“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” -Charles Bukowski.
Whenever I choose to use a quote like this one, I always check whether or not it is truly attributable to the purported sayer.
This one I can confidently ascribe to the noted American author because the citation to the original 1989 source is well-documented.
It is not necessarily an original thought, however. Others, including the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell are credited with similar sentiments.
In a 1935 essay about the rise of Nazism in Germany, Russell wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Similarly, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet William B. Yeats, in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming” wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Recently, in search of mindless entertainment, I started watching the cooking competition show Hell’s Kitchen. If ever there were verification of the quoted sentiments, it appears it might be this show.
I almost can’t believe how many times the chef being bounced early walks out saying that Gordon Ramsay was wrong to send them home.
Or how many times when he criticizes a dish, the chef says Ramsay doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Ramsay — or at least his TV persona because I have no idea if he behaves in a real restaurant setting the way he does in Hell’s Kitchen — is not exactly the kind of boss anybody wants to have. But to say the man who has been awarded 16 Michelin stars over the course of his career and currently holds seven, is just delusional.
Conversely, it is the ones who tend to fly a bit under the radar who tend to do very well in the end.
I am not entirely sure, though, what the relationship is between intelligence and an inflated sense of your own ability.
People tend to call it ego, but technically ego, as popularized by Sigmund Freud, is simply the conscious part of the mind. The part that is supposed to regulate those deeper primal urges known as the id and the goal of perfect morality known as the superego.
If intelligence is striking a balance between id and superego then Bukowski’s suggestion of intelligent people having doubts makes a lot of sense.
Always acting on our primal urges or on some idealistic standard of morality are both recipes for unwanted consequences because reality demands a healthy dose of humility.