It is fascinating how half of the comments on this thread are so off-the-wall and fictitious. Whassup wit dat? Anyway, I am grateful to all of you for at least taking a shot at discussing the question. I know stupidity is not limited to the West. The contrast is that Western ingenuity and initiative has done so many successful thigs that it seems contradictory, or at least anomalous, that it generates at the same time the kind of arrogant, overweening thickheadedness that started, for example, the Missionary Movement and the Temperance Union; not to mention the present political mess. Hard to believe it is the same species, and even harder to believe it is the same culture, broadly speaking.

Frequent mention has been made here of the impact of arrogance and the belief in "superiority" over others. This of course was the great justification for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and combined with the most lop-sided and one-eyed sort of deism, the Crusades, the invasion of the Phillippines, I suppose many other instances of cultural arrogance. To assert you are right and others are wrong means of course that you have to divide yourself away from them, energetically denying any commonality. Of all the mechanisms used by humans to act out aberration on the world stage I think this obsessive separatism is the most responsible for human misery and stupidness. My opinion.


A