CHAPTER 12 STRUCTURALLY STUPID SOCIETIES: Explorations in Artificial Stupidity by T. R. Young March 26, 1991 April 29, 1991 May 3, 1991 May 7, 1991 May 12, 1991 May 13, 1991 ___No. 155_______ Circulated as part of the Transforming Sociology Series of the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology, Weidman, Michigan, 48893. WARNING: The National Academy of Science has determined that the material here is not real science. The Office of the Attorney General of the United States has ruled that this material is subversive to the American way of life. The Surgeon General of the United States has ruled that prolonged consumption of such material can be hazardous to your academic or political career. The Federal Bureau of Information warns that any persons using this material for any purpose other than for their private entertainment can be, and will be, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The C.I.A. has lavishly funded a secret study group at Iron Mountain to develop the science of naturally stupid societies as part of its efforts to Americanize countries around the world which are beginning to be smart. Their research has been given top secret status and is not available to the general public. Proceedings are underway to prosecute the author of this material since its release is prejudicial to the national security of the rich and powerful. By Executive Order of George P. Bush, President of the New World Order with profits to go to the seven rich nations which control most of the best military technology in that world order. and Major John Major, Vice President in charge of mildly defunct colonial powers. DEDICATION This essay is dedicated to Jonathan Swift (for Gulliver's Travels), to Richard Sheridan (for School for Scoundrels), to F. Nietzsche (who went mad at the desanctification of society and nature), to George Orwell (for his contributions to doublethink), to Lily Tomlin (who searched and searched for signs of intelligent life on Earth), to Teilhard de Chardin (who was convinced that, in principle, intelligence is possible) and to that great and good man, Thomas Merton who, had he lived, would have had much to contribute to authentically intelligent societies. If Noah Chomsky, the Berrigan brothers or Barbara Tuchman ever get into the center of American knowledge processes, they too, will be acknowledged; until then, we'll just have to stay stupid. And then how I shall lie through Centuries and hear the blessed mutter of the mass at joke, and see God made and eaten all day long, and relish this good strong thick stupefying smoke. ...variation on a verse by Robert Browning NATURALLY STUPID SOCIETIES: Explorations in Artificial Stupidity ABSTRACT While progress in artificial intelligence continues apace within a small circle of computer programmers, nonlinear mathematicians, and eager corporate CEOs as well as pentagon generals, there is little thought given to the social nature of intelligence or the social problems created by artificial intelligence. Still less is the social organization of artificial stupidity a topic of any great attention. This article repairs these oversights, offers not only really good definitions and profound insights but is also a lot of fun. Research into artificial intelligence is moving fast through the corridors of modern science. There are new books on the topic almost daily. While there are many happy uses to which artificial intelligence are put, there is little scientific thought given to nature and advantages of artificial stupidity. This omission, it seems to me, is witless, irresponsible, reckless and imprudent. The fact of the matter is that most firms, most armies, most universities and a great many societies are well organized to promote artificial stupidity. One might say that artificial stupidity is a fact of life and needs no great investigation but that ignores that fact that, if it exists, it can be measured and if it can be measured, it can be converted into scientific principles as well as unprincipled science. I want to survey the social nature of real intelligence, note the limits of artificial intelligence and go on from there to explicate the elements of artificial stupidity. There are the usual definitions and propositions one can find in any science worthy of the name. Once we realize the limitations on artificial intelligence, we can go on to explore and exploit the very great potential of artificial stupidity. The Natural Stupidity of Artificial Intelligence Roger Penrose, arguably the most famous layer of bathroom tiles, refuses to concede the possibility of artificial intelligence. He says that, while the human brain obeys all the very precise mathematical laws of nature, it does something that cannot be computed. Penrose, it turns out, is attacking a strawman--or rather, a straw brain. Penrose presumes that those interested in artificial intelligence are talking about something as wonderful as human intelligence. They are not. The clever, quick and crafty brain of which they speak knows no imagination, no creativity, no consciousness, no passion, no shame nor does it show compassion, mercy or meta-textual understanding. Still less does it grasp the sweep of history and lay its own labor in the larger context of that history with a voice dusty with the wisdom of the ages and powerful with a love for life. If we were to enquire just what is missing from the thinking of those who delve and dive into artificial intelligence, we would discover that they miss the obvious. Computers, however large, lack more than the complex structure of the brain; they lack the body chemistry that produces complex thought; they neglect the deep connections between glands, brain cells and the autonomous nervous system as well as the muscle memory that shapes thought, feeling, speech and motion. All this was covered by Hubert Dreyfus in 1972 in his essay, 'What Computers Can't Do.' But there is much more to the Intelligence than this well placed criticism. From this point, we must keep in mind that, without emotion and desire propelling human cunning and craft, most of us would be but a thinking machine; routinely processing whatever we see with whatever software we are given by nature and by society. Indeed a competent architecture for artificial intelligence would have to include a body very much like that of a human being. Each computer would have to have its own adrenalin gland, its own endorphines and its own insulin. Media, Media and More Media Those who work in social psychology and, especially, in symbolic interaction will mention that any architecture that aims to simulate human intelligence will have to equip it with the four media systems which, in delicate interplay, give off the infinite permutations of any one of the many media upon