Humanity's Kidney Stone

Below are four wildly varying examples of a dysfunction that's become like a kidney stone humanity seems unable to pass. We are obliviously unable to recognize—much less diagnose or resolve—this cognitive problem.

In short: our intelligence has become dangerously clumpy. We are towering geniuses when it comes to Them, and blindly yammering morons when it comes to Us.

Matched Set
There are two toxic, flamboyantly unreasonable women in my life who are like colicky toddlers wearing the glittering crowns of haughty queens. Naturally, they hate each other.

Like all maladjusted children, they've learned to rage to get what they want, which they do frequently because nothing else is real for them. The rest of us out here exist solely to assist or impede the getting of what-they-want.

Having exhausted their surrounding ecosystems, they rarely get what they want. But that's lucky for them, because their desires are uniformly stupid. Delusional superiority long ago smothered any facility for learning (learning requires the acknowledgement of deficiency), ensuring a remarkably consistent level of stupidity.

Yet each could sketch a shrewd and detailed profile of the other. In this one field of knowledge—exegesis of the hated—both are brilliant scholars.

Middle East
Talk to any Israeli and you will hear a long litany of Palestinian atrocities. But any Palestinian could offer an equally horrifying litany of Israeli atrocities.

Shrewdly expert in the moral deficiencies of the Other, each side clutches grievances to justify ever more repugnant behavior as they climb symmetrical ladders of barbarity.

MAGA
America's extremists on both the left and right are cartoonishly repugnant. For a clear-eyed accounting and explanation, just ask the other sides. Unless you're perched directly on the precarious center line, one account will have the ring of deep truth while the other seems like caustic lies.

Moderates reserve their most lavish contempt for moderate counterparts on the other side. How can they so blindly excuse their tribe's extremists? Vision is hyperacute in one direction, and entirely blurry the other way.

Leff's Dictum
Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant.


Every profound insight translates, upsettingly, into some impossibly banal cliché. If "Two wrongs don't make a right!" still had some juice to it, I wouldn't need to write this.