How to Fix Stupid

Comedian Ron White once made a philosophical observation so profound that it became the name of one of his specials and a signature line: “You can’t fix stupid.”

And for shits and giggles, here is the full quote: “Let me tell you something, folks: You can’t fix stupid. There’s not a pill you can take; there’s not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.”

I am going to attempt to challenge Mr. White, but with a twist: You can fix YOUR stupid.

For the sake of this essay, “stupid” has nothing to do with IQ or intelligence. Nor does it have to do with formal education. My definition of stupid is “willful ignorance”. This is choosing to be stupid for a variety of reasons, most of them related to your identity and your ego.

Most people blame collective stupidity on the usual suspects: social media, cable news, failing schools. They’re not wrong. They’re just looking at symptoms while ignoring the structural causes that made those symptoms possible.

Here is what actually happened.

How We Got So Stupid

Logic would say that if you give a populace access to endless amounts of information, it would raise the level of collective intelligence.

It has not. The opposite happened.

We dumped endless amounts of information onto human brains that evolved to handle scarcity, not abundance. Information overload short-circuits cognitive function. When overwhelmed, the brain doesn’t upgrade its processing capacity like your iPhone does. It prioritizes information that confirms what it already believes, especially beliefs tied to identity and tribal belonging. This is the essence of cognitive bias, and it largely determines what our minds perceive to be reality.

But that’s just the mechanism. The real question is: what created the conditions for that mechanism to produce systematic stupidity at scale?

The answer is a convergence of institutional failures that trained multiple generations to avoid critical thinking.

The Educational Shift: Training Compliance Over Thinking

Starting in the early 2000s, standardized testing became the organizing principle of American education. The incentive structure changed overnight. Schools got funded based on test scores. Teachers got evaluated on test performance. Students learned that success meant memorizing answers, not questioning concepts or premises.

At the same time, both public high school and universities gutted the courses that taught critical thinking skills: philosophy, debate, comparative religion, essentially the courses that taught you how hold multiple conflicting worldviews in your head simultaneously became optional. What replaced them? Career-focused curriculums designed to produce employable workers, not independent thinkers.

The message was clear: your job is to absorb information and perform tasks, not to question systems or think for yourself. Critical thinking became a luxury good reserved for elite private schools while public education became a pipeline for compliance.

But not all elite private schools.

The Evangelical Education Boom: Right Doctrine Over Right Thinking

Between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s, enrollment in private evangelical K-12 schools doubled. Evangelical universities saw massive growth during the same period before plateauing in the 2010s. We’re talking about a significant portion of the American population being systematically educated in environments where the stated goal was teaching “right doctrine.”

When your institution’s purpose is doctrinal conformity, critical thinking becomes a threat. You don’t teach students to question assumptions. You teach them which assumptions are sacred and which questions are dangerous. You train them to accept church authority over evidence, faith over inquiry, and group consensus over independent analysis.

In essence, theology became pedagogy. And when you educate millions of people to treat questioning as spiritual failure, you create a population structurally incapable of critical thinking.

Corporate Culture: The Late Arrival to Critical Thinking

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Corporate America figured some of this out, but only recently, and only after spending decades doing maximum damage.

For most of the late 20th century and well into the 2000s, corporate culture perfected systems that rewarded obedience and punished independent thinking. Command-and-control hierarchies didn’t just tell you what to do. They trained you to stop thinking about whether what you’re doing made sense.

The employee who questioned the strategy got labeled “not a team player.” The manager who pushed back on idiotic directives got performance-managed out. The CEO who brought bad news to the shareholder meeting got exiled.

But something shifted in the last decade, particularly in tech and among companies that figured out innovation requires people who can actually think. Concepts like “psychological safety,” “red teaming,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “constructive dissent” started appearing in leadership frameworks. Companies began rewarding people for challenging assumptions rather than punishing them. Flexible hierarchies replaced rigid command structures. Some organizations even built critical thinking into their operating systems.

