You’ve certainly been called stupid at least once in your life. And at least once you’ve been offended that someone called you names. Maybe it was your parents who labeled you that way or some kids that you were hanging around when you were a child, or perhaps even now some of your acquaintances are calling you stupid to your face or in secret and you still feel what it means to be despised by others. There is nothing pleasant in that! Whether you are still struggling with the fragility of your social self and are saddened by the humiliation produced by others, or you are past this phase and are saddened by the immaturity of the people who have such attitudes, it doesn’t matter, such words along with the emotions that accompany them produce pain in the one to whom they are addressed, it is inevitable.
In this article, I want to answer three questions:
- What does someone mean when they call you stupid?
- Why does it still hurt when someone calls you stupid?
- How can you develop genuinely so that you are less and less affected by this pain? Or, more precisely, how can we transform our sadness, which arises because we feel humiliated, into sorrow for the other person, for their moral lowliness?
- What does someone mean when they call you stupid?
According to the dictionary, when someone says that another person is stupid, they are labeling the other person as intellectually inferior, naive, or lacking in life experience, or they are attributing to him a lack of skills that the one saying the word finds useful. No great mystery, when you call another a fool, you want to make him feel worthless. You are expressing your lack of appreciation for him.
It is a fact that there are people who are born imbeciles. Are they stupid because they are incapable of surpassing the intelligence level of a preschooler? That they are incapable of solving elementary math problems, again, is a fact. They do very poorly in everyday life on their own. Situations that do not require any sort of ingenuity to solve leave them powerless. But are they stupid? If we make them stupid, we inevitably cancel out their human value. In other words, they are intrinsically worthless because they fail to do what most people can accomplish without effort. It is one thing to say that someone is doing badly, and quite another to call them stupid. In the first case, we are talking about an action, the result of someone’s exposure to a given situation and the poor way in which they interacted with it, and in the second case, when we call someone else stupid, we reduce their essence to stupidity, we define them as having no value. To make it less personal, we can have the same discussion about a tool. We can say for a start that this tool is broken, which means that it can be repaired or used in other conditions or in a different way than it was originally. So far, although things are not optimal, they can be optimized. And it is quite another story for the tool in question to be a bad one because, despite all our positive efforts to improve it, it will continue to remain incapable of performance.
Therefore, when you tell someone else that he is dumb, you are conveying the fact that he is worthless, for the simple reason that he is not useful to your purposes. If you’re not congruent with my interests, you’d better get lost. The problem is that the other has no value, meaning he no longer deserves to exist, just because you consider yourself the fixed point against which a person’s value can be validated or invalidated. Sad horizon…
- Why does it still hurt to be called stupid?
Yeah, why does it still hurt? What’s your problem with me calling you stupid? A lot of people probably pass by me, watch me as I sometimes drag myself disoriented down the street, especially when I’m in a place I don’t know, and wonder: “Wow, this is a stupid guy, look at him, he’s like a penguin in the desert!”. Anyway, each to their level of creativity when it comes to mocking others, but the bottom line is, a lot of people may think I’m stupid and I have no idea. Does that affect me in any way? No way! For the simple reason, that I am conditioned by what I know. Furthermore, if someone else’s reaction to what I do does not touch what I think about myself, then even if he calls me stupid and I am aware of it, I am not affected. If the other person’s opinions have little or no power over what concerns me, I cannot be affected. However, if I am interested in being seen well and having my value in society confirmed by others. I may even expect not to be rejected, rejected, or despised for who I choose to be. Then I will certainly be offended when someone labels me a fool. I will feel humiliated and destabilized in my perception of my self-worth. It’s normal to have a formal framework of politeness and mutual respect, but these are all convenience, mere formalities. People will always find ways to express their true opinions and intentions, no matter how guarded we may be in procedures and protocols of social etiquette. Because when you don’t know who you are when you don’t know how to take the right balance when you take a blow, any breeze will destabilize you and destroy your fragile castle of cards in which you think you reign supreme. In the end, the problem is not that someone is calling you stupid, the problem is that you believe it and therefore want to fight back. Whether you have a big fist and thick muscles, or a sharp and venomous tongue, or whether you confine yourself to your thoughts and imaginary taunts. It doesn’t matter if it affects you, it means you are defending yourself from what’s coming at you, and if you are defending yourself, it means that what you think you are, can be destroyed by others’ opinions regarding your actions, it means there is still work to be done…
- How can you develop genuinely so that you are less and less affected by this pain? Or, more precisely, how can we transform our sadness, which arises because we feel humiliated, into sorrow for the other person, for their moral lowliness?
