Wednesday, October 03, 2007

The Depth and Breadth of Human Stupidity

I read the news every day, or at least as much of the news as I can stomach. I like to know what's going on in my community and in the world, at least to a point. What I wish I wouldn't be exposed to is exactly how stupidly some of us act, and how terrible the results of our stupidity can be.

In a town near where I live, two boys were fooling around in a high school locker room with an aerosol body spray and a lighter. One boy directed some spray at the other, lit it, and set him on fire. I doubt that there was any malicious intent, but since the boys are each fourteen years old, wouldn't they know that what they were doing might be dangerous? In the aftermath of this nonsense, someone volunteered the observation that the boy who had been set on fire had consented to or invited the act. So? Even if that is true, is it relevant? Would any reasonably intelligent person do something that might endanger another simply because the other asked him to?

Well, yes, I guess many people would do just that. They shouldn't. They should think matters through first. But people do stupid things all the time.

Why do people do stupid things? Because the direct line between cause and effect has been blurred. Nothing is any individual's fault any more. When someone fails, it is not he or she that is responsible, it is our fault, the rest of us, for allowing it to happen. Perhaps the admonition "Do not use this product to set your friends on fire" wasn't displayed on the aerosol can. Perhaps it was displayed, but wasn't printed in red ink so that it would really stand out. Maybe it was the school's fault because they didn't have signs at each entrance way stating that on school property no aerosol cans of any type are allowed.

Maybe I am just too stupid to 'get it.' After all, boys will be boys, right?

This isn't a diatribe against tomfoolery. I was a teenage boy once. I did stupid things. I hurt myself more times than I would care to admit here, doing things that were dangerous and ill-advised. I didn't, however, hurt someone else.

This isn't a diatribe against anything other than the fact that we can't seem to realize that more rules, more regulations, more laws, bigger punishments -- none of these are going to protect us from ourselves or keep us from hurting others. And above all, we should stop trying to deflect blame from or excuse the behaviour of idiots.

Perhaps I should restrict my exposure to the world outside to the Sunday Funnies and episodes of the Simpsons. At least there, the problems aren't real and can be solved with the stroke of a brush or pen.


  1. In my highschool, the year after I graduated, there was what got to be known as the "Kiss and Kill murder".

    A highschool girl was continually telling other students that she wanted someone to kill her. She said she just didn't want to live anymore. No one took her serious, except for this one boy. He talked to her and agreed to do as she wanted.

    One night, she crawled out of her bedroom window and met him in the alley behind her house.

    He drove her to an abandoned sludge pit for a capped oil well. There they kissed and he put a shotgun up to her head and pulled the trigger.

    He then waded out into the sludge pit and dropped the body. A friend of mine's father had the funeral home that retrieved the body after the boy confessed to what he had done.

    It just goes to show that you have to be careful for what you ask.

  2. Wow. You're right, Don Ray.The teenage years are tough for everyone, kids and parents alike, but it is so easy to do something very foolish, and very permanent that kids are lost or injured every day. They don't realize that no matter how bad they think things are, the situation usually improves. Some things that I thought were horrible at age fifteen don't seem all that important now.

  3. They probably videotaped that shit and sent it in to see if America's Funniest Home Videos or Jackass or some other Airhead Productions series would run it, filed under Stupid Human Tricks.
    Your diagnosis is excellent. People are not taught the simple principle of "Truth, or consequences" anymore: Learn, love and live truth, or suffer the consequences of error.
    It's not rocket-science, if you'll pardon the pun!

  4. That whole business of blaming the victim and going round the bend to keep from blaming the responsible party is a very worrying trend. Sick!

  5. Could not agree with you more.

  6. The latest in brain research shows that teenagers can't extrapolate the consequences of their actions. The brain isn't fully developed to do this until about 25.

    Stupid, maybe. Acting in the moment, probably. Not realizing what might happen, most likely.

    I had written about this today. As parents, these lessons are important to share. Unfortunately some kids learn by the school of hard knocks, even when they have "good" parents...

  7. I've conducted my own, admittedly unscientific, experiments with my own son to try to establish the action/consequence connection. If I tell him that he has to clean his room or he won't be allowed to go out with his buddies, he can connect the dots. He also knows that if he doesn't succeed in life, it will be his own fault, that he won't have tried hard enough, and he governs himself accordingly, mostly. Between those two extremes is where things tend to fall apart. I think that nuanced situations are the ones where associations between actions and consequences are fuzzier with teenagers. I also think that not enough parents simply say to their kids: "Don't do anything stupid, because it may just turn around and bite you in the ass." They should, naturally, spend the time to explain what is right and responsible behaviour and what isn't. However... many parents themselves can't make that distinction, so we are basically screwed, aren't we?

  8. So by what mischief did society convince us that we are no longer expected to think for ourselves, especially when it comes to the welfare of others? Bloody pathetic performance of late in the developed mind, let alone the immature mind.

  9. So right, lin. I don't know that I will ever get used to the fact that increasingly people don't follow the edict that we were taught years ago: "Engage brain before speaking or doing."