For many Boomers down to older Millennials, this evolution happened too late for those who spent their entire careers being trained NOT to think independently. And it’s still mostly confined to elite knowledge-work environments. Vast swaths of corporate America still run on the old model where kissing ass gets you promoted faster than critical thinking.

This means if you came up in traditional corporate culture, you were systematically trained to abandon critical thinking for most of your working life. The fact that some companies finally figured out this was stupid doesn’t undo decades of conditioning. You still have to deprogram yourself.

Case Study: What Happens When Intellectualism Dies

If you want to see what institutional intellectual collapse looks like in real time, watch what happened to American conservatism over the last 15 years.

The conservative movement used to have intellectual infrastructure: Buckley, Friedman, Hayek, Will, Goldwater, Kristol. You could disagree with their positions but they provided frameworks. They built arguments. They created principle-based constraints around ideas like constitutional limits, free markets, and moral clarity. Those constraints required grappling with ideas and defending positions through reason, not ideological loyalty.

Then Trump tapped into anti-intellectual resentment and made willful ignorance a loyalty test. Think tanks that spent decades building policy frameworks either bent the knee or got ostracized. Credentials became evidence of corruption. Domain expertise became suspect. The movement stopped vetting candidates based on intellectual capacity and started selecting for media performance and tribal signaling.

The result? Fox News, Newsmax, podcasters, and social media influencers became the new intellectual class. Grappling with ideas got replaced by WWE-style showmanship where the winner is whoever can best “own the libs.” Critical thinking became bad for the grift.

I am not saying all conservatives are stupid (nor am I saying all people on the middle or left are smart). I am pointing out what happens when an intellectual movement systematically kills its own intellectual tradition.

Critical Thinking as a Three-Dimensional Practice

The antidote to conditioned stupidity is critical thinking.

Critical thinking isn’t a skill you acquire by reading the right articles or taking a course. It’s a practice built on three axes that most people conveniently ignore because addressing all three requires admitting they’ve been full of shit about their own intelligence for years.

Intrinsic: Examining Your Internal Biases

You can’t think critically until you understand what you’re protecting. Most people mistake their anxieties for their values. They defend positions because those positions keep their identity intact, not because the positions are sound. They’re just running expensive psychological protection rackets on themselves.

Real critical thinking starts with brutal self-inventory. What do you need to be true? Where does your certainty feel too comfortable? Which beliefs would cost you relationships or income if you questioned them? Which hills are you willing to die on because you’ve already invested too much reputational capital to back down?

People who skip this step become ideological mercenaries. They’ll deploy any argument that serves their team, their brand, or their ego. Self-awareness functions as the foundation. You either know what you’re bringing to every judgment call, or you’re just performing intelligence while your unconscious runs the show.

Daniel Kahneman understood this: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” The work starts with admitting you bring bias to every conclusion in ways that operate structurally, beneath conscious awareness.

Extrinsic: Interrogate Everything, Especially What You Want to Believe

This dimension counters the passive information consumption and authority-based thinking that institutions trained into you.

Critical thinking dies the moment you stop treating information as contestable. Who benefits from this claim? What evidence would change my position? Who disagrees and why, and are they stupid or just threatening to my worldview?

Most people curate their inputs to confirm what they already think. They mistake consensus for truth and volume for validity. They build themselves cozy little epistemic bunkers where everyone agrees and nothing hurts. Real curiosity demands you seek out people who will wreck your assumptions.

This requires deliberate exposure to disconfirming evidence and uncomfortable dialogue. You seek out the smartest version of the argument you oppose. You engage people who will challenge your priors without letting you hide behind credentials or consensus or the safety of your ideological tribe.

Carl Sagan said it plainly: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.” People defend their bamboozles because they’ve built entire personalities around being bamboozled and abandoning them costs identity, belonging, and certainty.

Systemic: Red Teaming Your Life

“Systemic” in your personal life means understanding that nothing operates in isolation. Most people navigate life like they’re playing whack-a-mole. A relationship problem pops up, deal with it. A career crisis happens, handle it. A health scare emerges, address it. They never step back to see how the relationship problem connects to the career crisis which connects to the health scare which connects back to the same unexamined assumptions about control, worth, and what it means to be safe in the world.

