Stupidity, in this sense, is not merely an intellectual deficit but a foreclosure of relation—a refusal to engage with the complexity and density of others, a denial of alterity’s depth. This refusal, this flattening, is not passive ignorance but an active, violent simplification. It is the cognitive mechanism of prejudice, the means by which nano and hydraulic prejudices function: reducing others to static categories, abstractions, caricatures, killable objects.

To view others as simple is to neutralize their capacity to disrupt one's world, to demand recognition, to exist beyond the frameworks that render them legible to power. It is to make them manageable, containable, disposable. Stupidity, in this sense, is an epistemic violence—it ensures that the world remains small, predictable, and comforting to those who benefit from its exclusions. It is the narcotic pleasure of not knowing, of not having to know, of ensuring that knowledge remains a closed circuit rather than a site of disruption, encounter, and transformation.

But stupidity is not merely a failing of the individual; it is structural. It is manufactured, rewarded, and naturalized. It is a mode of governance, a way of keeping the world in order by ensuring that rich, disruptive, and fugitive forms of knowledge remain inaccessible, unimaginable. It is, as Mbembe suggests, the tactical destruction of reciprocity—not just through force but through the dulling of thought, the erasure of complexity, the refusal of relationality itself.

And so, stupidity is not innocent. It is not harmless. It is an orientation toward the world that facilitates violence, that makes eliminationism possible by making it seem natural. It is the ideological soil in which genocidal logic takes root, the quiet precondition of atrocity.

GPT