Stupidity is a scar left where curiosity or impulse was crushed by coercion

Evidence

Stupidity is a scar. It can stem from one of many activities—physical or mental—or from all. Every partial stupidity of a man denotes a spot where the play of stirring muscles was thwarted instead of encouraged. In the presence of the obstacle the futile repetition of disorganized, groping attempts is set in motion. A child’s ceaseless queries are always symptoms of a hidden pain, of a first question to which it found no answer and which it did not know how to frame appropriately. Its reiteration suggests the playful determination of a dog leaping repeatedly at the door it does not yet know how to open, and finally giving up if the catch is out of his reach. It also has something in it of the desperation of the lion pacing up and down in its cage, or of the neurotic who renews a defensive reaction that has already proved futile in the past. If the child’s repeated attempts are balked, or too brutally frustrated, it may turn its attention in a different direction. It is then richer in experience, as the saying goes, but an imperceptible scar, a tiny calloused area of insensitivity, is apt to form at the spot where the urge was stifled. Such scars lead to deformities. They can build hard and able characters; they can breed stupidity—as a symptom of pathological deficiency, of blindness and impotency, if they are quiescent; in the form of malice, spite, and fanaticism, if they produce a cancer within. The coercion suffered turns good will into bad. And not only tabooed questioning but forbidden mimicry, forbidden tears, and forbidden rashness in play can leave such scars. Like the species of the animal order, the mental stages within the human species, and the blind-spots in the individual, are stages at which hope petered out and whose petrifaction demonstrates that all things that live are subject to constraint. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Redefines stupidity as learned, coercively-produced scar tissue rather than innate deficiency — a corrective redefinition central to the work’s theory of domination.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed, paradigm-pivoting claim that intelligence is best understood as unfrustrated movement, and that coercion breeds stupidity, malice, and fanaticism as petrified hope — a thesis worth sitting with.
• XREF: The ‘coercion turns good will into bad’ line extends the sacrifice theme from earlier chapters; scar-as-petrified-hope also connects to the culture industry’s manufactured dimming of desire. — connects to: Stupidity is socially produced and harms oppressors as much as the oppressed — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1010; Blind trust in authority can be culpable stupidity rather than virtue; Complicated cleverness can be worse than simple sense — , A Year of World Stories, 5572 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: what a pedagogy of ‘unfrustrated movement’ would look like — reading the history of compulsory schooling as a history of administered scars.

Broader Connections

• Stupidity is socially produced and harms oppressors as much as the oppressed #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1010
• Blind trust in authority can be culpable stupidity rather than virtue #qualifies (0.75)
• Perpetrators rationalized participation through futility and coercion of circumstance #exemplifies (0.72)
• Complicated cleverness can be worse than simple sense #complicates (0.70) — , A Year of World Stories, 5572