“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Imagine my surprise to find out that there were ‘dumb bastards’ in 1959. People from that age group don’t talk about them much. We don’t remember the dumb bastards because we prefer to remember the good things.

It’s like talking about how great a bowel movement was without mentioning what it smelled like. Even doctors don’t ask about that. Nobody wants to remember that.

I digress.

What Vonnegut calls ‘dumb bastards’ is a colloquialism for stupid people. Etymologically, it’s an interesting thing to unravel as to why that colloquialism worked well for that period. ‘Dumb’ was used as a synonym for ‘stupid’, and is easily interchangeable. ‘Bastard’, on the other hand, is just someone whose parents intertwined zygotes successfully out of wedlock. That used to be an insult, because… why?

Stupid bastards, probably.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to elitism when it comes to intelligence, but we do have people who do not meet our expectations. Most people get this wrong, since they mistake a lack of knowledge for a lack of intelligence (that’s ignorance).

The first time you stick your hand on stove while it’s on, it was ignorant. The second time you do it, you’re either stupid or have a heat tolerable prosthetic. Easy way to remember it.

But we have nuance. We have some people who put their left hand of the stove, then put their right on it and expect a different result. It’s effectively the same as placing the same hand on the stove, so we’ll shuffle over to that group over there: People to keep out of the kitchen.

This is not a survival trait. Yet intelligence is not considered a survival trait.

It’s one of life’s great mysteries.