DISPATCH: It's the stupid, stupid.
Always learning. Everywhere. Any time. With or without a school.
Hello Friend,
I returned to Lone Rock in Bailey, Colorado, for a fellowship gathering with the Redemptive Leadership Project. They called it a retreat. I prefer to think of it as a refuge.
Each visit has changed me, answering a troubling question. But this one was different because it was Christ-filled and didn’t require me to check my faith at the door.
I’ve been working through some things—shutting down my organization, developing new opportunities for when it dissolves, and grounding myself in a creative state to produce my next batch of life’s work. More questions than answers. More faith than facts.
More on that in a future dispatch.
For now, I continue studying the public health threat of mass stupidity and its cure, open education.
I know this sounds harsh. But I’m convinced stupidity is endemic in the U.S. and threatens the civic health of our country. A society that keeps knowledge behind paywalls, firewalls, and institutional gates, locks it in classrooms, underfunds it beyond high school, and makes it more available to elites than to the populace is doomed.
This isn’t about personal failing. Educational failure is the outbreak monkey.
My insistence on destigmatizing stupidity so we can address it is a provocative hook. Somewhat cheeky but surprisingly scientific. The goal is to slow-walk the conversation toward massive investment in creating a learning society—one where access to reason and knowledge is greater than access to guns, toxic media, pseudo-intellectualism, alcohol, or porn.
In a nation dying of stupidity, the only hope is ensuring that learning can happen everywhere, anytime, with or without school.
That’s my speech. Expect to hear it again.
ARTIFICIAL UNINTELLIGENCE: A new study on AI reliance delivers the clearest evidence yet that outsourcing our thinking to large language models does more than make us lazy—it rewires the brain toward shallower, weaker forms of cognition. Researchers compared people who wrote with AI assistance to those who wrote unaided. The differences showed up not only in behavior but in brain wiring itself.
Participants who relied on AI early showed dramatically reduced neural connectivity in regions responsible for deep thinking, memory formation, and semantic understanding. They also struggled to recall what they had “written” without the machine’s help. In contrast, people who began by thinking for themselves and later used AI showed stronger activation, better recall, and far greater cognitive control.
This is one of the first studies to capture AI-driven cognitive atrophy in real time. If stupidity is a public health crisis, this is the neurological evidence of how it spreads. When we hand our thinking to machines, our brains stop learning how to think.
“Early dependence on LLM tools appeared to have impaired long-term semantic retention and contextual memory, limiting their ability to reconstruct content without assistance... This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.”
UNFREE SPEECH: A new FIRE survey shows something unprecedented: nearly three out of four Americans now believe free speech in this country is headed in the wrong direction. Pessimism rose across every political group—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike—signaling broad national recognition that expression is becoming harder, riskier, and more policed.
What matters for Stupidology is not the partisan breakdown but the underlying pattern: a population that feels unable to speak freely is a population entering cognitive lockdown. When people self-censor, fear retaliation, or mistrust public debate, they stop thinking in public—and eventually stop thinking clearly in private. That’s how a stupidogenic society accelerates.
Even “tame political statements” triggered sizable minorities calling for a professor to be fired. Roughly half of Americans are now “very” or “extremely” concerned about government pressure on speech platforms. Free expression is becoming a stress point in the public mind—a sign that the informational environment is deteriorating.
This poll confirms the cultural drift we’ve been tracking. When a society loses its tolerance for expression, it loses its capacity for thought.
“A staggering 74% of Americans in the October edition of the NSI responded that things are headed in the wrong direction for free speech.”
THE GUARDIAN: Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? Researchers at MIT warn we might be entering a “stupidogenic society”—a world where technology erodes our ability to think, remember, and reason. A small but revealing MIT study found that when people use tools like ChatGPT to write or solve problems, their brains show significantly less activity in networks responsible for cognition, attention, and creativity. Even more alarming: after writing with AI, most participants couldn’t recall what they had just “written.”
The article argues that our culture of frictionless convenience—apps that think for us, maps that guide us, AI that writes for us—is quietly dissolving the mental friction required to stay sharp. We’re outsourcing not just tasks but thinking itself. The cost is a population increasingly susceptible to misinformation, distraction, and mental dependency.
For those treating stupidity as a public health crisis and pushing Open Education as an antidote, this piece is a flashing red warning. Friction isn’t the enemy. It’s the fuel of learning.
“Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote… That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.”
SYSTEMIC STUPIDITY: A theologian revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning that stupidity is not a lack of intelligence but a social disease that rises whenever power exploits wounded people. In this piece, Tim Snyder explains Bonhoeffer’s view that stupidity is a psychological condition—a mass infection created by political charisma, grievance, and propaganda. It cannot be reasoned with. It cannot be argued away. It exhausts democratic processes and blinds people to reality.
The key takeaway for Stupidology: stupidity isn’t an individual failure. It’s a predictable outcome of social conditions, power structures, and emotional vulnerabilities. Unless those conditions change, the stupidity persists.
“Against stupidity we are defenseless… Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity… the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
“Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.”
―Robertson Davies, World of Wonders
HOMO IDOTICUS: Cezary Pietrasik, author of “Homo Idioticus: Why We Are Stupid and What to Do About It,” is an excellent help in destigmatizing stupidity. He says, “We humans have the most sophisticated brainpower in the animal kingdom, but behave incredibly erratically. Despite our ability to split the atom, re-engineer DNA, and send people to Mars, in our daily lives we often act incredibly... stupid, even when we have perfect access to information to make the right decisions.”
Look around and you will see human stupidity everywhere. We are not Homo sapiens or Homo economicus; we are Homo idioticus. Can you believe that: 10% of Americans use their phones during sex; 40% of Americans reject the theory of evolution; Nearly 40% of the world’s population has not completed high school; 86% of American teens cannot differentiate between fact and opinion; IQs in developed countries have been declining since 1995
AN OLD TAKE ON STUPIDITY: Nearly a century ago, A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity mapped the roots and expressions of human foolishness across biology, culture, politics, religion, economics, and everyday life. Written in the 1930s, it treated stupidity not as an insult but as a force shaping civilizations—a predictable pattern of irrationality, bigotry, misinformation, and mass gullibility.
What’s striking is how contemporary it feels. The author warned about linguistic stupidity, propaganda, quacks thriving in boom cycles, the social stupidity of crowds, and institutions failing to cultivate clear thinking. Everything we now describe as symptoms of our stupidogenic society had already been identified long before smartphones, algorithms, and AI shortcuts.
The lesson fits perfectly with Stupidology. Stupidity is not new, but it is measurable, contagious, and historically destructive. Unless societies build intentional defenses—open learning, critical literacy, cognitive friction—stupidity adapts to whatever age it finds itself in.
“Stupidity is Man’s deadliest weapon, his most devastating epidemic, his costliest luxury. It has survived millions of direct hits without being in the slightest way the worse for them.”