Stupidity - Intellectual Stupidity

Intellectual Stupidity

Otto Fenichel maintained that "quite a percentage of so-called feeble-mindedness turns out to be pseudo-debility, conditioned by inhibition....Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it". He suggests that "people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium."

In rather different fashion, Doris Lessing argued that "there is no fool like an intellectual...a kind of clever stupidity, bred out of a line of logic in the head, nothing to do with experience."

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