By Wm. Cook
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Introduction: The Weight of Words
Words are not ornaments. They are the foundations of thought, law, and moral clarity. When words are diluted, civilizations weaken. One striking example is the word suffering. Once reserved for the innocent bearing the weight of injustice, it is now applied to any harm, inconvenience, or discomfort. This downgrading is not harmless. It erodes compassion, confuses justice, and leaves societies unable to distinguish tragedy from triviality.
This paper argues that the corruption of language — what I call fashionable stupidity — is not simply a cultural quirk but a civilizational danger. It has roots in education, media, and history, and if left unchecked, it leads to the same collapse that befell Athens and Rome.
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1. Defining Stupidity
Stupidity, in this context, is not a lack of intelligence but a trained incapacity to think.
• Education prizes memorization over reasoning.
• Media rewards emotion over reflection.
• Culture values belonging to the group more than questioning the group.
Cicero warned long ago: “When, instead of reasoned argument, there is shouting and abuse, the people become a mob.” This is the essence of fashionable stupidity — not ignorance, but the abandonment of reason for emotional language.
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2. The Case of “Suffering”
Consider suffering.
• True suffering: externally imposed, undeserved, unavoidable (starvation, war, abuse).
• Folly: pain born of poor judgment (recklessness, addiction, waste).
• Intellectual stupidity: pain born of stubborn denial (clinging to rotten apples, refusing reality).
• Fashionable stupidity: when entire groups misuse words until they lose weight.
When inconvenience is called suffering, and true suffering is equated with discomfort, language itself begins to rot. George Orwell, in his essay Politics and the English Language, warned: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” That cycle is now visible in how our culture abuses the word like suffering.
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3. Education and the Manufacture of Obedience
The roots of fashionable stupidity can be traced to the early 20th century. Under the influence of John D. Rockefeller and his General Education Board, American schooling was reshaped not to produce thinkers, but compliant workers.
The infamous line, often attributed to Rockefeller’s circle, captures the spirit if not the exact words: “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”
The system emphasized:
• Basic literacy and numeracy, sufficient for factory life.
• Strict schedules, bells, and obedience.
• Memorization and repetition over questioning and reasoning.
This achieved its industrial purpose but at a cost: it discouraged deep reasoning, producing generations skilled at repetition but untrained in thought.
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4. The Unintended Consequences
• Instructional fragility: Without reasoning practice, multi-step instructions became difficult.
• Loss of abstraction: Workers struggled with hypotheticals or layered directions.
• Reduced adaptability: Obedience replaced problem-solving.
Ironically, the very system designed to create compliant followers weakened their ability to follow complex instructions at all. Later policies like No Child Left Behind deepened the rot by rewarding surface-level test performance over mastery. Education became hoop-jumping, not thinking. Students advanced without ever developing precision of thought.
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5. Language and Emotional Vocabulary
The educational downgrade hollowed language itself.
• Precise vocabulary became foreign.
• Emotional vocabulary filled the gap, drawn from music, media, and peer culture.
• Words became shorthand for feelings rather than tools for thought.
As historian Edward Gibbon noted of Rome in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “When the spirit of inquiry was checked by absolute authority, the faculties of the mind were contracted, and the language itself became barren.”
Our own language now faces the same barrenness.
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6. Historical Parallels
We have seen this before:
• Athens: Sophists used ornamental rhetoric to sway crowds.
• Rome: Oratory devolved into flattery and mob manipulation.
• Medieval Europe: Absolutist sermons replaced reasoning with emotional control.
• Totalitarian regimes: Slogans drowned nuance in service of power.
The pattern is always the same: emotional language empowers quickly, but it destabilizes societies. Precision must return, or collapse follows.
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7. The Cost of Fashionable Stupidity
When language collapses:
• Laws bend until they mean anything.
• Leaders govern by emotion instead of reason.
• Citizens lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
Rome did not fall only to barbarians — it fell because its discourse rotted. Bread and circuses replaced debate, and once words lost their grounding in truth, the Republic could no longer stand.
Orwell foresaw this, too: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” That defense always begins by bending language.
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8. The Way Forward
How do we resist this decline?
• Protect words: Guard the true meaning of suffering, bravery, justice, freedom.
• Resist the herd: Do not let fashionable stupidity redefine language for comfort.
• Teach reasoning: Education must recover its purpose of cultivating thinkers, not just test-takers.
• Balance vocabulary: Emotional language has its place, but precise vocabulary must anchor it.
A nation can survive hardship. It can even survive folly. But it cannot survive the rot of language.
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Conclusion
Suffering belongs to the innocent, folly to the foolish, intellectual stupidity to the stubborn, and fashionable stupidity to the herd.
If we allow the herd to hollow out our words, we will not need an invader to destroy us. Like Rome, we will fall from within — not because we lacked power, but because we abandoned truth when we abandoned the weight of words.