There’s a stark, almost majestic difference between stupid people and idiots — and it’s worth drawing the line with a thick, unforgiving marker. Stupidity, in the classic sense, is simply variation in mental faculties. Not everyone is cut from the same cloth, and not everyone is meant to carve the same statues. When I went to law school, I performed well above the average herd more than once, even snagging first place here and there when papers and commentary were on the menu. I had a knack for distilling absurdly complex legal arcana into something even non-jurists could read without reaching for painkillers. That was a gift — not universal, not required of all, but real.
Then came the boyfriend of a good friend of mine — a mathematician, admitted into one of France’s most prestigious mathematical temples. No small achievement. I tried to step into his world, follow the strange geometry of his thoughts, but it was hopeless. We were built differently, forged for separate domains. So which of us was stupid? Neither. Just different toolkits for different terrains.
Idiots, however, are another species entirely. They can be festooned with academic honors, glittering with accolades, the kind of professional record that makes HR departments weep with joy — and yet be intellectually fossilized. Their world calcifies around one or two sacred ideas, and the organism inside turns into something brittle, inert, incapable of evolution. They can’t adapt. They can’t truly think. They must defend their frozen worldview with religious fervor, come hell, high water, or empirical annihilation. Reality becomes an inconvenient rumor.
That is not stupidity. That is idiocy.
Stupid people can still do valuable things. Idiots can’t do anything but damage.