When stupidity reigns supreme
Faridah Hameed, MM
Just how much ridiculousness can a country tolerate before it becomes unhinged? Why does it feel like when the subject of faith is on the table, we speak in forked tongues and stand on ‘hollowed’ rather than ‘hallowed’ ground?
Right now, it feels like our screws have come loose and all that’s standing between the peacemakers and the mad men at the gate is a wobbly door.
So, when it all got too much for me, I took refuge at my neighbourhood ‘spa’ for some pampering. And there, in the story of a young Vietnamese girl called Lina, I learned just how much silliness has seeped into our so called tolerant culture.
Lina is a 20-something extremely bubbly girl from Ho Chi Minh city. She fits the comedic stereotypes of Vietnamese manicurist you find on YouTube — in a good way. In under five minutes, she convinced me to do a full mani-pedi (manicure and pedicure) and by the end of the hour, had even pre-sold me on another product.
All this from a girl who didn’t speak a word of English before she came to Malaysia five months ago. But it is her experience with her Malay-Muslim roommates that embarrassed me on how we continue to speak with such insensitivity to those of other faiths.
As we talked about her experience in Malaysia so far, she tells me that she has a good boss and stays in a house with two Malay-Muslim girls. What she says next, just makes my toes cringe.
“I cannot cook in the house,” she says. “You don’t know how to cook?,” I ask. “No,” she answers animatedly. “The girls say if I cook, they cannot eat.” I look surprised. “But why?” I ask in surprise.
“They say I’m not Muslim. They cannot eat food not cooked by Muslim.”
Oblivious to my rising anger at the ridiculousness that she’s been fed, she continues. “But it’s OK, I cut the vegetables and help them prepare the meals and I wash up.”
Though I tell her what she’s been told is absolutely wrong, my words sound hollow even to me. All I can hope for is that she realises we’re not all a bunch of idiots hell bent on showing just how silly we sound to the rest of the world.
Like many Malaysians who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, I have experienced nothing but kindness and understanding from my non-Muslim friends. During Chinese New Year or Christmas, they would ensure that they didn’t serve pork in our presence and would even go so far as cook in a separate pot.
In college, in the US, the cafeteria management cooked eggs separately for Muslim students so that it wouldn’t mix with the bacon and eggs served to the rest.
When others go out of their way to show us respect, why is it that some reciprocate with abject disrespect?
This led to my searching of whether there was such a thing as a ‘Stupidity Index.’ Are human beings truly becoming more stupid or are we simply hearing a lot more stupidity spewing in the media and the airwaves?
This is what I found. Research shows our intelligence as a species is diminishing. The first such known study was done in 1976 in the aptly called ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’ by Italian economist Prof Carlo M. Cipolla.
He made four key observations but two hit home: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation; Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
More recently in 2012, a study by Dr Gerald Crabtree of Stanford University and Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, Professor of Work and Organisational Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, concluded that we no longer need intelligence to survive unlike our ancestors.
Within the last 3,000 years or about 120 generations, they estimate that we have sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability.
Nobel prize winners psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people tend to have “overly favourable and objectively indefensible views of their own abilities, talents and moral character.”
“For example, a full 94 per cent of college professors state that they do ‘above average’ work although it is statistically impossible for virtually everybody to be above average,” said Dunning.
So it comes to this. Science tells us that the universe abhors a vacuum. Unfortunately, in human terms it tends to be filled with a lot of hot air.
It’s time for the Non-Stupid people of the world to unite. We may all have a few screws loose, but like it or not, it’s in our hands to ensure that what intelligence we have doesn’t go the way of the dodo bird.
* Faridah Hameed is the creator of the Language of Power for Women training programmes. Connect with her on Facebook, LinkedIn or her website www.faridahhameed.com
