Why smart people say dumb things

I was watching an argument a few days ago about a guy who is sort of a religious extremist. His fans and detractors were bickering back and forth about how to deal with him and I kept hearing the “smart” label thrown around. Apparently since he is smart, some think that we all need to listen to him.

I have read the guy and I agree that he is smart. He is also a great writer. I don’t agree with much of what he has to say but I do read him from time to time because his writing style is sort of entertaining.

But do I really need to take his views seriously because he is smart? The answer is no. Many of his views are not smart at all in my opinion. They are uninformed and truth be told, pretty dumb.

That brings up a question. Why do smart people believe dumb things? Or to put it another way, since probably everyone reading this (including me) considers themselves on the smarter end of the scale, why do we ourselves have a tendency to start believing dumb things?

Here are two reasons:

1) Ideology.
Our ideology is our worldview, our perspective, and the lens we view life through. For example, depending on your ideology, you might watch a speech from Obama and see it either as race-baiting or as standing up for minorities.

Our ideology may be influenced by Biblical truth but it is also influenced by other factors such as schools, parents, friends and geographical location. None of these factors outside of Biblical truth are immune to error. In fact, error is rampant everywhere. There are errors and blind spots in every single one of our ideologies. Think of ideology as a pair of glasses that is smeared with mud in various places.

That is a big problem: we don’t know truth nearly as well as we think we do. What we know is truth through the flawed lens of our ideology. And over time, our version of truth is no longer just colored by ideology but is actually warped and distorted by ideology.

Then if we are not careful, eventually our ideology is no longer a lens at all but rather a filter. Information that contradicts our ideology is rejected as untruth while information that aligns with our ideology is accepted regardless of its validity.

In other words, our ideology can become more important to us than truth.

Need an example? Open Facebook and look at all the ideology that is completely devoid of truth that is passed around during a political season by those on all sides of issues. Look at the spin and distortion, the misrepresentation and the taking out of context. People that pass around that stuff would know how untruthful it is with just a little thoughtful research. Yet conservatives and liberals alike blindly pass on those untruths because it aligns with their ideology.

Ideology is not bad in itself but it becomes an enemy of truth when we make it more important than truth. And when that happens, regardless of our IQ, some very dumb things start coming out of our mouths.

2) Arrogance
Smart people become susceptible to believing dumb things when they decide they know enough and can stop learning. Arrogance and dumbness may not always go together but the correlation between the two is pretty high.

The easiest way to spot an arrogant person is by comparing how much he talks to how much he listens. You know exactly what I mean. Here are two quotes that I constantly preach to myself.

Those that know the least know it the loudest.

Those that know all the answers do not usually even know the questions.

I was recently at a museum here in Atlanta and went through an exhibit discussing the discovery of the oceans. One of the statements that caught my eye was a description of the scientific community during the early 1800’s. They actually apparently believed that they were within a few years of “knowing everything there was to know.”

Fast forward two hundred years and we know infinitely more about science than they could have ever imagined. And yet one of the most important things that we know is how little we actually know.

We could look back at those scientists in the 1800’s as arrogant and naive but I am afraid we all have a tendency to fall into the same trap. Arrogance breeds complacency and complacency is another enemy of truth.

Arrogant, complacent people are breeding grounds for dumb beliefs.

I have a hypothesis that goes like this: in general, as we age, we should get wiser but we also become more susceptible to arrogance and a solidified ideology that gets in the way of truth. I will be honest: as I age, I spend a lot of time worrying about that. I don’t want to give up wisdom for a false dogmatism that comes from a flawed ideology and undeserved arrogance. That is a bad trade.

You shouldn’t make that trade either.