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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Famous quotes containing the words intellectual and/or stupidity:
“Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”
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