In Springboro, Ohio, the school system decided to cancel two U.S. Constitution summer courses earlier this month after those courses became embroiled in controversy. The courses, provided by the Institute on the Constitution and the National Center for Constitutional Studies, came under criticism as being “Tea Party leaning” and religiously oriented. On Thursday night Sonny Thomas, the president and founder of the Springboro Tea Party, unfurled a a Confederate flag at a school board meeting after giving a speech meant to defend the Constitution classes.
Thomas, who has previously come under fire for racist tweets, gave a speech meant to defend the Constitution classes. According to sources, however, he also made racist comments and endorsed the League of the South, which advocates for an independent Southern republic. At the end of his speech he unfurled a Confederate flag and asked the audience if they were offended.
But remember folks….the Tea Party isn’t racist!
aattp dot org A very informative site
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others”.
Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, Dunning and Kruger have noted similar historical observations from philosophers, including Confucius (“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”)[3] and Bertrand Russell (“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision”).[8] Geraint Fuller, commenting on the paper, noted that Shakespeare expressed similar sentiment in As You Like It (“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole.”
http://aattp.org/how-cruel-twisted-teapublicans-talk-about-poor-people-video/ Watch Video
ANY QUESTIONS !
Mike,
Excellent comment. Fascinating! I’ve not before encountered this thesis. What piques my interest are the philosophical observations. I’m not too keen on Russell, but he’s spot on here. It’s Fuller’s observation of Touchstone that is most illuminating.
Reason being – the quote here, “The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knows himself to be a Foole” alludes to a long tradition of the “wise fool.” Shakespeare created the role of Touchstone for comedic actor Will Kemp – an actual Elizabethan “jester.” Similarly he wrote the character of Feste (Twelfth Night) for comedic actor-jester Robert Armin. Both characters and both actors directly figure into the larger, longer tradition of the Wise Fool – the Lord of Misrule featured in festive dramas (Feast of Fools, mumming, morris dancing etc.) and the nature of the “natural fool.”
Shakespeare’s fools pretty much function all in the same way (structurally speaking) within this tradition. The fool characters are usually skeptics, tricksters, truth-tellers, revealers of deception, “corruptors” and dissemblers of language. Touchstone will successfully argue both sides of a question, for instance, and derail “facts” and the “obvious” as obtuse, farcical, or hypocritical. Similarly Feste plays the “simpleton” who reveals the debased simplicity of others.
In Twelfth Night or What You Will Feste says,
“Wit, and’t be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools; and I that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man. For what says Quinapalus? ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.’” and
“Lady, ‘Cucullus non facit monarchum’: that’s as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain. Good maddona, give me leave to prove you a fool.” In other words his harlequin suit is the deception. It is his inner harlequin mind which embodies wise truths – because he is a “natural” fool – A Tom Tell-Troth, Thomas Tell-Troth, Titus Tell-Troth or just Tell-Trothe (“Tell-Troth” all permutations of the trickster truth-teller who appears “dim”).
And that he’s not Olivia’s “fool” but a dissembler of her speech: “A sentence is but a cheverel glove to good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.”
Feste’s remarks point to a double-entendre emblematic of the Wise Fool – Trust not the superficial word nor the surface value of the speaker. That caveat cuts both ways. Be wary of the “true” fool, the one who appears wise, because the “true” fool isn’t wise, but rather approaches the world with arrogance, avarice, and ambition, qualities which are destructive to those around him (society).The natural fool – the “jester-clown” is the wise one for his “nature” is empathy and insight thus he is the Lord of Misrule – he inverts the power structure and social order for the benefit of all rather than the privileged few.
The Lord of Misrule figured as the King of the Festival of Fools or Feast of Fools where social norms and social order/class were inverted – the fool – of the lowest rank becomes king. Much more to be said on this – Erasmus and In Praise of Folly, the origins of mockery, comedy, and satire in Saturnalia, Commedia dell’arte – masks, masques, Harlequins… much too much to go into here and a somewhat of a digression….
I suppose that was the long way around getting to the final point – sorry about that. I guess what I was noodling through there is Dunning-Kruger’s thesis and the exempla you posted. Here we have a deliberate attempt at class inversion that the Festes, Touchstones, and Lords of Misrule would surely (and with cutting wit) scour out as the machinations of “true” fooles which can only end in misery, decay, and malevolence. Ironic.
Furthering the irony, of course, is brandishing the Confederate Flag in this context given that the Confederacy and everything it stood for undermined the Constitution and everything the Constitution intended to establish, achieve, and instill. On that note, it might be useful to note a crucial differentiation – The Wise Fool inverts. The “True” Fool subverts (what we see in this post and in your insight). The latter is corrupting, the former is liberating.
Thank you for posting this, Mike. Loved it!