Adapted from the poster for I Am Greta
(a documentary film dir. Nathan Grossman, 2020)
I.
Byung-Chul Han says that the idiot has all but vanished from our society. But Han is not using the term idiot in its familiar modern sense (i.e., to
refer to a stupid person).
Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek
term from which it derives - ἰδιώτης - which refers to a
private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than
simply subscribe to common sense or conform to popular opinion (even at the risk of
appearing ignorant or foolish).
For Han, the idiot is thus a type of outsider or heretic; not so much uninformed as unaligned with any party or cause; someone who values freedom and opposes the violence of consensus [1]. The idiot, in brief, is the kind of person attracted to philosophy, a practice born - like psychology - of idleness and characterised - like art - by its uselessness [2].
II.
Unfortunately, however, there's more than one type of idiot in this world.
And if the type of useless philosophical idiot privileged by Byung-Chul Han has all but vanished from contemporary society, the political idiot who prides themselves on their allegiance to a cause, party, or ideology and happily makes themselves useful to such is, it seems, proliferating in number ...
Some commentators may clutch their pearls - or even reach for the smelling salts - when they hear the term useful idiot [3], but it's a widely accepted term within political discourse [4] to refer to someone who believes they are fighting for a just cause and have history on their side, without fully appreciating the consequences of their actions or the extent to which they are being cynically manipulated by nefarious forces.
Many supporters of Extinction Rebellion, or Black Lives Matter, or those we currently see larping for Palestine on streets and campuses across the Western world, are probably well-intentioned idealists; i.e., perfectly sincere in their views, but they are politically naive to the point that idiocy hardly even covers it; closing their eyes to reality and shutting their ears to reason, they unwittingly assist in the destruction of their own culture, history, and society.
Notes
[1] See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017). And see also the post 'On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism' (20 Nov 2021): click here.
[2] Nietzsche famously asserts in Twilight of the Idols (1889) that idleness is the beginning of psychology (and is therefore the result of vice).
Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, writing in a Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) claimed: "All art is quite useless." He later explained in a letter what he meant by this: "Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way." Similarly, philosophy is simply intended to open up a space for thinking - nothing else. Wilde's letter can be read in full here.
[3] For those gentle souls who prefer a slightly less harsh-sounding term, it might be noted that some commentators speak of useful innocents, whilst those within the intelligence community apparently refer to unwitting agents.
[4] Frequently used during the Cold War to describe those
susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation, the phrase useful idiot was
(ironically but mistakenly) attributed to Lenin by the Russian human
rights activist and
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Lenin may have liked to use it, but
he certainly didn't coin it, and nor is it found in any of his writings.