which people hang the information of daily doing. Taking the information capacity of each medium alone, the task is formidable; taking all of them and more together requires sheer genius from even the youngest child. Words, Words, Words The human voice has several variable attributes upon which meaning can be constructed: pitch, timbre, volume, pace, harmonics, tone and so on all of which can be modified by use of lungs, larynx, tongue, lips, teeth, nose and other parts of sound chambers. No one sound is ever exactly like another sound in any given iteration of that sound since body states vary, air quality varies, sound dynamics vary with architecture and since the sound waves from other sources make interference patterns. Given all the words in all the various languages of the world, we see that the natural and social worlds are so complex and so deeply connected that the selection of concepts with which to slice up that reality and, in the case of social systems, create them, the task of allocating meaning to words is made very difficult. If we focus only on words leaving paragraphs and pages to fend for themselves, we come to understand that it would take a computer with an capacity larger than any Ackerman tower one could imagine just to deal with words. And, given that number of words, the speed with which a computer would have to run challenges even the best Cray computers exuent. An intelligent machine would have to have at least this capacity to store information and still another capacity to run through likely combinations in the thought process with a speed that defies mechanical reproduction. Body Talk and Body MemoryParallel and interactive with the spoken word in shaping meaning is a complex body language system with additional billions of information bytes at the service of human intelligence. No one gesture is ever precisely like another gesture even though the same meaning is assigned to it. Body position, muscle tone, nerve signals and states of awareness vary and interact in varying ways to produce an ever changing pattern for the same hand shake of welcome, nod of agreement, shrug of contempt or smile of delight. Each cell in the body has billions of molecules which serve as memory tapes. The immune system alone can recognize billions of invading proteins and, usually, distinguish them from the millions of different cells which belong to the body itself as a system. Hands, face, body posture, body tension, legs, feet as well as arms and shoulders are used to convey meaning. Facial muscles alone or in combination can produce over 100,000 discernible bits of information. When one considers all the possible iterations of all possible embodiments of a single symbolic encoding using just body parts as a linguistic medium, one begins to see that each speech act can have a veritable mandelbrot set of iterations with infinite length, infinite centers, and infinite detail. No two iterations of a gesture, pose, or stance are ever alike. There is no linearity between the thought and the deed when it comes to body talk yet there is the human capacity to conceptualize any given embodiment as part of a region of meanings in an infinitely large basin of concepts. A computer with artificial intelligence would have to have the same capacity. 1000 megabytes of storage would not suffice. Body parts are often shaped by surgery, binding, tattooing or burning to convey information. Some societies file teeth, stretch necks or lips, cut off clitoris, or insert bone, metal or fiber objects into body parts in order to help define social status-role, social occasions or social boundaries. The iterations of body decoration for any given person is unique. Age, height, skin tone, skill, materials available, and all other components of body talk converge to form an infinitely large and variable universe of symbols. In actual symbolic interaction, both small and large differences in embodiments of body talk symbols are ignored and with that subjective interpretation, nonlinear meaning is taken and returned for validation by second, third and nth parties to the production of intelligent behavior. Clothing, cosmetics and body paint, weaponry, tattoos, manicure, and jewelry are used in great array to define social standing, age, occasion, gender, religion, sexual preference, marital status, kinship grouping and other social facts. No one piece of clothing is ever worn exactly as before or as another wears. Body posture, body health, time of day, lighting or humidity affect shade, shape, or other features of display in infinite variety. Those who express meaning do so with infinite variety. Those who read such data take an active part in the language process, ignoring most variations and adding missing elements as needed to the social occasion under construction. Reading Raoul Runs of behavior, from simple a hand motion summoning, greeting or dismissing others to whole cycles of behavior that take years to complete are, also, assigned cultural meaning. These runs of behavior, encoded deep in the structure of memory and desire are called forth instantaneously and used to give and take meaning. The preparation of a meal may denote an anniversary; the bringing of roses may denote a fine appreciation of a loved one; the re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross at Easter time may denote a re-commitment to private and public redemption of our sins. No one run of behavior is ever just the same as a previous embodiment nor is the meaning of a given run of behavior exactly the same, yet there are common themes which suffuse all such runs of behavior and produce self-similarity sufficient to stabilize meaning and social relationships. Reading Societies All symbolic work is interactive; therefore real intelligence is a product of a whole society, not simply the capacity of a single, thinking individual person, machine or an isolated algorithmic set however well matched to the environment with which it seeks to understand and to manipulate. If we concede that intelligence, understood as the ability to achieve goals with a reasonable regularly in a very, very complex surrounding, and if we accept that intelligence behavior is built on the incredibly complex interactions between people [rather than the single acting individual], then the task of modelling even natural stupidity is far more difficult than those who work with simple neural networks and nested algorithm now suspect. Mind, Self and OthersMissing data can be supplied by interacting others in ways a single machine cannot reproduce. Out of the semi-shared but special history of each human being, one person in a group can supply information that makes a thing sensible to others; this bridging of reason by imagination and memory means that symbolic activity