An Ode To Stubbornness (And Why It Isn’t Stupid)

If we’ve never met, here’s something you need to know about me: I am stubborn.

I am prodigiously stubborn. I’m rational, I’m patient, and I have an extremely long fuse, but when all of these have been tested and worn down, it’s quite difficult to move me. Thankfully, I choose to use this prodigious stubbornness for the forces of good, to hold my ground on things that are useful, even helpful.

I’m telling you this as a preface to something about which I am passionately, devotedly, even impressively stubborn. Are you ready? Here it is:

Humans are not stupid.

I know, there is plentiful evidence to the contrary. History is littered with instances of human-made havoc. For thousands of years, we’ve gone out of our way to chop each other up, hold each other down, hide from the truth, and squander our resources. We’re avid collectors of dishonesty and destruction, and we string them up and wear them with pride. The past two years alone, no, the past two weeks should stand as a testament to our unforgivable bone-headedness. If there’s a way to screw something up, we’ll find it. We’ll multiply it, find all kinds of related mistakes to make. We’ll go looking for problems we’ve previously ironed out and deliberately add new wrinkles. We pass blame, ignore alternatives and solutions, and treat each other (not to mention our planet) like hot garbage.

How on earth can a reasonable person think that humans aren’t stupid? The daily news reads more like the bar scene from the movie Gremlins than a curriculum vitae for a species that has reached numbers of over 7.5 billion. I’m not completely clueless. I’ll willingly admit that we are selfish, crude, arrogant and that we have the collective sense of humour of an overtired toddler. But we aren’t stupid. Not even close.

I keep thinking of Thomas Hobbes, who stared out on the English Civil War, as his country came apart at the seams, and described the unchecked version of human life as “nasty, brutish and short”. I get this. I see this too, and I’m ashamed that over three hundred years later, if Hobbes had a ringside seat for our current circus, he’d probably ask what we’ve been doing with our time. Or maybe he wouldn’t be surprised. He very clearly saw the awful people were capable of, the chaos we seem to like to keep close. However, for all his pessimism (or maybe it was just realism) about human nature, Hobbes also knew we were intelligent enough to fix things, to survive. He saw past the nonsense and the destruction and found that we had potential, possibilities.

The human race, in many ways, is a flaming dumpster fire, but from that burning heap jump little sparks. We’re the species that saw tools hiding in chunks of rock, that painted fantasies on cave walls, that learned to cross the water and eventually get off the planet. All of us share our genetic code with Einstein, Hypatia, Confucius, Avicenna, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Maya Angelou. In no way do I want to diminish their brilliance, their unique minds, but at the end of the day, they, like the rest of us, were a set of arms and legs chauffeuring a warm, gooey, grey lump with electricity humming through it. It was there, and for whatever reason, under whatever circumstances, they used it.

I’m here, and you’re here, and everyone else is here because humans are smart. 200,000 years ago, we were smart enough to keep ourselves fed and warm (and uneaten) in an unforgiving world. We’ve birthed poets, philosophers, composers, painters, scientists, explorers, inventors, and even the occasional humanitarian.  We’ve knit together 7,100 different languages, for Pete’s sake. That just doesn’t happen to something that doesn’t have anything going on between its ears.

All this is what I stubbornly cling to. This isn’t me being optimistic, idealistic, or naïve. It’s not a matter of faith. I think that’s just the way it is, and the fact that most of us choose to do nothing with this gift, or even actively try to destroy it in ourselves and others, doesn’t make it go away. We’re all a little different, but I hold that there’s something smart, creative, and insightful in every gooey, grey lump. For every act of stupidity and foolishness, there’s a counterexample, some act of foresight, understanding, and innovation. There’s no take-backsies on this.  

The question of how we get human beings to embrace our intelligence, as opposed to actively trying to suppress it, is one I don’t know how to answer. There have been thousands of years of thinking humans who were never able to crack that tough little nut. But I do know this: it’s a little scary to be told you have potential. It implies that it needs to be cultivated, used properly. It means that you’ll have to try harder, that you’ll probably screw up a bit, and then you’ll be expected to fix things and try again. People will expect things of you and might be disappointed if (more likely when) you don’t deliver. With great power, comes great responsibility, as they say. It might take a nontrivial measure of, well, I don’t know…stubbornness to keep going.

Some days it seems to hurt more, knowing what we have going for us is so often squandered or weaponized, than it would to just concede that we don’t have the intellectual goods. But that’s not the way my gooey, grey lump works. It’s a persistent, tenacious little thing, and it demands that I put my feet on the floor every morning and keep looking for what I know is out there. Because that seems like the smart thing to do.