How idiots make it to the top
I spent many years living in the Middle East. They were luminous years, drenched in color and contradiction, and I returned with a love for that region and its people that no distance can dilute. The desert gets into your blood like a narcotic—both harsh and tender. The light falls differently there, as if every stone were in on some divine joke. One afternoon, sitting in a small coffee shop heavy with the scent of cardamom and tobacco smoke, I was approached by a stranger. He turned out to be a German, a long-term expatriate marinated in Middle Eastern life. We fell quickly into conversation, the way travelers often do, propelled by a sense of coincidence and inevitability.
After a while, I noticed he had an agenda. His words kept circling, like vultures narrowing in, towards certain religious concepts. I treat religion as I do underwear: necessary, personal, and never something to parade in public. Particularly not in a part of the world where people measure a man’s worth by how well he mouths the divine script. But the more I sidestepped, the harder he pressed.
I attempted reason, which only made him swell with indignation, as if logic itself were a personal affront. His eyes took on the zealot’s glaze, the kind that hints at stones and gallows somewhere down the conversational road. Arguing with such a man is like debating the fire while standing inside it—you don’t win, you just burn. Rather than see the encounter tip into unpleasantness, I cut my losses and walked away. There was no common ground to be tilled, only a swamp of dogma waiting to swallow the discussion whole. The lesson branded itself deep: some people are immune to dialogue, and no amount of reasoning will cure them. Best to walk away and spare yourself the disease. Diogenes would have laughed and urinated on his sandals for good measure.
This post first appeared in 2024, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
And so, let us pivot. Last week we examined how idiots measure themselves against society. This week, we consider the impact of the idiot—what happens when their presence metastasizes within a complex, ostensibly civilized order.
Both the Bandit and the Idiot corrode the society they inhabit, sucking sustenance without offering anything in return. They are parasites, but of different orders. The Bandit is a parasite like a tapeworm: unpleasant, yes, but careful not to kill the host outright. The Idiot, however, is a necrotroph, a flesh-eating bacterium. He does not simply feed—he kills the organism on which he depends. Some parasites live in uneasy symbiosis; Idiots are more like the fungi that rot trees from the inside, leaving only hollow husks that topple in the first storm.
One might suppose that Bandits, being natural predators of society, would prevent Idiots from rising. After all, Bandits want a host that survives, at least long enough for them to gorge. But Bandits chronically underestimate the destructive power of Idiots.
What Bandits truly fear is other Bandits. They know how they clawed their way up, how many backs they stepped on, and they live in constant paranoia of a rival returning the favor. Caesar feared Brutus, Stalin purged his friends one by one, and every Renaissance court was a carnival of daggers behind the tapestry. Idiots, by contrast, do not terrify them. In fact, they prefer to surround themselves with Idiots. Idiots make them feel secure, like guard dogs too stupid to bite their master.
Thus Idiots creep upwards in the wake of Bandits, a sort of accidental promotion. Eventually, after enough time and enough blind indulgence, whole structures become thick with them. Today you can see their handiwork in the rotting halls of politics, in the fumbling sprawl of corporate boardrooms, across virtually every democracy where mature institutions are strangled by mediocrity. Think of the CEO who cannot explain his own company’s product, or the minister who trembles before a multiplication table. The late Roman Empire was overrun with just such bureaucrats, promoted for loyalty rather than competence, and the results were as catastrophic as you’d expect.
Does this mean democracies are flawed beyond redemption? Should we cast longing glances toward the so-called efficiency of autocracy? Hardly. Autocracies are equally riddled with Idiots, though they are better at hiding the fact—until the moment the façade collapses. Witness China or Russia when real stress hits: hollowed-out systems, eaten alive by their own Idiots, suddenly buckling. The Soviets mastered the Potemkin village, reporting miraculous production statistics while their factories rotted. In democracies, transparency and accountability apply some limits to idiocy. In autocracies, there are none. It is Bandits all the way down, dragging Idiots in their slipstream.
So, if Idiots are inevitable, how do we survive them? Are we doomed?
Not quite. Doom implies finality. Our societies will not vanish, but they will groan under the strain of Bandit-enabled Idiots. And because Idiots make existence more difficult for everyone, they inevitably suffer most under the weight of their own havoc. Picture a drunk lurching forward, tripping on his own feet, yet never quite falling—our societies stumble like that, bruised but moving.
Consider the activists gluing themselves to asphalt, or the campus crusaders bellowing entitlement. They reek of privilege. September 11’s terrorists, too, hailed from comfort—educated, well-traveled, spoiled by the luxuries of modern life. It is not poverty that breeds this fury but idle rage, carefully nurtured. In 19th-century Russia, aristocrats with nothing better to do wandered into nihilist movements, burning down the house that sheltered them. History repeats itself with new costumes.
