Oliver Hardy learned about people from growing up in his mother’s little hotel in Augusta, Georgia.
Of the Laurel and Hardy team, it was Laurel who did most of the intellectual work and it was Stan Laurel who talked in the interviews about it.
So when they pressed him about the secret of his character’s popularity, he put it in one sentence:
“Nobody is as dumb as a dumb man who thinks he’s smart.”
That one comment was worth everything that his talented partner ever said.
I learned Hardy’s Law in detail before I reached my teens, because with my brother in med school we had a lot of medical histories around. In the mid-50s the entire history of modern medicine could be summed up in one sentence:
“When it comes to medical practice over the last thousand years, what made sense came up all the time against Scholars and their Latin and Greek texts of Ancient Wisdom, and what made sense ALWAYS lost.”
When they bled George Washington to death to cure his pneumonia, it was because he had EDUCATED medical care, men familiar with Galen, the Great Ancient Wise Man in the Roman Empire.
They acquitted rapists and damned young girls for two thousand years because Galen Himself had said that a girl could not become pregnant unless the sex was consensual.
Contrary to everything you read in regular history, Medieval hospitals were extremely clean and the germ theory of disease was VERY widely believed in. Everything we READ from those days ignores germ theory, except for one quote I have where it was condemned because “no Authority” had endorsed it.
Authority meant Greek, Latin, and University Medicine.
That particular quote, by the way, was made by Louis XIV’s chief physician, but the most interesting thing about it is that he names some twenty German physicians who attributed syphilis to “tiny beings too small to be seen that multiply rapidly and are spread from person to person.”
Pretty good description of a germ by someone who didn’t have a microscope.
But I repeat, real people knew about germs for hundreds or even thousands of years before that.
They used to bathe regularly before the Intellectuals told them that bathing was unhealthy.
Whitaker’s restatement of Hardy’s Law is that “Nobody is as dumb as the person people THINK is smart.”
#1 by Dave on 12/13/2011 - 10:12 am
The Establishment not only has its facts wrong on race, it has its facts wrong on absolutely EVERYTHING.
That is why in today’s world having your facts right equals power.
It is really that simple.
#2 by BGLass on 12/13/2011 - 10:14 am
dumb people who think they are smart don’t notice others at all. For the other people, that’s humility is a capacity for seeing oneself in the larger landscape, Positional Thinking, but it doesn’t mean you’re a nobody, just a realist. (Which is why idk why people hate ‘classical liberalism” which I always thought was about that and an inoculation against becoming a dumb person who thinks you’re smart.
For the dumb people who think they are smart, humility seems like debasing oneself. Sycophantism, pride in being a cog in a wheel, in being “regular,” in “fitting in,” in being part of the big machine and bowing down, Admiration and Flattery all the time. The “Hero!” “Humility” is understood as being a big fat nothing. Brown-nosing and pats on the head. The hero who follows orders!
It’s hard to communicate the difference.
Dumb people mistake Bossiness, Bullying, Officiousness, flattery, circles of admiration, chatting up, air kissings, and general preisthood pushing around, AS competency. Opposite of the Clint Eastwood screen image, imo—the guy from nowhere, who knows his stuff, who just takes care of business, without fanfare or getting knighted for it in fancy ceremonies by big whigs.
It’s a difference in ‘type’ that is impossible to explain.
I know a guy who always has Experts come help him out. Then he says they make him feel bad, pointing out all the things he does wrong, but hey, they “know their stuff.”
Actually, they don’t, and others get just as much help from people who don’t boss them around. But the guy has no vision for actually finding NON-“expert” helpers (who might really be good at what they do) who know their stuff, help without fanfare, and don’t have to make the client feel like a piece of shit.
He just won’t hire those people. Unless they make him feel like a piece of shit, too— he really believes they are incompetent.
Just as an aside, he’s a military person, which got me thinking about the Weakest Generation.
Anyway, he has no clue why nobody else ever takes him up on recommendations for the people who help him. “I keep telling you to call so and so!” (Everyone is stupid because they don’t ‘call so and so.’ And this is what he believes.
In reality, it’s just sort of awful to see a grown man hiring people to boss him around, using the excuse that they say they are “experts.”
Why not just hire some leather clad lady with a whip.
#3 by Genseric on 12/13/2011 - 11:07 am
I heard that EVERYBODY thinks Tim Wise is a fucking genius!
An idiot savant of the race politics realm.
#4 by The Old Man of the Mountain on 12/13/2011 - 2:36 pm
I don’t know nothing!
There are things that I believe are probably true, things I suspect are true, things that seem to be proven to be true, and things that certainly seem false; but I don’t know nothing!
The entire World View of us Humans has changed several times already, and will continue to change in the future.
If I knew anything, I would be incapable of accepting new ideas and observations.
#5 by shari on 12/13/2011 - 7:47 pm
Me too, Old Man!
#6 by Frank on 12/13/2011 - 11:45 pm
Sorry to post this off-topic note, but when I hit the SWARM button, it drops me back into 8/9/11.
I someone fooling around with the database? I don’t get the usual selection of topics, only page177 on 8/9/11
Advise?
#7 by Scythian on 12/14/2011 - 4:23 am
This article reminded me of quote by German field-Marshal Manstein: “There are four kinds of officer: the lazy, stupid type who do no harm; the intelligent, hard-working type who make good staff officers; the lazy, intelligent type who are the best strategic leaders; and finally the stupid, hard-working type who must be dismissed immediately as they will lead to disaster.”
#8 by Alan B on 12/15/2011 - 1:14 pm
An American war corespondent is shocked by the resistence the German Army put up against the American troops that had crossed the Rhine River. The corespondent said, these Germans are delaying their Liberation!” Hitler Bad!! In Reality, all Germans were bad!
Mommy professor proclaims, Multiculturialism for White nations and only White nations is wonderfull, those opposed to it are ignorant, white racsist. Mommy Professor says, stop delaying your liberation and surrender. Racsim Bad!! In reality, Whites are bad!!
The Germans new the truth then and Bugsters know it now, were are in a fight for survival.