Playing Stupid
Eric Berne described the game of "Stupid" as having "the thesis...'I laugh with you at my own clumsiness and stupidity.'" He points out that for the protagonist (White), "there is considerable external gain, since the less White learns, the more effectively he can play....He has known from an early age that everyone will be satisfied with him as long as he is stupid, despite any expressions to the contrary. People are surprised when in times of stress, if he decides to come through, it turns out that he is not stupid at all - any more than is the 'stupid' younger son in the fairy tale."
In a Kleinian view as "outlined by Wilfred Bion...pseudo-stupidity is a consequence of the massive tendency toward projection and the resulting inability to internalize new knowledge" in the arrogant.
Read more about this topic: Stupidity
Famous quotes containing the words playing and/or stupid:
“They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car.
They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar.
Yes, but I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)