Survival concerns leave little room for ideological spasms. If you are scrambling for rent, chasing food, clinging to daily necessities, you do not have the luxury of indulging in abstract crusades. Idleness, however, is fertile soil for rage. Welfare recipients marinated in dependency, eternal students bleeding their parents’ wallets, professional victims who convert grievance into grants—all these have ample time to rot.
And rot produces opportunistic growths. People are lazy by default; instead of generating their own thoughts, they latch onto pre-packaged causes, assembled by Bandits looking to exploit fragility. The Idiot becomes the foot soldier, happily wielding borrowed slogans. But movements gain momentum, and even when Bandits abandon their schemes, Idiots keep the machine sputtering forward, flogging it long past its expiration date. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they splash and hack until the house floods, long after the master has fled.
The Idiot is impervious to evidence, deaf to reason, blind to self-preservation. He marches into ruin whistling.
You know the old saying: strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, bad times make strong men. Let us run the four human archetypes—the Helpless, the Wise, the Bandits, and the Idiots—through this mill.
In hard times, the Wise and the Helpless cooperate to build stability. Bandits slink in the shadows, biding time, while Idiots struggle and often vanish because they cannot endure hardship. As stability hardens into prosperity, Bandits creep out, fattening themselves. The Wise remain, still balancing the scales. But Bandits grow cocky. Their schemes become ever bolder, ever more destructive. Eventually, the Wise, weary of filth, abandon the ladders of power.
And so the stage is cleared: Bandits thick on every rung, terrified of each other, surrounding themselves with Idiots as protection. Idiots multiply unchecked. Systems collapse under their collective incompetence. The termites have eaten through the beams while everyone was admiring the paint.
Thus the cycle continues. Weak men bring bad times. We stand now on that ledge. The pruning is overdue. Spengler called it decline, Ibn Khaldun called it decay; it amounts to the same thing.
In bad times, Idiots wither. Their antics lose appeal; society tires of their tantrums. But Idiots cannot recognize limits. For them, every concession is merely a stepping stone toward absolute fulfillment, a horizon that forever recedes. They overshoot. They always overshoot. Robespierre demanded more heads, until his own rolled into the basket. Idiots do not learn; they accelerate.
And then comes the backlash. Society yanks away the Idiots’ scaffolding. Bereft of comfort, forced into struggle, their causes shrivel. Some radicals perish spectacularly—recall the Red Brigades of Europe, burning themselves out in lunatic violence. Most simply fold. Idiocy, too, comes in shades.
Radical Idiots are like Ebola—so lethal they burn themselves out before spreading far. More dangerous are the palatable Idiots: polite, reasonable-sounding, soft-voiced. They erode silently, persuading us to smile while they rot the foundations. I confess: I prefer the radicals. At least with them you know where the train is headed.
But who are the Idiots, really? The mirror is unkind. At times, all of us play the Idiot. Each human contains the four types in shifting measure. Being an Idiot is tempting—it is easier to conform, to outsource your opinion, to rest in borrowed certainty. The fool was once a jester in the medieval court, the only one allowed to mock the king. Today the fool wears a different mask, but the temptation is unchanged.
Think of it as a spectrum, like Jung’s personality scales. Few at the extremes, most in the fat middle. Some are Idiots situationally; only a rare few are Idiots without interruption. Can such partial Idiots be reclaimed? Occasionally. I have friends—bright, educated people—who, on certain topics, mutate instantly into frothing Idiots. I’ve tried to reason with them. Success was minimal.
Decades ago, I read Kirschner, who argued persuasively that idiocy is not genetic fate but choice. Every person can decide to wise up, to walk another path. They need only do what the Wise do, not merely parrot the words. It is a matter of will. Like quitting a vice—it is difficult, but possible.
Socrates put it bluntly: “Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have the answers.” Try debating an Idiot and you will see the truth of it. The Greek agora had its fools just as Twitter has its threads—idiocy never changes, only the platform.
This is not new. Ancient societies recorded their exasperation with Idiots: Persians, Egyptians, Romans. The Wise of every age left graffiti about the same plague. Babylonian scribes complained, Confucian scholars sighed, Mayan stelae even hint at kings ruined by folly. Civilization grows complex, a leisure class emerges, and suddenly Idiots multiply like mold in damp corners.
Einstein supposedly remarked that only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. He was uncertain about the universe. Entropy grows, and so does idiocy. Perhaps they are the same thing.