is not the product of a single entity but rather the product of interacting, responding, remembering and comprehending others. Interpretation is a distinctly shared phenomena. This opens up the boundaries of the thinking machine to other critters, other cultures; other minority groups, other genders, other generations and other occupations. Thinking machines, if comparative stupid, would have to know and communicate with washing machines, automobiles, light bulbs and vacuum cleaners. No great task if one is a low grade moron but rather daunting to 'smart' computers. Natural Fractals Buried deep in the runs of behavior and in the cycles of the seasons are untold billions of natural fractals, some of which are recognized and encoded in differing ways by differing language systems. Some of these natural fractals are visible to even the simplest 'brain.' The immune system, for example, is composed of antibodies which are composed of simple proteins; each antibody has two heavy chains of protein and two light chains. The short version is that the heavy chains can form 4,800 different patterns containing the ability to destroy invading proteins and the light chains map themselves more closely to invading proteins. The chains work together in the antibody to identify and destroy up to 1,920,000 differing viruses and bacteria. Natural Stupidity Now one would think that identifying and destroying 2 million invading takes a lot of intelligence. But when you remember that the English language has 340,000 odd words in it and each word has between 4 and 8 meanings; when you realize that the human brain can work with infinite permutations of such terms in creating scientific texts, poetry, plays or simple conversations, no two of which are ever, ever alike, 2 million mappings is a relatively stupid feat. The Task More than merely the ability to handle 340,000! terms, such a machine would have to, simultaneously, express itself in all four such media simultaneously, display a fine understanding of the interconnections between each medium and appreciate the possibilities of ever new combinations of word, gesture, activity, and costume. Much as an actor tears his hair, rips open his blouse, or pauses without thought or script to convey a thought or feeling, an artificially intelligent machine would have to have comparable potential else, by comparison it would be dull, plodding and pedestrian. Such a machine would have to have the capacity to read out the reactions of others, take its own linguistic presentations into account, judge how others regard them, feel guilt, shame or delight and then extend, repair or elide that which it has expressed. Not a small capacity. An intelligent machine would have the ability to laugh at itself, to cry and to grieve, to doubt itself. It might even question the wisdom of architects of such machines. A really intelligent machine, connected with many, many others would get together at shop, office, and factory. Each machine would contribute their share to the final word, thought or deed under construction. If such machines could be built, they might well organize a social movement claiming their rights as members of a civil society; as human beings and as an oppressed minority--and rightly so. It would be artificially stupid to do the work of an intelligent creature and not demand the rights. The work in artificial intelligence then, fails to appreciate that intelligence is a product of a network of interacting others who, through symbolic interaction also produce mind, morality, self, social others, and society itself. Thus intelligence is located, falsely, within the boundaries of a single data processing object. Artificial intelligent systems would have to establish control over all persons and all groups in a given society if it is to be intelligent in human terms and still be a tool of those who own them. Confidence in the efforts of those to impose such narrow standards on any field presumptuous enough to call itself artificial intelligence is, in the light of the task confronting it, misplaced. However, Penrose and all others who work the field or question the possibility of artificial intelligence open up a larger question. They open up the very nature of the field of artificial intelligence. Clearly the field is important and clearly it has, if you'll pardon the pun, made headway. The question becomes, how to label the field to dethrone such pretension; to strive for more modest objectives. I propose we call that field, Artificial Stupidity Studies. Then those who work and write about neural networks, data bases, megaflops, and parallel computing, those who are practiced in the field can get on with their contributions to natural stupidity. ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITYWhat is lacking, then, in all this work on artificial intelligence is a glimpse of the other regions of the larger paradigm in which it occupies but a small niche. By far the largest region of that paradigm is the study of naturally (the immune system for example) and artificially stupid systems (see below for examples). I believe that there are some general points one could make about structures and functions of stupidity that would contribute to a scientific study of stupid systems in parallel with the quest for artificial intelligence. The most general proposition I can derive is: A society is naturally stupid when it lacks the means to reflect on its own behavior and modify it in ways that ensure the well being of its members and the natural and social environment upon which it depends for survival. A corollary proposition sets forth the character of artificial stupidity: A society is artificially stupid when it has the means to reflect on its own behavior and ensure the well being of its citizens but fails to do so. Such structural stupidity is functional in many ways; outdated traditions are preserved, ancient enmities enjoyed, archaic religions celebrated, antiquated privileges reproduced and villains refreshed to the April Day. I suggest some of the more obvious advantages of working in artificial stupidity in passing, for example, I can imagine a group of clinical stupologists advising the government. However the point of this essay is, primarily, explication of the elements of artificially stupid systems. So, let us consider the nature of artificial stupidity and the features of really stupid systems. Definitions: All really good sciences take particular care to define their terms carefully. I would not want to be accused of sloppy thinking when it comes to the nature of stupidity so I offer these more rigorous definitions. Stupid comes from the Latin, stupere, meaning stunned. It calls forth the image of a thinking animal which, for a while, has lost its ability to monitor its