Are we living in the golden age of stupidity? This new book takes a deep dive

When Stuart Jeffries saw people turn their backs on science during the pandemic, and watched Trump legitimise a loathing for expertise, he had an idea for a book. He talks to Suzanne Harrington about his short history of stupidity

US President Donald Trump speaking to the media at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. Picture date: Monday June 16, 2025.

Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? Certainly, all the signs are there.

Across the human spectrum, from climate breakdown (caused by us) to incompetent dictators (elected by us) to the anti-science movement (created by us), we appear to be having a prolonged wallow in deep stupidity. No matter how much we develop, it seems our stupidity develops right alongside us, mutating to keep up.

To put our current stupidity into context, journalist and author Stuart Jeffries has written the clever, funny A Short History of Stupidity, folding in everyone from Socrates to Jade Goody, Voltaire to Trump, Hitler to AI. He takes us on a fascinating, illuminating dive into ancient stupidity, modern stupidity, structural stupidity, mass stupidity, digital stupidity — you get the idea. Unless of course you’re stu...

“This book came out of covid, from people not respecting science, not respecting those who have spent their lives researching vaccines to save lives,” he says.

“This is a kind of stupidity that seems to be growing,” he adds. “Trump has legitimised a loathing for expertise, while valorising people who don’t know much. That American idea of being able to do whatever you want is linked with stupidity.”

Jeffries’ book asks some big questions about stupidity. Is it strictly a human thing, or can animals be stupid too? (My dog, a breed used by the police, is thick as mince.) Do IQ tests measure stupidity, and if not, why not?

If we’re so clever, why did we give phrenology and eugenics credence for so long? What about racist stupidity? Why did the Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg have high IQs? Could genetic engineering eliminate stupidity, or is it too valuable to be rendered extinct? And what, exactly, is stupidity in the first place?

Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage speaking during a campaign event at Stafford Showground, Stafford, whilst campaigning for this week's local elections. Picture date: Wednesday April 30, 2025.

The five horsemen of the stupid apocalypse, says Jeffries, are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin — “indulge a little British parochialism — the politically cataclysmic clown shows of” Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. He describes these men as “masters of post-truth stupefaction” who “subvert democracy by making their electors weapons of their own stupidity”. He’s not wrong.

“The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves to be as smart as he is,” wrote Viennese satirist Karl Kraus about Hitler, almost 100 years ago. Had he written it this morning, it would equally apply.

The problem is that nobody likes to think of themselves as stupid. “To recognise one’s stupidity, one has to be clever,” says Jeffries. “If you are stupid, you probably won’t recognise you are.”

Or as Ricky Gervais put it, “When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. It’s only painful for others. The same applies when you’re stupid.”

This is not, however, a sneery book which punches down on ordinary ignorance — which differs greatly from stupidity. Many ignorant people are clever, just as many educated people are stupid.

“Jade Goody didn’t know how to pronounce East Anglia, and people laughed at her when she was on Big Brother,” says Jeffries. “But then she had the wit to monetise [her ignorance]— she became a millionaire before she died. She was very astute.”

Jeffries says that science can’t measure stupidity — because it’s a judgment rather than a measurable fact. It has nothing to do with IQ tests. 

“Stupidity evolves, it mutates and thereby eludes extinction,” he says. And, he adds, it’s big business. Just look at the levels of stupidity monetised by oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who called the early users of his social media platform “dumb fucks”.

Stuart Jeffries.

Or all the self-help books — not aimed at the stupid, but at those dealing with the stupid (that is, you or I, who are definitely not stupid, right?). Titles include How To Deal With Idiots; Surrounded By Idiots; The Psychology of Stupidity; The Stupidity Paradox. And perhaps most usefully, Why Your Cat Thinks You’re An Idiot.

“The ancients didn’t see stupidity as a cognitive lack,” he continues. “They saw it as a failure of soul, of something evil that you could be helped out of. That was the function of education.”

Like poverty, will stupidity always be with us? “If we define poverty relatively, some people are going to be relatively poor — and if we define intelligence relatively, some people are going to be relatively stupid,” he says. “But often stupidity is a term of abuse — it has been weaponised as a way of controlling people and subjecting them to processes which serve to exclude them.”

In his chilling chapter on Stupid Eugenics, Jeffries mentions American women having forced hysterectomies in the 1960s because “they were deemed too stupid to breed”. As many as 100,000 Americans were sterilised in the 20th century, in a “misbegotten war against stupidity.” The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who coined the term ‘banality of evil’ about Adolf Eichmann at Nuremberg, equated stupidity with a lack of empathy. “It was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous,” she said of Eichmann. “[His] resistance to ever imagine what another person is experiencing.”

