The Evolution of Stupid

Some men are born stupid, others have stupidity thrust upon them.

How (you may ask) can stupidity be thrust upon us?  When  we give portions of our brains away, and what we are left with is only part of a brain. What we are left with is stupid.

Take, for example the case from the New York Daily News:

"Police and firefighters stood on a California beach and watched as a suicidal man waded into the San Francisco Bay and drowned in the surf.

The body of Raymond Zack was finally pulled from the 54-degree water by a passerby as local fire officials blamed budget cuts for their inability to save the man."

Did you see that?  Budget cuts.  The man drowned because of budget cuts.  Firefighters and policemen stayed out of the water and did not rescue a man who took almost an hour to drown due to budget cuts. 

The article tells us:

'Police and firefighters were brought to Robert Crown Memorial State Beach by a 911 call, authorities said.

Fire officials said the department's water rescue program disappeared with its funding in 2009. And an overtime cutback prevented firefighters from logging sufficient training hours for water rescues."

Ah, now it is clear.  Budget cuts caused the policemen and firefighters not to be trained to walk out into cold water and pull a man to shore.  That makes some kind of sense.

But the article indicates that there were more than one policeman there, and more than one firefighter.  If one firefighter could not prevent the man from walking slowly out into the water,  might two or three firefighters  working together have figured out a way to do it?  If they could not,  then might the firefighters call upon the policemen watching  idly from the shore?  Could some of the civilian bystanders be recruited to form a human chain to pull that man out of the water?  Apparently not--and here's the reason why.  

"The incident was deeply regrettable," said Alameda Fire Chief Mike D'Orazi. "But I can also see it from our firefighters' perspective. They're standing there wanting to do something, but they are handcuffed by policy."

What they are saying in effect is that they cannot think of saving a drowning man, because policy forbids it.  They  cannot move unless some rule tells them it is okay.  Thinking for themselves is not in their job description. 

Who can blame them?  They were once fully functioning human beings, capable of thinking and acting tor themselves,  Off-duty, they may still be fully functioning human beings.  But now they work for the government, whose cardinal virtue is not  intelligence but obedience.

If the man had wandered out into the surf after five o'clock, and those same men were standing around on the shore out of uniform, that man might be alive today. After all,  the article never mentions that they did not have the necessary skills to save him, only that they had not logged in sufficient training hours to make them free of liability if they did.   These men, possessed with the life saving skills they had, might have been able to save him, but they were not allowed to even think of doing it, because of policy. 

There is a word to this. It is called stupid. The decision-making portions of their brains  were surrendered to a higher power, the government.  For all intents and purposes, these otherwise intelligent men had all become functionally stupid.

Such stupidity doesn't happen easily, or all at once.  It takes a certain level of cultural sophistication to produce this level of stupidity.  Hunter-gatherers of the African plain would not have done this. If hunter Oog, saw gatherer Moog about to be crushed by a giant mammoth he would no doubt have gathered his friends to save him.   The builders of the pyramids would have at least let down a rope to save one of them from being crushed by a runaway stone. But then, they did not face the level of bureaucracy  we do today, which apparently insists that the saving of a life can only occur the rescuers had logged sufficient hours in mammoth evading or stone stopping skills, or if public policy allowed it.  These primitives had not yet reached the level of division of labor necessary to convince one person that they were not able to rescue another simply out of policy.  It requires a full, triple-tiered level of sophistication to produce this level of stupidity.

First, you must have someone who makes the policy.  This person isn't stupid, just not omniscient.  No one who makes the rules can possibly know every possible way a policy can be interpreted.  No matter how hard we try to write all-inclusive rules, we will never produce a single policy that will always be practical and efficient.  In many cases, the people making policy know that and expect that people will exercise good judgment when applying them.

Next, there needs to be an enforcement level.   The enforcement of policy is carried out by someone other than the ones who make the policy.  This person is not stupid either, just intent upon doing a good job for the policy makers.  The enforcers, out of fear or ambition,  do their job zealously, and believe intently in "the law" in abstract. They therefore refrain from judging the law which they serve, and are unwilling to bend from it.

Finally, there are those  who actually carry out the policy.  Again,  they would act like reasonable people, if they felt free to do so. But they are not free. They see themselves as slaves of others, and so they cannot use their own minds. 

Voila,  stupid.

Fortunately there is a cure for stupid.  It is to go back to the beginning, back to what God gave us,  to something that is not complicated or hard, but is in fact very easy. It's called common sense.  It is that right we have,  even if we are slaves or employees, to think for ourselves, and realize that there are things more important than what we do for a living, or even living, for that matter. It is doing the right thing in the right way. 

Sometimes, we have to forget policy, and do what's right. 

Or, we can just stay  stupid.