surroundings and adjust to the exigencies there. The referent of the adjective stupid, is then, any competent system which exists in an informationally rich environment but is incapable of using that information. It is easy to mistake stupidity for its close cousin, ignorance. Ignorant societies may be stupid, of course, but one should not confuse the two. Ignorant systems do not have access to information; or having access to information, do not have the means to process it. Stupid systems, on the other hand, have access to information and have the means to process data but fail to do so; thus the connection between stupidity and its cognate, stupor. Then, too, there are dumb societies. Dumb societies are societies which have heads of state that speak for their citizens in a voice that is very different from that of the general population. Societies such as the Union of South Africa or El Salvador are exemplars of the genre. One can be certain that, whatever the heads of state in those countries say, it will not be what the people would say if they had a voice of their own. Much as Dr. Hannibal Lecter bit off the lips of his victims in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, those who control the media in church, state, and marketplace steal the voices of their victims and leave them as silent as lambs who go quietly to their own slaughter. The word, dumb, comes from the Gothic word, dumbs, meaning dull or stupid. Modern usage carries the sense of silent, without speech. The word can have several meanings laced into it from a dozen cultures. Some meanings in usage come from 'stutter' or 'stammer.' Only a few translations take the meaning of 'dull.' Some actually mean stupid. The meaning of silent is preferred since dumb was used to translate the negation of the Greek, phogos, meaning voice. Dumb societies then, are those in which most people are rendered silent. We shall mention features of societies which capture the sense of voicelessness and well as silent but certainly not stupid. Dumb societies, with good theory and good politics have a lot of promise. Naturally stupid systems are bathed in a sea of data and fail to notice it. In artificially stupid societies, the data are collected, they are processed; they may even be used. However such data are mediated by structures of privilege and/or professions and thus reduced in their timeliness, accuracy, or availability to the general population. Stupidity is not won, it is earned by designing a society in such a way that, given a magnificence information flow technology, it is informationally poor and interactively deficient. Artificially Stupid Societies As I am a sociologist, I will take as my example and use as my data, the elements of artificial stupidity found in societies generally and in American society in particular. I would not want the reader to think that the essay is particularly disloyal or unpatriotic: I would think that one could take any society in the world at random and generate the same points. I invite the really intelligent reader to make a parallel and simultaneous survey of one or more other societies as one follows the points below. A particularly astute reader could, doubtlessly, simultaneously analyze sample societies from each of the eight or so naturally stupid blocs of countries emerging in the naturally stupid new world order. The Architecture of Artificial StupidityIn order for a society to be adjudged artificially stupid, it would have to have a complex architecture for the acquisition, storage and retrieval of information that is available but not put to use in the solution of its central problems or the resolution of pressing issues. Such societies use advanced knowledge capacities to solve trivial problems and ignore more grievous problems in the various environments in which it must live. To rephrase the epigram of Rene Dubos, to be stupid, one must 'Think locally; act globally. An artificially stupid society would have great libraries, hundreds of universities, dozens upon dozens of professional disciplines, thousands of professional journals, tens of thousands of scientists, tens of thousands of classes with hundreds of thousands of students all busily making hypotheses, gathering data, surveying results and publishing findings. Out of all this would come knowledge which would serve the information needs of some to exploit others. An artificially stupid society would have supercomputers and huge data banks. It would have satellites that can image any and all electromagnetic radiations in any given wave length. It would have telephones, televisions, fax, xerox machines and personal computers by the millions yet none of this would be linked to the study and solution of social problems that debilitate it; that subvert it; that pollute it, that criminalize its corporate officers and its street urchins. Still less would an artificially stupid society ever measure its own stupidity and locate itself on an ordinal scale of stupidity among all such stupid societies. Thus the authentic self-knowledge of a society would be displaced by a profound but disconnected knowledge of some of its parts. Measuring Stupidity Most people who are into tests and measurements try to measure intelligence but few deal with stupidity as a topic in and of itself. This is stupid and thus preserves the natural capacity of a society for stupidity. An artificially stupid society would have the capacity to measure its own stupidity and, of course, squirrel the information away. If we were to quantify stupidity, I suspect we would try to derive an estimate of the degree to which it avoids good data. I propose to call this estimate, a stupidity quotient--or SQ. The SQ score of a society would require an estimate of the data available over the data used times 100. For example, if sociology, economics and political science were to, in fact, produce all the relevant data a society requires to solve its more crippling social problems, and if that society used but 1/10th of that data for policy purposes, then a society would have an SQ of 1000 (and thus appear to be smart). But a really stupid society would take care not to encourage its social sciences to collect relevant data but rather to collect data useful to perpetuate its own natural stupidity. I have given thought to the advantages of stupidity to such societies. In the first instance, such a society would limit the quest for its own authentic self knowledge and thus the necessity to change would be dramatically lowered. The reduction in the necessity to adjust to changes in its environment, is of course artificially manufactured, hence artificial stupidity. Reflexivity. A naturally stupid society, then, is organized to avoid knowledge about much of its own behavior. It avoids many kinds of