dumb people — vs smart people, a table that does not hold up

dumb people versus smart people is a table that does not hold up under any weight, and i have tried. the supermarket aisle is the courtroom. the DIY haircut is the verdict. mountain people are a separate category entirely. the table has eleven rows and exactly two of them are honest.

so here we are, with a chart drafted on the back of a receipt for nutritional yeast i did not need. the chart was meant to settle the question. the chart instead made the question worse. that is, in fairness, what charts do, when the man drawing them is the man being measured.

before anyone writes in: yes, i count myself among dumb people. this whole investigation is a self-portrait with the lights on. the broader argument lives in the wider pillar essay on what dumb actually means, which i drafted on a friday from this same chair. today we are zooming in on the supposed two-tribe split, and on what happens to it when you push.

writing this from the desk at 9:18am on a thursday. carla took a danish and a clipboard into the all-hands on the third floor, which is the longest of the meetings; i have, optimistically, until lunch.

i drafted the original chart on a sunday at the supermarket, between the pasta aisle and the freezer that hums in B-flat. the trolley was sideways. a woman in a green coat was watching me write on the back of a receipt with a pen i had borrowed from the deli counter. she did not ask what i was doing. i appreciated that. some of the best fieldwork happens when nobody asks.

dumb people, the category as drafted

let me describe the category as i first laid it out, before reality intervened.

a dumb person, in the popular telling, is someone who buys the second can opener. someone who puts the keys in the fridge for “safekeeping”. someone who reads the back of the cereal box during a job interview, then mentions, brightly, that the cereal contains riboflavin. someone who, when given two doors, picks the wall.

that is the cartoon. the cartoon is comforting because the cartoon is always somebody else. the cartoon has a slack jaw and a backward cap and an opinion about the moon landing. the cartoon does not pay rent in your zip code. the cartoon is always two aisles over.

here is the trouble. when you sit down with a pen and try to staff the category with real people you actually know, the cartoon evaporates. mom is not the cartoon. dave is not the cartoon. mike, who has not filed his taxes since 2019, is not the cartoon. i am not the cartoon, and i have a microwave history that should arguably qualify me as the chairman.

so the category, in practice, is staffed by ghosts. the chart’s first column is full of people who do not exist except in things other people forwarded to me by email. that is, structurally, a problem for the chart.

smart people, the alleged category

now the second column. the alleged opposite. smart people.

the cartoon here is a man named brian who reads at 4:08pm on a sunday and has a podcast queue arranged by his own taxonomy. brian eats almonds by the gram. brian uses the word “cohort”. brian’s car has fourteen cupholders and brian has filled exactly one with water and one with a small container of brian’s own snacks. brian is, in the cartoon, the answer.

i know a few people who look like brian on paper. they have brian’s reading habits. they have brian’s cohort vocabulary. and they also, every one of them, walked into a glass door at least once, sent a sext to a parent at least once, and bought a treadmill that now functions as a coat rack. brian, on close inspection, is not in fact the opposite of the can-opener-buyer. brian is the can-opener-buyer with a slightly nicer can opener.

i am not the first to notice this. there is a question of whether the smart-or-dumb test is even a real test, which i drafted last spring at this same desk while carla was in the budget walkthrough on the third floor. the test, on inspection, asks the wrong question.

which brings us to the chart.

the comparative table, drafted at the supermarket

here is the chart, transcribed from the receipt. i have not edited the rows. i have only typed them.

two honest rows. row 5, the haircut. row 8, the tie. nine ties, broken or rigged. that is not a chart. that is a verdict, and the verdict is that there is no chart.

