No One is Actually “Lazy” or “Stupid”
It’s fun and easy to call people these names, right? Someone just doesn’t seem to have any urgency for something you care about, or doesn’t seem to be able to “work hard,” so they’re “lazy.” Someone doesn’t seem to grasp something you understand easily or does something reckless or dangerous, so they’re “stupid.” Simple enough, right? Wrong.
We use these words to describe, mostly, people or actions we disapprove of, understandably, and it’s essentially shorthand for “that (act/person) is bad,” or, at its core, “I am better than that (act/person.)” And I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’ve never done this before, or that there are no bad acts or actors. I wanted to write this brief essay — before I eventually dive into it in a much longer project — to give you a tip that you probably mean one of a few other things when you use these words, and we’d all be better served by switching up our language just a little bit.
Why does this matter? Because who usually, in our society, gets classified as “lazy” and/or “stupid?” You know what groups I’m referring to. People in precarious or unstable situations, people without jobs, people without permanent homes, or, if we’re just feeling puckish, people we disagree with politically. I don’t necessarily care about the last group, but by using the same words for, say, conservatives flouting COVID restrictions in 2020 that we might use for an unhoused family, it sure isn’t the conservative who ends up suffering.
To be clear, these are not dictionary definitions. The whole internet is available to you for that. These are just my analysis of a better and more accurate way to describe certain behaviors and individuals.
People aren’t “lazy” or “stupid,” really. They’re one of three things:
Impaired, when it truly is an issue of something medical or psychological that prevents them from having the capacity or energy to complete a task. The people who seem to be unable to catch small errors, we might call them “lazy” or “sloppy,” or say they don’t have attention to detail, but it’s possible their brain makes these things a Herculean effort for them, and harboring disdain for these people or situations does us no good. Now, is it an adult’s responsibility to try and find the most effective way to move within the way their brain and body works? Yes. If they can afford it, is it an adult’s responsibility to seek treatment for impairments? Yes. But if they don’t get support, it just means they’re making a bad decision, and, well, I think we’ve all been there.
I know I was called “lazy” when I was younger for not being able to complete certain types of homework, and in retrospect, my undiagnosed condition meant that concentrating on things that weren’t compelling made this a challenge. Now, this is a challenge that I have since overcome mostly by finding a job and a series of outlets that play to my strengths and powering through the dull parts to get to the good parts, which is only possible because of support I have received and my ability to afford treatment and so on, and the fact that I have a whole Dr. before my name so people tend to listen to what I say these days, which is, honestly, the biggest value of that whole degree, but I digress. With all that said, I still make some mistakes though. This reclassification is also important for people who believe in relative levels of “grit,” which implies that some people just don’t try hard enough. I assure you almost everyone is doing the very best they can with the brain, bodies, and, most importantly, privilege they’ve been given. Anyone who has been on Twitter since November should understand that having more money surely doesn’t equate to more capability or effort.
These people might also be Incurious, when they grow up sheltered (literally or emotionally) and, perhaps out of fear, have little interest in learning about other peoples, cultures, or groups. People in this group may or may not be hateful, but it’s just easier for them to believe what they were taught — or, in 2023, to try and stop their children from being taught new things — but they’re not lacking in intelligence for being afraid of CRT. They don’t want to know what it would mean to understand these “new” ideas. If you dismiss them as “stupid” or even “intellectually lazy,” you’re saying they don’t understand what they’re doing, and that’s a dangerous way to behave if you want to fight them.
Lastly, these acts or individuals might ultimately be Ignorant, for the people who have every bit of information, went to every school, have their degrees, and still reject things they don’t like out of hand, or know they’re wrong but enforce their preferences on everyone else anyway, either out of habit or greed or both. Even the people you don’t like, the very worst of politicans and SCOTUS justices, they are not stupid. And most of them have sat and listened to (or read) things they disagree with by virtue of how many people they’ve spoken to. They just don’t care, and choose to, well, ignore what they know is right in front of them. And I think we all know how harmful this is to the rest of us.
I can say hundreds of pages more about this — and I will, soon enough, with a lot more detail — but this is just a brief primer on what I believe is a better way to analyze people and behaviors.
-Dr. G