data about its own major social problems. It has no way of knowing about debilitating trends in its major institutions. If there happen to be data sets which suggest the possibility that existing internal social relations produce social problems, the really stupid society takes care to blame its own problems on outside agents or upon those at home whom it excludes from policy processes. Thus artificial stupidity is achieved by means of externalizing causal agency while internalizing ignorance. A naturally stupid society declines to gather comparative data with which to measure its own failings against the successes of other societies in health care, child care, housing, literacy and such. If such data are available, say from the United Nations Yearbook or from the International Monetary Fund or from the C.I.A., it is not used to match its own performance against other societies (but see the exception below). Still less are cross-cultural studies in crime, child care, health systems, resources for senior citizens or housing policy produced and distributed to the general public. Artificially stupid societies, on the other hand, use comparative data to polish its own halo and decry its main competitors. Thus variety, options, and alternatives are artificially eliminated. A naturally stupid society would not be able to identify a really serious pathology until that pathology had passed the point of no return. However an artificially stupid society would know about its homeless, its crime rates, its infant mortality rates and its suicide rates among teenagers and senior citizens but it would do nothing constructive about them. Much like a person who has gangrene of a finger and watches it turn black and fall off, a really stupid society would look at the data about inequality and distortion in its major institution and then go on to play golf, bowl or watch Monday Night Football. One can learn much about artificial stupidity from its more adept practitioners. Mike Royko tells us that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Mayor Daley, Boss of Chicago, helped build housing for the affluent overlooking the lake front but taxed those who lived in salt-box houses to pay for the land and to provide the infra-structure for such housing. He was aided by Congressman Dawson who delivered the Black vote but did nothing for them other than to protect those who ran the policy numbers, prostitution, narcotics and disemployment while firmly ignoring segregation policies in schools, firms, police and hospitals of Chicago. In terms of social control, a really stupid society would put more and more people in prison while ignoring the social factors which produce criminality. One would wait until the cost of police, prison, and probation exceeded the cost of child care, effective schooling and full employment programs. Then, once safely pass the point of no return, such a society would continue to put more and more people in prison, build more prisons to accommodate them and brutalize the inmates so that they are more likely to return to a life of crime thus maintaining its structural stupidity. A naturally stupid society, lacking information about its debt ratio, its real income, its ability to produce wealth and about the social problems mentioned above, would continue to increase national debt, consumer debt and foreign debt until it exceeded the point at which it could avoid bankruptcy. An artificially stupid society would collect tax the poor to fund programs that benefit the rich thus eliminating the base for taxes upon which its own problem solving capacity depends. Grants, tax holidays, free tax zones, tax rebates and tax abatement for the rich are most helpful to artificial stupidity since the rich do not need better housing, safer autos, more education or pollution control. One can lower the demand cycle by taxing the poor; by disemploying them; by lowering wages or by increasing prices. Thus one can give the dramaturgical appearance that there is no real need for decent housing, effective education, or pollution control since there is no market demand for them. Info-cryption Artificially stupid societies are designed to conceal or withhold information from those who need it by a variety of means. The USA, as a case in point, has developed artificial stupidity to an art form, i.e., its stupidity is crafted by tens of thousands of highly paid artisans. It has very sophisticated information processing capacities. All that technology is narrowly focussed and used to serve the information needs of the most powerful which, in the USA, begin with the military and end with multinational finance corporations. Profoundly stupid societies give those with money and power effective control over the deployment of whatever research capacity it has. Those who are closest to the problems and in possession of the best data are systematically excluded from setting research programs or providing information about the faults and flaws in a society while those who benefit from existing conditions are selected as sponsors or experts in such problems. Much as a stupid shepherd would ask a wolf what is killing the sheep, a stupid society would ask American doctors why minority children have higher death rates than those in Nicaragua or Cuba. They would argue for free enterprize and thus exclude still more kids from prenatal care, vaccination, food and a clean environment. Likewise one would ask professors why students fail; ask owners why workers go on strike; ask racists why Blacks are not in college; ask men why women are raped. In the USA, the best computers, best satellites, best scientists and best software are focussed upon the problematics set by military and by multinational corporate elites while other social institutions are starved for information. Much as great cathedrals exist in societies which systematically murder their neighbors signal failing grades in MQ, great edifices of learning, knowledge and information amidst hovels, shacks, and huts filled with ignorant, frustrated and violent denizens, signal those societies with the highest SQ scores. Artificially stupid societies permit a few people to have a monopoly on information and sell it for profit, status or political power. Societies which have a lot of information about health and medical matters and which permit 700 thousand doctors to keep 150 million others waiting for it is an artificially stupid society. Monopolies by lawyers on law and legal matters as well as copyrights, patent laws, licensing and registration of trademarks and proprietary information all work to increase the artificial stupidity of a society. The remainder of the information flow capacity of a thoroughly stupid society is given over to sports, soap operas, nature shows and trivia quiz