Understanding Stupidity samples

Stupidity is the learned corruption of learning. As such, it is a normal, dysfunctional psychic phenomenon which is caused when a schema formed by linguistic biases and social norms acts via the neurotic paradox to establish a positive feedback system which carries behavior to maladaptive excesses. This book is really devoted to elucidating the interactions of the enumerated specifics of this process, but by way of introduction, let us note that stupidity is generally produced by the interdisruption of two commonplace mental faculties—a self-deceptive inability to gather and process information accurately and a neurotic inability to match behavior to environmental contingencies. p. 2

Conflicting or contradictory data from the external environment is deflected or deflated by the belief system, which develops into a fundamental religion. Any objective analyst may easily discern all kinds of logical inconsistencies and perceptual absurdities in someone else's religious schema, but that type of analysis is invariably based on a rational evaluation of factual data. Actually, devoutly held schemas are functional not because they effectively define and address particular problems but because they help bind self-deceptive people together. This emotional/social dimension as it contributes to group cohesion is usually overlooked by rationalists, thus making their analysis flat and somewhat irrelevant. However logical, neat and smug self-contained texts in cognitive psychology may be, they usually omit this central point and leave the reader with the same vaguely empty feeling he would have were he to see a production of Hamlet without Hamlet. p. 13