To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
– Voltaire
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 21st, 2010 |
 13 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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That’s a hard double-act to pull off! Stupid people would have trouble remembering when to be polite, after all- forgetfulness is part of stupidity.
Does the reverse work? Can you succeed if you are smart and ill-mannered? Can anyone give examples?
The establishment in Britain overflows with terrifyingly polite and yet eye wideningly stupid people, Nuke… polite and eloquently delivered stupidity is the most dangerous stupidity of all.
Would they really be stupid, or just stupidly advised?
Australia’s very own K.Rudd could often sound very stupid, but he was a smart man who taught himself Mandarin (And then found out that the Chinese don’t actually like foreigners who can speak their language, since they can’t then ‘translate’ criticism away!)
In this Election campaign, the candidates have decided that it’s better to sound a bit robotic and scripted than spontaneously say some thing controversial which will lose the election. They sound stupid, but we know they are not, because of what they were like before this campaign.
My grandmother used to say about people such as the ones Perry describes: “stupid for others, clever for themselves”. Sure, those in the establishment are clearly not clever enough (or just too lazy) to succeed in the open market – that is why they got into the establishment in the first place. But they are nonetheless clever enough to make the best for themselves out of the situation, and the rest of us clever clever people are mostly taking it lying down.
Yes. I have always thought this quote to be profoundly brilliant.
There are almost no exceptions!
Slimy clever, yes. Pompous, even.
AJ Nock:
We have all seen men who were quick witted, accessible to ideas and handy with their management of them, whom we should yet hesitate to call intelligent; we are conscious that the term does not quite fit. The word sends us back to a phrase of Plato. The person of intelligence is the one who always tends to “see things as they are,” the one who never permits his view of them to be directed by convention, by the hope of advantage, or by an irrational and arbitrary authoritarianism. He allows the current of his consciousness to flow in perfect freedom over any object that may be presented to it, uncontrolled by prejudice, prepossession or formula; and thus we may say that there are certain integrities at the root of intelligence which give it somewhat the aspect of a moral as well as an intellectual attribute.
On his death bed, Voltaire was asked to renounce the devil. He looked at those around him and said: “This is no time to be making enemies!”
At least there’s no resident religious nutter on Samizdata.
John B.: sorry, but that is nonsense. There are no such men as described by Plato (surprise), and so either all of us are stupid, or we’d have to admit that those Voltaire refers to as ‘successful’, are not all that stupid after all.
Alisa, I guess it depends on one’s frame of reference –
one’s priorities?
Priorities?
Yes. Whatever is more important.
For me it is the eternal (of which the present is a very important part!) but it does tend to mean that success to me is probably slightly different to whatever it is to a hedge fund manager.
You are basically saying that success is subjective – that goes without saying, of course, but that is also beside the point of Voltaire’s quote.
My apologies.
I take this opportunity to address Alisa:
Alisa, as a resident of Israel perhaps you could give westerners of more easily defended lands (Western Europe, etc) a clearer idea of the true hazards we face?
What I read by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post gives me a lot of food for thought. It seems the stupidity of governments that give way to their enemies is part of the Israeli scene as well as that in Europe.
And that we are in serious trouble.
(Wrench it back onto topic by, yes, success and stupidity must eventually part company, but for a while, it works. Witness us, lurching to our doom in a presumably successful mode but drawing ever closer to destruction.)
John, I don’t necessarily see Islam as the most serious threat to Western civilization (although I by no means dismiss its seriousness), as I think that that title should go to our own elites and establishments. Some liken Islam to cancer, but if I were to stick with the medical line of metaphors, I’d liken our own elites and establishments (including governments, obviously) to the HIV, and Islam to pneumonia and the like (the relatively minor diseases that actually kill many of the HIV victims). In that respect, the situation in Israel is not nearly as bad as it is in the West – although our own betters are doing their, um, best to catch up with their Western counterparts. The reason for their rather limited success being the very real physical threat this country has been living under since its inception – something the West didn’t have to deal with since WWII, and something that keeps forcing regular Israelis to remain more realistic and vigilant (and more faithful to our own culture) than our lords and masters.