games on the commercial networks. Such networks constitute cheerleaders during wars of economic predation and serve as PR agents for corporations which close factories, abandon cities, pollute oceans and conspire with each other to fix prices. Again, in America if not in the world, broadcast networks and news monopolies enable the nation to increase its SQ. Although the Public Broadcast System and National Public Radio with its in-depth news reports and its critical documentaries threaten to lower the overall SQ of the Nation, the Nixon administration took steps to maintain the structural stupidity of the country. It opened the door for commercial sponsorship of PBS programs. In turn, private corporations funneled its monies into nature shows, concerts, sports programming, conservative commentary, money and stock reports and other kindred programming which helped keep the SQ score in the upper ranges of all societies. Perhaps the largest single body of experts engineering artificial stupidity are in the advertizing industry and its close cousin, Public Relations. This industry absorbs $200 billion (1990 figures) to manufacture images in lieu of quality. It uses the best artists, best musicians, best actors, best cinematographers and best engineers to manufacture images of quality, images of utility and images of necessity for cheap, useless, and even harmful products. It uses the best ideas from psychology and the most clever innovations in stage, screen, radio, or religion to shape the desires and needs of consumers, voters, taxpayers, students, women and children. It uses advanced demographics and social research data to create the dramaturgical impression of greatness in product, in education or in health care for those who have the price to pay $250,000 or more for a 30 second ad. The advertizing industry uses the liveliness and loveliness of human sexuality to peddle ugly dead things. It uses the elegance and beauty of sports as an envelope into which to transfer human desire from human beings toward beer, batteries, panty hose, muscle cars or military goods. The advertizing industry has created the postmodern condition and is using postmodern art, music, comedy and color to redeem it in a fictive world is creates on television, in magazines, political campaigns and history books. An intelligent being might think that there are better uses to which postmodernity might be put. Such selective use of whatever intelligence capacity of which a society is capable is most functional to the preservation of the natural stupidity of the nation. Were the same resources available to deal with housing, health care, child care or to problems of crime, the stupidity quotient of a society would decline precipitously. Tunnel vision produces, in a way of speaking, a crises in artificial stupidity; too much knowledge seeking too few outlets. Info-funneling Artificially stupid societies funnel emancipatory knowledge to the sector of the population least interested in acting upon it. For example, if one were to have a really intelligent documentary on warfare, poverty, crime, gender or racial inequality, a naturally stupid system would do as we do, show it on PBS whose audience is limited to those who benefit from its structural stupidity or to those who are powerless to act upon the data. Really fine universities contribute to artificial stupidity by confining their enrollment to children of the upper middle classes or by suborning the children of the lower classes with enticements of wealth, power, and status were they to abandon their ties to friends, family, church and town; one must deny one's ethnic or class origins if one is to be welcomed in standard American academia. Thus, any realistic estimate by professors of the ravages of corporations would be neutralized since accurate and indicting information about corruption, venality and betrayal of the public interest by state bureaucrats or by corporate executives would be safely confined to those who benefit from venality and crime. Artificially stupid societies use a self-fulfilling prophecy to limit the intelligence of those in the lower strata of wealth, power and status. Thus women are taught that they are naturally witless and hair-brained pieces of fluff when, in fact if stupid at all, they are but artificially stupid. Minorities are taught assiduously by songs, jokes, movies and legal barriers that they are an inferior race and thus not worth the effort to teach nor worth the effort to consult relative to policies which affect their own lives. In similar fashion, intelligent reports about economics, politics, or social institutions are confined to scholarly books, journals, or conferences with the general public carefully separated from whatever emancipatory potential they entail. Public dissemination of intelligent work is priced and marketed in such a way as to restrict it to professions or to larger corporations which then preserve the structural stupidity of that society by careful use of the limited supply of intelligence. Stupefying Language Naturally stupid societies can maintain their stupidity by careful tailoring of language systems. Subversion of comprehensibility is a basic element of artificial stupidity; a stupid society takes care to keep whatever intelligent information it has about its own behavior or about the environment in which it dwells, wrapped carefully in language that is esoteric, strident, poly-syllabic, poorly organized or otherwise off-putting. Medical information is withheld from patients by teaching physicians to scribble in Latin. Legal information is hidden from people by putting it in the smallest possible print and the dumbest possible jargon. Political issues are displaced by shibboleths, slogans and patriotism wrapped in yellow ribbons. Market information is wrapped around the neurotic compulsions of people for sex, status, power and love. Any effort to make scholarly language lively, enjoyable, angry, engaging or down-right fun is discouraged by stupid scholars, stupid teachers or stupid authors since wit and antic joy is hostile to stupor. Artificial RationalityNumbers are the natural language of stupidity since they have neither wit nor wisdom. Artificially rational societies force its scientists to encode all of the more interesting and relevant data into numbering systems. The scientist who can package the most data in the smallest, most obscure package is the scientist who is given the highest awards. Nobel prizes are given for two pages of equations on economics, astrophysics or genetics. Artificially stupid societies treat poetry, song, and graffiti as if they weren't packed full of knowledge and human understanding. Such wise and wonderful wit are left bereft of prize or pride in synthetically stupid societies. This may