Anger comes armored with a silent lie: Cultivate me, wield me, and you may gain something large and lasting beyond the ordinary. Cynical opportunists know this and turn it against us. Why else would every moral runt grasping for power promise to fight for us?

What dooms us to generation after generation of sad goofiness is not a lack of intelligence but a fundamental Faustian bargain: witless obedience in exchange for the emotional reassurance that comes with group identity. We'd rather belong than think.

In accounting for such abundant dumbness, some of it banal, much of if dangerous, one is tempted to shrug and explain it all by writing off people as simply stupid. But they are not stupid.