“The foolish do not fail to see truth; they simply prefer the comfort of illusion.”
In our modern vocabulary, we have grown fluent in the language of depression, anxiety, and trauma. We have learned to speak softly about emotional wounds, to place a hand on the trembling shoulder of those trapped inside themselves. We recognize that when a person sinks into inner darkness and loses the will to live, it is a crisis of the psyche deserving compassion, guidance, and treatment.
But rarely, if ever, do we speak about the illness at the opposite pole. The one that does not shrink inward, but swells outward with false confidence and delusion. The one that does not whisper sorrow, but roars with shallow certainty. The illness that does not immobilize a single soul, but infects entire societies.
Stupidity!
Not the harmless ignorance of the uninformed, but the militant stupidity born from blocked growth, fragile ego, lazy cognition, and borrowed certainty. A stupidity that disguises itself as patriotism, loyalty, righteousness, or optimism. A stupidity so contagious it spreads faster than any virus, because it appeals to comfort rather than truth, to fantasy rather than responsibility.
We pity the depressed because they cannot find their place in the world.
We rarely recognize that the stupid destroy the world they occupy.
One illness shatters the self.
The other shatters civilizations.
The Tyranny of Delusion
Depression corrodes the inner landscape.
Stupidity corrodes the collective one.
When a person falls into despair, we send doctors, counselors, and communities to help them stand again. Their struggle, painful as it is, invites empathy, and often leads to deeper awareness and humility.
But when a mind inflates with misplaced certainty, when fantasy replaces reality and arrogance masquerades as truth, society calls it “strength,” “passion,” or “loyalty.” The person suffering this condition does not seek healing, because they do not know they are ill. Worse, they believe they are righteous.
The “doctors” who try to treat this illness are not thanked, but punished. In a land ruled by comforting illusions, the truth-teller is the villain. The whistleblower becomes the traitor. The philosopher becomes the “enemy of the people.” Those who point to reality are accused of destroying dreams, when in fact they are trying to save lives.
For the deluded, a lie feels like home. Truth feels like theft.
You are not simply challenging their beliefs.
To them, you are stealing their security blanket, their fantasy currency, their emotional oxygen.
And predators know this.
Power thrives on stupidity.
Demagogues treat fools as livestock. They feed them slogans instead of bread, enemies instead of facts, pride instead of dignity. A population unable to think is not a community. It is a resource to be harvested.
History has no shortage of examples.
When Stupidity Marches
Look at the zealots who shouted for war under dictatorships, convinced they were heroes while marching toward their own slaughter. Look at those who cheered “national glory” only to become cannon fodder. They were not evil. They were unthinking. And that, tragically, was enough.
Look at a recent pandemic mishandled not as a crisis of science and public health, but as a stage for political theater. Look at the officials who celebrated victory while morgues filled, who prioritized optics over life, who treated tragedy as a parade.
Look at the citizens of North Korea, not evil, not foolish by nature, but trapped in a system that cultivates ignorance the way farmers cultivate rice.
Stupidity, when organized and weaponized, becomes genocide in slow motion.
It kills not with bullets, but with blindness.
A Social Pathology
Stupidity is not a moral flaw.
It is a psychological and social disorder.
It thrives where curiosity dies.
Where dissent is punished.
Where comfort replaces thought.
Where emotion outruns evidence.
It spreads by imitation, by tribalism, by algorithms designed to amplify outrage rather than understanding.
And like all epidemics, it destroys the weak first.
But eventually, it consumes everyone.
Why It Must Be Named
To say “stupidity is a disease” is not an insult.
It is a diagnosis.
And a warning.
A society too polite to confront stupidity will drown in it.
A civilization unwilling to treat collective delusion will not survive it.
We do not mock the mentally ill; we treat them.
We should do the same for those trapped in illusions, because the consequences of leaving them untreated are not merely personal; they are civilizational.
Stupidity kills silently at first.
Then loudly.
And always in crowds.
The tragedy is not that fools exist.
The tragedy is that systems arise to exploit them.
And when someone tries to heal the wound, both the wound and the infection fight back.
The fool resents the doctor.
The tyrant hunts him.
A society that punishes its healers is one that has chosen disease over future.
The Last Line
So yes, depression is a tragedy.
But stupidity is a catastrophe.
One destroys individuals.
The other destroys worlds.
Until we learn to diagnose both, treat both, and protect those who dare to heal, we remain vulnerable not to darkness, but to delusion.
And history has shown us which one kills more.