not seem stupid but one should remember that social life is an immensely complex and interconnected whole. Quantification is a process by which information is systematically discarded as the incalculable richness, variability and strangeness of social life are converted into words and words into numbers. Then the numbers themselves are condensed and delimited in such a way that, by the time they are retrieved, almost all of the information has been discarded. That way it is possible to generate nice clean theoretical statements--statements which are the last distillate of numerical stupidity. Numbers further numbify those who are bombarded by them since those who use them do not distinguish ordinal and nominal scales on the one side and interval and rational numbering systems on the other, thus giving their data an artificial rationality that cannot be recognized by innumerate citizens. Numerologists pick and chose among the many dimensions of phase- space to create the dramaturgical appearance of accuracy, precision and truthfulness but fail to mention that, had they sampled another region of phase-space, they would have had to report contrary results in such things as the dangers of low level radiation, the causal connection between cancer and tobacco, or the harmful effects of malnutrition on infants. Stupefying Universities Universities make several important contributions to the structural stupidity of a nation. Large classes, impersonal processing, irrelevant course requirements and inferior instructors all contribute their share to naturally stupid societies but there is a lot more that can be done to prevent intelligence. Selective screening of students does much to stupefy a nation. Again, if an educational system does its share to exclude or to expel women, Blacks, Chicanos, Indians and the children of the working class, it builds great reservoirs of ignorance in the general population upon whom great stupidities depends. Schools assiduously teach young people to take education seriously when it should be fun. Schools teach young people tons of stuff that they can never use and wonder why it is forgotten. Schools teach the literature of dead white males as if those in living color had nothing of interest to say. The more linear and impersonal the stuff is, the more important professors say it is when, in fact, the more mystery and magical a thing it, the more engrossing it is. The liveliest students with the liveliest imagination are dumped out of the school system leaving only those who will sit quietly long hours enduring boring and useless lectures given by indifferent and arrogant teachers. The thought is that, if one will sit quietly taking notes for 12, 16, or in the case of psychiatrists, 20 years, one can be entrusted with any really stupid task. Artificial stupidity is functional to the structure of class, gender and racial privilege and is to be encouraged by any society wishing to preserve its larger stupidities. Again, estimate of SQ are easily derivative; one simply takes the total number of women (or Blacks or Indians or Chicanos) in the general population as the numerator; install the number of women (etc) actually in university as the denominator and one has a quick and dirty reading of the stupidity quotient of a society. There is much more to be done to refine such scores but, as a crude indicator, it is not off by any magnitude. For example, Women can be systematically routed into some of the more stupefying disciplines (home economics, physical education, teaching or social work) while men are routed through the more demanding (but still tunneled) disciplines such as engineering, military science [sic], medicine, law, or agriculture. Land grant universities offer a model for structurally stupid societies to emulate while such elites universities such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale contribute to artificial stupidity in quite another way; they offer good education to safe constituencies. Notre Dame, Alabama, Nebraska, Florida State and University of Nevada at Las Vegas manage to maintain their contribution to structural stupidity by emphasizing football, basketball or track while disdaining any effort to build an intelligent knowledge process. One can say with confidence and pride that a football player or basketball star coming out of Notre Dame or UNLA is as ignorant about society and nature as they were when they entered, or perhaps, more so. It is not an easy accomplishment and should be acknowledged for its contribution to the general stupidity of a society. Stupefying Faculty A society with an extensive educational system, a plethora of social problems and the unused capacity to solve them requires a special kind of a faculty if it is to maintain first place on an SQ scale. In American universities, professors make their special contribution to artificial stupidity. Sociology faculty teach the children of the lower classes that stratification is functional: someone has to do the tedious and the dirtiest jobs at the lowest possible wages or the stratification system won't function. Everyone knows that women, workers and minorities must function as if they were stupid or a structurally stupid society will fall apart. Everyone knows that strong democracy is not possible and were it instituted in the work place, in the market place or in the university, the whole stupid society would collapse. Sociology faculty teach children of the upper middle classes that their own privileged place in society is the result of merit, which, presumably, one day they will display in their display of artificial rationality. Sociologists teach premed students that their studies are much harder than is the labor of the farmer or the factory hand therefore they deserve higher wages after they graduate. They teach lawyers that their work is much more important to society than is food or housing work therefore lawyers deserve to earn 5, 10, and 20 more than farmers or carpenters. Sociologists teach their students that sociology is the queen of the sciences therefore they should never entertain a critique of it. Economists teach students in economics that there is an invisible hand that will, someday, make everyone wealthy and prosperous if only some people stay poor and in ill health now so some can be wealthy and prosperous. The data from worker-owned and operated firms are discretely neglected since they tend to show that costs are lower, quality higher, profits larger, absenteeism absent and worker moral higher that are firms owned by the leisure class. Political science professors teach their students that America is a democratic society but, happily, fail to mention that it is run by some 200,000 members of elite clubs, schools, corporate firms. They teach students that