Although the ancient Greek Stoics considered apathy a virtue, for us today it is more of a symptom that accompanies soul imbalances. These philosophers said that if you manage to stop being affected by the fulfillment of your random individual desires (rain or no rain, rain or this or that), then, according to their perspective, you become free and therefore virtuous. You neither get angry nor excited but reach a state of calm where all is what is what is, and that is enough for you.
As a mature and autonomous adult, you can learn to detach from yourself and your strict preferences, but such a vision cannot be a self-sufficient principle in the development of a whole person. A child needs to feel that he is important, from being held and fed, to having what he says listened to by the adults in his life and validated as real. This is even if that reality is his alone, but he does matter. What I want to emphasize is that a person needs to be considered as an individual to develop harmoniously. Secondly, everybody needs to encounter opposition, limits, and constraints, so he/she can learn to understand the consequences of his options and to be able to observe even the long-term harm that many of his desires can have, even for himself and his real interests. Without this last acquisition, we humans, would not be able to live together in communities, and alone we would not survive. Wherever there is a neglect of individuality or of the authority that regulates community membership, so that the other may be over-expressed, deep inner imbalances arise. Therefore, what characterizes the self of a socio-emotionally healthy person, whether a child or an adult, is the flexibility needed to oscillate between the two aspects that describe our life as persons: individuality and community.
We live in an imperfect world, so everyone has an innate tendency towards one of the two poles mentioned above, a tendency that often leads to one-sided development. This, while offering some considerable advantages, also predisposes us to the flaws accompanying these strengths, which leave us incomplete as people. If you are a born individualist, you will be very good at valuing your interests, but you will inevitably have to exclude others, and this often leads to unhealthy selfishness, along with isolation from the wider community and what is good for all of us. If you are membership and community-oriented, you will be very good at taking others and their interests into account, but you will very easily tend to please others and exclude yourself when your perspective can bring imbalance, even if it is the right one. Life is a dance, and we all need to learn to dance it.
So, to be able to develop a healthy and resilient self, one capable of not feeling humiliated if labeled stupid, but also not falling into a state of listless indifference that makes us absent from relationships, we need to take on the need to learn the dance of life. Everyone needs to know their tendencies, and then start moving towards the center by following the other pole. If you are an individual(ist), seek community and belonging. If you’re someone who naturally thinks primarily of the group and not about themselves, seek to assume your individuality and who you are beyond the possibility of rejection in your relationships. We all suffer from the shame of being truly known for who we are, even those people in your life that you consider extremely authentic. We all have needs that demand to be met, but to fulfill them fully we are required to step out of our comfort zone, out of the zone where we move so easily and well. But if we accept to dance, accept that we need to learn how to live our life again, and therefore to be clumsy at first, we will come to experience reality in a whole new way. We will therefore get to know who we are, in our innermost intimacy that has remained unexplored until now. To free ourselves from the certainty that we can only be who we have been forced to become to feel in control. Gradually we will also release ourselves from our expectations of others, expectations of how we expect them to behave towards us. We will get there when step by step, we realize that whatever we receive is a gift and so is whatever we give, and it is our expectations that stand between us and our happiness.
So, what if you think I’m stupid?
As I heard a nice guy once say: “God likes me, my wife likes me, I like me, so I’m really at peace, no matter what you say about me.”
Maybe I’m even stupid by your standards, or maybe I’m even lacking in what you value and would like to embody, but first and foremost I am a person. Therefore, my value is intrinsic, whether you like me or not, whether I’m useful to you or not. Then, secondly, I am settled with who I am, my life has meaning and the decisions I make in my own right empower me and give me security because they are authentic, they flow from who I am. I know who I am, and I have people who value me for who I am, and that is enough for me. So, even if I get in your way and to you, I’m stupid, I want you to understand that I’m not mad at you. When you finally get up the courage to assume who you are in the wholeness of your unique and real self, there will be no more suckers and smart, dumb, and cunning, there will be just people, people in various stages of maturing. People who are struggling and everyone has their obstacles to grow and develop. Some throw their fists in the wind, others hit the target. No one stands in your way, it’s only you who self-sabotages yourself, but blaming others is more convenient, that’s always the easier way…
Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?” Paul replied, “Short time or long—I pray to God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.”
Bibliography:
[1] Stupid – Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster
