stupid people — a category that holds 0 names

the category exists because someone needs it to exist. it does the work of sorting humans into a bin so the sorter does not have to be in the bin. i am not in that bin. you are not in that bin. the bin only ever contains other people. that is how you know it is fictional.

friday, 11:23am, the office is half-empty for a vendor walkthrough on the second floor that carla volunteered for because there is, allegedly, a fruit platter. i have, by my read of her calendar, until lunch.

so. stupid people. the phrase shows up about three times a week, on average, across every breakroom and group chat in the country. the speaker is never one of them. the speaker is always the witness. that is the first clue. the listener also nods like a witness. nobody, in the history of the phrase being used in a sentence, has raised their hand and said that is me, by the way. the hand has not been raised.

stupid people: a category most often assigned by the speaker to a third party who is not present, and accepted by the listener as a fact about a population the listener is also not in. the category, on inspection, is structurally empty — it has a name and an opening but never any volunteers. it is a bin nobody climbs into. it is, by simple counting, a fiction with very good marketing. the longer case against the word stupid as a verdict at all is on a separate shelf and does the heavier lifting.

THE BIN. CONTAINS. ZERO. NAMES.

the bin contains zero names. you can supply suspects. you cannot supply admissions. the absence of admissions is the part i find clarifying.

stupid people, the category as people use it

when somebody says stupid people in a sentence — and people do, freely, daily — they are venting after a slow checkout line, or on the phone with a sibling about a third sibling, or reading a comments section. the category is a relief valve. the speaker needs to release the heat into a labeled container.

the trouble is that the container does not, on inspection, have a list of members. you cannot, in any honest moment, name the five most recent stupid people you have personally met. you can name people who have annoyed you. you can name people whose decisions you would not have made. you cannot hand over a list of five members of a category you genuinely believe in. said out loud, it sounds enormous. written down on a piece of paper at this desk, it contains nobody you would, when pressed, sign your name under.

i did this exercise once. i sat with a notebook and tried to fill the list. i got, on the page, the man who had, at a parking meter, taken six minutes to pay. the man had been on the phone, possibly with bad news. the bin had, after one entry, lost its first member.

who built the category and why it persists

the category is old. older than the internet, older than the phrase being printed on a t-shirt for $19.95 in a font designed to look hand-lettered. people have been talking this way since people have had a way of organizing themselves into groups and noticing that some groups are easier to belong to than others. it is, structurally, the cheapest way to belong to a group. it requires only that you not be in it.

that is why it persists. it is the bargain-basement membership card. you do not have to read a book or take a test. you have to point. you point at someone, you call them stupid, and you have, in that act, joined the other club. on a strict economic basis, the category never gets retired. retirement would close the cheapest club in town.

the merchandise around stupid people depends on it. tim burton’s charlie and the chocolate factory, the 2005 one with willy wonka running quality control on visiting children, runs an entire factory premise on a category test the audience, in the dark, grades from the outside. the audience is, by design, not in the bin. the audience is the sorter. that is the contract. harmless in the room. off the screen, the bargain-basement card again, dressed up in lights.

i hold, in passing, a take that has not yet been disproved at the desk: cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. not relevant. on the chart. moving on.

dave called, mom had called sunday, the category came up

this is the part where the post owes you a scene. i will, briefly, comply.

my friend dave called wednesday afternoon, around 3:51pm, to debrief on a thing i had done with a microwave the previous week — the seventh unit is, currently, on its way out of my apartment in two bags. dave laughed for nine consecutive minutes about the bag count. i timed it. when he could speak again, he said: this is what stupid people do. flat. confident. on the record.

i did not defend myself. defending is the defense’s worst opening move. i waited. then i said: name three other ones. dave paused. dave is a person who, professionally, names things. he could not, with the engine of his car running, supply three. he supplied two. a cousin who had, in 2019, sold a car for less than the loan on it. a man named gary who had, at a wedding, arrived in a golf cart he did not own. the second name was a person dave found mostly delightful. the bin was, again, leaking.

this would be a lighter scene if mom had not, on sunday at 6:47pm, also said the phrase. mom uses it the way she uses traffic. as a weather report. somebody had cut her off in a left-turn lane. mom does not structurally hold the category — she rents it for a left-turn lane and hands it back. mom knew, when i asked, the somebody had probably been late for something. she said well, i was, too, in a way. the bin emptied a third time, in one week, on a phone call from a sunday i had not been there for. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

two phone calls, two deployments, two retractions. that is the data, at this hour.

why i refuse to assign it and to receive it

i refuse to assign stupid people because i cannot, when pressed, fill it with names. i refuse to receive it because the people who deploy it, when pressed, also cannot fill it. those two refusals are the same refusal. they cancel out. no accuser whose evidence survives a second sentence, no defendant whose conviction survives a polite question. we are all standing around an empty bin nobody is in. we should, sensibly, walk away.

this connects to the case i made for smart and stupid as roommates rather than opposites, which removes the dichotomy the category needs to function. and it sits on the same shelf as the question of whether the verdict sticks at all, which i argued against in the longer rebuttal of forever as a duration.

there is a smaller, sharper version on the cousin shelf — the bit about defending fun against the qualifier. one is applied to a hobby, one is applied to a population. neither, on inspection, holds up after the second question. the second question is always the same question. name three.

the travel angle, on what happens when an idiot goes abroad and the locals run the sorting, is in the longer file on the idiot abroad and the foreign bin. i wrote that one with my passport on the desk, decoratively.

verdict, the category collapses under polite scrutiny

carla is back from the second floor, eating a piece of pineapple with a fork that is not sparky and looks, on inspection, hotel-quality. she has not asked what i am working on. i have not volunteered.

one final thing. the third yoga mat is still under the couch, where it has been since 2023. it has watched seven microwaves come and go, two phone calls about a category, and has not, in five years, expressed an opinion. there is something to learn from the mat. i have not, yet, learned it.

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