Thinking About Stupidity In Our Scholars
Uploaded by wmason on Jan 30, 2000
The stupidity in our scholars, like stupidity and arrogance everywhere, follows a model. The model presented here was developed by Anticommerical University Professor William Mason. It applies in general to stupidity at any level of intensity. It has 5 stages.
1. Mimetic Arrogance
One party identifies themselves as an authority on a subject and other parties imitate that arrogance. Examples of things scholars and professors are arrogant about: science, literature, art, sociology, psychology, philosophy. Whatever the culture tells us is a difficult subject, that's what scholars decide is worth being arrogant about.
2. Mimetic Use of the Word Mimetic
Now the parties begin competing for the object of arrogance: jargon. Whatever big, fancy words emerge, others copy them. Since they all use the same words in different ways, any hope of finding concrete definitions of them vanishes. To win, you only need to get more exclusivity of words such as 'exclusivity.' If the word becomes ubiquitous, then you make up even more complex words that have simple meanings, such as 'ubiquitous.' If this doesn't work, then you must resort to using neojargon or pseudojargon or neopseudojargon or neopseudoneojargon. Examples of these forms of jargon are the prefixes 'neo' and 'pseudo.'
3. Graikos
Graikos is a Greek word that means "Greek." It's the root of much stupidity found in scholarly discursions. In the rivalry for respect, if one side finds an inferior usage of jargon, they are caught in the temptation of Graikos and feel compelled to retaliate by literally speaking a whole new language. Thus begins a "jargon" war, fought on the battlefield of the dictionary. Graikos is what makes it so hard to read their professional journals, so hard to feel like you have any grasp whatsoever on vocabulary. It's so easy to feel intellectually inferior to such unjustified usage of language. The gap between scholar and layman escalates.
4. Intimidation
Eventually one side crosses some arbitrary threshold of concern where the supervising authorities feel compelled to intervene. It's essentially random which side is considered the "supervising authority" since they both consider the other as worthless scum, but often it's the faction with more college degrees, which uses more venomous attacks to maintain parity. Whichever side is considered the "supervising authority" becomes the intimidator of the layman and the others who kept their ego below threshold are victims, doomed to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness.
5. Authorized, Sanctioned and Sacred Stupidity
To appease the scholars, the authorities determine...