The convection current of history: Intelligence makes people more powerful. Power makes people stupider.
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The powerful don’t have to listen. They dictate terms. They do the talking.
The powerful don’t have to understand anyone. Everyone flatters their misunderstandings. Everyone fears straining their patience or embarrassing them. The powerful invest their power in forcing the world to assist their decline. They forget how to respect, and gradually become contemptible in the presumptuous belief that any challenge to their perspective is presumption.
They already know what needs knowing. They stop listening and stop learning. What they forget they cannot replenish. They forget what they’ve forgotten, and nobody can remind them.
At points they become vaguely aware of what is happening to them. They try to augment their intelligence with advisers. By now, however, they have become too imperious to be advised. They dictate what they will be taught. They demand that everything flatter their atrophied perspective. If it is difficult to learn, it isn’t worth learning.
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The powerful will learn a fact, but will not suffer an insight. An insight that is not yours doesn’t make sense until you come to understand. The powerful always already understand. What makes sense to them makes sense, and what doesn’t make sense to them is nonsense.
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Only vulnerability can cure the stupidity of power.
Only vulnerability to an other can reawaken the intellect.
The need to know how to evade or influence a powerful other leads to the pursuit of insight.
Pursuit of insight is very painful — we only do it when we have to.
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Individuals, couples, cliques, organizations, companies, classes, parties, nations — every unit of every scale of human culture is vulnerable to hubris.
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A different kind of stupidity afflicts the weak: moralism.
Moralism praises us for not asking the most basic questions about how we ought to live. One simply behaves as one should behave, which is selflessly, altruistically — against one’s own strength, in favor of the interests of the powerful.
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A horrible thing to witness: As the powerful become increasingly decadent and stupid and base, the upper and lower elements of society become less distinguishable. Suddenly the moralistic weak find the powerful easy to identify with. They imagine catching a game and enjoying a beer with their powerful buddy who’s just like them, except he’s worked harder and maybe been luckier.
Then, instead of awe for a distant and unattainable ideal, the weak masses adore and idolize a reflection of themselves. The powerful soak up this adoration, and swell up with the inrush. They strike bold poses and make declarations. Crowds cheer, mandates are declared, action is taken, etc.
The whole thing explodes into a narcissistic fireball of self-worshiping mob idiocy.
When humble learn to shed their humility through the miracle of mob, all sorts of world historically terrible things become possible.