Stupidity

Since then, stupidity has taken place along with "fool", "idiot", "dumb", "moron", and related concepts as a pejorative for misdeeds, whether purposeful or accidental, due to absence of mental capacity.

Researchers Michael Klein and Matthew Cancian have reported a declining aptitude among college educated applicants to the Marine Corps over the past 34 years, although this effect was not observed in the general enlisted population.

[6] Researchers Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer, and Aaron Reuben report those born between 1951 and 1980 may have lost an average of 2.6 IQ points from exposure to leaded gasoline.

'"[8] He points out that the player has the advantage of lowering other people's expectations, and so evading responsibility and work; but that he or she may still come through under pressure, like the proverbially stupid younger son.

[10] Otto Fenichel maintained that "quite a percentage of so-called feeble-mindedness turns out to be pseudo-debility, conditioned by inhibition ... Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it".

"[12] In rather different fashion, Doris Lessing argued that "there is no fool like an intellectual ... a kind of clever stupidity, bred out of a line of logic in the head, nothing to do with experience.

"[15] Similarly, Michel Foucault argued for the necessity of stupidity to re-connect with what our articulate categories exclude, to recapture the alterity of difference.

[25] It depicts examples and analyses of stupidity in modern society and media, and seeks "to explore the prospect that willful ignorance has increasingly become a strategy for success in the realms of politics and entertainment".

[26] Idiocracy, a Mike Judge film from 2006, explores a dystopian future America where a person of average IQ is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 500 years later to find that mankind, increasingly dependent on technology built by previous generations that it does not properly maintain or understand, has regressed in intelligence to the standards of current-era mental retardation, and that he has become the de facto smartest person on Earth.

Americans have become so stupid that society faces famine and collapse, and according to Pete Vonder Haar of Film Threat, "...each laugh is tempered with the unsettling realization that [Judge's] vision of mankind's future might not be too far off the mark".