of such obligatory opinions are stupid. For example, in my home state of Washington, a referendum to ban using bait and dogs for hunting was easily passed. The consensus was that it was a very cruel and unsportsmanlike way to hunt that people shouldn't want to practice anyway. Of course, bait hunting was never considered a recreational sport. It is practiced by farmers to control predators. Now valuable livestock is being lost, cougars are no longer afraid of humans, and they can only be legally killed in a sportsmanlike manner which increases the likelihood of an animal being wounded and becoming vicious. Most Washingtonians are at least competent enough to drive a car and read, yet when asked for their input on a decision concerning something they were necessarily ignorant of (not being farmers, hunters, or humble realists), they supported a measure that has resulted in children being literally torn up by wild animals, for basically no reason.
As our collective body of knowledge grows, each of us becomes relatively more ignorant. There is more now to be ignorant of than ever before. Specialized fields spawn sub-specialties, and competent specialists can be shockingly stupid about life in general. Online, everyone is a newbie. If you were an expert on the Internet last year, you're dealing with a different Internet this year. We are forced to decide what areas we will be informed about, or even think about. Where other areas are concerned, two main options remain. One is to naively place faith in people who we hope are worthy of our trust. The other is to deny there is anything that cannot be understood in terms of the fields in which we are conversant, treating anything outside these areas with defensive pseudo-scientific skepticism (NUH-UH!). Either option carries a certain risk of stupidity.
Anyone with a modem is likely to be familiar with a circulating list of stupid predictions made by people who where experts in their fields. The list includes a record executive who refused to sign the Beatles because he believed guitar music was on it's way out, someone at IBM who said that there was a market for about five computers, and the famous (yet forgettably named) man who suggested about a hundred years ago that the U.S. patent office be closed on the grounds that everything had been invented. These people knew more than most people about their respective endeavors, but that very knowledge led them to the certainty that in retrospect makes their words so stupid. I hate to use the word paradigm, but that's what they where caught up in. They were also put in a position of trying to predict the future, which, because it is impossible, leads to some clear examples of stupidity. The parallel J-curves (associated with what some people call "the Quickening") of population growth, economic progress, global democratization, and especially technological innovation put more of us in the position of trying to predict the future more often than ever before. What Alvin Toeffler called future shock, we, here in the future, call stupidity.
If eliminating stupidity was ever an option, it no longer is. More than ever before, we must pick and choose our areas of stupidity, attaching whatever will fit to our working belief systems. Would it be condescending of me to conclude by quoting what Lincoln said about fooling all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time? Per-haps - he - spoke - too - quickly - for - us - to - under-stand - the - first - time.