Your marriage doesn’t exist separately from your work stress. Your parenting doesn’t exist separately from your unresolved shit with your own parents. Your financial decisions don’t exist separately from your beliefs about scarcity and worth. These domains interact. They influence each other. They create feedback loops that either stabilize your life or destabilize it in ways you won’t see coming.

The solution here is the best critical thinking framework I’ve ever encountered: red teaming. I learned about it from my close friend, Bryce Hoffman, the founder of Red Team Thinking and author of the book “Red Teaming.” He was the first civilian to graduate from the U.S. Army’s elite Red Team Leaders Course. He spent years translating military intelligence methodology into practical tools for people who’d prefer not to get their asses handed to them by reality.

Red teaming improves systemic critical thinking by giving you specific methods to expose how your beliefs create cascading consequences.

First, it forces you to break your strategies down into the actual assumptions they rest on, not the ones you tell people about, but the ones driving your decisions. You think you’re choosing your career based on passion, but red teaming reveals you’re assuming financial security requires corporate employment, which assumes your skills have no independent market value, which assumes you can’t build anything on your own. You map the chain. You see the dependencies. You realize your entire career strategy collapses if any link in that chain is wrong.

Second, red teaming makes you test those assumptions under adversarial conditions. You don’t just ask “is this true?” You ask “what’s the strongest case that this is bullshit?” You pressure-test the belief the way an engineer stress-tests a bridge. You assume your assumptions are wrong and work backward to see what remains true. Your assumption that “people who work hard get rewarded” might feel true until you red team it and realize it only holds in systems where merit matters more than politics, which immediately reveals why your career has stalled despite your effort.

Third, red teaming traces second and third-order effects. It doesn’t just identify the faulty assumption. It identifies what else breaks when that assumption fails. If your belief about hard work is wrong, then your approach to office politics is wrong, which means your relationship with your boss is built on fantasy, which means your plan for promotion is delusional, which means your financial projections are fiction. Red teaming shows you the whole structure before it collapses.

Red teaming gives you the tools to find the load-bearing assumptions in your life systems and test them before they fail catastrophically. It teaches you to think like an adversary about your own thinking. It makes you hunt for the flaws in your logic before reality finds them for you. And it shows you how everything connects so you stop treating symptoms and start addressing systems.

The Work

Most people would rather stay stupid than do the work. They’d rather defend their certainties than examine them. They’d rather maintain their identities than evolve them. They’d rather blame the system than acknowledge how complicit they’ve been in their own stupidity. Ron White was describing them, and he wasn’t wrong about their permanence.

The good news is that if you are reading this, it means you’re at least curious about your own stupid. And I have learned that curiosity is the first step. The next step is turning that curiosity into action, which means starting with something concrete across all three dimensions.

For the intrinsic work, pick one belief you hold that would cost you relationships or income if you questioned it publicly. Something tied to your identity, your tribe, your sense of who you are. Write down why you need it to be true. Not why it IS true. Why you NEED it to be true. What are you protecting? What falls apart if you’re wrong about this?

For the extrinsic work, pick one source you trust completely and find the smartest person who thinks that source is full of shit. Not a troll, not an idiot. Someone with credentials and arguments who disagrees fundamentally with your trusted source. Read what they say and sit with the discomfort. Ask yourself what evidence would change your mind and notice whether you’re willing to accept that evidence or snuggle deeper in the warm blanket of willful ignorance.

For the systemic work, pick one strategy in your life that isn’t working and map the assumptions underneath it. Ask what you’re assuming about how the world works, how people operate, how cause and effect function. Then red team those assumptions. Ask what’s the strongest case that you’re wrong. Ask what breaks downstream if that assumption fails. See how much of your life depends on beliefs you’ve never stress-tested.

That’s how you fix stupid. Not forever, because the forces producing stupidity are still operating at scale. Just today. And then again tomorrow. One belief at a time. One assumption at a time. One system at a time.