Remember that guy or girl or whatever variation of human you ran into that day who did or said something that got you thinking “What an idiot?!” Maybe they spoke so much nonsense with so much confidence, and it baffled you how little they knew about what they were talking about, and the thought of trying to correct them just felt like a waste of your time and energy. Maybe they broke anything they were in contact with for more than 2 minutes because they were too clumsy. Or maybe they carried out the simplest task in the most complicated way imaginable and when you showed them an easier way, they just said (rather irritatingly might I add) “So now you think you’re better than me?” For some of you, this might be someone who lives in the same house, works at the same office or studies in the same class. For the lucky ones it was a chance run-in with this infuriating species of a person.
Well, it so happened that I was that guy.
Yea, I was the guy who picked up his auntie’s flower vase to admire, and in an attempt to measure its weight, decided a brilliant way to do that was to toss it up and down a bit. I clumsily dropped it. I’m also the guy who very confidently argued with the fuel station employee that the car I was driving was a diesel car and not petrol only to nearly die because the car halted in fast moving traffic. I was the guy who sat on the tv remote and tearfully blamed everyone else for hiding it from me. I was also the guy who decided to “stretch my legs from the bed” after the alarm rung on the day of my interview. All this to say that I have been an idiot in childhood and adulthood, so the other day when I did something idiotic (again), I got thinking about the concept of idiocy. I wondered if I was the only idiot I knew but then I remembered the idiotic things my closest friends had done and laughed in relief. Few things feel better than knowing you’re not the only idiot in town. But then the thought inspired more questions; were there people who were not idiots? People who had mastered the art of life? Were there people who were capable of eating soup without a napkin on their laps because they knew that not a drop would spill onto their pants? Were there people who never tripped over anything and were never caught tongue-tied about important topics like where Paint comes from or whether “your” and “you’re” are interchangeable? Were there guys who always realized when they were wrong and admitted it openly in order to be corrected?
I shuffled through a list of people I thought would fit the bill starting with the humans who raised me and off the bat, memories of blatant idiocy surfaced. I remembered the taste of burnt food, being forgotten at school and having to turn off the tv in the morning because someone dosed off while “watching the news” and I thought “naa, they are definitely idiots”. What about the dignitaries of the world? Presidents and C.E.O.s, Queens and Kings, Popes and Imams. They didn’t fit the bill either, just look at how shitty society is! 100 people own everything and yet society is always crying about poverty and war. Clearly the people running things are also idiots. But what about the scientists and academicians and diplomats, surely, they don’t do idiotic things. History proved me wrong. Drinking urine was once prescribed as a treatment for acne and eczema. People smeared cow dung on their faces and in their hair to cure headaches. Others sacrificed people to appease gods and change the weather. Prominent academicians have snorted all sorts of diabolical substances to “unlock the mysteries of the universe” Like…what? To be fair these people didn’t know better and probably neither do I. But by that logic, one must ask, if people employed idiotic solutions to their problems back then, and wholeheartedly believed in their effectiveness until concrete proof from more advanced technology and research was presented, then which idiotic solutions are we currently employing?
I was dumbfounded. Were we all idiots? Was Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the man with 22 PHDs an idiot? Was Ghandi? Wangari Mathaai? Anne Hathaway? Ngugi wa Thiongo? My goodness!
The question that has been swimming in my head since then is, if we are all idiots, is idiocy such a bad thing? What if we simply accepted that part of being human means we are all to a degree, each an idiot? The fact that not only are we unable to know everything, neither does anyone else. Our brains can only hold so much information, and if there were any words that encapsulated this sentiment, they would be “The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know (some old guy said this)”. The limited perspective of everyone makes it impossible for us to be perfect people. We all make mistakes. We lie. We are clumsy and we all occasionally take a shit (literally and metaphorically).
Is it possible then to adjust our focus from avoiding idiocy to becoming loveable idiots? I think it is. My guess is to start with kindness. When a friend trips and falls in the streets, help them up, dust them off and then laugh at the situation like a good idiot would. When we are confronted about our lies, we could simply acknowledge that maybe we need to do more research on the topic of debate and laugh at ourselves when we find out that we were wrong all along, perhaps even apologize to our counter parts. When we fall in love, we should ask our partners “In what ways are you an idiot?”. I dare say we should even actively do something idiotic once a week, to remind ourselves that this is who we are and it’s okay. Randomly argue with strangers about which country has a better flag, dance to your music in the middle of the street, dress silly, walk silly, laugh silly, take photos with wild animals, try an extreme sport, and enter your office through the window. It certainly breaks the pressure of perfection and as an added bonus allows us to laugh at ourselves. Maybe life isn’t all that deep after all.
Written by Denzel Maniple Everd
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My idiocy, presenting as extreme clumsiness, has once appreciated and neatly shelved by my family as a cute quirk. Until they didn’t.
Of course one soon learns to avoid touching things in showrooms ‘just to admire ko’ and ordering soupy meals on first dates.