This one has been on the backburner for a while, but with recent comments from *certain* politicians about how ‘autistic people don’t contribute to society / pay taxes’ I thought it was the right time to share this thought.
If someone calls you dumb, it feels like an insult, right?
But why? Why is dumb an insult?
Could it be… because of capitalism? (or any equivalent exploitative system)
what is 'dumb' anyway?
First, let’s define dumb.
I’m of the belief that *almost* everyone has their own personal brand of intelligence, that there is no objective ‘smart/intelligent’ or ‘stupid/dumb’.
(Especially as someone who my whole life has been told I don’t know ‘obvious’ things and then other people don’t know what seems obvious to me.)
Even without any observable / describable ‘intelligence’, all life has value – full stop.
In this context, however, when I say ‘dumb’ I’m referring to the societally-defined sense of not book smart or smart in a sense that they could achieve something ‘great’ (again, a subjective term) like making a lot of money or creating a product or doing some type of complicated research.
The kind where kids who aren’t able to sit in their chair and score high on standardised tests are considered ‘less smart’ than those who are.
why does it matter if you're smart or not?
Now we’ve defined terms, we can ask – why does it matter if you’re ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’?
In this system, in this society, it affects your ability to earn money, ‘contribute’, and achieve status.
In this system where (some people think) not everyone deserves to eat and have a house. Where you must earn the right to be alive, there must be some way to differentiate who ‘deserves’ to be successful, wealthy, comfortable.
And one of those signifiers is intelligence.
(Because we live in a myth of meritocracy and somehow intelligence is a merit.)
So, if you’re ‘dumb’ as per the rules of what society defines as dumb or smart, you’re less deserving of… success? Happiness? Power? Life?
You’re more likely to end up on the ‘bottom rung’ of the ladder of life.
what if we thought all life was intrinsically valuable?
But, for a moment, imagine a different world.
Imagine a world where every person’s contribution was considered equally important and equally deserving of having food, shelter and a comfortable life.
Not only allowing every type of intelligence and capacity to find their own place in society, but also celebrating each role as equally important.
For example, people often talk down about baristas, service staff, and bin men (or, trash collectors for my US audience). But all those roles are very important to us functioning as society.
It’s true you don’t need a PhD in physics to be a rubbish collector or a barista or a cleaner, but they are skilled labour in their own right.
In this world, your intelligence wouldn’t matter because every role is seen as equally important and deserving of survival, comfort, and joy.
In that world, would 'dumb' be an insult?
Probably not.
Because it wouldn’t have the same signifiers attached to it as it does in our capitalist, wealth-hoarding, competitive system.
It’s kind of like the word ‘fat’.
Like dumb, fat is a subjective term – some people will think a person is fat because they’re curvy, other people think you need to carry a lot more weight before you achieve that descriptor.
But fat is only an insult because for some reason we decided having ‘extra’ weight on our body is bad.
It decreases the value of a person – for some reason.
(And please don’t start with the ‘health’ argument – we all know that skinny people can be in terrible health, and while yes there are health complications at certain extreme weights, someone can look ‘big’ and be able to run, lift weights, function very well, etc. I’m not here to debate fat-phobia and body liberation, just to give another example of how words become insults because of the system in which we live.)
In this world, being dumb wouldn’t decrease your value as a person – so it wouldn’t be an insult.
It's the system.
Once again, something that is actually a systemic issue is being placed on the individual.
A person being dumb or smart shouldn’t be the determining factor as to whether they can have enough resources to be housed and fun and enjoy life.
It shouldn’t be.
But in many ways, it is.
So the next time someone calls you dumb (if they do), or a similar insult, remember – it’s only an insult because of capitalism.
