Spaw:

John Wayne said it best in an old Marine Corps flick:

"Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid."

Another angle, though, is that stupidity itself is a byproduct of beliefs like "This is incomprehensible" or "This can't be confronted" or "I'm overwhelmed".

There's a kind of gleeful recklessness that comes when you are close to complete apathetic resignation -- if nothing matters and you can't do anything about it anyway, what the fock... -- and it is tragic that in many instances our parenting and our schooling methods produce this effect, instead of beliefs like "I can make it better if I keep my wits about me" or something similar.

The other side of the problem is that -- IMHO -- there is a place where you have to consult unarticulated affinities and the feel of things in order to know a scene beyond the scope of ordinary data analysis -- but it's one thing to follow your heart after due reflection, and another altogether to translate that into "do whatever you feel like". One is a sensitive path, and the other is the Philistine Way...I know it well, I live just around the corner...