“There’s a connection between stupidity and evil,” says Jeffries. “A lack of emotional intelligence allows people to commit vile acts.”

He talks about “higher” stupidity as a failure of intelligence, rather than a lack of intelligence: “Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are the leading virtuosos of this higher stupidity.” That is, stupidity as moral blindness.

“Clever stupidity is not an oxymoron,” he adds. “Intelligence and stupidity are not each other’s negatives… they cohabit uneasily in every society, in every individual.”

President Donald Trump, left, claps as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk prepares to depart after a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show on Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

So is the cult of Trump inherently stupid? Or, like the anti-science movement, are his followers choosing an elevated form of stupidity by ignoring hard facts? (Trump, when he refers to himself as “a very stable genius”, is a gold-standard example of the Dunning-Kruger effect — a cognitive bias whereby you vastly overestimate your own intelligence and capacity).

“What amazes me is that Trump’s blue-collar base [elevated] a guy profiting from inherited wealth,” says Jeffries. 

“Why would Americans admire that? It’s so weird to see that in America, where the dream is that anybody can become anything. That you can rise up from nothing. Trump didn’t do that. Why did they buy into him? He’s clearly not delivering for them.

“Are they very stupid to have placed their faith in such a wicked man posturing as their saviour, who is in fact damning them to more poverty and ignominy than they’re used to?” he wonders.

“You could argue that Trump is weaponising a kind of stupidity, a kind of folksiness and ignorance. In that respect, he’s not too different from Jade Goody in that they were both thinking about how best to utilise ignorance.”

The key difference, however, is that while Goody harnessed her own ignorance to make some cash via reality TV, Trump harnessed the collective ignorance of his reality TV-watching base to gain immense power.

“I think he’s evil in the Hannah Arendt sense,” muses Jeffries.

Yet Trump is merely a symptom, a cipher — not a cause. “Maybe we are living in Peak Stupidity,” says Jeffries cheerfully.

“But I think we have only reached a peak, not the peak.”

So what is peak stupidity? The obvious zenith of human idiocy will be when we allow ourselves to become extinct because it was economically less viable not to. No other species — not even amoebas — are that stupid.

“It’s quite impressive, really,” he laughs. “In a way, our very intelligence is a sign of our stupidity — the way in which we’ve used our intelligence to destroy ourselves and our planet is extreme stupidity.”

This is all so depressing that we roar with laughter. So will AI save us?

“We think we’ve created [technological] tools for us, but everything we do — how we interact, how we communicate — has been shaped by technology,” he says.

“We are much more likely to be malleable to the machines, rather than the other way around.”

Jeffries explains how in the 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the 1960s, the working week would be down to a leisurely three days, and how US anthropologist David Graeber thought that by the turn of the century we’d be flying around on jetpacks.

“The reality is we’re working much harder, longer hours for much worse contracts,” says Jeffries. He worries about governments being blinded by AI. “The UK government is really pro-AI, as a way of solving our economic problems. Blithely engaging without considering any downsides. Is this peak stupidity?”

He pauses. “We’re being hacked all the time. The Russians are probably listening in right now, thinking, ‘These fools!’” He pauses again.

“Maybe technology is making the tide of stupidity rise faster?”

Keen to end on a positive note, I ask him if he has hope for the future. A future with a bit less stupidity?

“Anyone who makes an argument for a benign future is an idiot,” he says. “I can only see things getting worse.”

A short history of stupidity by Stuart Jeffries

SIX COMMANDMENTS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST STUPIDITY (with thanks to Socrates)

Greek philosopher Socrates in front of the National Academy of Athens

• Everything is open for inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to get to the truth, not to win arguments or make myself feel good. Questioning is good, and admitting error is even better.
• Arguments are met with arguments – not character assassinations, offence, or smears. ‘You smell’ is not a valid argument. I don’t defer to you because you’re shouting louder, but because of the quality of your reasoning.
• Popular opinion and easy consensus are not to be trusted.
• Good manners are necessary for good argument. Shouting and name-calling should be avoided, although irony and sarcasm can be deployed sparingly to know-it-alls.
• Giving or taking offence undermines rational enquiry.
• I stay humble. There’s a good chance I am wrong, or don’t know everything about everything.