THE TABLE. DOES NOT. HOLD.

i sat with the receipt for a while. the woman in the green coat had moved on. somebody had restocked the pasta. the freezer kept humming in B-flat. nothing, in the world, depended on the chart, and yet the chart had been a small religion of mine for about twenty minutes and now the religion was empty. that is, often, what investigations do. you set out to file the people. you end up filing the chart.

the diy haircut as the great equalizer

row 5. the haircut. let’s stop on this one because this is, possibly, the only honest line in the whole table.

i cut my own hair. i have, on three documented occasions, used the good knife from the kitchen because i could not find the scissors, and on one of those occasions the good knife did better than the scissors would have, which troubled me for weeks. the haircut, when i do it myself, is a confession. it is the only confession i wear in public for ten to fourteen days. people see it. people know. nobody asks. there is a kindness in that.

the smart person, in the cartoon, sits in a chair and pays a stranger sixty dollars to know their head. that is, on most measurements, the wiser play. and yet the smart person and i pass on the street and we both, briefly, look. they look because they recognise a fellow head. i look because i am imagining the sixty dollars. neither of us is, in that moment, smart. neither of us is, in that moment, dumb. we are both, in that moment, two heads on a sidewalk.

the haircut is the great equalizer because the haircut is the one act in which dumb behaviour and smart behaviour converge in the same goal: do not look frightening on a tuesday morning. the dumb route uses a kitchen knife. the smart route uses a chair. the mirror, at the end of the week, does not care which.

(i should note here, while we are on the subject, that the closest cultural anchor anybody has for the dumb/smart split is the 1994 film dumb and dumber, which i have, separately, defended at length elsewhere; the longer note on the film and what it actually argues went up some weeks back. on the haircut question specifically: harry’s bowl cut is not the worst haircut in cinema. it is, arguably, the most committed.)

the mountain people take, briefly, since they appear in the table

row 10 mentions cities. that is a cheat. it is a cheat because most charts about people live in cities, by people in cities, for people in cities. the moment you leave the city, the chart breaks in a different way.

this is where i have to cite my hot take, which is contentious and which i hold without apology. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese. i did not invent this position. i inherited it from observation, and i hold it with the conviction of a man who has visited a mountain twice and survived both visits.

mountain people, in my limited and not-particularly-rigorous study, do not fit either column of the chart. they do not buy the second can opener because they have, somewhere, a knife that opens cans. they do not put forks in microwaves because they often, defiantly, do not have a microwave. they do not hit snooze because they get up when an animal asks them to. by every metric in the chart, mountain people are smarter than i am, and yet i would, given the choice, not be one. that is the contradiction. the contradiction is the point.

they are also, separately, correct about cheese. nobody disputes this. the cheese is, on the mountain, made differently and aged differently and sliced thicker, and on this i fold. the rest of the mountain — the boots, the silence, the suspicion of paved roads — i decline. but the cheese is theirs. i mark them down as a third category and move on.

three categories. the original chart had two columns. the corrected chart needs a third. the corrected chart is no longer a chart. it is, at best, a venn diagram, and at worst it is a sketch of three blobs, with mountain people drawn smaller because i have only met four of them.

verdict, the categories collapse on contact

so here is where the whole thing lands.

there is no clean column for dumb people. there is no clean column for smart people. there are mountain people, and they are correct about cheese only. the rest is sliding scale, mood, daylight, and how recently the person was in a supermarket with a sideways trolley. the chart has the structural integrity of a paper cup that has been used for tea and then for wine and then, very briefly, for an olive.

this is not a sad result. this is a kind one. it means that the woman in the green coat at the supermarket, who watched me write on the receipt, was not in a separate category from me. she was in the same one. so was the trolley. so was the deli counter pen, which i did not return, and which i note here because honesty, in the end, costs nothing.

i can hear the elevator. that means the all-hands is wrapping or somebody escaped early to the bathroom. either way the receipt with the chart on it goes back into the third drawer, with the boat magazine and the takeaway menu from the place that closed in 2022. i have a little less time than i thought.

if you got this far, the broader argument continues over in the older note on what a fool actually is, which sits in a different cluster but covers some of the same ground; a fool, by the way, is not the same as a dumb person, and the two terms do not interchange — that is the substance of the other piece, and i won’t repeat it here. the chart, on that question, did better. one column for fool. one column for dumb. zero columns for smart. so progress, of a kind.

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