a country run by a few special interest groups is a pluralist country and therefore a democratic nation. They argue that when a citizenry votes for one of two candidates--both preselected by corporate and conservative interests--that such a process is a democratic one. Students are kept assiduously ignorant of the fact that doctors, lawyers, merchants, corporation executives and organized crime bosses get together regularly at clubs, conferences, retreats and restaurants to make sure that this invisible hand squashes opponents, critics and nay-sayers while it fixes prices, assigns market share, divides up whole continents and organizes blacklists. Psychologists teach students that all behavior, all morality and all criminality is a product of the single individual acting alone out of anger and anxiety left over from potty training or from nipple biting. Infantile desires and frustrations are blamed for crime rather than disemployment, compulsive consumerism, racial hatred, profit rates or nationalism. Morality is never a function of a whole social formation but only the separate acts of a person who follows the rules. Criminality is not generated by the everyday norms and values of a society but by the private greed or impulsive violence of unloved persons. Mother is blamed for much of what goes wrong in banks, schools, police stations, armies and football teams while father is blamed for what goes wrong in politics. Hydrology researchers, forestry instructors, engineering professors and vet med teachers all contribute to the artificial stupidity of a society by their enthusiastic service to whatever and whomever has the funds for research. Ag profs in california invent hard and tasteless tomatoes so multinational food companies can lower labor costs. Landowners in Pakistan want to hog all land so they hire 'modernization teams' to build agricultural systems that only big farms can use and irrigations systems that are too costly for small farmers. Plywood companies want cheap timber so foresters strip a forest of its many species and replant one quick growing pine and thus impoverish the natural variety of a forest and its inhabitants. Infoxication. Naturally stupid societies spend a lot of time in praise of themselves. They are self intoxicating. A society organized to behave stupidly gathers information about its own behavior, filters out the negativities, broadcasts its positivities and institutes a cadre of publicists (called professors, priests, politicians, and reporters) to redefine negativities and to celebrate positive accomplishments. Such self administered info-toxins produce ecstacy and bliss but do little for self knowledge, self healing and self renewal. People who fail to admire their own society mindlessly, enthusiastically, boisterously are driven off, excluded from policy processes and shunned as unpatriotic. The recent events in the Persian Gulf are helpful to a theory of naturally stupid societies. The Iranian media, clergy, academy and state officials dutifully joined Saddam Hussein in labelling Americans devils, demons, beasts and Satans. American reporters, professors, priests and local politicians worked assiduously to celebrate America while reviling and upbraiding Saddam Hussein as a Hitler. Good looking anchor men and women everywhere cheerfully label anyone and every one 'enemy,' 'terrorist,' 'criminal,' or 'subversive' as defined by their presidents and prime ministers. Structurally stupid societies are unable to see any thing worthy in other societies. This is most helpful in engineering the death or destruction of others. Environmental Obtusity Any society, wishing to organize itself as a artificially stupid system would be careful to avoid any real understanding of its environment. Much as a person who is blind, deaf, tasteless, and untouchable, such a society ignores any data from the outside. Artificially stupid societies do not monitor the harm it does to other countries, to future generations or to the environment in which it must function. The advantages of environment obtusity are great indeed; obtuse societies do not have to change, and if they are powerful enough, can force the external environment to change to accommodate its natural stupidity. Indeed, its very stupidity calls forth the technologies of coercion which, themselves obviate the necessity of intelligence. The recent events in the Persian Gulf are instructive to a theory of environmental obtusity. President Bush and his administration did not need to know anything about the politics, culture, or history of the Persian Gulf. They could simply bomb and kill until the peoples there did what we wanted them to do. Indeed, it was most helpful to a structurally stupid program to keep as much knowledge about the history and politics of the Mideast from the general public as was possible. Again, most of that which was intelligent was confined to National Public Radio to which almost nobody listens. Z Magazine had some good stuff but, again it was strident and offputting. Artificially stupid societies are greatly strengthened when its home-grown dissidents artificially isolate themselves from the general public. Estimates of EOQ are easily derived. One simply takes the number of wars in the world, add the number of nations which use force on its own minorities, multiply by Young's constant and divide by the number of cases brought before the World Court at the Hague. Young's Constant is derived by taking the value of all the food shipped out of the third world as a denominator and using the reciprocal of the value of the arms shipped into the third world as the numerator of the Constant. When the constant remains the same, environmental obtusity is guaranteed even if peace breaks out. If one were bright but lazy, one could just count up the number of cops and soldiers, divide by the total number of people in a city, state or nation and get the same score. ConclusionThere is, arguably, a lot more one could say about naturally stupid societies and, by extension, naturally stupid systems but, there is a danger. One should avoid thinking generally if one is be preserve one's social acceptability but one is specially at risk if one delves too deeply into the structure and function of stupidity. There is always the danger that, as mentioned at the onset, that theories of naturally stupid systems and naturally intelligent systems converge. One might find out that much intelligence is in the service of a greater stupidity. Sounds stupid but there you are: intelligence in the service of a monumental stupidity. That's artificial stupidity for you. The best way to minimize the danger is, of course, to discard essays in structural stupidity before they become a fad or fashion. 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