I think that describing the various aberrations produced by human politics as dumb feels as a moral faux paux for anyone who’s not in the “rationality crowd”. Here, being dumb (not in the sense of realising and admitting of having been dumb to do better) is basically a mortal sin, serious enough to kill an idea once and for all.
Going by normal social norms, that something was dumb is just a… slight addendum to the fact that it was evil. You are supposed to hate and feel revulsed by the Soviet purges and the concentration camps because they were evil and wrong, if you started discussing the effectiveness, people could thing that’s the main problem you had with those ideas and that you would have approved them if they “worked”, so talking about how dumb it was at length feels like you were lowering yourself at their level, actually examining the idea to see if it was really wrong, which is seen as less moral than just feeling immediate horror and revulsion. Sometime an author or a historian would use the “dumb” argument as a way to plant one more nail in the coffin, but the speech usually goes like “it was evil, aberrant, immoral, monstrous, and it didn’t even succeeded in its objective.
I think that moral judgements are also more effective at keeping the populace away from dumb evil ideas than judgements on the intelligence of the ideas. If it’s WRONG you can’t do it ever, if it’s just dumb why, you could of course find any idiotic way to “improve” it, or reasons why it wasn’t really dumb, or why this time it wouldn’t be dumb...
If we turn to the larger classes of political mistakes, I think that usually the historian tries to stick to the facts. Competence is more easily measured than intelligence, if you look at someone’s actions. You have to be exceptionally smart to be noticed as such through the lenses of history, because you’d usually just leave behind actions that denoted a competent ruler/general or an incompetent ruler/general, and would be judged as such. You’d need to do exceptionally well in a lot of fields before an historian would feel legitimised to write a “personal judgement” on your intelligence.
As a last thought: people seem to care a lot less than they should about being intelligent, the dumb heroes who just does what’s right or charges straight forward or does whatever regularly outperforms the intelligent secondary character/comic relief/villain in most fictions.
People are also a lot less worried that they should about themselves possibly being dumb, everyone seems to think that THEY would just think as they always do in any situation, why, how could those silly germans fall for Hitler’s words while I know Hitler was wrong, clearly it would have been obvious to me that he was evil if I lived back then, and I don’t need to wonder if I’m acting like them in any way whatsoever, since I’m not seeing any Hitler or nazis in front of me.
Even when people get proof that they are being dumb in some way, they likely react turning it in a badge of honour, I’m “sticking to my guns”, maybe I’m not as smart as that pansy egghead but at least I know how to spit and so on and on.
So in general it seems that the large majority of the population doesn’t really believe that trying to be dumb or intelligent has anything to do with being right or wrong on anything, or even with being effective.
Edit: I hope this was useful and apologise for the unnecessary ranting, I wrote this being in a rather bad place.
I think that describing the various aberrations produced by human politics as dumb feels as a moral faux paux for anyone who’s not in the “rationality crowd”. Here, being dumb (not in the sense of realising and admitting of having been dumb to do better) is basically a mortal sin, serious enough to kill an idea once and for all.
Going by normal social norms, that something was dumb is just a… slight addendum to the fact that it was evil. You are supposed to hate and feel revulsed by the Soviet purges and the concentration camps because they were evil and wrong, if you started discussing the effectiveness, people could thing that’s the main problem you had with those ideas and that you would have approved them if they “worked”, so talking about how dumb it was at length feels like you were lowering yourself at their level, actually examining the idea to see if it was really wrong, which is seen as less moral than just feeling immediate horror and revulsion. Sometime an author or a historian would use the “dumb” argument as a way to plant one more nail in the coffin, but the speech usually goes like “it was evil, aberrant, immoral, monstrous, and it didn’t even succeeded in its objective.
I think that moral judgements are also more effective at keeping the populace away from dumb evil ideas than judgements on the intelligence of the ideas. If it’s WRONG you can’t do it ever, if it’s just dumb why, you could of course find any idiotic way to “improve” it, or reasons why it wasn’t really dumb, or why this time it wouldn’t be dumb...
If we turn to the larger classes of political mistakes, I think that usually the historian tries to stick to the facts. Competence is more easily measured than intelligence, if you look at someone’s actions. You have to be exceptionally smart to be noticed as such through the lenses of history, because you’d usually just leave behind actions that denoted a competent ruler/general or an incompetent ruler/general, and would be judged as such. You’d need to do exceptionally well in a lot of fields before an historian would feel legitimised to write a “personal judgement” on your intelligence.
As a last thought: people seem to care a lot less than they should about being intelligent, the dumb heroes who just does what’s right or charges straight forward or does whatever regularly outperforms the intelligent secondary character/comic relief/villain in most fictions.
People are also a lot less worried that they should about themselves possibly being dumb, everyone seems to think that THEY would just think as they always do in any situation, why, how could those silly germans fall for Hitler’s words while I know Hitler was wrong, clearly it would have been obvious to me that he was evil if I lived back then, and I don’t need to wonder if I’m acting like them in any way whatsoever, since I’m not seeing any Hitler or nazis in front of me.
Even when people get proof that they are being dumb in some way, they likely react turning it in a badge of honour, I’m “sticking to my guns”, maybe I’m not as smart as that pansy egghead but at least I know how to spit and so on and on.
So in general it seems that the large majority of the population doesn’t really believe that trying to be dumb or intelligent has anything to do with being right or wrong on anything, or even with being effective.
Edit: I hope this was useful and apologise for the unnecessary ranting, I wrote this being in a rather bad place.