The stupidest people are always the ones who think they have the right answers.

Yeah, so getting back to my studies of the ancient world, which is the main part of me, one thing that always excited me was this concept of the ancient Greeks, that more harm is caused in this world by stupid, incompetent people than by evil people, right?

And there's a word in Greek called phronesis, which is a form of wisdom, to use your title here, but it's a form of practical wisdom, to be able to get things done, to navigate through life, navigate through people, to be balanced and get things done, okay?

So what makes people stupid, and right now we have a lot of stupid people in this world, there always have been stupid people, because there are more people on the planet, exponentially there are more stupid people on the planet.

What makes people stupid, and I'm sorry, I'm just going to tell it like it is, is their certainty that they have all the answers.

This is what's going on with our government, this is what's wrong with this or that, this is what people should be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So you're narrowing your focus to this little tiny little rail, something that you heard from somebody else, it's not even your own stupid idea, you've absorbed it on the internet, whatever, and you're going down on this kind of monorail path.

Meanwhile, the world is all around you and you're just going like, zoom, like that, because you're so certain you have the answer.

And when you have leaders, to get back to the Greek thing, when you have leaders who are source certain, they enter a country into a war that they haven't been thought out of, and so the paradigm in ancient culture was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war that ended up kind of being the end of Athenian democracy and of their golden era, right?

And it was the idea, and Thucydides, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, living at that time, he was saying that people, the leaders thought, oh, this will be so easy, and think of all the great things when we go and we take Sicily and we conquer that, the whole world, the Sparta will be destroyed, right?

It wasn't thought through.

They were so certain of the answer that they didn't think of the parameters, right, they didn't think really on a grand strategic level.

So people who are certain of things are very stupid, and when they have power, they're very, very dangerous.

I'm not saying evil people aren't dangerous, but incompetent, stupid people who are so certain, who haven't thought things through, are just as dangerous as evil people.

I think there's far more stupid people than there are evil people as well. Probably, yeah.

Yeah.

It's very interesting to think about where the Venn diagram intersects for people who are always cynical and people who always have the right answer or who always know.

They go hand in hand.

Correct.

Totally overlap, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So, one of your fellow countrymen from 200 years ago, exactly 200 years ago, a gentleman named John Keats, a poet, came up with a concept called negative capability.

And negative capability, he wanted to answer the question was, why is Shakespeare another one of your countrymen?

Why was Shakespeare so brilliant?

Well, his characters were so realistic because he made them as real human beings, and what he could do was, they weren't stick figures.

Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time.

They could be both evil, but also have a strain of goodness inside of them.

They were complex.

Human beings are complex.

And negative capability is the essence of being creative.

It means you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, two thoughts that apparently contradict each other, but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other.

Not pass judgment immediately.

Yeah.

So, you're kind of able to deal with ambiguity, and you're able to say, life isn't that, it isn't that.

It's kind of both at the same time.

That is creativity.

That is real thinking.

You know?

I mean, I could go on and on about my ideas about live ideas and dead ideas, but this is real, live thinking.

I have been playing with an idea that's basically the same thing, just repurposed with a silly meme from me, which is a cognitive superposition.

So, like, how in physics, yes.

And then when you decide, you collapse the superposition down.

But I try to, you know, think in superpositions as much as possible.

There's a very good book written about like that.

It's not perfect.

It's a pretty good book called The Possibility Principle.

You can look that up.

He tries to apply those kind of ideas in physics to day-to-day life in psychology.

It is interesting.

It's worth looking at.