If
you’ve ever happened upon a particularly mind-numbingly stupid edition of a Fox
News show – be it the time Eric Bolling mocked a female fighter pilot by
asking if she could be considered “boobs on the ground” or when Sean Hannity
claimed Halloween was a liberal holiday because it teaches children to “ask for handouts.” – and
asked yourself “How is this level of stupidity possible?
Actor and Monty Python alum
John Cleese has a simple, yet startlingly accurate assessment: Fox News hosts
are so dumb, that they aren’t even smart enough to recognize how dumb they are.
In
a video circulating the web, Cleese is asked about stupidity in the world.
He
says the problem with stupidity is that it breeds further stupidity.
“If
you’re very, very stupid,” he explains, “How can you possibly realize that
you’re very very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how
stupid you are.”
He
then backed up this claim with some actual scientific data by a researcher
named David Dunning at Cornell (if Sean Hannity is reading this, “scientific
data” are those number-y things that make you angry). According to Dunning,
knowing how good you are at something “requires exactly the same skills” as it
would to actually be
good at that thing. To put it another way, you could call it the “it takes one
to know one” effect.
Interestingly,
the philosopher Socrates made this very same point in ancient Greece, when he
discovered to his dismay that he was the smartest person in Athens merely
because he, and he alone, recognized how ignorant he was.
Video follows, please continue.
Video follows, please continue.
For
Cleese, this finding is extremely powerful. It poses a serious problem for
those who want to enlighten others about their ignorance, because that same
ignorance is preventing them from realizing that they don’t know anything.
“And
this explains not just Hollywood,” Cleese concludes, “But almost the entirety
of Fox News.”
So
the next time – probably today – you see that Fox News has someone spouting
utter idiocy into the cameras, pity them. They know not what they do – they’re
simply too stupid.
Author Jameson Parker covers US politics, social justice issues, and
other current events which aren't getting the attention they deserve. Feel free
to follow or drop me a line on twitter.